Esse 2016 Abstracts

ESSE
2016
BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

1

Summary of Contents

CONTENT

Seminar Abstracts
Roundtable Descriptions
Posters

Sub-plenary lectures

PAGE
9
379
385
387
2
This document was published on Friday 19 August.

A Note on Presentation
Seminar convenors made a variety choices about how to present their abstracts. Some
chose to give a breakdown of the timing of individual seminars, others to give their
seminar sessions specific names or subthemes, and so on. Some convenors included
biographical information for speakers; others did not. Some listed papers in the order in
which they will be presented; others did not, or were obliged to reorganise their seminars
due to withdrawals.

Rather than seeking to impose consistency which would have required the removal of
information from most seminar descriptions the editors of this document have
presented material largely as it was sent to the organisers.

Some changes have been made to formatting for reasons of space; delegates email
addresses have been removed; and we have sought to eliminate repetition of information
that is available in the programme. It is also possible that some changes will inadvertently
have been made in the transmission of an abstract from the speaker to the convenor to the
conference organisers. The content is otherwise unaltered.

3
List of Seminars
S1 Pragmatic strategies in non-native Englishes. Co-convenors Lieven Buysse, KU
Leuven University of Leuven, Belgium and Jess Romero-Trillo, Universidad
Autnoma de Madrid, Spain
S2 Negation and negatives: a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. Co-
convenors Irena Zovko Dinkovi, University of Zagreb, Croatia and Gaper Ilc,
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
S3 Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Approaches to Phraseology. Zoia Adamia,
Ekvtime Takaishvili Teaching University, Rustavi, Georgia and Tatiana
Fedulenkova, Vladimir State University, Russia
S4 New advances in the study of the information structure of discourse. Co-
convenors Libue Dukov, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic and Jana
Chamonikolasov, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic and Renta Gregov,
P. J. afrik University, Koice, Slovakia
S5 The influence of English on word-formation structures in the languages of
Europe and beyond. Co-convenors Alexandra Bagasheva, University of Sofia,
Bulgaria and Jess Fernndez-Domnguez, University of Granada, Spain and Vincent
Renner, University of Lyon, France
S6 Multimodal Perspectives on English Language Teaching. Co-convenors Belinda
Crawford, Camiciottoli, Universit di Pisa, Italy and Mari Carmen Campoy-Cubillo,
Universitat Jaume I, Spain,
S8 Change from above in the history of English. Co-convenors Nikolaos Lavidas,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Jim Walker, Universit Lumire
Lyon 2, France
S9 Social identities in public texts. Co-convenors Minna Nevala, University of
Helsinki, Finland and Matylda Wodarczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
S10 Comparative and Typological Studies of English Idioms. Co-convenors Anahit
Hovhannisyan, Gyumri State Pedagogical Institute, Gyumri, Armenia and Natalia
Potselueva, Pavlodar State University, Republic of Kazakhstan
S11 English Phraseology and Business Terminology: the Points of Crossing. Co-
convenors Victoria Ivashchenko, The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine/The
Institute of the Ukrainian Language, Kiev, Ukraine and Tatiana Fedulenkova,
Vladimir State University, Russia
S12 Research Publication Practices: Challenges for Scholars in a Globalised World.
Co-convenors Pilar Mur-Dueas, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain and Jolanta
inknien, Vilnius University, Lithuania
S13 ESP and specialist domains: exclusive, inclusive or complementary
approaches? Co-convenors Shaeda Isani, Universit Stendhal, Grenoble 3, France
and Michel Van der Yeught, Aix-Marseille University, France and Miguel Angel
Campos Pardillos, University of Alicante, Spain and Marcin Laczek, University of
Warsaw, Poland
S14 Teaching Practices in ESP Today. Co-convenors Cdric Sarr, ESPE Paris,
France and Shona Whyte, University of Nice, France and Danica Milosevic, College
of Applied Technical Sciences, Nis, Serbia and Alessandra Molino, University of
Turin, Italy
S15 English as a Foreign Language for Students with Special Educational Needs
Chances and Challenges. Co-convenors Ewa Domagaa-Zyk, John Paul II Catholic
University of Lublin, Poland and Nusha Moritz, University of Strasbourg, France and
Anna Podlewska, The Medical University of Lublin, Poland
S16 The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing

Borders of Languages and Cultures. Co-convenors Giuditta Caliendo, University
Lille 3, France and Giuseppe Balirano, University of Naples LOrientale, Italy and
Paul Sambre, University of Leuven, Belgium
S17 Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation in Diasporic Communities of
Practice. Co-convenors Siria Guzzo, University of Salerno, Italy and Chryso
Hadjidemetriou, University of Leicester, UK
S19 The Fast and the Furious: The Amazing Textual Adventures of Miniscripts.
Co-convenors Francesca Saggini Boyle, University of Tuscia, Italy/University of
Glasgow, UK and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, University of Chieti, Italy,
esoccio@unich.it
S20 A Poetics of Exile in Poetry and Translation. Co-convenors Penelope Galey-
Sacks, Valenciennes University, France and Sara Greaves, Aix-Marseille University,
France and Stephanos Stephanides, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
S21 Shakespearean Romantic Comedies: Translations, Adaptations,
Tradaptations. Co-convenors Mrta Minier, University of South Wales, UK and
Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University, Italy and Iolanda Plescia Sapienza
University of Rome, Italy
S22 Anachronism and the Medieval. Co-convenors Lindsay Reid, NUI Galway,
Ireland and Yuri Cowan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Trondheim, Norway
S23 The (in)human self across early modern genres: Textual strategies 1550-
1700. Co-convenorsJean-Jacques Chardin, Universit de Strasbourg, France and
Anna Maria Cimitile, Universit degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Italy and Laurent
Curelly, Universit de Haute-Alsace, France
S24 Renegade Women in Drama, Fiction and Travel Writing: 16th Century - 19th
Century. Co-convenors Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria
and Efterpi Mitsi, University of Athens, Greece
S25 Picturing on the Page and the Stage in Renaissance England. Co-convenors
Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia, Italy/LMU, Germany and Armelle Sabatier,
University of Paris II, France
S26 Icons Dynamised: Motion and Motionlessness in Early Modern English Drama
and Culture. Co-convenors Gza Kllay, Etvs Lornd University, Budapest,
Hungary and Attila Kiss, University of Szeged, Hungary and Zenn Luis Martnez,
University of Huelva, Spain
S27 English Printed Books, Manuscripts and Material Studies. Co-convenors Carlo
Bajetta, Universit della Valle dAosta, Italy and Guillaume Coatalen, Universit de
Cergy-Pontoise, France
S28 Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy. Co-convenors Cian Duffy,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Martina Domines Veliki, University of
Zagreb, Croatia
S29 The Politics of Sensibility: Private and Public Emotions in 18th Century
England. Co-convenors Jorge Bastos da Silva, University of Porto, Portugal and
Drago Ivana, University of Bucharest, Romania
S30 And when the tale is told: Loss in Narrative British and Irish Fiction from
1760 to 1960. Co-convenors Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo,
Bulgaria and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany
S31 Regional and World Literatures: National Roots and Transnational Routes in
Scottish Literature and Culture from the 18th Century to Our Age. Co-convenors
Gioia Angeletti, University of Parma, Italy and Bashabi Fraser, Edinburgh Napier
University, UK
S32 The Sublime Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of the Sublime in British Literature
since the 18th Century. Co-convenors va Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly University,
Eger, Hungary and Kamila Vrnkov, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic
S33 Peripatetic Gothic. Co-convenors David Punter, University of Bristol, UK and
Maria Parrino, Independent Scholar, Italy
S34 The Fiction of Victorian Masculinities and Femininities. Elisabetta Marino,
University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy and Adrian Radu, Babes-Bolyai University of
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
S35 Reading Dickens Differently.Co-convenors Leon Litvack, Queens University
Belfast, UK and Nathalie Vanfasse, Aix-Marseille Universit, France
Desire and "the expressive eye" in Thomas Hardy. Co-convenors Phillip Mallett,
University of St Andrews, UK and Jane Thomas, University of Hull, UK and Isabelle
Gadoin, Universit de Poitiers, France and Annie Ramel, Universit Lumire-Lyon 2,
France
S37 The finer threads: lace-making, knitting and embroidering in literature and
the visual arts from the Victorian age to the present day. Co-convenors Laurence
Roussillon-Constanty, Universit Toulouse 3, France and Rachel Dickinson,
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
S38 Work and its Discontents in Victorian Literature and Culture. Co-convenors
Federico Bellini, Universit Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy and Jan Wilm,
Goethe-Universitt Frankfurt am Main, Germany
S39 Impressions 1860-1920. Co-convenors Bndicte Coste, University of
Burgundy, France and Elisa Bizzotto, University of Venice, Italy and Sophie Ayms-
Stokes, University of Burgundy, France
S40 The Neo-Victorian antipodes. Co-convenors Mariadele Boccardi, University of
the West of England, UK and Therese-M. Meyer, Martin-Luther University Halle-
Wittenberg, Germany
S41 Tracing the Victorians: Material Uses of the Past in Neo-Victorianism. Co-
convenors Rosario Arias, University of Mlaga, Spain and Patricia Pulham,
University of Portsmouth, UK and Elodie Rousselot, University of Portsmouth, UK
S42 Reinterpreting Victorian Serial Murderers in Literature, Film, TV Series and
Graphic Novels. Co-convenors Mariaconcetta Costantini, G. dAnnunzio University
of Chieti-Pescara, Italy and Gilles Menegaldo, Universit de Poitiers, France
S43 Victorian and Neo-Victorian Screen Adaptations. Co-convenors Shannon
Wells-Lassagne, Universit de Bretagne Sud, France and Eckart Voigts, Technische
Universitt Braunschweig, Germany
S44 Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of Modernism. Co-convenors Adrian
Paterson, NUI Galway, Ireland and Christine Reynier, University Montpellier3-
EMMA, France
S45 Technology and Modernist Fiction. Co-convenors Armela Panajoti, University
of Vlora, Albania and Eoghan Smith, Carlow College, Ireland
S46 Reportage and Civil Wars through the Ages. Co-convenors John S. Bak,
Universit de Lorraine, France and Alberto Lzaro, Universidad de Alcal, Madrid,
Spain
S47 The paradoxical quest of the wounded hero in contemporary narrative
fiction. Co-convenors Jean-Michel Ganteau, University of Montpellier 3 and Susana
Onega, University of Zaragoza, Spain
S48 Spaces of erasure, spaces of silence: Re-voicing the silenced stories of Indian
Partition. Co-convenors Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome, Italy and Daniela
Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania
S49 The Postcolonial Slum: India in the Global Literary Imaginary. Co-convenors
Om Prakash Dwivedi, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee College, University of Allahabad,
India and Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania
S50 Globalisation and Violence. Co-convenors Pilar Cuder-Domnguez, University
of Huelva, Spain and Cinta Ramblado-Minero, University of Limerick, Ireland
S51 Perpetrator Trauma in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.
Co-convenors Michaela Weiss, Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic and
Zuzana Burkov, Pavol Jozef afrik University in Koice, Slovakia
S52 Leadership politics in the United Kingdoms local government. Co-convenors
Stphanie Bory, Universit de Lyon III, France and Nicholas Parsons, University of
Cardiff, UK and Timothy Whitton, Universit de Clermont-Ferrand II, France
S53 The Politics of Language in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Drama. Co-
convenors Ian Brown, University of Kingston, UK and Daniele Berton-Charrire,
Universit Blaise Pascal, France
S54 The Inner Seas connecting and dividing Scotland and Ireland. Co-convenors
Jean Berton, Universit de Toulouse-Jean Jaurs, France and Donna Heddle,
University of the Highlands and Islands, UK
S55 I hear it in the deep hearts core: political emotions in Irish and Scottish
poetry. Co-convenors Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK and Carla Sassi,
Universit di Verona, Italy
S57 Celtic Fictions - Scottish and Irish Speculative Fiction. Co-convenors Jessica
Aliaga Lavrijsen, Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza, Spain and Colin
Clark, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
S58 The Symbolic Power of Humour: Gender Issues and Derision. Co-convenors
Florence Binard, Universit Paris Diderot, France and Renate Haas, University of
Kiel, Germany and Michel Prum, Universit Paris Diderot, France
S59 Religion and Literatures in English. Co-convenors Pilar Somacarrera,
Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain and Alison Jack, University of Edinburgh,
UK
S60 Memory, Autobiography, History: Exploring the Boundaries. Co-convenors
Irena Grubica, University of Rijeka, Croatia and Aoife Leahy, Independent Scholar,
Ireland
S61 Contemporary Irish female writing at the intersection of history and memory.
Co-convenors Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin, Ireland and Marisol
Morales-Ladrn, University of Alcal, Spain
S63 Biography. Co-convenors Joanny Moulin, Aix-Marseille University, France and
Hans Renders, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
S64 Life-Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections. Co-convenors Sandra
Mayer, University of Vienna, Austria and Julia Lajta-Novak, King's College London,
UK
S65 Contemporary Writers on Writing: Performative Practices and
Intermediality. Co-convenors Amaya Fernandez Menicucci, Universidad de
Castilla-La Mancha, Spain and Alessandra Ruggiero, Universit di Teramo, Italy
S67 Word and Image in Childrens Literature. Co-convenors Laurence Petit,

Universit Paul Valry-Montpellier 3, France and Camille Fort, Universit de
Picardie Jules Vernes, France and Karen Brown, University of Saint-Andrews, UK
S69 Young Adult Fiction and Theory of Mind. Co-convenors Lydia Kokkola, Lule
University of Technology, Sweden and Alison Waller, University of Roehampton, UK
S71 Thinking about Theatre and Neoliberalism. Co-convenors Hlne Lecossois,
Universit du Maine, Le Mans, France and Lionel Pilkington, NUI Galway, Ireland
S72 Dilemmas of Identity in Postmulticultural American Fiction and Drama. Enik
Maior, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania and Lenke Nmeth,
University of Debrecen, Hungary
S73 Literary Prizes and Cultural Context. Co-convenors Wolfgang Grtschacher,
University of Salzburg, Austria and David Malcolm, University of Gdask, Poland
S74 21st Century Female Crime Fiction. Co-convenors Wolfgang Grtschacher,
University of Salzburg, Austria and Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish, University of
Gdask, Poland
S75 Media, culture and food - meaning of new narratives. Co-convenors Slvka
Tomakov, Pavol Jozef afrik University in Koice, Slovakia and Mara Jos
Coperas-Aguilar, Universitat de Valncia, Spain
S76 Gendered Bodies in Transit: from Alienation to Regeneration? Co-convenors
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, University of Mlaga, Spain and Manuela Coppola,
University of Naples LOrientale, Italy
S77 Women on the Move: Diasporic Bodies, Diasporic Memories. Constructing
Femininity in the Transitional and Transnational Era in Contemporary Narratives
in English. Co-convenors Julia Tofantuk, Tallinn University, Estonia and Silvia
Pellicer Ortn, University of Zaragoza, Spain
S78 Travel and Disease across Literatures and Cultures. Co-convenors Ryszard W.
Wolny, Opole University, Poland and Sanja Runti, University of Osijek, Croatia
S79 20th and 21st century British Literature and medical discourse. Co-convenors
Nicolas Pierre Boileau, Universit dAix-Marseille, France and Clare Hanson,
University of Southampton, UK
S80 Writing Old Age in twenty-first-century British Fiction. Co-convenors Sarah
Falcus, University of Huddersfield, UK and Maricel Or-Piqueras, University of
Lleida, Spain
S81 Ekphrasis Today. Co-convenors Renate Brosch, Universitt Stuttgart,
Germany and Danuta Fjellestad, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden and Gabriele Rippl,
University of Berne, Switzerland
S83 Literary and cinematographic prequels, sequels, and coquels. Co-convenors
Ivan Callus, University of Malta, Malta and Armelle Parey, Universit de Caen,
France and Isabelle Roblin, Universit du Littoral-Cte dOpale, France and Georges
Letissier, Universit de Nantes, France
S84 Cultural politics in Harry Potter: death, life and transition. Co-convenors
Rubn Jarazo-lvarez, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain and Pilar Alderete,
NUI Galway, Ireland
S85 Fantasy Literature & Place. Co-convenors Jane Suzanne Carroll, University of
Roehampton, UK and Anja Mller, University of Siegen, Germany
S86 Calculables and Incalculables in Teaching English Today. Co-convenors Roy
Sellars, University of St Gallen/University of Southern Denmark, Denmark and
Graham Allen, University College Cork, Ireland
S87 Richard Hakluyts The Principal Navigationsof the English Nation (1598
1600): Historical and Geo-Political Contexts. Co-convenors Daniel Carey, Moore
Institute for the Humanities, NUI Galway, Ireland and Claire Jowitt, University of
Southampton, UK
RT1 Literary Journalism and Immigration: A Stranger in a Strange Land Co-

convenors: John S. Bak, Universit de Lorraine, and David Abrahamson,
Northwestern University
RT2 Re-defining the Contemporary in Anglo-American Fiction. Convenor: Ana-
Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
RT3: Narrative Strategies in the Reconstruction of History in the Work of
Contemporary British Women Novelists. Convenor: Ana Raquel Fernandes,
University of Lisbon
RT4: Stories of Their Own: Gender and the Contemporary Short Story in English.
Co-convenors: Jorge Sacido-Romero, U Santiago de Compostela and Michelle Ryan-
Sautour, Universit dAngers
RT5 Competition out of the ordinary: Roundtable on top research in English
Studies. Co-convenor: Janne Korkka, University of Turku and Elina Valovirta,
University of Turku.
RT6: The Spatial Turn: What is Literary Geography Now? Co-convenors:
Eleonora Rao, Universit di Salerno and David Cooper, Manchester Metropolitan
University.
RT7: Romantic-Era Labouring-Class Poetry: New Critical Directions. Convenor:
Franca Dellarosa, Universit degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro,
RT9: Uses of literary texts and cultural studies to expand EAP practice: breaking
new ground. Convenor: Ann Gulden, Oslo and Akershus University College of
Applied Sciences
RT11 Creating a European Anglicists' Gender Studies Network. Co-convenor:
Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Iil Ba, Boazii University of Istanbul and Mara
Socorro Surez Lafuente, Universidad de Oviedo
RT12 Shakespeare in the Second Language Classroom. Convenor: Delilah
Bermudez Brataas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

PhD Sessions
Organiser Lachlan Mackenzie
Literatures in English: Sean Ryder (NUI Galway) and Katerina Kitsi (Thessaloniki)
Cultural and Area Studies: Teresa Botelho (Lisbon); Nicolas Parsons (Cardiff)
English Language and Linguistics: Josef Schmied (Chemnitz); Andreas Jucker
(Zrich)

9
S1. Pragmatic Strategies in Non-Native Englishes

The pragmatic marker you know in learner Englishes
Lieven Buysse, KU Leuven, Belgium
Over the past few decades the surge of scholarly interest in pragmatic markers has also
addressed non-native speaker perspectives. Such studies for English have brought to light
differences between native speakers and learners largely albeit not exclusively resulting
in reports of underuse by the learners but it has also become clear that learners do
not form a homogeneous group. Apart from L1 background, other factors that have been
considered relevant are proficiency level, setting, and the type of pragmatic marker. The
present study sets out to investigate one particular marker that has been shown to be
highly frequent in native English, viz. you know. Four components of the Louvain
International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) will be examined to
identify differences and similarities in the use of this marker by upper-intermediate to
advanced learners of Dutch, French, German and Spanish. The pragmatic functions of you
know will be teased out and compared to those attested in a native speaker reference
corpus, and the incidence of the marker and its functions will be compared between
interlanguages and with native speaker practice.

Interpreting care: Interpreters between the voice of medicine and the (ELF)
lifeworld. A corpus-based investigation of interpreter-mediated doctor-patient
interaction in ELF and Italian
Eugenia Dal Fovo, University of Trieste, Italy
This paper presents a study on interpreter-mediated doctor-patient interaction in Italian
and English as lingua franca (ELF) (inter al. Albl-Mikasa 2015) based on real-life data
recorded in healthcare providing institutions of the city of Trieste (Italy). Interpreting in
this area is provided by non-professionals called cultural and linguistic mediators
(Rudvin/Spinzi 2013): non-Italian citizens with migration history, extensive knowledge of
the Italian language and culture, and foreign patients background. Indeed, interpreting
curricula in Italy rarely provide trainees with the necessary tools to tackle the multifaceted
challenges healthcare interpreting poses, especially when involving ELF-speaking patients.
The study aims at investigating healthcare interaction as a form of institutional talk-in-
interaction, which, when interpreter-mediated, requires an adjustment of discourse
practices and configuration (Baraldi/Gavioli 2012). Particular attention will be dedicated
to the use of ELF by non-Italian speaking patients and its implications on mediated doctor-
patient interaction.

Albl-Mikasa, M. (2015) English as lingua franca. In Pchhacker, F. (ed.) Routledge
Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies.
Baraldi, C. / L. Gavioli (2012) Coordinating participation in dialogue interpreting.
Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rudvin, M. / C. Spinzi Mediazione linguistica e interpretariato. Regolamentazione,
problematiche presenti e prospettive future in ambito giuridico. Bologna: CLUEB.

Are you going to ask me a question?' The discourse/pragmatic functions of
interrogatives in learner interviewee speech
Sylvie De Cock
Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
Universit catholique de Louvain, Belgium/ Universit Saint-Louis Brussels, Belgium
10

The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) contains
informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign
language. In spite of the interview's fixed turn-taking format (Lazaraton 1992) and of the
interviewees' obligation to answer questions (Fiksdal 1990), interrogative clauses can be
found in the learner interviewee turns in LINDSEI. This paper sets out to explore the
discourse/pragmatic functions of these interrogative clauses and more specifically of the
Wh-questions and yes/no-questions (Biber et al 1999) used by the learners in four
subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010), namely
LINDSEI_CHINESE, LINDSEI_DUTCH, LINDSEI_FRENCH and LINDSEI_POLISH. The paper
examines and illustrates the various discourse/pragmatic functions uncovered in the data
(e.g. speech management, rapport building, metadiscursive function) and discusses both
the impact of the LINDSEI interview format on some of the pragmatic strategies used by
the learners and possible pedagogical applications of the study.

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999), Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Fiksdal, S. (1990) The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of Cross-cultural Gatekeeping
Interviews. New Jersey: Ablex Norwood.
Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (eds) (2010), The Louvain International Database of
Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses
universitaires de Louvain.
Lazaraton, A. (1992) The Structural Organization of a language Interview: A Conversation
Analytic Perspective. System 20/3, 373-386.

Where did that come from lah? The use of L1 discourse markers in English as a
Lingua Franca
Andy Kirkpatrick
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

This paper will use data from the newly released Asian Corpus of English (ACE) (now
freely accessible at http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/ace/ ) which represents a corpus of 110
hours of naturally occurring speech events conducted by Asian multilinguals using English
as a lingua franca. ACE provides a complementary Asian-centred corpus to the more
European-centred Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE).The focus of the
paper will be the transfer of the use of discourse markers or particles from the speakers
L1 into their use of ELF. For example, in an earlier paper (Kirkpatrick and Subhan 2014) it
was found that, while there was comparatively little morpho-syntactic influence on the
ELF of L1 speakers of Malay there was evidence of the use of Malay discourse markers in
the speakers use of ELF. This paper will extend the study to include speakers of different
L1s (including varieties of Chinese and Filipino languages) and will investigate whether
these speakers transfer discourse markers from their respective L1s and, if so, for what
pragmatic purposes. The paper will also examine whether the use of these L1 discourse
markers in the speakers use of ELG causes any misunderstandings among interactants.

Pragmatic strategies for expressing attitudinal and interpersonal meanings in ELF
research articles
11
Biljana Mii Ili
University of Ni, Serbia

Scientific writing has been recognized not as an impersonal presentation of factual
information but as a social act with interactional discourse elements used to express
writers attitudes and to convince or otherwise influence peer audience (Myers 1989,
Hyland 1996, inter al.). Scientific and academic writing in non-native English, due to its
profusion, availability of sources, as well as its social significance, provides data for the
study of various features of higher level non-native Englishes, including discourse and
pragmatic strategies. Although various lexico-grammatical and textual features and
communication functions have been studied in different academic genres both in English
and contrastively, pragmatic aspects have remained relatively under-investigated. The aim
of this study is to examine pragmatic strategies for expressing attitudinal and
interpersonal meanings in social sciences research articles written in English by Serbian
authors. The research includes quantitative and qualitative analysis of 25 articles from
high-ranked national journals published in English. Specifically, the analysis focuses on
attitudinal markers, hedging devices and interrogatives from the structural and pragmatic
perspectives, relating them to strategies of positive and negative politeness, and hopes to
provide new insights into the pragmatics of non-native English scientific writing and
pragmatic strategies used within this particular genre and discourse community.

An annotation scheme for identifying types of repair in requestive speech acts
produced by Japanese learners of English
Aika Miura
Tokyo University of Agriculture, Japan

This study presents a multi-layered annotation scheme identifying types of repair in
requests produced by Japanese learners of English at different proficiency levels. The
study investigated the extracted data of shopping role-play from the NICT JLE Corpus,
containing the corresponding CEFR A1 (64), A2 (67), and B1 (64) learners. First, the
learners requests were manually annotated as segments of head-act and internal-
modification as Figure 1 shows (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). The head-act was
classified into direct (e.g., I want to buy this.) or conventionally-indirect (e.g., Can I try
it on?) strategies. Internal-modification was illustrated as a politeness marker please,
discourse markers (e.g., I mean) and various patterns of if-clause. The second
annotation was made to see how they offset their inadequacy at English, based on the tags
for self-corrections and repetitions, originally contained in the corpus. Two types of
repair (rephrasing and repeating) were identified in the learners requests. As a result,
about 40 percent of the learners requests was produced with repair, and its ratio
decreased as the proficiency developed. Thus, A1 and A2 learners showed 64.3% of
repeating and 35.7% of rephrasing, while B1 learners showed approximately 50% of
both types.

politeness-marker-please
INTERNALinternal-modification
discourse-marker...
MODIFICATION
MAINif-clause...
main
TYPE
direct...
HEADhead-act
ACT-TYPE conventionally-indirect...

12

Figure 1 Annotation scheme of requests

The functions of the discourse markers so and now in ELF project discussions
Hermine Penz
University of Graz, Austria

The study of discourse markers in non-native English discourse has only fairly recently
become a focus of interest in pragmatic research (Romero-Trillo 2002, Buysse 2012,
House 2013). So has been found to be the most frequent discourse marker in both native
and non-native speaker discourse, yet its frequency turned out to be even higher in non-
native speaker talk by Buysse (2012). This study aims to identify the frequency and
function of so and now in intercultural project discussions using English as a lingua franca
(ELF). The data comprises a corpus of group discussions in an international educational
context. The analysis includes both quantitative and qualitative methods of discourse
analysis. So surfaced as one of the discourse markers with the highest frequency (only and
as well as but ranked higher) whereas now was less prevalent. Both discourse markers
serve a variety of different functions in the group interaction analysed, most of which
center around discourse structuring.

Bolden, Galina B. (2009). Implementing incipient actions: The discourse marker so in
English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 41:974-998.
Buysse, Lieven (2012). So as a multifunctional discourse marker in native and learner
speech. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1764-1782.
Romero Trillo, Jess (2002). The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-
native speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 34:769-784.
Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prosodic patterns of pragmatic markers in native and non-native Englishes
Jess Romero-Trillo
Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Spain

The present investigation analyses the relationship between prosody and pragmatics from
a theoretical and practical perspective. Specifically, it compares the realization of native
and non-native prosodic performance of feedback elements in speech, and their
similarities and differences on the basis of statistical analyses. From a pedagogical
perspective, I believe that the study of the acoustic features of Pragmatic Markers that
realize feedback in conversation is essential to understand how these elements function as
punting poles that help speakers sail through the flow of conversation, and in the case of
foreign speakers of English their need to master the prosody of these elements in order to
be pragmatically correct.

Opportunities for developing L2 politeness strategies in EFL classrooms in France
Aisha Siddiqa
Universit Nice Sophia Antipolis, France

The present study explores the development of politeness strategies in requests among
young English as foreign language (EFL) learners in France. Research in interlanguage
13
pragmatics (ILP) has demonstrated the inadequacies of traditional foreign language
classrooms for developing pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig & Taylor, 2003). The
integration of pragmatics in classroom activities is therefore advocated (Takahashi, 2010),
but more research is needed, particularly with respect to younger learners (Kasper &
Rose, 1999) and methodology (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 2005). This study extends the
scope of ILP research by focusing on a larger group of younger learners, using multiple
methods including a cartoon oral production task, role plays, classroom films, textbook
analysis, and participant interviews. This paper analyses the observational data collected
by classroom filming in French secondary schools, involving 250 EFL learners from three
different levels (aged 11, 14, 17). The data set includes empirical examples of politeness
strategies in requests, with analysis based on Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). The paper also
involves a critical analysis of the opportunities in classrooms to practice L2 pragmatics.
Preliminary results suggest that the learners range of politeness strategies is quite
restricted and the classroom activities focus on L2 lexico-grammatical functions rather
than aspects of L2 pragmatics.

Pragmatic strategies in ELF communication in the academia: ways of achieving
communicative effectiveness
Ignacio Vzquez Orta
Universidad de Zaragoza

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become a major and expanding field of academic
research within Applied Linguistics. English is currently the dominant language in many
domains, and academia is one of the most prominent ones. The focus of ELF research has
turned over the past few years from linguistic description to more pragmatic concerns
with the purpose of discovering why certain forms are preferred over other forms and the
roles these forms play in intercultural communication. This study also turns to explore
these concerns in academic settings. The aim of the present study is to investigate the role
played by pragmatic strategies in the communicative effectiveness of ELF communication
by lecturers in two teaching programs at the University of Zaragoza. Our main assumption
is the critical role of accommodation as the single most important pragmatic skill in ELF
communication and the different ways in which it is linguistically manifested. Our
preliminary findings suggest that a skilled ELF lecturer is no longer a quasi-native speaker
of a particular native variety of English, but someone who has acquired the pragmatic
skills needed to adapt their English use in line with the demands of the current lingua
franca situation.

Adversative pragmatic markers in learner language: A developmental perspective
Valentin Werner
University of Bamberg, Germany

The intention of this paper is to extend the perspective on the functional acquisition of
lexical pragmatic marking in learner English, an area that has received considerable
attention in a number of recent corpus-based studies (see, e.g., Buysse 2014, 2015; Aijmer
2015). While previous analyses have mostly focused on speech, and have considered a
relatively homogeneous learner population in terms of proficiency, I shed some light on
pragmatic marking in written discourse, and at different learner proficiency levels. To this
end, I specifically contrast the usage of adversative pragmatic markers by intermediate
learners with the one of advanced learners. I test when pragmatic markers first emerge in
14
learner language, and consider the factors type of the first language of the learners as well
as the developmental patterns of individual pragmatic markers and variation between
individual learners. The overall findings suggest (i) that different developmental patterns
can be observed for individual pragmatic markers; (ii) that the first-language background
of the learners influences the time and rate of acquisition; and (iii) that the native-like use
of adversative pragmatic marking represents a learner-hard feature, which is only
mastered by advanced students.

Aijmer, Karin. 2015. General extenders in learner language. In Nicolas Groom, Maggie
Charles & Sughanthi John (eds.), Corpora, grammar and discourse: In honour of
Susan Hunston, 211234. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Buysse, Lieven. 2014. So whats a year in a lifetime so. Non-prefatory use of so in native
and learner English. Text and Talk 34(1), 2347.
Buysse, Lieven. 2015. Well its not very ideal... The pragmatic marker well in learner
English. Intercultural Pragmatics 12(1), 5989.

15
S2: Negation and negatives: a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective

Verbs derived with negative prefixes in English and Romanian: A Spanning Account.
Adina Camelia Bleotu
University of Bucharest, Romania

The aim of the paper is to work out the internal structure of verbs derived with negative
verbal prefixes in English and Romanian in a first-phase syntax, where verbs undergo
decomposition (Ramchand 2008) (<init, proc, res>), and in the spanning framework
(Svenonius 2012, 2014, Ramchand 2014). I look at the negative verbal prefixes de-
(deactivate), dis- (dishonour), un- (untie), competing for expressing the undoing of a
previous state (Marchand 1972: 636), and mis- (misdiagnose), expressing the meaning to
do something badly, and at the corresponding prefixes de- (deactiva), des/dez-
(dezonora), dis- (disprea disappear) in Romanian; there is no counterpart for mis-.
I embrace the view that verbal prefixes scope lower than negation, since to
deconstruct does not mean not to construct (Lakoff 1969, Hust 1975), and I lexically
decompose disassemble as cause to no longer be assembled, misdiagnose as give a not
correct diagnosis a.o. Ultimately, I recast lexical decompositions into first-phase syntax
and make use of spanning, a framework which spells out spans (i.e. extended projections),
dismisses intermediate labels and uses direct linearization: the span spells out at a certain
height (specifiers to the left of the heads, complements to the right). For a verb such as
dishonor, dezonora, I put forth the representation <Init, Proc, Neg, N>, linearized as x [Neg
Proc Init] N y. Thus, scope facts related to negation are captured in an economical and
elegant way, showing that English and Romanian behave similarly.

References:
Hust, Joel R. 1975. Dissuaded. Linguistic Analysis 1: 173-90.
Lakoff, George.1969. On Derivational Constraints. CLS 5: 117-39
Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word Formation.
2nd ed. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck.
Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first-phase syntax. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ramchand, Gillian. 2014. Deriving variable linearization. A commentary on Simpson and
Syed (2013). Natural language and linguistic theory 32 (1): 263282
Svenonius, Peter. 2012. Spanning. Ms. University of Troms
Svenonius, Peter. 2014. Spans and Words. Ms. University of Troms

Negation as an Empirical/Conceptual Tool: A Case Study with V-V Compounds
Kazuhiko Fukushima,
Kansai Gaidai University, Japan

This case study with Japanese lexical V1-V2 compounds reveals a descriptive/conceptual
utility of negation, which is not immediately obvious considering English alone. The
compounds are a very popular, but controversial target of research (Kageyama 1993,
Matsumoto 1996, Nishiyama 1998, Himeno 1999, Fukushima 2005, Yumoto 2005 being
major ones). One controversy is headedness. Following Williams (1981), many (eg.
Kageyama 1993, Yumoto 2005) assume that V2 is the head (1). This supposition is
problematic: the head is V1 with adverbial V2 in (2), or they can be dual-headed (3).
Headedness crucially determines: (i) argument-matching between V1-V2, and (ii) case-
16
marking of the inherited arguments (Kageyama 1993, Fukushima 2005, Yumoto 2005
reveal perplexing intricacies.)
So far, headedness is determined by speakers intuitions there is no independent
criterion. However, negation helps. With negative -nakat-ta, affirmative continuations
(4b,c) (6b,c) display different patterns of contradiction (#), depending on the compound
types. The verb creating contradiction is the head.
Negation is also interesting from a theoretical/conceptual point syntactic (Nishiyama
1998) vs. lexical (others above) accounts are at odds with each other. Compare (7) with
(4): the (b) readings are shared while the (c) readings diverge. (7c) is possible with a
regular V+te adverb (but not (4c)). Nishiyama (1998) presupposes the same syntactic
modificational structure for adverbs as well as cause/manner V1. A lexical account is
home free; the two belong to separate domains.
Negation offers independent criteria empirically and conceptually, which eventually
enables a more solid testing and construction of predictions and hypotheses.

Data:

(1) right-headed: odori-tukare dance-get tired, i.e. get tired from dancing, koroge-oti
roll-fall, i.e. fall down by rolling
(2) left-headed: mi-oros look-lower, i.e. look down, kaki-nagur-u write-hit, i.e. write in
unruly fashion
(3) dual-headed (dvandva): naki-sakeb cry and scream, hikari-kagayak-u shine and
glitter
(4) a. Hanako-ga odori-tukare-nakat-ta. (cf. (1)) b. demo odot-ta. but danced
Hanako did not get tired from dancing.
c. #demo tukare-ta. but got tired
(5) a. Taroo-ga gake-o mi-orosa-nakat-ta. (cf. (2))
b. #demo mi-ta but looked
Taroo did not look down the cliff
c. demo orosi-ta but lowered
(6) a. Ziroo-ga naki-sakeba-nakat-ta. (cf. (3)) b. #demo nai-ta. but cried
Ziroo did not cry and scream.

c. #demo saken-da. but
screamed
(7) a. Hanako-ga [ADV odotte] tukare-nakat-ta. b. demo odot-ta. but danced
Hanako did not get tired due to dancing. c. demo tukare-ta. but got tired

References:
Fukushima, Kazuhiko. 2005. Lexical V-V compounds in Japanese: lexicon vs. syntax.
Language 81: 568-612.
Himeno, Masako. 1999. Hukugoodooshi-no Kozo-to Imiyoohoo [Structure and semantic
usage of compound verbs]. Tokyo: Hitsuji.
Kageyama, Taro. 1993. Bunpoo-to gokeisei [Grammar and word-formation]. Tokyo: Hitsuji.
Matsumoto, Yo. 1996. Complex Predicates in Japanese: a Syntactic and Semantic Study of the
Notion Word. Stanford: CSLI.
Nishiyama, Kunio. 1998. V-V compounds as serialization. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 7:
175-217.
Williams, Edwin. 1981. On the notions lexically related and head of a word. Linguistic
Inquiry 12: 245-274.
Yumoto, Yoko. 2005. Fukugodoshi/Haseidoshi-no Imi-to Togo: Mojuru Keitairon-kara Mita
Nichieigo-no Doshi Keisei [The semantics and syntax of compound verbs/derived
verbs: verb-formation in Japanese and English viewed from a modular morphological
perspective]. Tokyo: Hitsuji.
17

It Goes without Saying (though I will Say it Anyway)
Tanja Gradeak-Erdelji,
University of Osijek, Croatia
Dorijan Guduri,
University College London, UK

It is not very frequently assumed that negation may play an active role in achieving
specific conceptual frames, but as claimed by Langacker (2008) or Lakoff (2004), language
enables the actual physical presence of words, even if in some kind of a negative
construction, to create the positive conception of what is being denied.
Our research focuses on the phenomenon of praeterition or apophasis as a
rhetorical device in political discourse, where we noticed a frequent use of various types of
negation constructions as introductory lines for the content which is actually not being
negated but rather accentuated. Structures like It goes without saying, We don't want
to mention that, etc., which are then followed by actual descriptions of affected
participants or events, have been spotted in our corpus of public political speech events, in
the media discourse and in other types of discourse involved in shaping the public opinion.
The corpus gathered from both British and Croatian newspapers, and transcripts of
political speeches will show that this linguistic phenomenon is universal and that the
underlying cognitive processes very cleverly serve quite pragmatic purposes of
manipulation by language.

References:
Lakoff, George. 2004. Dont Think of an Elephant. White River Junction: Chelsea Green
Publishing.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Cambridge:

Negation as a Means of Face Management in Online Discussions
Veronika Kloukov,
Masaryk University, Slovakia

The paper is based on a survey comparing the use of negation in two different varieties of
digital discourse: the synchronous (real-time) chat represented by the NPS Chat Corpus,
and the asynchronous discussion forum represented by a corpus of my own compilation.
Negation and the use of negatives is observed from the pragmatic point of view, and the
notion of face management is handled as a central aspect of Brown and Levinsons (1978)
politeness theory. In general, participants of discussion forums and chat groups observe
certain rules of communicative behaviour different from conventional face-to-face
communication. Expressing negation can pose a risk regarding the participants face,
because it usually goes hand in hand with expressing disagreement, rejection or refusal.
However, the communication conventions of the two multiparty online discussion types
are different, and so is the participants use of negation. The analysis of negation takes into
account the different semantic forms of negatives preparing the ground for an examination
of the pragmatic aspects of negation which bring forward the issues of indirectness, social
distance and power negotiation.

18
References:
Baron, Naomi S. 2008. Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1987. Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?
Journal of Pragmatics 112: 131-146.
Carston, Robin. 1998. Negation, presupposition and the semantics/pragmatics
distinction. Journal of Linguistics 342: 309-350.
Crystal, David. 2011. Internet linguistics: A student guide. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Giora, Rachel. 2002. Masking ones themes. Irony and the politics of indirectness.
Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies. Louwerse, Max and Willie van Peer (eds.).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 283-300.
Herring, Susan C., Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen. 2013. Pragmatics of computer-mediated
communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Horn, Laurence R. 1985. Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity. Language 61
(1): 121-174
Moeschler, J. 2006. Ngation, polarit, asymtrie et vnements. Langages 162: 90-106.
Mschler, Jacques. 1992. The pragmatic aspects of linguistic negation: Speech act,
argumentation and pragmatic inference. Argumentation, 61: 51-76.
Moeschler, Jacques. 2010. Negation, scope and the descriptive/metalinguistic distinction.
Generative Grammar in Geneva 6: 29-48.
Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics. London:
Longman.
Thurlow, Crispin, and Kristine R. Mroczek, 2011. Digital discourse: Language in the new
media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Semantics of Dry Adjectives across Languages
Victoria A. Kruglyakova,
Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Russia

Negation applied to the semantics of qualities (Goddard 2007) produces a large group of
caritive adjectives. They describe a wide scale of characteristics that are brought together
by the general meaning lacking X, X-less. Dry is one such adjective, applied to objects
that are free or relatively free from any liquid, and especially water; devoid of natural
moisture or no longer wet (Merriam Webster 2016).
As any caritive does (cf. Tolstaya 2008 on Slavic languages), dry favors semantic
shifts, based on the lack of pattern. We offer an overview of the most frequent and
significant adjectives of this kind in 15 languages that we have studied (English, German,
French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Khanty, Moksha, Hungarian,
Georgian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian).
Quite anticipated are the metaphors that express a lack of expected component
(Gibbs 2008): Lithuanian sausa ko porridge without butter, Spanish sueldo seco salary
with no bonus.
But the most numerous are shifts to the emotional and mental domain. They can
be further divided into subgroups according to the absent abstract element: a lack of
emotional concern: Latvian sauss stils matter-of-fact style, Mandarin gnxio forced
lough, Polish suchy gos non-emotional voice; a lack of creativity: French auteur sec
author of lame style, English: dry style of painting. The relation of lacking expressed
through dry adjectives to negation proves to be a plentiful source of metaphorisation.
19

References:
Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 2008. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goddard, Cliff, and Wierzbicka Anna. 2007. NSM analyses of the semantics of physical
qualities sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross-linguistic perspective. In:
Studies in Language 31/4: 765800. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Merriam Webster Online, Retrieved February 24, 2016, from http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/dry.
Tolstaya, S. M. 2008. Prostranstvo slova. Lexical semantics in pan-slavic perspective.
Moscow: Indrik.

Over- and out- as pragmatic markers inferring negation
Catherine Moreau
Bordeaux Montaigne University, France

In this paper, I address the issue of negation through two markers: verbal prefixes over
and out, which do not have an intrinsic negative meaning but which act as pragmatic
markers of negation. In the utterer-centred framework used here, these markers are seen
as means of assessing a value in relation to a subjective boundary. Different semantic
stages are defined in a notional domain. Negation is thus considered as the expression of
an alteration which results from going beyond normal limits to such an extent as to
possibly exit the domain. Overbook, overdo, for instance, imply excess hence not having
the expected value. A comparison is made with French equivalents sur- and outre- as in
surpasser (outdo) and outrepasser (override), all the more interesting as the very
movement of going beyond results in diverging appraisals. The markers considered are
studied in context and taken from a large corpus of oral and written English and French.

References:
Descles, Jean-Pierre, Ewa Gwiazdecka, Azucena Montes-Rondon. 2001. Towards Invariant
Meanings of Spatial preposition and preverbs. Workshop on Spatial and Temporal
Information Processing, ACL, Toulouse.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Negation in Academic Discourse and Pragmatic Rhetoric
Olga Oparina,
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

The very essence of science combines two directly opposite issues. On the one hand, it
follows certain standards and regulations; on the other hand it implies critical thinking.
The latter, in its turn, overthrows established settings, suggests new theories and
approaches, and changes the existing world-view.
Such desired flexibility presupposes a certain style of rhetoric. The main goal is to
persuade an addressee in the authors point of view. It means to present the idea, to
motivate and prove it, and to make it interesting and attractive for further investigation.
Negation is a powerful tool to achieve this. B. Russell, an outstanding scientist and
scholar, exploited the potential of negation and used various types of it in his texts. How
20
can it be treated? As his individual attitude and the rejection of the established world-view
postulates, or as the best way to illustrate and prove his standpoint?
Some of Russells works contain negation in the title. What is it? Can we regard it as
emphasis or as the means of attracting the readers attention? Individual pragmatic
rhetoric and negation as its counterpart will be considered in this report.

References:
Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and
Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Komova, Tatiana A. 1985. The Category of Negation in English Language as the Subject of
Morphostylistic Analysis. Moscow State University Newsletter. Philology 2: 41-45.
Leonard, Sterling. 1929. The doctrine of correctness in English usage, 1700 -1800. Madison:
Columbia University
Pinker, Steven. 1995. The language instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York:
Harper Collins Publishers
Russell, Bertrand. 1922 [1914]. Our knowledge of the external world. London: George
Allen & Unwin
Sanders, Ted, and Wilbert Spooren. 2007. Discourse and text structure. In: The Oxford
Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens (eds).
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 916-941.

Evaluating Knighthood: Featuring the Discourse Functions of Negation in Le Morte
Darthur by T. Malory
Anastasia Sharapkova and Tatiana Komova,
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

The medieval knighthood that has been attracting attention of historians, linguists and
literary critics for centuries is a complicated phenomenon of military and Christian ethics,
feudal society, and literary representation. The latter is no less important for
understanding its philosophy than the first two.
The chivalric romances, among which Malorys work (1485) takes the most
prominent place, gave credibility to the detailed classification of knightly virtues in later
decades. The opposition of a good and a bad knight is created through the category of
negation that may be linguistically analyzed on various levels: lexical, morphological, and
syntactic. It allows the author not only to picture the bad, but also to stress and evaluate
the ideal.
Negation turns out to be not a distinct logical counterpart of positive utterances,
but a powerful tool for featuring knighthood as a socially and ethically important
endeavour. The presentation will show how it works in the text of Le Morte Darthur in
relation to various characters, and women in particular.

References:
Kennedy, Beverly. 1992. Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer
Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A history of English Negation, Harlow: Pearson, Longman
Linguistics Library
Schmidt, A. V. C. (ed) 1982. Le Morte Darthur the Seventh and Eighth Tales.
Schmidt, S. J. 1973. Texttheoretische aspekte der negation. Zeitschrift fr Germanistische
Linguistik 1.2: 178-208.
21
Tottie, Gunnel, Wim van der Wurff, and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds). 1999.
Negation in the history of English. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter
Komova, atiana . 1985.
[The category of negation
within the system of grammatical morphological categories of the English verb].
oscow: Moscow University Press
Mantiyeva, B. A. 2006.
. [Negation in conceptual and linguistic
picture of the world in personal and fictional discourse]. PhD dissertation in
Germanic philology: 10.02.04. oscow:

Genitive of Negation in the Croatian Language
Diana Stolac
University of Rijeka, Croatia

A direct object in Croatian is an object in the accusative case or an object in the genitive
case interchangeable by accusative. There are two direct objects in the genitive case
partitive genitive and genitive of negation (Slavic genitive). The conditions for a genitive of
negation are that the predicate verb has to be transitive, and that the sentence has to be
negative. Therefore, the genitive of negation can be realised only in negative sentences in
which it is synonymous with the accusative, while in the deep structure of positive
sentences the direct object is exclusively in the accusative case.
Literature on the genitive of negation primarily deals with its origin and original
meanings partitive, ablative (Meillet 1897), its position in the Indoeuropean noun case
system (Heinz 1965), and its status in specific Slavic languages (Trvnek 1938, Breznik
1943, Hausenblas 1958, Harrer-Pisarkowa 1959, Gortan-Premk 1962, Heinz 1965, Hlavsa
1975, for Croatian: Feleszko 1970, Menac 1979, Vince-Marinac 1992, Stolac 1993, Stolac
and Horvat-Vlasteli 2004).
This morphosyntactic fact is a feature of Slavic languages (which is why it is also
called the Slavic genitive) in which it has different qualitative characteristics (stylistically
marked/unmarked, interchangeable with the accusative with or without a difference in
meaning, non-interchangeable with the accusative). There are no equivalent syntactic
structures outside of the Slavic language family.
This paper comments on the differences between Croatian and English syntax
which do not enable direct translation of the genitive of negation and require translation
strategies which would preserve all of its features (amplified negation, stress of negation,
stylistic markedness). Apart from translation, this is also an issue in teaching Croatian as a
foreign language as the change in government between the positive and negative sentence
confuses the users of Croatian as a foreign language.
The relationship between the following examples is discussed: Vidim budunost. //
Ne vidim budunost. (neutral affect) / Ne vidim budunost (marked affect) and their
possible translations: I don't see the future. / I see no future.

References:
Breznik, Anton. 1943. Stavna negacija v slovenini. Razprave AZU 1: 157200.
Feleszko, Kazimierz. 1970. Skadnia genetiwu i wyrae przyimkowych z genetiwem w
jzyku serbsko-chorwackim. Wroclaw, Warszawa, Krakow: Zakad Narodowy im.
Ossoliskich Wydaw. PAN.
22
Gortan-Premk, Darinka. 1962. Pade objekta u negativnim reenicama u savremenom
srpskohrvatskom knjievnom jeziku. Na jezik, Nova serija 12: 130148.
Harrer-Pisarkowa, Krystyna. 1959. Przypadek dopenienia w polskim zdaniu
zaprzeczonym. Jzyk polski 39: 932.
Hausenblas, Karel. 1958. Vvoj pedmetovho genitivu v etin. Praha: SAV.
Heinz, Adam. 1955. Genitivus w indoewropejskim systemie przypadkowym, Warszawa:
Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
Heinz, Adam. 1965. System przypadkowy jzyka polskiego. Krakow: Uniwersytet
Jagielloski.
Hlavsa, Zdenk. 1975. Denotace objektu a jej prostedky v souasn etin, Praha:
Academia.
Meillet, Antoine. 1897. Recherches sur l'emploi genitif-accusatif en vieux-slave. Paris: .
Bouillon.
Menac, Antica. 1979. Slavenski genitiv u suvremenom hrvatskom knjievnom jeziku. Jezik
26/3: 6576.
Stolac, Diana. 1993. Slavenski genitiv u jeziku Titua Brezovakoga. Filologija 21-22: 425-
430.
Stolac, Diana and Anastazija Horvat Vlasteli. 2004. Slavenski genitiv kao problem
kontrastivnih sintaktikih opisa. In: Suvremena kretanja u nastavi stranih jezika.
Stolac, Diana, Nada Ivaneti, and Boris Pritchard (eds). 431442. Zagreb, Rijeka:
HDPL.
Trvnek, Frantiek. 1938. Zporov genitiv v etin. Slovo a slovesnost. 129-138.
Vince-Marinac, Jasna. 1992. Vrste rijei i genitivno-akuzativni sinkretizam. Suvremena
lingvistika 34: 331-337.

Lexical Bleaching of the Verbal Construction Fail to X A Contrastive Corpus-Based
Study
Andrej Stopar,

The English verbal construction fail to X allows two interpretations: in the first, the verb
has the full lexical meaning of not being successful in what you are trying to achieve,
whereas in the second, it shows signs of lexical (also: semantic) bleaching (cf. Hopper and
Closs Traugott 2003), and can thus be interpreted as a grammaticalized marker of
negation (Eckardt 2006; Mackenzie 2008, 2009). As a result, in the latter case, the verb fail
is no longer analyzed as a full lexical verb selecting infinitival complementation (i.e.,
VP1+VP2), but as a verb of intermediate function modifying the full lexical verb (cf. Quirk
al. 1999: 136ff). In terms of its semantics (Kartunnen 1971, 2012), the verb fail in the
bleached construction is analyzed as a two-way implicative verb, i.e. a verb that yields an
entailment both in positive and negative contexts.
Taking into account the syntactic and semantic properties of the construction fail to
X, the present analysis examines its distribution in two types of corpora. General corpora
(BNC and COCA) are used to examine the distribution of both, the non-bleached and
bleached, meanings in English. To further elaborate the findings and contrast them on a
cross-linguistic level, two parallel English-Slovenian corpora (Evroterm and
ELAN/TRANS5) are used to observe the translations of the construction fail to X into
Slovenian. The contrastive approach in the analysis of the parallel corpora of translations
also makes it possible to identify the lexical and grammatical structures that Slovenian
uses to express the double function of the construction fail to X described above.
23

References:
Eckardt, Regine. 2006. Meaning Change in Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hopper, Paul J., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge:
Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. Implicative verbs. Language 47: 340-358.
. 2012. Simple and Phrasal Implicatives. Proceedings of *SEM: The First Joint Conference
on Lexical and Computational Semantics, Montral, Canada, June-7-8, 124-131.
Mackenzie, Lachlan J. 2008. Failing without trying. Jezikoslovje 9 (1-2): 53-85.
. 2009. English fail to as a periphrastic negative: an FDG account. Working Papers in
Functional Grammar 82: 1-28.
Quirk, Randolph et al. 1999. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow:
Longman.

On Negation in English: A Diachronic Study
Lidija trmelj,
University of Zadar, Croatia

The article deals with the development of negation in English in the period from the ninth
to the fourteenth century. It explores the morpho-syntactic features of negative
constructions in Middle English on the basis of the Late Old English and Late Middle
English translations of the Gospel according to John, both composed after the same Latin
source text, the Saint Jeromes Vulgate from the fourth century. By comparing the two
translations we aim to investigate the change in the frequency of a particular word order
in negative constructions, including a restriction or extension of structure, and to state, if
possible, some general trends in that sense. In particular, we try to examine the usage of
prefixes and suffixes, prepositions, pronouns and adverbs for word-negation and
sentence-negation.
It is interesting to see the variety of negative forms in the context of Middle English
shift from a synthetic to an analytic system, which, on the one side, brought about a
relatively fixed word-order, and, on the other side, allowed multiple negation, since the
processes of standardization had not yet begun.

References:
Bergen, Linda van. 2008. Negative Contraction and Old English Dialects: Evidence from
Glosses and Prose. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2008: 275-312, 391-430.
Brinton, Laurel J., and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2006. The English Language: a Linguistic History.
Oxford University Press Canada.
Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre. 1992. A Book of Middle-English. Oxford: Blackwell.
Closs Traugott, Elizabeth. 2005. Syntax. The Cambridge History of the English Language.
Vol.1, The Beginnings to 1066, ed. Richard M. Hogg, 168-286. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fischer, Olga. 2006. Syntax. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 2, 1066-
1476, ed. Norman Blake, 207-383. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenbaum, Sidney, and Randolph Quirk. 1990. A Student's Grammar of the English
Language. London: Longman.
Grnberg, Madeleine. 1967. The West-Saxon Gospels - a Study of the Gospel of St. Matthew
with Text of the Four Gospels. Amsterdam: Poortpers N. V.
24
http://faculty.acu.edu./~goebeld/vulgata/newtest/john/vjo11.htm. (accessed 7 25, 2006).
http://www.sbibleboom.ru/wyc/loh1-htm. (accessed 8 28, 2006).
Hogg, Richard M. 2005. Phonology and Morphology. The Cambridge History of the English
Language. Vol.1, The Beginnings to 1066, ed. Richard M. Hogg, 67-164. Cambridge:
Kemenade, Ans van. 2002. Word Order in Old English Prose and Poetry: The Position of
Finite Verb and Adverbs. Studies in the History of the English Language. A Millennial
Perspective, eds. Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell, 355-373. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Lass, Roger. 2006. Phonology and Morphology. The Cambridge History of the English
Language. Vol. 2, 1066-1476, ed. Norman Blake, 91-147. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ogura, Michiko. 2008. Negative Contraction and Noncontraction in Old English.
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2008: 313-329.
Quirk, Randolph, and Charles L. Wrenn. 1977. An Old English Grammar. Cambridge:
Reznik, P.B., T. S. Sorokina, and I. V. Reznik. 2001. A History of the English Language.
Moscow: Flinta, Nauka.
Visser, Frederick Th. 1969. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Vol. 3: Syntactical
units with two verbs. Leiden: Brill.

Pleonastic Negation from a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Irena Zovko Dinkovi,
University of Zagreb, Croatia

Gaper Ilc,

In recent linguistic theory, pleonastic negation is treated either as an instance of a lexically
present but semantically vacuous negation, often placed in relation to negative polarity
(e.g. Portner and Zanuttini 2000, Espinal 1992, van der Wouden 1994, among others) or as
a special subtype of negation that differs from proper or sentential negation in terms of
its syntactic as well as semantic scope, and may actually be considered a form of modality
(Mueller 1991, Abels 2005, Yoon 2011). We follow the latter approach and discuss
pleonastic negation as it appears in various syntactic structures in English and other
languages, primarily Slovene and Croatian. In doing so, we observe that, even though the
syntactic environments in which pleonastic negation occurs are highly comparable, there
seems to be a parametric variation as to the level of optionality of pleonastic negation, and
to the type of mood with which pleonastic negation is used (Ilc 2004, Zovko Dinkovi
2015).
Based on empirical data, we argue that the difference in the scope of negation
between sentential and pleonastic negation is mirrored directly in their syntactic
properties: while the former licenses n-words, the latter cannot license them. Both types of
negation, however, may trigger the Genitive of negation in languages still displaying the
Genitive of negation in negated clauses (e.g. Slovene).
The observations and the analysis presented in this paper are aimed at contributing
to a better understanding of pleonastic negation by attempting to prove that it is neither
semantically empty nor a feature of sentence negation, but rather a linguistic phenomenon
akin to other means of expressing modality in language.
25

References:
Abels, Klaus. 2005. Expletive negation in Russian: A conspiracy theory. Journal of Slavic
Linguistics 13: 574.
Espinal, Maria Teresa. 1992. Expletive negation and logical absorption. Linguistic Review
9/4: 333358.
Ilc, Gaper. 2004. Skladenjska okolja pleonastinega zanikanja. Slavistina revija 60(4):
659-676.
Muller, Claude. 1991. La ngation en franais. Geneva: Droz.
Portner, Paul and Raffaella Zanuttini. 2000. The force of negation in WH Exclamatives and
interrogatives. In Negation and polarity: Syntactic and semantic perspectives. Horn,
Laurence R. and Yasuhiko Kato (eds.) Oxford: OUP. 193231.
Wouden, Ton van der. 1997. Negative contexts: Collocation, polarity and multiple negation.
Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics. London, New York: Routledge.
Yoon, Suwon. 2011. Not in the mood: the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of evaluative
negation. PhD dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago
Zovko Dinkovi, Irena. 2015. Ekspletivna negacija u hrvatskome. In Dimenzije znaenja.
Belaj, Branimir (ed.) Zagreb: Zagrebaka slavistika kola. 323-336.

26
S3 Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Approaches to Phraseology

Symbolic and Semantic Meanings of Emerald in English and Georgian Biblical
Expressions
Manana Shelia
Sokhumi State University
Ekvtime Takaishvili Teaching University
Tbilisi, Georgia

Phraseological units show the features of a culture and convey the way of thinking and
values of each nation. They express the figurative sense of words and make the language
more colourful.
The Bible is a source of enlightenment and inspiration and instructs us in all areas
of life. Biblical expressions concentrate on wisdom of all nations and cultures.
This paper aims to conduct a complex study of symbolic and semantic meanings of
emerald as one of the precious stones in English and Georgian biblical expressions and
make a detailed analysis of the gemstone, its etymology, cognitive features, symbolic
categories of colour and object. The present research makes an attempt to compare and
investigate the usage of emerald in English and Georgian biblical expressions. Comparative
approach allows us to reveal similarity and differences of the given gemstone in
expressions of both English Bible (KJV, NIV) and Biblia-Georgian variants. Descriptive and
comparative analysis is a necessary precondition of profound studying of lexical and
phraseological units.
The paper focuses on symbolic properties and various virtues of emerald that is the
valuable and highly prized grassy-green variety of beryl. Emerald is always associated
with the landscapes and the richest greens. In many folklores and literatures precious
stones have been used to symbolize and create the image of nature. Emerald Isle is the
poetic name for Ireland due to its fine green natural landscapes. Emerald is also the poetic
name for Georgia, a mountainous country in South Caucasus, the world's cradle of wine.
This gemstone has been frequently used in Georgian literature to describe the countrys
amazing nature.

English Phrasal Verbs as Cognitive Phraseological Units: Typology and Teaching
Valeriy Shabaev

Novosibirsk State Technical University
Novosibirsk, Russia

Phrasal verbs are widely believed to be particularly difficult to master (1) because of their
idiomaticity and (2) because the choice of verb-particle combinations seems so
unsystematic. According to cognitive linguistics (CL), however, those combinations are in
fact motivated. Several small-scale experiments have already demonstrated that revealing
the linguistic motivations behind phrasal verbs can help learners better comprehend and
remember these lexical units. We report a larger study in which CL treatment of phrasal
verbs was integrated into an extended general EFL course. The results of the study signal
that (1) not all phrasal verbs lend themselves equally well to straightforward CL teaching,
and (2) for CL pedagogy to be optimally effective. It requires a certain level of cognitive
investment on the part of the learners, something which cannot under all circumstances be
taken for granted.
27
Among the apparent sources of phrasal verbs mastering difficulties are (1) lack of
transparency in meaning and (2) the semantically random nature of the particles [in
Russian linguistic tradition postpositions]. However, the research carried out within the
framework of CL has demonstrated that much of what was traditionally considered
arbitrary in language is in fact systematic and motivated. Brugmans in-depth analysis of
particle over and Lindners of out and up were early, influential contributions to the view
that particles in phrasal verbs are like any other aspects of language in showing a great
deal of semantic coherence. Some linguists have seen the potential of this view for the
classroom and have produced large-scale adaptations of CL theory in an attempt to make it
easier for learners to acquire phrasal verbs.
Here, we will try to answer three points. (1) Are learners likely to transfer insights
into the motivation of particular phrasal verbs to their processing of phrasal verbs they
encounter subsequently? (2) Can the positive results obtained with regard to the samples
of phrasal verbs that have so far been targeted be directly generalized to the class of
phrasal verbs in general? (3) Will classroom applications mirror experimental results?

Culture-Specific Nominative Patterns in English Phraseology: A Linguo-Cultural
Study
Elena Ryzhkina
Moscow State Linguistics University
Moscow, Russia

Traditionally, phraseology is viewed as one of the most conservative subsystems of the
language, for it is not liable to free variation of its units, borrowing, and other ways of
replenishment typical of the lexical system as a whole. However, this belief was challenged
by a massive research into the stylistic and non-conventional functioning of idioms,
initiated by Alexander V. Kunin in the late 1960s and later taken over by his followers.
That series of studies, which eventually crystallized as a branch of linguistics termed
phraseological stylistics, worked out a new conception of phraseology as a flexible, self-
developing system, open to various types of renovation, including structural or/ and
semantic modification of codified units in discourse.
A considerable influx of idiomatic neologisms coupled with visible dynamics in the
existing phraseological fund, markedly intensive in the last decades of the 20th century, put
on high agenda a range of new issues concerned with innovative phenomena in
phraseology. One of the most relevant problems to be studied is the balance between
human creativity involved in the use and variation of codified idioms in discourse, on the
one hand, and the language norm, on the other.
The present research provides an insight into the language mechanisms which
regulate the neological processes in modern English phraseology and also into the
extralinguistic, primarily cultural factors which both condition and constrain the evolution
of phraseological units.
The basic assumption the study proceeds from is that innovations in phraseology
should be treated as a system phenomenon which is stipulated by the general tendencies
the language displays in its development and which depends on the language-specific
nominative strategies, including the fund of nominative means accumulated throughout
the language history. This also extends to non-conventional modifications of idioms, for
they do not fall out of the system but, indeed, rest on the language norm. Thus, an
28
extensive analysis of empirical material shows that most neologisms and nonce-phrases
created on the basis of codified English idioms fit in certain nominative patterns existing in
English.
The major thesis of the study is that the patterns which underlie the modification of
codified idioms or the formation of new ones are largely language-specific. This is
substantiated by cross-language and cross-cultural analyses of phraseological calques
borrowed from the same source (e.g.: German Strohwitwe/ Graswitwe => English grass
widow and Russian ) which display different modes of functioning and
vectors of evolution peculiar to the respective language and, moreover, to the respective
national culture.
The methodology employed in the research derives from the linguoculturological
approach to the study of phraseology, much of which was elabourated by Veronika N.
Teliya and her disciples.
The study shows that national culture has a pervasive influence on the
development of phraseology, defining to a great extent its general trends, modes, and
specifically the language nominative patterns which serve to produce new units. These
patterns factually represent the cultural concepts, important for the language community.

Modern Languages and the Modern-Language Phraseological Expressions
Nino Sanaia
Tbilisi, Georgia

Phraseological expressions with unclear figurative denotation are usually met in the
modern languages, the etymology of which can be realized through the mythology of the
language. The analysis of the mythology reference is the solid means of the study of the
phraseological etymology.
The goal of the study is to use the mentioned methodology to analyze the
phraseological level of non-related languages as the legacy of antique culture. The
influence of antique mythology in line with the universal figurative-associative thinking
caused isomorphism in the phraseology of modern languages which had been influenced
by the antique, especially Greek culture. The study is also interested in terms of the
dissemination area of isomorphic figurative phrases.
The research establishes possibility of a logical connection between the symbol of
Arians thread in the myth about Theseus and metaphorical word combinations like:
suivre le fil de ses ides , perdre le fil de ses ides (In French language); (In
Russian); azrebis Zafis dakargva; fiqris Zafi davwyvite (yazbegi), azri gamiwyda (In
Georgian) in modern languages.
In my opinion the metaphorical image of the "thread" here represents a logical
sequence of thoughts. This fact is also proved by the circumstance that in French two
homonyms coexist derived from Latin filum (thread). One of them: fil (m) means thread
and another file (f) sequence (NPR: 230).
These language facts have suggested us an idea that the Arians thread in a myth
about Theseus is also an escape from a difficult situation, can mean a sequence of thoughts,
their logical chain and even more. We think that this symbol vails some doctrine or
knowledge.
Z. Gamsakhurdia making comments on the Greek myths comes up with idea that
the goal of a campaign of Theseus to Crete is acquisition of spiritual knowledge
29
(Gamsakhurdia 1991: 202). Though he does not mention the symbol of thread, we think he
more means the same wisdom.
Considering structure of rituals in the Greek myths, R.Gordeziani states a similar
thought about the myth of Theseus. He considers that the structure of this myth
corresponds to the structure of ritual of consecration of youngsters as a whole. Leaving
home and travelling in far countries, Victory over death and killing of the villain,
Experience of love and reception of the fatherly inheritance All these elements are
obligatory stages of consecration (Gordeziani 2005: 55).
Hence, the metaphorical image of "thread" in the modern languages designating
sequence of thought is semiotic transformation of symbol of Arians thread a symbol of
spiritual knowledge.
To sum up we might say, the same phraseological figurative expressions in modern
languages are usually caused by the universal understanding of mythology. In our case, the
analyses of the myth of Theseus made it easy, on the one hand, to delve deeper into the
etymology of the phraseological figurative expressions and, on the other hand, interpret
their content in a modern way confirming the efficiency of the method.

Antithetical Proverbs
Lali Ratiani
Tbilisi, Georgia

The vocabulary of the German language is constantly enriched with phraseological units
which make the language more colourful and reflect the national culture of the world.
Proverbs play a particular role in the transmission of the peoples cultural and national
identity as well as cultural-national vision of the world is embodied in the figurative
contents of expressions. They exist in the language as ready-made units and are always
activated in live speech and mass media.
The analysis given in the paper is presented by antithetical proverbs as they are the
index of culture and mentality, the most important source of their features description.
The sphere of realization of the antithesis are mainly individual phrases, sentences, some
sections, of the text found in literature but proverbs create particular and productive
ground of this phenomenon and in this regard they are presented by a quite interesting
object. Almost the exact analogue of none of the German antonyms is found in the
Georgian language by neither lexical composition, nor structure.
The features of the antithesis are conditioned by a native speakers cultural
background. The determination of the specific cultural background and its exact
interpretation for a language-speaker must be recognized as a necessary concomitant
moment of study. The culture and language are two semiotic systems by their common
signs and structural differentiated features. Language is the basis of culture, the main
specific sign of culture and the means of expression of national-specific features and is
considered as means of ethnic integration and ethno-differentiation.
As a support of the antithetical proverbs study should be taken cultural
achievements of specific native speakers and at the same time the pragmatic dimension
conditioned by national culture. This phenomenon should be discussed/occurred within
two-purely linguistic and linguo-cultural frame.
The antithesis is based on the opposition of objects and phenomena perceived by
the subject hostility based on the objects and phenomena that acquires additional
30
significance in the context, the significance caused by situation adds to oppositional
semantics the illustrations of which are given by proverbs.
On the basis of the study, it was possible to make a stereotypical conclusion, which
is obligatory for the realization of antithetical proverbs in the German, English, Georgian
and Russian languages.

Aesthetic Evaluation in English Phraseology
Elena Mesheryakova

Volgograd State Social Pedagogical University
Volgograd, Russia

Julia Mesheryakova

Volgograd State Social Pedagogical University
Volgograd, Russia

In the language an evaluation is materialized in the form of certain value judgments, and
they usually possess a proper expression (or subjective) evaluation, and some qualitative
characteristics of the object being evaluated. Aesthetic evaluation category is expressed by
the lexical (adjectives, pejorative vocabulary and idioms) and syntactic (the context, the
situation of communication and social and status properties) levels. In this study, we will
focus on phraseological units in English, containing a lexical minimum of the positive and
negative aesthetic evaluation (250 units). In modern linguistics an idiom means a single
semantic unit which tends to have some measure of internal cohesion, such that it can
often be replaced by a literal counterpart that is made up of a single word.
National concept of beauty is reflected in phraseology and therefore is inextricably
linked with the concepts of appearance, behavior and inner world. I.S. Con notes that the
appearance is valuation of the basic properties and qualities of the inner world (Con,
1978: 80). English phraseological units pay special attention to the beautiful appearance of
a human. Beautiful appearance of a person is expressed in the following comparative
combinations: graceful as a swan, as pretty as picture, as handsome as a young Greek god, as
handsome as paint, as shining as star. It seems that the main person in the description of
the exterior are the ones to contemplate the visual characteristics that are comparable
with the standard or existing image of a young Greek god, graceful swan, art.
An ugly person appearance is worded in the following idioms in the English
language: ugly as a scarecrow, ugly as a toad, ugly as a dead monkey, ugly as sin. Ugly
appearance is compared with a bogey, toad, reptile, monkey dead, sin, suggesting that
there is a negative aesthetic evaluation in the English language mapping of the world.
English linguistic culture emphasizes the presence of illness attribute to describe an
ugly person by means of phraseology. The image of the ugly / unhealthy person is
represented by a large group of idioms: bag of bones, walking corps (skeleton), one of the
pharaoh's lean kine. Thematic fields of health and beauty of the English language in their
intersection are composed of a phraseological unit group with the meaning of ugly and
lean: bean-steak, string bean, bare-bone, barber's cat.
Positive aesthetic evaluation is fixed in the following features: 1) a work of art, 2) a
comparison with the deity, 3) comparing with flowers and stars, 4) comparison with the
noble animals and birds. The negative aesthetic judgment is fixed in the following features:
1) poor health, 2) excessive and insufficient growth and body weight, 3) lack of taste in
clothes, 4) comparison with dirty animals, 5) the comparison with the deadly sin, 6) age
31
specification of negative evaluation appearance (clumsiness teenagers and evil ugly old
women).

The phrase, the whole phrase, nothing but the phrase: the pervasiveness of
phraseology in European documents
Denise Milizia
University of Bari Aldo Moro
Bari, Italy

This paper is part of a larger-scale project which investigates words and keywords,
phrases and key-phrases in ESP, in particular in the legal language of European
documents.
The bilingual/parallel corpus English and Italian used for this study includes all
the treaties drafted in the European Union, from the Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris in
1951, to the Treaty of Lisbon, signed in Lisbon in 2007 but approved and ratified only two
years later. Being the purpose of this research merely linguistic, the Treaty establishing a
Constitution for Europe, here called the EU Constitution for the sake of convenience, is also
taken into consideration, even though it was rejected by France and the Netherlands in
2005.
The current project is being carried out with students of law and political studies
who too often find themselves in the situation of having to translate not individual words
(for which the dictionary would do) but legal phraseology which is known for being
convoluted and abstruse (Williams 2013), and which is one of the greatest constraints on
legal translators (Meunier and Granger 2008).
The analysis starts form the assumption that language is phraseological, both in its
general and specific varieties legal, in the case in point and that text is essentially
phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2004; 2008). Lexical items are primed to
occur in, or avoid, certain structures or grammatical/lexical words (Hoey 2005), thus in
the English version of the European Treaties we find IN CONFORMITY WITH but never IN
CONFORMITY OF or IN CONFORMITY TO, whereas in the Italian version all three prepositions
CON, DEL, AL are found occurring with IN CONFORMIT (Milizia 2011). Thus, IN CONFORMITY is
attracted to the preposition WITH and is repelled by OF and TO, for no obvious reason other
than habit. Yet, research has shown that IN CONFORMITY WITH, despite being grammatically
correct, is used only four times in the European Treaties, whereas IN ACCORDANCE WITH
occurs on 444 occasions. The three-word cluster IN ACCORDANCE WITH is indeed the most
frequent phrase in the European Treaties (Milizia 2010).
By means of the Clusters facility provided by Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (Scott 2011), the
EU Constitution is referenced against the Lisbon Treaty, to analyse the phrases but mainly
the key-phrases that emerge in the old document and have been dropped in the new:
EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK LAWS, HIS OR HER, HE OR SHE emerge top of the list. Interestingly, the
concept of FRAMEWORK LAW/LEGGE QUADRO is an inherent part of Italian legal culture, but it
does not traditionally play a part in British culture (Williams and Milizia 2007).

The Evaluative Features of the Image Death in Proverbs and Sayings (On the
Material of English and Russian Languages)
Alexei Lzylov
Smolensk State University
Smolensk, Russia.

32

The paper studies proverbs and sayings that also bear the name of paremiological units.
We share the opinion that proverbial expressions may be considered a constituent part of
the realm of a larger scale. In other words proverbs are viewed as a constituent part of the
sphere of phraseological units of the language. Phraseology, being a comparatively young
linguistic discipline, attracts much attention in modern linguistic studies as it has proved
its importance within the set of other linguistic disciplines. There is no natural human
language that would lack a set of expressions, which plane of content would not equal the
meanings of its constituent parts taken separately. Phraseological units are to exist and
correspondingly studied as long as human languages are used by their speakers.
The paper concentrates on the study of the evaluative features which constitute an
important part of the plane of content of proverbs and sayings.
The sphere of proverbial expressions is characterized by its ability to objectify all
evaluative meanings, both positive and negative. The evaluative potential of
paremiological units of the two languages is studied on the basis of the conceptual image
death, which is considered to be one of the cornerstones of human consciousness. Death
is objectified in proverbs not only directly, but also figuratively, by means of metaphor and
personification.
The semantic features of the image death are examined comparatively on the
basis of two languages: English and Russian, which have created a rich stock of proverbial
expressions in the history of their development. The development of languages is known
to be an interrelated and inter-conditioned process which also influenced the
paremiological sphere. The study of the proverbial material of the two languages drives us
to a conclusion that the proverbs under consideration are able to express both universal
truths and the ideas that have a national specific character as every language has enough
intellectual potential to create their own, unique phrases, reflecting relevant concepts,
existing in human mentality.

Adjectival Comparative Phraseological Units as an Element of Cognitive Mechanism of
Comparison
Ekaterina Volkova
Severodvinsk Sea College
Severodvinsk, Russia

According to Alexander V. Kunin, adjective comparative phraseological units structurally
include following three elements: the thing that is compared (the subject of comparison);
the thing to that it is compared the sample, the reference carrier of a characteristics (the
object of comparison); and the characteristics which gives foundation for comparing (the
basis of comparison) (Kunin 1996: 272).

Comparing as a cognitive process is considered by scientists more generally. After G.L.
Denisova we accepted the following definitions of the comparing mechanisms: the
comparing subject the top knot, which is marked by the statement, or presented in it
implicitly; theme presentation of the comparison; module an idea of characteristics,
the comparison is based on; standart the object the thing is compared to (Denisova
2009: 6-7, 11]. Three out of four elements characterize the adjectival comparative
phraseological units: the subject of comparison, the theme is represented by the basis of
comparison (the way a native speaker thinks of the word taken as a basis of comparison.
33
The theme of adjectival comparative phraseological unit is invariant and depends on the
case of use. The subject, module and standard remain unchanged. Referring to the
comparison, a person uses the entire accumulated experience. However, some scientists
argue that the modules that are often recoursed by language carriers are completely
deprived of expressiveness due to lack of specificity. A set of objects in different categories
always has each of characteristics. And here takes effect the metaphorical essence of
comparing as a mental activity. Metaphor individualizes the subject in an attempt to catch
and transmit its uniqueness. Nina D. Arutyunova believes that metaphor is especially
exposed to lexemes, which include culturally marked signs (Arutyunova 1999: 28). ACPE
then starts playing the role of trigger that when running gives the thinking process the
direction towards getting more detailed and specific information on comparing module.

On the image of God in American and Polish paremiology a contrastive study from a
linguo-cultural perspective
Boena Kochman-Haadyj
Rzeszw University
Rzeszw, Poland

The paper aims at comparing and contrasting a corpus of selected American and Polish religion-
related proverbs featuring God as a constitutive element with a view to revealing certain
characteristic features in the attitude towards religiosity in two respective linguo-cultures. More
precisely, an attempt will be made to select the religion-oriented proverbial texts from both
languages and group them in terms of the general messages they put across in order to search for
common ground and specific differences. It is to be hoped that Mieders general plead for more
articles dealing on a crosscultural level with misogyny, stereotypes, religion, animals, etc. in proverbs
(Mieder 2004: 81-82) will be at least partly fulfilled.
The analytical section of the paper is based on two unparalleled and invaluable
paremiographical collections. The American God-related proverbial texts are selected from A
Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992) edited by W. Mieder, et al. In turn, the empirical research on
Polish proverbs with the element of God in their wording is conducted on the basis of a fairly recent
and detailed paremiographical reference compiled by D. & W. Masowski in their Wielka Ksiga
Przysw Polskich The big book of proverbs (2008).
Even a cursory glance at a structured set of American and Polish paremiographical
collections pertaining to religion leads us to discover that the category of proverbs with the lexeme
God in their wording is the most numerous in both languages. Also, a peculiar observation that may
be suggested is the fact that in both linguo-cultures there are proverbs which may be subsumed
under a single logeme of a profound trust in God, who is the source of true happiness, prosperity and
sense of life (e.g. American Who trusts in God builds well; Polish Kto Boga w sercu nosi, ten chleba nie
prosi The one whos got God in heart, does not ask for bread). The opposing force to God is the
image of the devil, that in many proverbs is presented as the one who uses every means and trick to
seduce a poor Christian (e.g. American God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks; Polish Kto si w
starej babie kocha, ten dwa razy grzeszy: Pana Boga obraa i diaba cieszy The one who falls in love
with an old woman, sins twice: offends God and pleases the Devil).

Word combinations in English academic writing by Italian undergraduate EFL
students: a corpus analysis of essays
Donatella Malavasi
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
34

In descriptive studies of academic discourse, the tendency to examine characteristic
lexico-grammatical features of genres (Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993), has been
accompanied by a burgeoning interest in the analysis of recurrent sequences of words,
variously called phraseology, lexical bundles, formulaic language (Biber et al. 1999; Wray
2002; Cortes 2004; Biber & Barbieri 2007; Granger & Meunier 2008; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis
2010). From a Second Language Acquisition perspective, although multi-word units have
started to be explored in native-speaker and non-native speaker writing, few studies have
focused on the examination of recurrent word combinations in EFL academic texts (Chen
& Baker 2010; del & Erman 2012).
In an attempt to partially fill this gap, this study investigates the formulaic language
most frequently used in academic writing by a group of L1 Italian learners of English. Data
for this study consist of a corpus of essays in English Linguistics written by third-year
students majoring in Foreign Languages at an Italian University. With the support of
corpus linguistic tools, recurrent lexical bundles will be identified and analysed both
quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, the learner corpus will be compared with the
British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus to shed some light on aspects of
convergence and divergence between learner and native speaker production in the use of
word combinations.

Theoretical problems of the Study of Phraseological Units
Natalia Kluzheva

Vladimir State University
Vladimir, Russia

Phraseology means the branch of linguistics dealing with stable word- combinations
characterized by certain transference of meaning. Specialists in phraseology face a number
of problems. They describe the variants of phraseological units and they determine the
specific features of words in phraseological units. Specialists in phraseology also define the
correlation of phraseological units with parts of speech, determine the syntactic role of
phraseological units, and study the formation of new word meanings in relation to
phraseological context. The scope of phraseology is broadest when such usage is
independent of the nominative or communicative value of the unit. The scope of
phraseology is narrowed when phraseological units are defined by the criteria of the
semantic unity of the word groups meaning and of the word groups equivalence to a
single word in terms of nominative function.

In fact, phraseological units or idioms can be described as the most picturesque,
colourful and expressive part of the languages vocabulary. Most Russian scholars today
accept the semantic criterion of distinguishing phraseological units from free word-groups
as the major one, and base their research work in the field of phraseology on the definition
of a phraseological unit offered by Professor A.V. Kunin, the leading authority on problems
of English phraseology in this country: A phraseological unit is a stable word-group
characterized by a completely or partially transferred meaning. The definition suggests
that the degree of semantic change in a phraseological unit may vary.

Professor A.V. Kunin includes proverbs in his classification of phraseological units
and labels them communicative phraseological units. From his point of view, one of the
main criteria of a phraseological unit is its stability. If the quotient of phraseological
stability in a word-group is not below the minimum, it means that we are dealing with a
35
phraseological unit. The structural type that is, whether the unit is a combination of
words or a sentence is irrelevant.
The paper deals with the problem of identification of phraseological units.

Semantic aspect of English colour idioms
Maia Marghania
Tbilisi, Georgia

Phraseology of English language is so vivid and diverse. To understand English clearly one
should know not only its standard vocabulary but also its styles, dialects, proverbs,
sayings, phrasal verbs and idioms, the way they are used in various spheres.
It is generally known that phraseological units are notable for their special
structural stability and integrity. Most of them are characterized by figurative imagery and
metaphoric meanings. They are complex formations in which history and culture of a
nation are revealed. From this viewpoint phraseology has become the subject of study of
linguistics, ethno-linguistics, anthropology and psycholinguistics as well.
It should be noted that phraseological units- idioms cover the significant sector of
the lexical fund of a language. As idioms cannot be derived from the meanings of their
components and correspond to semantically quite different words it is noteworthy to
study them.
The paper deals with the semantic, expressive cognitive features of phraseological
units, especially, colour idioms and their connections with figurative language.
The study examines colour idioms in English frequently employed as part of our
spoken and written discourse. They develop figurative meanings, evoke imagery and add
depth to our words. Among the idioms containing colours, a visual cue can often be found
in the origin of the phrase.
The analysis also reveals that idioms have an expressive function and dynamic
semantics. They make our speech emotional, diverse, more flexible and figurative.
Figurativeness is considered the main factor of forming the semantic structure of
phraseology.

On the comparative analysis of phraseological pictures of the world
Elizaveta Ivanova

St. Petersburg State University
St. Petersburg, Russia

One of the main approaches to language semantics in modern linguistics is the analysis of
the reflection of cognition, mentality and culture in language signs. In Russian linguistics
this approach resulted in numerous reconstructions of certain conceptual spheres based
on the semantics of language signs and termed language pictures of the world. It is
necessary to make a reservation here by pointing out that linguists aim at the description
of this or that fragment of a language picture of the world, rather than at its reconstruction
as a whole, for the latter would demand the efforts of several generations of researchers.
The approach in question originates from the views of W.von Humboldt, E. Sapir,
L.Weisgerber, later A. Wierzbicka and J. Bartminski. In general, the language picture of
the world can be defined as an interpretation of reality reflected in language signs
(Bartminski 2005: 88).
36
As far as the analysis of this or that language picture of the world is concerned, we
can say that phraseological units represent an immensely useful language resource, in
many ways rewarding for those working in the field. This could be explained by the vivid
imagery of phraseological units, in particular those based on metaphor.
The conceptual structure that is modeled on the basis of the semantics of
phraseological units is called a phraseological picture of the world. It is regarded as an
integral yet clearly delineated section of the language picture of the world as it is.
A most interesting direction of research is the comparative analysis of
phraseological pictures of the world of different languages, for it allows the researcher to
penetrate into the imagery logic of the interpretation of reality, to trace cultural
similarities and differences and to define certain regularities of cognition.
The paper is targeted at exploring some aspects of the comparative analyses of
phraseological pictures of the world, of their fragments, to be more exact, based on
phraseological units of various types, including proverbs. The analysis encompasses
English, Spanish, German and Russian phraseological units. Some principles of their
comparison are outlined, additionally some controversial issues are looked at more
closely. The specific features of seeing the world through the semantics of phraseological
units of the above mentioned four languages are the main focus of attention.

Lexical and Stylistic analysis of Russian, English, Georgian Biblical Phraseological
Units
Zoia Adamia
Tbilisi, Georgia

The research is devoted to a comparative study of Biblical phraseological units in Russian,
English and Georgian. Comparative analysis is a necessary precondition of profound lexical
and stylistic studies of phraseological units. It is known that language is a means of
communication between people, showing their culture and a certain level of development
of society.
The text of the Bible is exclusively orthodox and canonized. That fact might have
guaranteed a considerable monotony and similarity of its various translations into other
languages. However, it is far not so. Russian and Georgian translations of Biblical
phraseological units much more considerably coincide among themselves, than Georgian
and English or Russian and English ones. It is apparently should be explained by the
following:
1.
The era of converting to Christianity by these or those people strongly
influenced the character of translation, in particular the lexicon and syntax of translation.
2.
The Georgians and Russians keep to one tendency of Christianity, i.e.
Orthodoxy. It has been gone on for centuries. It has put its mark on their understanding of
Christian dogmas, a role of religion in believers everyday life.
3.
The European countries and peoples, converting to Christianity, relied on
the knowledge in the field of classical philology, folklore, myths elements which are seen in
biblical texts and many times have been specified throughout centuries. For those
centuries, both translators skills and consumers tastes of translations have changed,
Besides some phraseological units have got a thin coating of archaism or actually became
archaic in the language.
37
In conclusion, we will emphasize that the comparative analysis of Biblical
phraseological units of various languages will be useful to compiling of the typological
passport (Vladimir D. Arakin's idea [Arakin 1983: 33]) of phraseology of each concrete
language.

Fantastic Variations and How to Translate Them: Style, Language and Other Issues
in UK Contemporary Fantasy Fiction
Linda Barone
University of Salerno,
Salerno, Italy

The paper, which title alludes to J. K. Rowlings 2001 book Fantastic Beasts and where to
Find them, deals with language variation, diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, but also the one I
call fantastic namely the typical fantasy attitude to invent evocative proper names and
to make an extensive use of creative allusions and puns in a translation perspective. I will
analyse and discuss works by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling from the
point of view of translation with the underlying assumption that the deeper the
variationist dimension is above all the one connected to wordplays, allusions and
onomastics the more lacking and ineffective the translation at a pragmatic level will be.
The desired effect on the reader is often undermined contravening one the most important
principles in translation which is recreating essentially the same effect on the TT
readership as the ST does on the ST audience (Munday 2009: 210).
I will explore how problematic areas in translation can determine the success or the
failure of a translated writer. The case of Terry Pratchetts Disc World saga is emblematic
in that only few of his novels have been translated into Italian and those which have been
did not allow him to become as popular in Italy as he is in UK because some of his
fundamental traits creative allusions and humour based on wordplays vanish in the
passage from the source language to the target language. It is a great pity that Sir
Pratchett cannot be, in the world, what he was for English native speakers up to March 12,
2015, the day in which Death told him DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, JUST THINK OF IT
AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH (Pratchett and Gaiman 1990: 198), that is the
second most-read living British author after J. K. Rowling.

On Phraseological Units and Their Nature
Maia Aghaia
Tbilisi, Georgia

Over the last twenty years phraseology has become an important field of pure and applied
research in Western European and North American linguistics. Phraseological units reflect
the wealth of a language displaying cultural paradigms of the speakers of a particular
language. Phraseological unit as the particular units of language came into the focus of
linguists attention at the beginning of the 20th century. In the second part of the 20th
century stable word-combinations became the object of scientific investigation.
Phraseological phrases are present everywhere and we see a fast growing role of
phraseology in a wide range of linguistic disciplines. As we know, phraseological
combinations contain one component used in its direct meaning while the other is used
38
figuratively. The phraseological unit is a stable, coherent combination of words with
partially or fully figurative meaning. Phraseological units are difficult to understand
because they have unpredictable meanings and grammar, and often have special
connotations. Studies in the field of phraseology show that phraseological units have an
important role in language. The vocabulary of a language is enriched not only by words
but also by phraseological units. Phraseology represents expressive resources of
vocabulary. Phraseological units are word-groups that cannot be made in the process of
speech, they exist in the language as ready-made units.
The aim of the paper is to show how phraseology makes language more expressive
and picturesque. Besides English speakers are able to use a wide range of phraseologisms
in order to make their speech more academic and fluent. I press the necessity to include
phraseology into English and Georgian language teaching because it is so needy and
essential to master the language properly.
I made some semantic and structural comparisons of English and Georgian
phraseologies and despite the fact that we are dealing with radically different cultures,
there have been found obvious similarities in them.

Systematicity in Phraseology: Basic Source Frames for Idioms Containing the Word
'Fire'
Alexandra Smirnova
Saint-Petersburg State University
Saint-Petersburg, Russia

In most dictionaries idiomatic expressions are listed in alphabetical order below the main
dictionary entry for the head word. Such lexicographic representation is due to the
common belief that these expressions are multi-word lexical units which meaning cannot
be predicted on the basis of the meanings of their components when these are used
independently.
Nowadays, however, a number of researchers in phraseology have made an attempt
to challenge these views by demonstrating that most idioms retain associative bonds with
their source frames in which the same expressions are used literally (Omazic 2008;
Tolochin, Loukjanova 2013). This fact indicates that these units maintain their original
semantic identity even within the target domain and serve as specific conceptual links
between two different situational models. As a result, in a dictionary it should be possible
to regroup idiomatic expressions sharing the same semantic component in their structure
according to their relation to basic source frames.
Analysis of idioms containing the word fire in the modern English language has
shown that they can be divided into three groups according to their semantic relation to
one of the three source frames in which the word fire is used literally: Controlled Burning
Used for Utilitarian Purposes, Uncontrolled Destructive Burning, The Use of Firearms in a
Military Conflict. In each of these situational models the word fire has a specific sense.
Every time an expression containing this word is used idiomatically in a target domain,
one of the three senses of the word fire is activated serving as a semantic base, which
ensures the existence of stable associative bonds between the idiom and its source frame.
Therefore, the description of phraseological units can be incorporated in the main text of
the dictionary entry, relating idioms to the specific sense of the word which realises its
idiomatic potential in their structure.
Such lexicographic representation of idiomatic expressions would reveal in a more
coherent way systematic relations that exist between different situational models in a
39
given language, presenting important sources of idiomaticity for the speakers of this
language. It would have important implications for foreign language learning, enabling
foreigners to get easily acquainted with the system of conceptual links of the given
linguistic community.

40

S4: New advances in the study of the information structure of discourse

Communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence in presentation sentences with
initial rhematic subjects
Martin Adam, Irena Headlandov Kalischov
Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Brno, Czech Republic

Within the framework of Firbasian theory of functional sentence perspective, the
distinction between the presentation and quality scale sentences plays a vital role (i.a.
Firbas 1992, Svobo2005, Dukov 1998, 2008, Chamonikolasov 2010). The present paper
proposes to discuss one of the most common configurations of the so-called presentation
sentences, viz. structures with initial rhematic subject (e.g. An uninvited dwarf came). Since
the prototypical presentation sentences of this sort actually violate the end-focus principle
(with the most prominent, rhematic element occupying the initial position), questions
arise in terms of appropriate prosodic treatment in spoken discourse. The research
objective of this paper is to examine the way native speakers place the intonation centre in
such structures, i.e. to map the correspondence between the degrees of communicative
dynamism and prosodic prominence. For the purpose of the proposed discussion, the
authors decided to analyze J. R. R. Tolkiens novel The Hobbit; the written form against its
spoken version (an audiobook narrated by R. Inglis). The procedure comprised several
stages: first, the presentation sentences with initial rhematic subject were extracted
manually, second, the prosodic treatment of their spoken counterparts was assessed, and
finally, the correspondence between the distribution of communicative dynamism and that
of prosodic prominence was determined.

Inversion as a Device for Structuring Information in Childrens Stories
Jean Albrespit
Universit Bordeaux-Montaigne, UFR Langues et civilisations, France

The aim of this paper is to examine different types of inversion involving prepositional
phrases and adverbial particles such as Off to the beach they go in childrens fiction in
English. Usual explanations in terms of text coherence and emphasis will be reassessed.
My claim is that a change in word order indicates that a change in the narrative structure
is taking place and at the same time that the register has changed as well (from -for
instance- a rather formal, written register to a more spontaneous, oral one). The
phenomenon is particularly salient in fiction for children and rarely occurs in spontaneous
speech apart from a few stereotyped expressions. The notion of style and register is thus
examined in its relationships with linguistic constructions. A comparison will be made to
French, which has recourse to deictic markers or interjections (Et hop, les voil partis!),
in order to analyze the different strategies selected by each language. This research is
based on a corpus of childrens books in English, in French and a parallel corpus of English
books and their translation into French

On English Thematic Subjects with Adverbial Semantics
Gabriela Brhov, Markta Mal
Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic

41
The paper analyses English sentences with thematic subjects conveying adverbial-like
semantic roles. These subjects were detected as translation counterparts of Czech
sentence-initial thematic adverbials realized by prepositional phrases with the
prepositions na, v/ve, do, z/ze complemented by a noun. The Czech sentence (Adv-V-S)
displays an initial scene-setting adverbial. In the corresponding English structure (S-V-O)
the adverbial is reflected in the thematic subject, which results in the adverbial-like
semantics of the subject. However, due to the syntactic divergence the English sentence
complies both with the grammatical word order and the basic distribution of
communicative dynamism. The sentences are analysed from syntactic, semantic and FSP
aspects. On the FSP level the paper studies the potential of the sentences to implement the
Presentation or Quality Scale. The data appear to support Adams claim that although the
construction seems to implement the Quality rather than the Presentation Scale,
displaying a thematic subject and a rhematic object, in its deep structure [] it conceals a
presentation idea (Adam 2013: 148). Since it is the semantic content of the verb that
actuates the presentation semantics of the sentence (Dukov 2015: 260), major
attention is paid to the syntactic-semantic structure of the verb in relation to the semantics
of the subject.

The position of function words in FSP
Jana Chamonikolasov
Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic

The paper examines function words from the viewpoint of one of the theories of
information structure, the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective. This theory studies
the dynamic character of different language units and their contribution to the
development of communication. Although the focus of most recent research into
information structure is on language units expressed by content words like nouns, lexical
verbs or adjectives and adverbs, the representatives of the Brno FSP theory have
considered in their analyses also function words like auxiliary and modal verbs, pronouns,
prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and particles. These closed-class words
expressing primarily grammatical or attitudinal meanings are interpreted within the FSP
theory as elements of a special category, which, however, share with other language units
the capacity to carry different degrees of communicative dynamism and to contribute to
the development of further communication. The paper presents an overview of the
classification of communicative units according to their degree of communicative
dynamism, explains the position of function words within the scale of thematic,
transitional, and rhematic elements, and indicates the frequency of different FSP functions
of function words in the examined corpus. Although function words usually carry
relatively low degrees of communicative dynamism and perform transitional and thematic
functions, they sometimes take over the role of the most dynamic element within a clause
or phrase and become rhematic.

Syntactic and FSP aspects of fronting as a style marker
Libue Dukov

The paper attempts to answer the question whether different types of fronting can serve
as a style marker. Attention is primarily paid to emphatic and contextual fronting, which
are expected to have different distribution in speech, especially conversation, formal
42
writing, and narrative. Accordingly, the sample texts include dialogic and narrative parts
of fiction, and academic prose. The differences in the distribution are assumed to be
connected with the respective FSP structures: in emphatic fronting the fronted element is
the rheme, whereas in contextual fronting it is the diatheme. Hence emphatic fronting
displays a prominent deviation from the basic distribution of communicative dynamism,
whereas contextual fronting achieves agreement with it. As compared with the unmarked
ordering in which both types display the fronted element in the postverbal position, in the
fronted arrangement the FSP function of these elements acquires an additional feature: in
emphatic fronting it is emphatically or emotively intensified, which is a feature found in
speech; in contextual fronting the fronted element serves as a direct link with what has
preceded, which is a characteristic of academic prose and narrative. In general, the paper
investigates how the devices offered by the language system are made actual use of in
texts.

Information structure of alternating psych constructions in cross-linguistic
perspective
ngel L. Jimnez-Fernndez, Bozena Rozwadowska
University of Seville, Spain; Uniwersytet Wroclawski, Poland

We investigate the information structure of Experiencer verbs in English, Spanish and
Polish with a view on the relationship between topic/focus articulation and the choice of
the verb from alternating doublets such as frighten vs. fear, dislike vs. bother, bug, or
annoy, love or enjoy vs. delight, etc., illustrated in (1):
(1) a. Extreme side effects frighten patients.
b. Patients fear extreme side effects.
We argue that, depending on what participant is the topic/focus of the sentence, speakers
prefer one verb over the other. We have run tests with native speakers of the three
languages, which include question/answer pairs, such as those presented in (2-4):
(2) Q: What is Angela afraid of/scared of/terrified of? (Focus on Theme; Topic on
Experiencer)
A: okAngela fears snakes.
A: #Snakes frighten Angela.
(3) Q: Who is afraid of snakes /scared of/terrified of? (Focus on Experiencer; Topic on
Theme)
A: #Angela fears snakes
A: okSnakes frighten Angela.
(4) Q: Whats up? (Expected answer: all-focus)
A: okAngela fears snakes.
A: okSnakes frighten Angela.
We will discuss the results of the experiment in comparative perspective and the
contribution of information structure analysis (so far overlooked in the literature) to the
debate about the puzzle of psych verbs.

Information Structure of English and Slovene Existential Sentences
Monika Kavalir
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Slovenia

Traditionally, the analysis of information structure in both English and Slovene has been
based on Czech functionalism (e.g., Halliday and Matthiessen 2014; Toporii 2000). It has,
43
however, never been applied to and contrasted specifically in terms of existential
sentences. The study presented here examines a corpus of 100 English existential
sentences and their Slovene translations. Special attention is paid to the choice of theme
and rheme as well as the verb. The analysis is based on Halliday and Matthiessen (2014)
and Firbas (1992). Due to cross-linguistic differences, several problematic areas emerge in
the analysis of Slovene examples. The treatment of clitics, for example, differs from the
way they are usually analysed in Slovene: it is argued that they are obligatorily thematic
and therefore cannot represent the topical theme. The analysis of modal adjuncts on the
other hand, differs from the Hallidayan model as these seem closer to fulfilling the criteria
for acting as the topical theme. The comparison of English and Slovene existential
sentences gives rise to the idea that English sentences can be seen as consisting of clearly
distinguishable theme and rheme, whereas Slovene sentences operate along a continuum
and instead of a strict theme-rheme division the most thematic and rhematic elements can
be determined.

Dynamic semantic scales in it-clefts with focused subject
Anna Kudrnov

The English cleft construction is a device that can fulfil multiple functions, one of which is
expressing information structure, in Prague School-based research known as functional
sentence perspective (FSP). Various FSP studies (Firbas 1992, Chamonikolasov and
Adam, 2005, etc.) suggest the existence of two main tendencies (plus some subtypes) in
information structure of a sentence, which are referred to as dynamic semantic scales:
Presentation scale, which introduces a new element on the scene, and Quality scale, which
ascribes a quality to a bearer of quality. Clefting is one of the ways to express information
structure more explicitly, but its relation to dynamic semantic scales has not yet been
widely studied. This paper presents a preliminary, corpus-based analysis of English it-
clefts with focused subject; the material is extracted from Intercorp, a multilingual
translation corpus. The main goals are to analyse the FSP function of it-clefts with the help
of some existing criteria (e.g. classification by Prince, 1978) and ultimately their Czech
translation equivalents a comparative analysis with Czech (a language with different
means of expressing FSP) could contribute to a better understanding of the issue.

Pronominal summarizing: the means of signalling, retrievability span, and idea
constraint
Ji Lukl
Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic

As far as their functions in sentences are concerned, the deictic pronouns this and that, and
particularly the impersonal it, are rather versatile. Among their functions is the ability to
represent long stretches of text and several ideas simultaneously. Primarily, this
summarizing function is of interest because it seems to contradict some views held by a
number of scholars, including, for instance, Wallace Chafe (limited number of ideas active
at the same time) and Jan Firbas (retrievability span). The first goal of the study will thus
be to determine the average number of sentences and ideas that can be represented by
these summarizing pronouns. In addition, in order for the summarizing function to be
effective, the addressee/reader needs to be able to recognize that something is being
summarized. Determining the syntactic and lexical signals by which this recognition is
44
facilitated will be the second goal of the analysis. Finally, the study will determine whether
there is a correlation between the way the summarizing function is being signalled and
the number of sentences and ideas the summarizing pronouns contain. The expectation
is that the greater the number of sentences and ideas represented in the pronouns, the
more prominently the summarizing function needs to be signalled. The analysis will be
performed on five topically enclosed texts (i.e. a chapter), two of academic prose, two of
fiction prose, and one of popular science prose.

Give them a Title: On the Global Theme of Research Articles
Renata Ppalov
Charles University, Faculty of Education, Prague, Czech Republic

Research articles rank among the most prominent academic genres and familiarize their
readers in a succinct way with the most recent results of academic research. Due to the
immense rate of publication these days it has become vital to stand out from the crowd in
order to gain adequate attention. This may be achieved, among other things, by the
suitable selection of a title. Since titles are freely available and visible even in paid online
journals, they are in open competition and serve a multitude of functions. For example, a
title should identify the global theme of the paper, lure the readers, or raise expectations.
This paper is based on data gathered on the titles of linguistic research articles published
recently by six renowned peer-reviewed international journals. An endeavour was made
to select only titles produced by English native-speaking authors (irrespective of the
variety of English employed) or those affiliated with universities established in English-
speaking countries. Reviews and editorials were disregarded. Examining their ideational,
interpersonal, and textual functions, this paper strives to identify some of the prominent
linguistic tendencies and patterns in titles of research articles, giving particular attention
to the FSP parameters of the headlines.

"Pretty fantastic what they have done": Evaluative focusing constructions and
information structure
Teresa Pham
Vechta University, Faculty III, Germany

Constructions like clefting, extraposition, topicalization, or dislocation (cf. Biber et al.
1999) have been studied intensively with regard to information structure. However,
beyond managing the textual information flow, such focusing constructions often contain
evaluative lexemes (e.g. adjectives like excellent, ridiculous; cf. Hunston/Sinclair 2000).
Therefore, the present paper aims at enhancing our knowledge of how these constructions
support the linguistic expression of evaluation. The paper is based on the manual analysis
of a corpus of academic and non-academic book reviews (ca. 24.500 words), published
online and in print in linguistic journals (Brinton et al. 2015; Carlson et al. 2015) and on
the cataloguing website Goodreads (Chandler 2015). The corpus examples of syntactic
constructions deviating from the unmarked SVX pattern or established combinations of
sentence constituents will be analysed as to parameters of information structure, but also
as to the mention of specific sources (cf. Sinclair 1988) and participating roles of
evaluation (cf. Hunston/Sinclair 2001). A first scrutiny shows, for example, that
extraposed sentences like It is crucial to do a diachronic investigation (Brinton et al. 2015)
are particularly well-suited for objectifying evaluations in academic reviews by placing
45
emphasis on a rhematic evaluative category in the superordinate clause while concealing
the evaluator.

FSP and the Essence of a Text
Leona Rohrauer
temporarily no affiliation due to maternity leave

I would like to present the results of a small FSP experiment exploring the FSP potential
for textual analysis. First, five short texts varied as regards the field of discourse will be
analysed in that their rhematic progressions will be identified alongside with their
thematic progressions. The words (lexical units) functioning as themes/themes proper
within the FSP structure of sentences (defined as basic distributional fields) will be put
into a set together with the words functioning as rhemes/rhemes proper. Second, five
linguists having the experience with publishing their research outcome and thus having
acquired the routine of identifying key words in their academic papers will be asked to
identify the key words in the analysed texts. These keywords will be compared to the set
of carriers of the themes and rhemes identified at stage one of the analysis. The initial
hypothesis is that the set of key words identified by the linguists will be included in the set
of words functioning as themes and rhemes in the analysed texts. These are presumed to
provide the potential reader with a rather accurate estimate of the gist of the text.

FSP analysis in small distributional fields: Focus on the subject
Vladislav Smolka
University of South Bohemia, Faculty of Education, esk Budjovice, Czech Republic

It is the experience of many researchers into Functional Sentence Perspective that the
difficulty of analysis grows with the complexity and length of the sentences explored.
However, the same seems to apply, though less noticeably, to small fields of distribution of
communicative dynamism, particularly to sentences consisting only of the subject and the
predicate. This has been intuitively grasped even by linguists who are not concerned with
information structure, namely by phoneticians like Roach and Wells. They point out that in
sentences like the phone's ringing; the brakes have failed, etc., the intonation nucleus
typically falls on the subject rather than on the verb, which they consider unusual as it
goes contrary to native speakers intuition.In FSP-related literature, this topic was already
given attention by Mathesius, who speaks of thetic sentences, and later explored by
Firbas, who observes that the distinction between presentation and quality may be
somewhat blurred in these sentences, since even verbs which do not suggest the
characteristics of appearance/existence semantically are capable of performing the
dynamic function of presentation. The aim of this paper is to outline the characteristics of
the subjects and verbs occurring in such sentences and to explore the factors which render
the former or the latter rhematic, particularly the context, and the absence of other clause
constituents as competitors for the rhematic function.

46
S5. On the influence of English on word-formation structures in the languages of
Europe and beyond

Vincent Renner (University of Lyon, France), Morphostructural borrowing: An
overview
Virtually all European languages have been affected by the ever-increasing global
dominance of English over the last decades. Contact-induced borrowing has been amply
described at the lexical level and, even if this has been less noted, it also often extends to
word-formation structures. This introductory paper discusses the concept of
morphostructural borrowing, illustrates it with examples involving a variety of processes
and languages, provides a tentative typology of the described phenomena and concludes
with an emphasis on methodological issues in the study of contact word-formation.

Silvia Cacchiani (University of Modena, Italy), Recent trends in Italian compounding
Over the last decades, a growing number of foreign neologisms, Anglicisms and false
Anglicisms have been recorded in reference works, scholarly works and websites.
Additionally, research in word-formation argues for a growing influence of English
compounding onto Italian (Adamo/Della Valle 2003a; Dardano, Frenguelli/Puoti 2005).
Hybrid words are possible, and shifts from left- to right-headedness can be observed, e.g.
baby killer young killer, afa record extreme heat and humidity, Dalema-pensiero
Dalemas political vision. Overall, foreign patterns apepar to encourage recourse to
otherwise marginal patterns in Italian (Iacobini 2015). For instance, Lombardi Vallauri
(2006) points out that naming and classificatory N-N and N-Name compounds like effetto
serra greenhouse effect or effetto-Berlusconi effect named after the consequences of
Berlusconis behaviour, are not new to Italian but productivity might have been boosted
by English. In this context, this paper brings together insights from recent studies on
Italian compounding in order to assess whether and to what extent contact with English
and Englsih word-formation patterns might have an influence on Italian compounding.
Data is taken from reference works, popularizing publications and online sources and will
be assessed along parameters such as headedness, semantic relation R, and phonotactics
of the calque, mixed compound, or pseudo Anglicization.

Roxana Ciolneanu & Alina Villalva (University of Lisbon, Portugal), The influence of
English on morphological compounding in Romanian and Portuguese
In the present paper we aim at looking at instances of possible incipient morphological
borrowing in Romanian and Portuguese from English within the context of societal
multilingualism (Romaine 2006). We are well aware that contact-induced
grammaticalization is a gradual and long process, involving several generations of
speakers (Heine & Kuteva 2003: 533). However, in the field of word-formation, the
influence of English on Romanian and Portuguese, two languages that basically favour the
derivational processes, seems to be already visible in the ever-increasing number of
compounds (e.g. Ro. toxico-dependent, Pt. toxicodependente). The tendency in Romanian to
move from a structurally-derivative type of language to a compounding-based system,
under the influence of foreign linguistic models (mainly French and English) was noticed
back in the 60s (Dimitrescu 1962: 397). Some of these compounds are already registered
in dictionaries, some others are not, but they are frequently met in specialised texts and
newspaper articles. Our analysis will be based on the following criteria:
a) Frequency (already established compounds vs. one-off cases of individual linguistic
creativity);
47
b) Syntax: the argument + head order is not the natural order in Romanian and
Portuguese word structures;
c) General language vs. specialised language (e.g. Ro. dependen de alcool vs. etanolo-
dependen).

Pierre Arnaud (University of Lyon, France), Is French relational subordinative
compounding under English influence?
French has Relational Subordinative [NN]N (RSNN) compounds (e.g. sauce tomate "tomato
sauce"). The expansion of RSNN compounding in contemporary French has been
frequently noted. A number of authors have claimed that the category originated in
English, and the present research is aimed at determining the influence of English on
French RSNN compounding. Searches in various early dictionaries and technical treatises
uncovered 68 pre-1800 units, which proves that English cannot have introduced RSNN
compounding into French. The translation equivalents of a random sample of 100 English
RSNN units were then searched. Only two French equivalents are similar compounds.
Obviously, French does not massively calque English compounds. In the other direction,
35% of French units do not have a word-for-word English equivalent, which indicates
some independence of the pattern. Initial attestations show that in the vast majority of
word-for-word pairs the English unit appeared first, but this does not constitute definitive
proof of causality. However, in a domain like computing, where most innovation took place
in English-speaking environments, there are significantly more word-for-word translation
pairs than in the general lexicon. French RSSN compounding was not introduced by
English, but there is indirect evidence of English influence on its productivity.

Isabel Balteiro (University of Alicante, Spain), Funtstico! English and Spanish
morphological intertwining
This paper focuses on hybrid blends between English and Spanish. Although the
phenomenon was documented a few decades ago (Rodrguez Gonzlez 1989 mentions
USAmericano, USAdas and yugre < yuppie + progre), there is little academic analysis of a
number of blends between English and Spanish lexical material, except for a brief section
in a study by Lpez Ra (2014) on names of Spanish music bands. It must be noted that we
shall not focus on traditional hybrids, e.g. Spanish words with a Spanish lexeme and an -ing
suffix (such as puenting, or balconing, often studied within false anglicisms), nor on the
reverse process, i.e. English lexemes with a Spanish suffix (rockero). Rather, we shall
concentrate on the convergence between two lexemes that drop part of their phonetic
and/or spelling material in order to create a word which is new, and yet recognizable from
its constituents. For instance, the Spanish vegetable grower Verdifresh sells an Ensalight
(www.verdifresh.info/5-ensaladas/247-ensalight), a blend between (ensalada salad
and light, a false Anglicism for low-calorie), which is accompanied by a sort of Mexican
roll called Wrapidos (www.verdifresh.info/ensaladas/wrapidos-new-york), and the
website Funtstico (http://www.funtastico.es) tempts us with a number of techno and
computer gadgets.

Anne-Line Graedler (Hedmark University College, Norway) & Gisle Andersen (NHH
Norwegian School of Economics, Norway), English morphological patterns in
Norwegian: The enigmatic -s suffix
Traditionally, the -s ending in Norwegian was only used as a possessive suffix in nouns, but
with increased lexical influence from English the association of -s with plurals is
expanding. A related category is the suffix -ings which often functions as a stylistic marker
48
of informality, as in dritings 'dead drunk'. Moreover, the English -s suffix also occurs as
part of singular noun forms, e.g. en caps 'a cap.
Interconnection and morphological similarities and differences are fundamental
factors in relation to both loanword integration and the influence of English morphological
patterns. This paper will present current productivity of the -s and -ings suffixes based on
empirical evidence from the large Norwegian Newspaper Corpus, which represents about
two decades of contemporary newspaper language.
The aim is to chart the inventory and identify predictors that may affect the degree to
which the suffixes occur: what kinds of lexical items that are coded with plural -s and -ings
in Norwegian, to what extent the two suffixes are productive beyond originally English
words, their effect on semantic and pragmatic functions, and how various factors such as
frequency, orthography, structural complexity, etc., affect variation between domestic and
foreign plural suffixes.

Rania Papadopoulou & George J. Xydopoulos (University of Patras, Greece), The
influence of English on Modern Greek: A morphosyntactic approach
Nowadays the influence of English on MG is attested at the lexical level (e.g. tnis < tennis,
dizin < design) reaching in some cases idiomatic phraseology through calquing (e.g. klo
pno ap to ximno la < cry over spilt milk). Influences of English on MG are also
observed at the morphosyntactic level inducing changes to the MG grammatical system:
phrasal verbs, e.g. prno pso < call back, zito kso < ask (sb) out; pre-modified NPs, the
pre-modifier being an uninflected loanword, e.g. tzaz musik < jazz music, Vodafone snesi
< Vodafone connection; the adverb prin (ago) transformed into a postposition, mimicking
ago; alternated thematic structures of some verbs, mimicking the equivalent verbs in
English e.g. promivo me < provide with (V+PP vs. V+NP) epikinon + NP (V+NP vs.
intransitive); new causative form structures, e.g. xo ta mali mu vamna < I have my hair
dyed instead of xo vamna ta mali mu. In this work, we analyze a set of collected MG
patterns that seem to be mimicking the equivalent English patterns, examine their formal
characteristics (morphological, syntactic etc.), compare them with the equivalent
structures attested in English, and investigate the changes that they cause in the MG
grammatical system.

Ivo Fabijani (University of Zadar, Croatia), English word-formation types in
Croatian: Current trends in the adaptation of Anglicisms
Globalization and its implications on wor(l)d transformations are huge. The English
language has at least a two-fold function in this process: direct (incidental) function as a
medium of communication, and indirect (coincidental) function as a medium of
transformations within the linguistic structures of borrowing languages. The influx of
English lexemes is becoming more evident in both formal and informal contexts (replicas
become more susceptible to models). In our previous research we suggested the widening
of analysis of anglicismsnominal syntagms, as a result of which new methodology of their
classification and analysis was devised, i.e. a three-degree adaptation of nominal
syntagms: zero, compromise, and complete transmorphemization. This article aims to
shed more light on current anglicisms and their adaptation into Croatian at the
morphological level within multiword expressions. Anglicisms are not anymore limited to
simple and open-class words, but more and more complex words are formed with
different English bound morphemes. There are also multiword expressions and
phraseological units, both in their hybrid forms and calqued forms, parahrasal verbs,
clippings, abbreviations, original English blendings and Croatian ones, made on the English
49
model. Moreover, some recent examples of anglicisms have proved the existence of
calqued syntactic structures/elements in Croatian.

Virginia Pulcini & Matteo Milani (University of Turin, Italy), Neoclassical combining
forms in English loanwords: Evidence from Italian
Most European languages expanded their vocabulary through word-building from Latin
and Greek elements already during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but more
intensely from the 18th century. This common source explains similarities throughout the
vocabularies of European languages, especially in technical and scientific terminology. The
neoclassical element is formally visible in English compounds containing affixes and
combining forms of Latin and Greek origin, some of which have been quite productive in
the course of time. When these English compounds are borrowed by Romance languages,
speakers are likely to recognize (formally and semantically) the neoclassical element
which is attached to the English element of the loanword. In this paper we argue that the
presence of these classical elements, which have a common historical and linguistic origin
in the source and in the recipient word stocks, will favour the borrowing process from
English into Romance languages. To this end, we have analyzed the neoclassical combining
forms found in Anglicisms recorded in Italian dictionaries, i.e. anti- (e.g. anti-age), aqua-
(aquapark), auto- (autoreverse), cyber- (cyberspace), eco- (ecolabel), extra- (extra-large),
hydro- (hydrospeed), inter- (intercity), intra- (intranet), mega- (megabyte), micro
(microchip), mini- (minibus), multi- (multitasking), mal- (malware), no- (no global), non-
(non-stop), para- (paraflying), super- (superstar), tele- (telemarketing), and will observe
their productivity in comparison with other combining forms of non-classical origin (e-,
under-, over-, up-). Data are taken from dictionaries and web-based corpora.

Reima Al-Jarf (King Saud University, Saudi Arabia), Lexical hybrids in Arabic
Arabic has loan words from ancient and modern languages. Not only has Arabic borrowed
lexical items, but it has also borrowed a number of derivational prefixes and suffixes from
Turkish, Greek, Farsi and English. Here, the borrowed affix combines with native Arabic
roots (free morpheme) to form new lexical items (single words, blends and two-word
compounds). Specifically, the following English affixes -cracy, geo, hydro, mania, meter,
hyper, topia, net, pedia, -book, net, com, sat, soft, leaks, wiki-, -tube, web, press, media, mini,
phobia-, -phobia, petro, Euro, logy, logia are being added to Arabic roots to form lexical
hybrids such as
and others. Many of those lexical hybrids first appeared in
the media during the Arab spring. The present study aims to explore the following: (i) the
structure of lexical hybrids in Arabic; (ii) how productive they are; (iii) denotative and
connotative meanings and whether they have the same meaning as the donor language;
(iv) whether they are used in Standard or colloquial Arabic; (v) in which domains they are
used; and (vi) the historical, political, and socioeconomic settings of the various contact
situations.

Jos Sanchez Fajardo (University of Alicante, Spain), Cultural Anglicisms in Cuban
Spanish: A corpus-driven analysis
Owing to its geographical proximity to the U.S., and the oft-quoted political and
socioeconomic relations with the North-American nation, Cuba has embodied the
phenomena of cutural transmission and borrowing. The study of cultural loans reveals
that not only have a number of linguistic borrowings been assimilated into Cuban Spanish
but they have also added cultural novelty and innovation e.g. fraternidad < fraternity,
50
scout, bride maid < bridesmaid, kitchen shower. Thus, this presentation is intended to: 1)
study the concept of cultural borrowing more thoroughly, 2) revise Cuban Spanish
lexicographical works and corpora with the aim of extracting cultural loans, and 3)
provide a general account of the typology of these anglicized lexical units. The present
analysis of cultural loans is of great importance to shed more light on the phenomenon of
linguistic borrowing in general. One of the earliest findings indicates that a cultural loan is
precisely a gradable transversal concept being in conjunction with the process of linguistic
borrowing. This unmeasurable index is aimed to qualify the process of anglicization in
terms of semantic load, word adaptation, or obsoleteness.

Jess Fernndez-Domnguez (University of Granada, Spain), Internally or externally
triggered morphological change? The case of Spanish verb compounds
Spanish verb compounds with the structure [N + V]V are morphologically opaque and
often infrequent today, and are perceived as archaic remnants of a now unproductive
word-formation process (e.g. aliquebrar). This verb-creating pattern has remained hardly
productive in time but, despite this, some of the few resulting lexemes can still be found in
Contemporary Spanish.In contrast, two morphological processes seem to be emerging for
the formation of Spanish verb compounds. One takes previously existing nouns and
generates compound verbs, as in bioestimular (to biostimulate) from bioestimulacin
(biostimulation). A second comparable process also involves back-formation and creates
compounds with two native Spanish constituents, as in bocabrir (to leave sb. open-
mouthed) from boquiabierto (open-mouthed). It seems, then, that Spanish verbs
compounds are being generated via two different routes, both with right-headed
properties and originated by back-formation. This paper approaches the structure,
formation and re-flourishing of such Spanish verb compounds. Their properties are
analysed and their origins and constituents evaluated in order to question the parallels
between these lexemes and their English counterparts. The aim is to explore productivity
levels in each of the paradigms and to test whether they are reviving due to the structural
influence of English.

Alicja Witalisz (Pedagogical University of Kracow, Poland), English linguistic
influence on the morphological system of Polish: N+N compounds
The article discusses a new, contact-induced word-formation rule, used in Polish to form
right-headed N+N compound words. Polish compounds are typically left-headed and
appear as N+inflected N, N+Adj and N+PP formations. Right-headed compounds must
necessarily contain the interfix -o-. The new word-formation rule used to derive right-
headed affixless N+N compounds in Polish is a by-product of English lexical influence.
English N+N compounds borrowed as loanwords were at first unanalyzed morphologically
and adopted as simple lexemes, yet, the growing English competence of Polish speakers
enabled them to analyze morphologically English compound loanwords and apply the
same word-formation rule in the production of native right-headed N+N creations. They
are often hybrids and make use of English lexical material, e.g. P. Gralburger (P. gral
'highlander' + E. burger), P. balkon party (P. balkon 'balcony' + E. party), P. wiochmen (P.
wiocha 'village' + E. man). The research material includes contact-induced N+N compound
words, classified into the following categories: loanwords, loanblends, loan translations,
hybrid creations and pseudo-anglicisms, as well as Polish native creations that have been
coined by analogy to foreign N+N expressions.

51
Akiko Nagano (Tohoku University, Japan) & Masaharu Shimada (University of
Tsukuba, Japan), Language contact between English and Japanese and the borrowing
of left-headed nominal modification construction
Vakareliyska and Kapatsinski (2014) discuss the productivity of [N [N]] constructions in
Bulgarian in which an English loan noun modifies a Bulgarian native noun, such as ekn
geroj action hero. In this paper, we will report a similar process of construction
borrowing now underway in Japanese, that is, the English nominal modification
construction by a PP (e.g., hero in a movie) being adopted as a naming strategy. In the
following left-headed [N1 [P-N2]] expressions, native Japanese noun N2 is selected by an
English preposition and modifies native noun head N1:

(1)
[ N1 [ on N2] ]

[tamagoyaki [ on natto ]]

omelet put.on natto

omelet topped with natto

(2)
[ N1 [ in N2] ]

[tamagoyaki [ in natto ]]

omelet put.in natto

omelet with natto inside

These expressions are coined as names. Syntactically, in in (1) and on in (2) are close to the
genuine English prepositions in realizing the left-headed structure, but semantically, they
are used in the sense of with, selecting the locatum argument. We will discuss contact-
related factors that underlie the emergence of this new construction.

Elizaveta Tarasova (IPU New Zealand), The use of loan abbreviations in Russian
analytical composites
In the last years a number of loan abbreviations entered the Russian language, e.g. DVD, IT,
IP. The morphological status of such loans in Russian is unclear and their degree of
assimilation is often difficult to determine. They may occur with the orthography of the
donor language, e.g. VIP- (VIP hall), CD- (CD player), but some of them have
acquired Russian orthography, e.g. sidi (CD), pisi (PC), piar (PR), and are involved in the
formation of new lexemes, e.g. piarshchik (PR specialist), aitishnik (IT professional).
The presented research focuses on N+N endocentric structures in Russian, in which the
first element is an abbreviation borrowed from English, e.g. SMM-uslugi (SMM services),
PR-aktsiya (promotion of a product/service). The study is based on the analysis of about
300 units and looks at how the use of loan abbreviations in such sequences influences
their assimilation in Russian. The analysis considers factors that motivate the formation of
new single lexemes, as well as analytical composites with loan abbreviations in the
recipient language.
The study contributes to the understanding of growing analytical tendencies in Russian
morphology, and also provides some new insights into the ways in which changes in
vocabulary may influence grammar of the language.

Rafa Augustyn (Maria Curie-Skodowska University, Poland), On the rise of clipped
formations in the contemporary Polish language: Is English to blame?
Similarly to other Slavic languages, Polish word-formation relies heavily on derivation, and
in particular suffixation. But this appears to gradually change now due to the global
52
dominance of the English language. Apart from rapid inflow of direct English borrowings,
semantic calques or loan translations into Polish following 1980, we can observe an
unprecedented shift in the productivity of certain word-formation or other morphological
processes. In particular, we deal with an increasing number of compound and prefixoid
formations on the one hand, and clippings on the other, all of which were far less common
(esp. compounding) or largely untypical (clipping) methods of creating new words in
Polish before, but rather characteristic of Germanic languages, including English.
Polish linguists have already studied this recent trend for more frequent use of prefixation
and compounding in the contemporary Polish language (e.g. cf. Jadacka 2001, Waszakowa
2005), but so far little attention has been given to clipped forms. This paper aims at (i)
providing a possible cognitive motivation behind selected popular clippings in Polish (e.g.
wykon performance, sit focia selfie) based on the Cognitive Linguistics theoretical
framework, and (ii) showing the differences, mostly on the morphological level, in the way
Polish and English clippings are formed.

53
S6. Multimodal Perspectives on English Language Teaching

Developing multimodal communicative competence in university students in
English as a foreign language: A practical example
Francesca Coccetta - Ca Foscari University of Venice, Italy
The extensive research into multimodal discourse (e.g. Routledge Studies in Multimodality)
triggered by Kress and van Leuweens seminal work Reading Images (1996) has lead to the
reconsideration of Hymes (1972) concept of communicative competence in a multimodal
perspective (e.g. Royce, 2002) and the consequent integration of multimodal literacy into
the language classroom (e.g. Royce, 2002; Campagna and Boggio, 2009; Coccetta, 2015).
This paper will report on how research into multimodality developed within the SFL
framework (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) has been integrated into the syllabus of a
university English course with the aim of equipping students in English as a foreign
language with the tools to cope with a selection of multimodal texts characterizing the
present-day society. To do so, during the course the students engage in activities which
guide them in the exploration of the complex array of semiotic resources contributing to a
texts meaning and develop their multimodal communicative competence. The paper will
provide a description of the materials created for the course and the teaching method
employed.

Campagna, S. and Boggio, C. 2009. Multimodal business and economics. Milano: LED.
Coccetta, F. 2015. Multimodality for non-language specialists: reconsidering the ESP
syllabus in a multimodal perspective. In F. Dalziel and G. Henrot Sostero (eds.),
Linnovazione nellapprendimento linguistico allUniversit di Padova. Padova: Padova
University Press, pp. 221-230.
Halliday, M.A.K and Matthiessen, C. 2004. An introduction to functional grammar. London:
Arnold.
Hymes, D. 1972. On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds.),
Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 269-293.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images. The grammar of visual design.
London: Routledge.
Royce, T. 2002. Multimodality in the TESOL classroom: Exploring visual-verbal synergy.
TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), pp. 191-205.

An implementation of a multiliteracy pedagogy: Digital stories
Victoria Zenotz - Public University of Navarre, Spain
The influence of society on literacy practices has been acknowledged for long. More
recently, the different technologies, and particularly the Internet, have become part of
modern society, opening a multimodal world, where communication and literacy have also
turned multimodal since learners must not only face the spoken and written word but also
meanings conveyed through images and sounds. Researchers such as those belonging to
the New London Group (2000) consider that learners must participate in real social
practices in the classroom connected to these multimedia technologies. They use the term
multiliteracies because apart from the multimodality alluded above they believe that
literacy teaching has to consider the diversity of cultures and languages.
The first part of the presentation discusses concepts such as multiliteracies and critical
literacy. With the aim of improving learners critical literacy multiliteracy pedagogy was
54
implemented. The research described is a longitudinal study carried out at a secondary
school in the north of Spain (2012-2015), where learners were involved in the creation of
digital stories. The qualitative data obtained through several instruments offer some
valuable insights into the ways to develop multimodal literacy in a cultural and
linguistically diverse society where critical perspectives are vital.

New London Group, (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures, in B.
Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social
futures. Macmillan: South Yarra, pp. 938.

Adaptive remediation and the transfer of writing knowledge in multimodal
composition
Michael-John DePalma Baylor University, Waco, Texas
Inquiry concerning the transfer of writing knowledge has been of longstanding interest to
writing researchers. One important development in recent scholarship is the ways transfer
has been reconceptualized in relation to multimodal composing practices. This emerging
body of research argues that transfer not only entails reusing past writing knowledge in
new situations; it also entails reshaping writing knowledge. A key concern for scholars
working from this perspective is discovering ways that English language teachers might
help multimodal composers facilitate the mobilization and adaptation of their print-based
writing knowledge when remediating written texts into new media compositions (e.g.,
digital stories, audio essays). In response to this exigency, my presentation discusses an
approach called adaptive remediation that can help writers develop meta-awareness about
how they might use and reshape prior composing knowledge and available semiotic
resources in ways to suit their rhetorical objectives in processes of remediation. In sharing
this approach, I aim to assist English language educators in our efforts to help students
transfer writing knowledge across media and, in the process, make rhetorically-sound
decisions about how to adapt and reuse multimodal literacies in a variety of contexts.

Taking it to the Streets: Using multimodal semiotic systems to encourage student
participation in language learning
Ayesha Heble Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
Teachers all over the world would agree that student motivation is one of the most critical
aspects of the learning process, but how much control do they have over it? Most of the
variables that influence motivation seem to be out of the purview of the teacher, controlled
by objective conditions within the broader socio-economic context, or subjective
conditions within the individual learner. This paper would like to suggest that teachers can
indeed influence student motivation through the setting up of tasks that increase student
participation in classroom activities by using the various different semiotic resources at
their disposal. It examines the semiotic options available to students and how these might
be exploited to help them in their learning of language. Some of the semiotic systems
include signs & images, words and their meanings, sentences & structures, written
discourse, spoken discourse, and computer mediated discourse.
An example of the innovative use of technology with Arab students in an Advanced
Language Studies course held at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman is described to illustrate
how this might be achieved. Students studied various different semiotic systems as part of
the course, and for their final assessment, were invited to interpret a particular topic in the
55
groups and present it in the form of a five-minute video, using visuals, sound, and text to
communicate their understanding of the subject.

Mode Saliency and Mode Effect in Multimodal Listening Comprehension Question
Design
Mari Carmen Campoy-Cubillo - Universitat Jaume I, Spain
This presentation introduces the notions of mode saliency and mode effect within the
construct of multimodal listening comprehension tasks in foreign language learning
(Campoy & Querol 2015). These two new terms are related to the concept of
multimodality and the design of communicative activities that take into account non-
verbal modes in language learning task design. Thus, making aspects of communication
such as the tone of our voice (which may point to our mood or emotional state) or our face
expression (frown indicating dislike) part of the listening comprehension task is seen as a
key issue in the sense that it can add information to a verbal message or even replace it.
It is suggested that in order to be able to deal with multimodal (spoken) texts in language
learning environments, we need to be able to define such texts in terms of mode saliency
and effect on the comprehension of a specific situation.
Building referential connections between visual and verbal representations in a video
sequence should be the guiding principle when designing video listening comprehension
questions. These referential connections should also guide the teaching of multimodal text
comprehension allowing space for the teaching of communicative modes as meaning-
making language features.
In line with Gee (2005) and Meyer (2005) we propose that the activation of learner
multimodal knowledge structures makes multimodal learning more effective, and that
multimodal structure knowledge needs to be part of the foreign language syllabus.

Campoy-Cubillo, M. C. & Querol-Julin, M. (2015). Assessing multimodal listening. In B.
Crawford Camiciottoli & I. Fortanet-Gmez (eds.). Multimodal analysis in academic
settings: From research to teaching. 193-212.
Gee, J. P. (2005). Learning by design: Good video games as learning machines, E-Learning,
(2), 5-16.
Mayer, R. E. (2005). Principles of multimedia learning based on social cues:
personalization, voice, and image principles. In R. E. Mayer, (Ed.) The Cambridge
handbook of multimedia learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. 345-368.

English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) workshops with a multimodal perspective:
Spanish and Cuban professors responses
Teresa Morell - University of Alicante, Spain.
Many university teachers worldwide are now confronted with having to use English as a
medium of instruction (EMI) (Dearden, 2015). Although non-native English-speaking
teachers are often solely concerned with the verbal mode, studies (e.g., Morell, 2015) have
proven that awareness of the affordances of written, non-verbal material and body
language modes improve their multimodal competence and, in turn, the communicative
potential of their verbal and non-verbal discourse. In this paper, I will first describe the 20
hour EMI workshop given at the University of Alicante in Spain and at the University of
Pinar del Ro in Cuba to train teachers of diverse disciplines to improve their multimodal
competence when teaching their content subjects in English. Second, I will compare and
56
contrast 20 Spanish and 20 Cuban academics' attitudes towards the use of EMI, and their
multimodal competence when carrying out lessons after having participated in the
workshops.

Dearden, J. 2015. English as a medium of instruction - a growing global phenomena. British
Council www.teachingenglish.org.uk. Oxford University.
Morell, T. 2015. International conference paper presentations: A multimodal analysis to
determine effectiveness. English for Specific Purposes, 37, 137-150.

The teaching of doctor-patient communication skills in English: A multimodal
approach
Daniele Franceschi - University of Pisa, Italy
This presentation examines doctor-patient communication with the aim of helping
learners of L2 medical English to become aware of some of the strategies that they may
adopt in their role as physicians to enhance knowledge dissemination. In particular, it
focuses on the analysis of those verbal and non-verbal elements that appear to facilitate
the communicative exchange (cf. Bezemer & Kress, 2016), while also contributing to
establishing rapport with the patient.
The data consists of authentic video-recorded conversations between a patient with
hepatitis C, who is reluctant to get treatment, and three doctors discussing his condition
and the benefits, as well as side effects, of undergoing standard of care therapy. The
material is freely accessible online through the Hepatitis C - Caring Ambassadors website
(http://hepcchallenge.org), as it is meant to be used by other hepatitis C patients to
understand different points of view about treatment. For the present study, however, the
conversations have been transcribed, annotated, and analysed following a multi-semiotic
approach (Baldry, 2000; Thibault, 2000; Baldry & Thibault, 2006).
The doctors in these videos show how to successfully bridge the communication gap
with their patient by making specific choices at various linguistic levels (e.g., higher
explicitness, repetition, hedging, reformulation with non-Latinate expressions, etc.) and by
relying on non-verbal elements (e.g. hand gestures, body movements and facial
expressions), which also contribute significantly to meaning (McNeill, 1992). This
multimodal approach needs to be specifically addressed in language teaching (McNeill,
1994), in that it can be beneficial to non-L1 English speaking doctors who can thus
improve their ability to communicate effectively and ultimately develop doctor-patient
trust.

Baldry, A. 2000. English in a visual society: Comparative and historical dimensions in
multimodality and multimediality. In A. Baldry (ed.) Multimodality and
Multimediality in the Distance Learning Age, 41-89. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli.
Baldry, A. and Thibault, P. J. 2006. Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. A
Multimedia Toolkit and Coursebook. London and New York: Equinox.
Bezemer, J, and Kress, G. 2016. Multimodality, Learning and Communication. Abingdon,
UK/New York, NY: Routledge.
McNeill, D. 1992. Hand and Mind: What the Hands Reveal about Thought. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
McNeill, D. 1994. What makes authentic language materials different? The case of English
language materials for education. Paper presented at the Annual International
57
Language in Education Conference, December 15-17, in Hong Kong. Eric Document
Retrieval N. ED386057. FL023221.
Thibault, P.J. 2000. The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement: Theory
and practice. In A. Baldry (ed.) Multimodality and Multimediality in the Distance
Learning Age, 311-385. Campobasso: Palladino Editore.

Towards a methodological approach for the analysis of interlanguage complaints
from a multimodal perspective: From research to teaching
Vicent Beltran-Palanques - Universitat Jaume I, Castelln, Spain
Over the past decades, researchers in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) have
explored, among other aspects, how learners perform and acquire speech acts, focusing on
the verbal component (e.g. Laforest, 2002; Flix-Brasdefer, 2008; Taguchi, 2011).
However, to the best of my knowledge, the interplay of verbal and non-verbal aspects has
not yet been explored from the perspective of ILP research. Gesture, for example, is one of
the non-verbal systems that have received more attention in the investigation of language
learning events (Roth, 2001) and its study is gaining importance within the field of SL/ FL
acquisition (Gullberg, 1998, 2006). Considering these aspects, in this paper I attempt to
present a methodological approach for the analysis of spoken complaint sequences and
gestures performed by a group of learners of English as a foreign language at two different
proficiency levels, B1 and B2, as described in the Common European Framework of
References of Languages. This study tries to shed some light on the traditional approach
for interlanguage complaints analysis, thus, taking a multimodal interlanguage
perspective. The methodological approach followed in this study and the results derived
from it are discussed, as well as pedagogical implications for the integration of
interlanguage pragmatics from a multimodal perspective.

Flix-Brasdefer, J. C. 2008. Politeness in Mexico and the United States. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Gullberg, M. 1998. Gesture as a communication strategy in second language discourse: A
study of learners of French and Swedish. Lund: Lund University Press.
Gullberg, M. 2006. Some reasons for studying gesture and second language acquisition
(Hommage Adam Kendon). IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in
Language Teaching, 44(2), 103-124.
Laforest, M. 2002. Scenes of family life: Complaining in everyday conversation. Journal of
Pragmatics, 34(10), 1595-1620.
Roth, W. M. (2001). Gestures: Their role in teaching and learning. Review of Educational
Research, 71(3), 365-392.
Taguchi, N. 2011. Do proficiency and study-abroad experience effect speech act
production? Analysis of appropriateness, accuracy, and fluency. IRAL International
Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 49(4), 265-293.

Multimodal literacy: Meaning negotiations in political cartoons on the refugee crisis
Daniela Wawra - University of Passau, Germany
This paper introduces political cartoons as frameworks for teaching multimodal
competence. Apart from language, images are an important means to represent and
interpret what is going on around us. With the advent of the digital age even an iconic turn
of communication has been proclaimed. Just like language, images can be analysed as texts
58
which contain systems of knowledge and belief, constructions of social identities,
social relationships* and ideologies. All this is particularly true for political cartoons,
which are multimodal means of communication, in which the verbal and visual modes
jointly create meanings. They usually take up prominent societal topics and debates and
take on the role of commentator and critic. We will present a selection of cartoons on the
current refugee crisis and demonstrate how and in which directions they can initiate
communication processes between teachers and learners. Learning objectives are a better
understanding of different kinds of signs, their creative and ideological potential, the
nature of meaning, the construction and functioning of a multimodal artefact, viz a political
cartoon and thus ultimately the development of students multimodal literacy.

Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity.
Fill, A. 2010. The language impact. London: Equinox.

A multimodal approach to teaching oral financial genres: The case of earnings
conference calls
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli University of Pisa, Italy
Earnings conference calls are now the primary channel for oral financial reporting in the
globalized corporate world. During these events, teams of company executives present
their companies financial results to professional financial analysts within an audio
teleconference setting. The presentations are followed by Q&A sessions with the analysts.
Despite the key role of this genre for corporate financial reporting, current
business/financial communication textbooks deal with these events on a superficial level,
providing little information about their distinctive structural, linguistic, and rhetorical
features, not to mention their prominent multimodal dimension. Given this complex
nature, earnings conference calls represent a particularly challenging genre for L2
business and finance students who need to be prepared for successful participation in
these events that typically use English as a lingua franca.
Building on extensive analysis of the linguistic and discursive features of earnings
conference calls (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2013), this presentation offers a descriptive
profile of this multimodal financial genre. Particular attention will be paid to the
intersemiotic complementarity of the various modes that come into play (Royce, 2007),
including prosodic features of the participants vocal production, accompanying verbal
texts, and visual supports with numerical data and graphical images). This will be followed
by an illustration of a practical application in the English for business/financial
communication classroom. The aim is to help learners become aware of the multiple
semiotic resources that can be exploited to effectively engage with others in this
professional setting.

Crawford Camiciottoli, B. 2013. Rhetoric in financial discourse. A linguistic analysis of ICT-
mediated disclosure genres. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi.
Royce, T. D. 2007. Intersemiotic complementarity: A framework for multimodal discourse
analysis. In T. D. Royce and W. L. (Bowcher eds.), New directions in the analysis of
multimodal discourse, pp. 63-109. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

59
S8 Change from above in the history of English

This seminar explores cases of change from above in the history of English. Change from
above refers to the consciousness dimension of linguistic change, to changes that come
from above the level of a speakers conscious awareness (cf. Labov 1965, 1994). It
concerns cases of borrowings from languages which the dominant classes consider
prestigious, or conscious selection, such as the retention and the re-introduction of
affirmative do in seventeenth century documents (cf., for instance, Rissanen 1991) or the
diachrony of negative concord (among others, Nevalainen 2006). The seminar will discuss,
among other issues, the (re)introduction of elements by the dominant social class in
various stages of the history of English, their correlation with changes in other features,
their (non)integration into the vernacular system, formal vs. functional approaches to
change from above and the question of the coexistent systems.

References
Labov, William. 1965. On the mechanism of linguistic change. Georgetown Monographs
on Language and Linguistics 18, 91-114.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. Negative concord as an English vernacular universal: Social
history and linguistic typology. Journal of English Linguistics 34.3, 257-278.
Rissanen, Matti. 1991. Spoken language and the history of do-periphrasis. In Dieter
Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English Syntax. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 321-
342.

Change from above in the history of English: State of the art and perspectives
Jim Walker & Nikolaos Lavidas
Universit Lumire Lyon 2, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

The aim of the presentation is to examine the different perspectives through which change
from above (as an importation of elements from other systems; Labov 2007) has been
considered a parameter for the diachronic development of English. In this respect, we will
discuss several case studies and show how this explanation is strictly associated with the
theory of language that scholars follow. Accordingly, the role of change from above can
vary from having a nonexistent, nonlinguistic, or a peripheral role to a possible situation in
transitional stages with speakers who can have parallel grammars and even to serving as
evidence for deliberate linguistic changes (which can be associated with a social class or
gender). A common characteristic for all approaches to change from above is that such
change is related to language contact. This is unavoidable if the scholar identifies the
change from above with borrowing from a prestigious language.
We will argue that change from above is actually involved in any case in which
characteristics of an earlier linguistic system still survive in opposition to the new
characteristics. In this manner, the case of contact between dialects of the same language
should also be addressed, when one of them has become the prestigious dialect (see the
changes in rhoticity in New York according to Labov (1966 [2006]); cf. also Labov, Ash &
Boberg (2006)), as well as the case of contact between the vernacular and an archaic
variety. These types of contact can lead to diglossia, parallel grammars (with bilingual
speakers who may use one or the other system according to the register, for instance), or
60
prescriptive rules (cf. van Gelderen (2004), for instance, on split infinitives and relative
pronouns or Curzan (2014) on the effects of prescriptivism on the history of English).
According to this view, we will also discuss whether a change from above can only delay
the introduction of a new characteristic or the completion of a typical change (cf. also the
early approach of Kroch 1978) or whether this type of change also can initiate the
introduction of new features (see the case of the passive progressive, whose first stages of
development have been analyzed as a conscious use of a restricted group of people
(Denison 1993, among others)). This discussion can reveal the role and value of all types of
texts and registers for the particular paths of change and the spread of a change. For
instance, diachronic research cleaned from learned registers in order to approach the
vernacular of a particular period leaves several unexplained aspects of the diachronic
development, such as instances of delay in the spread of a change or the re-introduction of
earlier features.
References
Curzan, A. 2014. Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge:
Denison, D. 1993. Some recent changes in the English verb. In M. Gotti (ed), English
Diachronic Syntax, 15-33. Milan: Guerini.
Gelderen, E. van. 2004. Economy, Innovation, and Prescriptivism: From Spec to Head and
Head to Head. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7, 59-98.
Kroch, A. 1978. Toward a theory of social dialect variation. Language in Society 7(1), 17-
36.
Labov, W. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2), 344-387.
Labov, W., S. Ash & C. Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics,
Phonology, and Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Labov, W. 1966 [2006]. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge:

Words, Words, Words: The Contributions of Authors and Monuments to the History
of the English Language
Don Chapman
Brigham Young University

History of the English language textbooks commonly mention great authors, like Chaucer
and Shakespeare, and great monuments, like the King James Bible, even though the
influence of any one writer, literary or otherwise, on the English language will likely be
minimal. The most probable reason for their inclusion in the histories is their contribution
to the story of English, more than to the language itself: they provide hooks to capture
the attention of students. Yet most histories also come up with ways that these writers and
monuments at least ostensibly contribute to the English language, and this paper will
examine some of those reputed contributions.
The most common contribution that histories cite for writers and works is to the
languages stock of words and phrases. Shakespeare is mentioned for all his supposed
coinages, for example, or his phrases that have entered English, like its Greek to me.
Thus the importance of writers and monuments to the English language will largely
depend on the importance we attach to words and phrases. While the lexicon has typically
been one of the least important components in linguistic descriptions of a language, it is
still a component, and perhaps a single writer or work that contributes words and phrases
to the language deserves mention in a history of English. In this analysis, phrases will
61
require extra attention, since they have been treated as even less important than words in
a languages description. Yet phrases still play an important role in a speakers
competence, and fixed phrases sometimes even keep familiar grammatical structures that
otherwise drop out of language, such as methinks and doth in The lady doth protest
too much, methinks. Much of this paper will therefore focus on the role of phrases from
clear literary allusions to common phrases that have lost all literary pretense.

Tracing the diffusion of a change from above in fifteenth century English
correspondence: the digraph <th> in the Paston Letters
J. Camilo Conde-Silvestre & Juan M. Hernndez-Campoy
Universidad de Murcia, Spain

Research based on corpora of historical correspondence has not only confirmed the
relevance of letters to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language changes in the
past, it has also sanctioned the historical validity of some sociolinguistic universals like,
among others, the curvilinear hypothesis, the distinctions between overt and covert
prestige, changes from above and changes from below and has often permitted to trace
the diffusion of historically attested changes over the social, geographical and temporal
spaces, as well as their connection to age, social status, occupation, gender and mobility.
In this paper, the sociolinguistic patterning of a spelling change in progress in fifteenth
century English the diffusion of <th> replacing <> and <> will be reconstructed by
analysing the individual repertoires of letter writers in the Paston Correspondence (1425-
1504). The origin of <th> in Biblical Latin an external highly prestigious norm makes of
this spelling innovation a likely candidate for its characterisation as a change from above
(Hogg 1992: 77; Lass 1992: 36; Benskin 1977: 506-507; 1982: 18; Stenroos 2006). We
believe that the analysis of its diffusion in the letters, in connection with some of the
sociolinguistic variables mentioned above, may confirm this status, adding an interesting
methodological dimension to the historical reconstruction of changes from above.
References
Benskin, Michael 1977. Local archives and Middle English dialects. Journal of the Society of
Archivists 5(8): 500-514.
Benskin, Michael 1982. The letters <> and <y> in later Middle English, and some related
matters. Journal of the Society of Archivists 7: 13-30.
Hogg, Richard 1992. Phonology and morphology. The Cambridge History of the English
Language. Vol 1: The Beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67-167.
Lass, Roger 1992. Phonology and morphology. The Cambridge History of the English
Language. Vol 2: 1066-1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 23-156.
Stenroos, Merja 2006. A Middle English mess of fricative spellings: reflections on thorn,
yogh and their rivals. To Make his English Sweete upon his Tonge, eds. M. Krygier & L.
Sikorska, 9-35. Frankfurt a. Maim: Peter Lang.

Change from above in the early prescriptive pronouncing dictionaries of English
Jean-Louis Duchet & Nicolas Trapateau
Universit de Poitiers

Our research has been conducted on a database stemming from a fully computerized re-
edition (Trapateau 2015) of John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of
the English language (1791, 1809) providing exhaustive lists of lexical units belonging to a
lexical set or to a stress pattern.
62
In Walker's dictionary the word vertigo has three competing pronunciations, two of
which are the consequence of a pressure from above: learnedly [vtao], modishly
[vtio], as opposed to the genuine English analogy of [vtio]. Walker yields to the
learned in his Dictionary.
Similar pressures have generated changes from above in stress placement, reluctance to
palatalisation, and vowel quality.
1) Stress placement
European, /010/ is superseded by the Latin stress pattern in /2010/.
2) Palatalisation
The noun duke pronounced [duk] or [duk] is not so vulgar as the former. Educate
[eduket], [dj] prestige form. Courtesy has an elegant pronunciation in [tsi] which has
prevailed on the vulgar pronunciation ti a back-formation of courteous [kts].
3) Vowels before /r/
The word merchant was pronounced with [a] like clerk. The spelling pronunciation which
prevailed, [mtnt], changed further to [mtnt]. The same is true of errand, mercy.
4) Diphthongs
The word wind as a noun was diphthongized but the polite circles have imposed [wnd]
as the standard pronunciation. The noun envelope is pronounced in the French way
[onvilop] but the mere Englishman pronounces it like the verb envelop.
The research will investigate such cases in which Walker says with ironical resignation
that in language as in many other cases, it is safer to be wrong with the polite than right
with the vulgar.

lfrics word-building activity as an attempt to create religious and linguistic
terminology in Old English
Yekaterina Yakovenko
Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Professor of Foreign
Languages Department, National Research University "Higher School of Economics"

Most lexical changes in the vocabulary that are accounted for by extralinguistic causes
(growth of culture, science and technology, social development, international contacts,
etc.) take place irrespective of humans will and intentions. However, history of English
knows several examples of conscious changes introduced by individuals aiming at filling
gaps in the vocabulary, ameliorating the language or carrying out a linguistic experiment.
Though authors inventions, being quite often far from successful, remain on the periphery
of the lexical system, such attempts should not be underestimated as they reveal
nominative and word-building potential of the language system.
The given paper focuses on linguistic terminology introduced into English by lfric
(10th c.) in his translation of Latin grammar going back to Priscian and Donat
(Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglic) as well as religious vocabulary appearing
earlier but reinforced in Aelfrics works (his translation of the Hexateuch, Homilies and
Lives of the Saints). lfrics metalanguage is quite various, including borrowings proper,
semantic loans and periphrastic expressions. Semantic, etymological and morphemic
analysis of semantic loans suggested by lfric proves their appropriateness to the system
of the receiving language.
lfrics linguistic activity is investigated in the wide range of similar phenomena of
language purism occurring in English and other Germanic languages (German, Icelandic)
in later periods.

63
S9. Social identities in public texts

The blog is served: crossing borders between the role of expert and non-expert in
the language of food blogs
Daniela Cesiri
Ca Foscari University of Venice Italy Dept. of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural
Studies

Food blogs have recently but increasingly grown in importance, taking the role of virtual
communities (Blanchard 2004) in which people with common interests in food share
information and recipes. This success is probably a consequence of the public concern in
healthier dietary habits as well as in the social dimension that food preparation and
consumption often involves.
Food blogs can thus be seen as places of social interaction between the expert (the
food blogger) and the non-expert (the users who visit the blog), especially as regards the
comments section in which bloggers and users exchange their ideas, viewpoints and
experiences.

In this regard, the present study examines the Top 10 UKs Food Blogs in order to
investigate how food bloggers and users shape their social identity, the role that they
construe in their posts. A qualitative analysis will look at the lexico-grammatical and
pragmatic aspects in the bloggers-users interactions in order to look at the ways in which,
within the social space of the blog comments section, they reciprocally position
themselves along the continuum constituted by the social categories of expert and non-
expert.

References
Blanchard, Anita. 2004. Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in
the Julie/Julia Project. In Gurak, Laura et al. (eds.). Into the Blogosphere. Rhetoric,
Community and Culture of Weblogs. University of Minnesota: available at
<http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/>. Last accessed: January 2015.

Constructing the self and the other in modern news discussion forums
Jan Chovanec, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Social identity is an inherently relational phenomenon: the performance of any act of self-
identity implies that there is some other individual or group that is implicitly or explicitly
constructed as different from the speaker. The sense of collective social identity becomes
particularly important when members of a specific group perceive some kind of an
external threat, e.g. as a result of immigration. In that situation, they will tend to
emphasize their claim to membership in their imaginary ingroup community by
emphasizing their differences from and incompatibility with the outgroup.
Drawing on the methodology of membership categorization analysis (Antaki and
Widdicombe 1998), social role analysis (van Leeuwen 1996) and cognitively-oriented
critical discourse analysis (Hart 2010), this paper documents how oppositional social
identities are constructed in the semi-public discourse space constituted by reader
comments in internet news sites. Based on data from British newspapers reader
comments on articles dealing with the recent immigration crisis, the paper analyses the
interplay between referential and predicational strategies that frequently construct, by
64
means of delegitimizing the other, the mutually oppositional identities of the ingroup and
the outgroup.
It is argued that the construction of these identities is realized not only through
textual choices but also multimodally. While visual representation of the other is absent
from reader comments, it is nevertheless reflected in the readers meta-commentary on
how the media manage visual material in their news stories. In this sense, reader
comments constitute a site in which all kinds of identities are painstakingly constructed,
jointly negotiated, and hotly contested, with readers involved in extensive deictic and
referential positioning.

References
Antaki, Charles, Sue Widdicombe, ed. (1998) Identities in Talk. London: Sage.
Hart, Christopher (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New
Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Van Leeuwen, Theo (1996) The representation of social actors. In: C. Caldas-Coulthard
and M. Coulthard (eds.) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis.
London: Routledge 3270.

The socio-pragmatic picture of the 18th-century woman of pleasure
Boena Duda University of Rzeszw
One of the greatest and, seemingly, ever-lasting tabooed topics is sex and everything that
goes with it. Prostitution has always been a controversial issue which has evoked mixed
feelings and a fair amount of linguistic beating about the bush. The primary aim of this
paper is to analyse and discuss the linguistic indicators employed in the representation of
prostitution as a profession and prostitutes as a social group in the 18th-century English
public texts. The data for the analysis encompass the memoir-style seduction story The
prostitutes of quality (1758) and the pamphlet Modest defence of publick stews (1725). Both
the works under analysis feature countless examples of reference to prostitutes as well as
depict lives of prostitutes in great detail, both those working in the street and those kept as
mistresses by the gentlemen of the society. The analysis of the data is to show how, at a
micro-level context, the addresser forms the detailed picture of the profession and, hence,
builds the social identity of a prostitute, and whether a macro-level perspective plays a
role in the formation of the socio-pragmatic picture of a woman of pleasure.

Selected references:
Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burridge, Kate. 2005. Weeds in the Garden of Words: Further Observations on the Tangled
History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cleland, John. 1749. Memoirs of Fanny Hill. [available at: www.gutenberg.org] Date of
access: December 2014.
Culpeper, Jonathan (ed.). 2011. Historical Sociopragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Bejamins.
Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.
Duda, Boena. 2014. The Synonyms of Fallen Woman in the History of the English Language.
Frankfurt a/Main: Peter Lang Edition.
Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.). 1995. Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the
History of English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Bejamins.
65
Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Nevala, Minna. 2011. Altering distance and defining authority: Person reference in Late
Modern English. In: Jonathan Culpeper (ed.). Historical Sociopragmatics. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Bejamins, 6182.

Get the snip and a job! Displaying social identity in public disagreement
exchanges online
Isabel Ermida
University of Minho Portugal

This article investigates the construction of explicit disagreement and the emergence of
conflict talk in the comment boards of the British Mail Online newspaper website. In so
doing, it sets out to examine how interlocutors manage their own, as well as others, social
identity. It focuses on the case of a young unemployed couple, parents of six, who are
asking Social Security for a four-bedroom flat. By resorting to Walkinshaws threefold
framework for the analysis of disagreement backgrounded, hedged and foregrounded
disagreement it concentrates on the linguistic and discursive strategies which online
speakers employ to disagree about family policies in an explicit way. In light of the
diversity of negative responses to this specific news report case, which range from mildly
disapproving comments to blatantly offensive remarks, it also explores the interactional
factors which influence the management of face and the occurrence of (im)politeness. Such
factors as anonymity, asynchronicity, spatial disconnection and, crucially, third-party
targeting are advanced as possible explanations. Besides, the fact that online interaction is
multi-party seems to lead to what is coined multi-topic argument, at the same time as the
public character of the exchanges prompts the expression of strongly ideological positions
regarding the broad concept of social class.

Keywords: Disagreement, (Im)Politeness, Face, Conflict, Identity, Internet

Selected bibliography:
Angouri, Jo and Locher, Miriam A. 2012. Theorising Disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics.
Volume 44, Issue 12, September 2012, 1549-1720.
Bolander, Brook. 2012. Disagreements and agreements in personal/diary blogs: A closer
look at responsiveness. Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 44, Issue 12, 1607-1622.
Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals of Language
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge:
Donath, J. 1999. Identity and deception in the virtual community. In Kollock and Smith
(eds.), 31-59.
Langlotz, Andreas and Locher, Miriam A. 2012. Ways of communicating emotional stance
in online disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 44, Issue 12, 1591-1606.
Scott, Suzanne. 2002. Linguistic feature variation within disagreements: An empirical
investigation. Text 22(2) (2002): 301328
Upadhyay, Shiv R. 2010. Identity and impoliteness in computer-mediated reader
responses. Journal of Politeness Research. Volume 6, Issue 1, 105127.
Waldron, Vincent R., Applegate, James L. 1994. Interpersonal Construct Differentiation and
Conversational Planning: An Examination of Two Cognitive Accounts for the
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Production of Competent Verbal Disagreement Tactics. Human Communication
Research, v21, n1, 3-35.
Walkinshaw, Ian. 2009. Learning Politeness: Disagreement in a Second Language. Bern:
Peter Lang.

Encoding of Social Identity in Central Bank Communication
Laurence Harris
This submission addresses the encoding of social identity in the annual speech delivered
by the Governor of the Bank of England on the occasion of a banquet given at the Mansion
House in the honour of the Bankers and Merchants of the City. The public texts under
scrutiny form part of a corpus of 70 speeches, from the nationalisation of the Bank in 1946
to the present. The Governors belong to a Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998) which
doubles up as a Discourse Community (Swales, 1990) sharing social norms and using
specific lexis to achieve common goals. Membership of this close-knit community is borne
out by linguistic indicators such as stance, pronouns or modality (Martin & White, 2007)
In-group cohesion (Tajfel, 2010) may be threatened by an outsider, as was the case when
Mark Carney was appointed as Governor in 2013. A comparative study of his Mansion
House speeches with the larger corpus helps identify the way he adopts the social codes of
the community and imprints his own social identity. He uses his interlocutive role to gain
the trust of the community whilst ushering in his own agenda via the power of language
(Bourdieu, 1982).

Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire: Lconomie des changes linguistiques. Paris:
Fayard.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2007). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge:
Tajfel, H. (Ed.). (2010). Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Reissue edition).
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge
University Press.

Irish Identity in The Troubles: language representation (the case of The Irish
Times)
Elena V.Kostareva
Associate Professor English Department
National Research University Higher School of Economics

The paper presents the results of using critical discourse analysis and quantitative corpus
linguistic method for revealing the ways of social identity construction and deconstruction
in public texts of The Troubles. Text resources under consideration are editorials, namely
the texts of The Irish Times, the period of 1996, opinion rubric. Within 30 years of The
Troubles, 1996 is one of the times between 1969 and 1998 when the situation would
escalate into a civil war as a result of ceasefire cessation. The idea that social identity in
Northern Ireland is based on religious and political apartness is a prevailing one. Still, we
intend to highlight the variety of core and minor language features which enables readers
to separate the perception of reality from the position of being Irish and non-Irish.
Emotive language is paid special attention to, as well as symbols externalized in concrete
67
nouns and authority figures mentioning are being analyzed. Thus, critical discourse
analysis provides an ample opportunity to consider linguistic constituents of political,
social, religious and other contexts within the frames of which the comprehension of
identity is developing. This is also an attempt to investigate the language representation of
authors neutrality which is supposed to be obligatory for media in societies in conflicts
but, according to some studies, is obviated.

There really is nothing like pouring your heart out to a fellow fat chick: Studying
identity and community in plus-size style blogs
Hanna Limatius, University of Tampere

In recent years, blogs have become more and more focused on social interaction.
According to Seargeant and Tagg (2014, 5) the two fundamental social dynamics that
characterize the use of social networking sites today are the presentation of self and the
building and maintenance of social relationships. My paper shows how the concepts of
identity and community are intertwined in the interaction that takes place within a group
of plus-size style bloggers. This group of bloggers can be characterized as a community of
practice (Wenger 1998); they have developed their own norms, routines and conventions,
including shared linguistic resources. A plus-size blogger identity can be observed in the
inclusive use of us when referring to a distinctive group (us bigger girls), in the use of
jargon specific to plus-size fashion and in the practice of discussing certain topics, like
weight loss, in a way that is deemed acceptable by the community. Investigating how
community and identity are created by and reflected in the language of blogs gives us a
fresh point of view to a genre that is still sometimes mischaracterized as vain or
egocentric (Puschmann 2013, 88). For plus-size style bloggers, blogging is a source of
empowerment and support.

References
Puschmann, Cornelius. 2013. Blogging. In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated
Communication, eds. Dieter Stein, Tuija Virtanen and Susan Herring, 83-108. De
Gruyter Mouton.
Seargeant, Philip and Caroline Tagg. 2014. Introduction: The Language of Social Media. In
Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, eds. Philip
Seargeant and Caroline Tagg, 1-20. Palgrave Mcmillan.
Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.

Negotiating the defendant role in the trial proceedings of the Old Bailey: guilty or
not guilty
Minna Palander-Collin & Ina Liukkonen
University of Helsinki

This paper focuses on the construction of social roles in trial proceedings and the role of
the defendant in particular. An earlier corpus-based correlational sociolinguistic study on
role construction in the Old Bailey Corpus, 1720-1913, showed that the use of first-person
mental verb expressions (e.g. I think, I saw, I know, I believe) separated the lay roles of the
courtroom, i.e. defendants, victims and witnesses, from the professional roles of judges
and lawyers (Palander-Collin submitted). Moreover, the defendants typically resorted to
68
first-person expressions showing a strong epistemic stance (I know) as if to distance
themselves from the accusations against them. Victims and witnesses, on the other hand,
argued with strong evidential claims (I saw, I heard). This paper looks more closely at
epistemic and evidential stance and the use of the first person in a smaller set of
defendants statements. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century data will be
collected on court cases in the Old Bailey Corpus (Huber et al. 2012) where the defendant
was found guilty and not guilty respectively to see whether the defendants role
construction through stance-taking could be used to predict the outcome of the trial.
Earlier studies indicate that it may indeed be possible to connect language use with such
real-life impacts. Kahlas-Tarkka and Rissanen (2007), for example, have shown that
discourse strategies adopted by defendants, especially cooperativeness, had an important
effect on a successful defence in the Salem witchcraft trials. Moreover, psychological
research has focused on the language of lies and self-deception, and Pennebaker (2011:
143-144) claims that real experiences as opposed to lies can be associated with various
linguistic characteristics, such as more frequent use of self-reference and fewer cognitive
and emotion words.

References
Huber, Magnus, Magnus Nissel, Patrick Maiwald & Bianca Widlitzki. 2012. The Old Bailey
Corpus. Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www.uni-
giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus.
Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena & Matti Rissanen. 2007. The sullen and the talkative. Discourse
strategies in the Salem examinations. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8 (1): 1-24.
Palander-Collin, Minna. Submitted. First-person mental phrases in the Old Bailey Corpus,
1720-1913 (OBC). In Huber, Magnus (ed.), Sociolinguistic Studies Based on the Old Bailey
Corpus.
Pennebaker, James W. 2011. The Secret Life of Pronouns. What our Words Say about Us.
New York etc.: Bloomsbury Press.

Satire and social identity in eighteenth-century English anonymous
dialogues
Anni Sairio, University of Helsinki

This paper explores how social identity is constructed in eighteenth-century
(semi-)anonymous texts which use satire in an attempt to expose folly and vice in
society. It is a case study of six dialogues between mythological, historical, and
contemporary eighteenth-century figures (e.g. Mercury and a fine Lady, Plutarch,
Charon and a Modern Bookseller, and Berenice and Cleopatra), written by the
sophisticated Bluestocking hostess Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800). Three of the
dialogues were included in Lord Lytteltons Dialogues of the Dead (1762) with the
appellation of a Friend, and the other three remained unpublished (now
included in Eger ed. 1999). Eighteenth-century culture of politeness and
sociability contains a legitimate space for satire (see e.g. Klein 1994, Griffin 1994),
and a poignant theme in these texts is the criticism of frivolous sociability at the
expense of learning and virtue, two important points of self-identification in the
Bluestocking circle. The dialogues are examined in light of the Bluestocking ideal
of self-discipline and self-mastery (Backscheider 2013) as well as the response of
the published dialogues by the readers and Montagus own circle (Mrs. Modish is
a great favourite with the town, but some ladies have tossed up their heads and
69
said it was abominably satirical, Montagu notes (Montagu ed. 1813: iv, 260). The
analysis is based on stance-taking particularly in terms of attitude and affect
(Besnier 1990).

Backscheider, Paula R. 2013. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the
English Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Besnier, Niko. 1990. Language and affect. Annual Review of Anthropology. 419-451.
Eger, Elizabeth (ed.) 1999. Bluestocking Feminism. Vol 1. General editor Gary Kelly.
London: Pickering & Chatto.
Griffin, Dustin H. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington, KY: University
Press of Kentucky.
Klein, Lawrence E. 1994. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse
and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Montagu, Matthew (ed.) 1813. The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu: With Some of
the Letters of Her Correspondents. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies.

Establishing social identities in advertising with linguistic indicators: social selves
at work in magazine ads
Elsa Simes Lucas Freitas
Universidade Fernando Pessoa (Porto Portugal)

Ads show us how people very quickly step in and out of the social roles they are placed in
and the way they interact with the group they identify with. Linguistic elements in the ad
copy are paramount for establishing social identity. In ads, the viewer will either accept or
refuse to be a part of an idealised group (target-audience). A plausible social identity for
the sender should be defined at the onset as well, for credibilitys sake.
It is my purpose to determine how the identities of sender and receiver and appropriate
interlocutive roles are quickly established/conveyed with linguistic devices. Thus, a
number of selected print ads will be analysed, focussing on the ingenious uses of:
- person reference (who is the I sending the message? Who is the you at the
receiving end?),
- deictic elements (why is the message appropriate for time and context? Why is it
felt as relevant and opportune?)
- interpersonal and authorial stance (how are participants positioned?)
- modality (how are emotions and feelings conveyed/confirmed in ads when time
and space are so scarce?)
- appraisal (which values are perceived/conveyed as desirable? How is this used as a
reinforcement of the idea of belonging to a social category?)
This close analysis of linguistic elements will be followed by a more general reading of the
ads selected, in order to relate the crucial role of these markers with the overall
seductive/persuasive effect of the message.

Construction and deconstruction of Irish identity in The Troubles literature
Svetlana A. Strinyuk
Associate Professor English Department
National Research University Higher School of Economics

70
The paper was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the
National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2016- 2017 (grant
16-01-0038) and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the
Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global
Competitiveness Program
The paper focuses on the analysis of content and language markers of construction and
deconstruction of social identity in Irish literary texts of The Troubles (1968-2000)
written in English. Reading in the Dark S.Deane, The International, Love in Troubled Times
G.Patterson, Eureka Street, R.M.Wilson, Cal B.MacLaverty are seen within the framework of
nationalist vs post-colonial or, more precisely, post-colonization perspective.
Using critical discourse analysis (M. Foucaults ideas as a theoretical background) I identify
content (socio-cultural) discourse markers, linguistic strategies of construction and
deconstruction of identity and the means of their realization. Research showed that the
idea of being victimized lies in the heart of Irish identity representation in The Troubles
novels of the period concerned. Close investigation revealed that political history (partition
and being victimized), religious identification (Catholic/Protestant), concept of place (locus)
(connected with national and religious identification) and folklore (often stereotypical
Irish) make a hierarchical system of content markers identified in novels created from
both nationalist and liberal perspective.
Constructive linguistic strategies found in novels of MacLaverty and Deane mainly include
promoting unification, solidarity and identification. They aim at representing similarity,
positive self-presentation and more important in case of Ireland - shared suppression and
sectarian division. Linguistic realization of constructive strategies include lexemes of
respective semantic fields, inclusive we for identification of family/community/nation,
personification (Ireland, Irish hearts), naming places identified with communal division
(Bogside, Derry, peace walls, Belfast etc.). Destructive strategies implemented by Patterson
and Wilson employ negative presentation (through negative attribution), emphasis on
liberal/international values (vs intra-national/communal), strong dissimilation
(comparisons, assimilative attributes), irony and pejorative attribution towards national.
Discursive analysis of literary texts gives empirical data for understanding identity as a
dynamic, changing, and sometimes ambivalent system. We assume that in literary texts
social identification is based on ideas of shared history, past, territory and culture despite
personal writers stance on Irish political and social milieu. It means that in novels with
both nationalist and liberal aspiration the same content discursive markers may be
identified although particular strategies and linguistic means in novels which tend to
construct or to deconstruct nationalist identity differ significantly.

Linguistically and Socially Identifying Oneself in Newspaper Opinion Pieces
Bledar Toska
University of Vlora, Albania

The aim of this short presentation is to investigate how the use of some linguistic
structures can help writers of opinion pieces construct their discourse and build an
efficient public image in social contexts and in silent interactional discursive acts with
readers. The promotion of a credible, positive and professional social identity is extremely
important in these pieces since it enables their writers to identify themselves in society
and/or similar circles. As instances of persuasion texts, opinion pieces are structured in
such a way as to convey particular viewpoints on various concerning issues and to invite
readers to align with them. The linguistic analysis of these structures at the micro-level
71
revels aspects of social identity as related to the other. This talk analyses instances of self-
mentions, hedges and boosters from a discoursal and metadiscoursal perspective in
Albanian newspaper opinion pieces. The small scale, but systematic analysis explores a
corpus of 500 pieces, amounting to half a million words. Various illustrations will
exemplify the particularities of these devices as well as issues related to gender variation
in the realm of social identity promotion in society and readership.

Looking at Italy: writers attitudes in 17th Century English Travelogues of Italy
Laura Pinnavaia (University of Milan)

While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English travelogues about Italy seem to have
been the focus of more consistent scholarly attention over the decades, especially in
literary studies (Batten (1978), Black (1996), Black (2003), Espey (2004), Glendening
(1997), Kirby (1952)), seventeenth-century travelogues still have much to reveal, despite
some work produced in this area (see Lafouge (1989), for example). In Pinnavaia (2013),
recurring lexical features, found in thirty-seven seventeenth-century English travelogues
of Italy, retrieved from the computerized archives Early English Books Online (see primary
sources), already seem to hint that such travelogues have a characterizing style of
discourse and represent a genre of literature in themselves, so strongly denied by
eighteenth-century scholars and reviewers of travel literature (see Batten (1978)). In the
wake of this preliminary research, the aim of this paper is to study further seventeenth-
century English travelogues about Italy to understand the way the world is represented.
Written at a time when Italy was simultaneously Eden and Hell owing to its artistic
beauties on the one hand and the quandaries of its religious and political institutions on
the other, the travelogues relate interesting social events, i.e. people, objects, means,
times, places (Fairclough 2003: 133) accompanied by differing opinions and evaluations.
The differing positions and attitudes of the writers reside principally in the morpho-
syntactic structures and rhetorical devices deployed. By analyzing the authorial choices
regarding deixis, modality, transitivity, nominalization, and verb processes, we hope to
bring to the fore the way in which these writers looked at Italy.

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else either of antiquity, or worth observation: lastly, Italy described, and the islands
adjoyning, as Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicilia, the Aeolian Islands, of Rome, Venice, Naples,
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with the religion and customs of the Graecians : of Aegypt, the antiquity, hieroglyphicks,
rites, customs, and discipline, and religion of the Aegyptians: a voyage on the River Nylus:
of Armenia, Grand Cairo, Rhodes, the Pyramides, Colossus, the former flourishing and
present state of Alexandria : a description of the Holy-Land, of the Jews and several sects
of Christians living there: of Jerudsalem, sepulchre of Christ, Temple of Solomon, and what
else either of antiquity, or worth observation: lastly, Italy described, and the islands
adjoyning, as Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicilia, the Aeolian Islands, of Rome, Venice, Naples,
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world) and all those towns and territories mentioned in ancient and modern authors /
translated out of the originals for general satisfaction, by Edmund warcupp, Esquire,
London, printed by S. Griffin for H. Twyford, Tho. Dring and I. Place.
75
Turler, Jerome (1575) The traueiler of Jerome Turler deuided into two bookes. The first
conteining a notable discourse of the maner, and order of traueiling ouersea, or into
straunge and forrein countrys. The second comprehending an excellent description of the
most delicious realms of Naples in Italy. A woorke very pleasant for all persons to reade,
and right profitable and necessarie vnto all such as are minded to traueyll, London,
printed by William How for Abraham Veale.

Secondary sources

Batten, Charles L., Jr. (1978) Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-
century Travel Literature. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Black, Jeremy (1996) Italy and the Grand Tour: The British Experience in the Eighteenth
Century. Annali d'Italianistica 14, 53241.
Black, Jeremy (2003) Italy and the Grand Tour. Yale: Yale University Press.
Espey, David (2004) Studies in Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing and Beyond: Genre,
Science, and the Book Trade. Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 15, 36779.
Fairclough, Norman (2003), Analysing Discourse, Routledge, New York.
Glendening, John (1997) The High Road: Romantic Tourism, and Literature, 17201820.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kirby, Paul Franklin (1952) The Grand Tour in Italy 17001800. New York: Vanni.
Lafouge, Jean-Pierre (1989) Italy in Travel Books of the XVIIth Century. Cahiers du dix-
septieme: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3.2, 11530.
Pinnavaia, Laura (2013) Traveling Words, the Words of Traveling: 17th Century English
Travelogues of Italy in Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New
Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX 3), Cascadilla Proceedings Project,
Helsinki.

Transgressive and transactional sex in Early Modern England a corpus based view
Tony McEnery and Helen Baker, Lancaster University, UK
In this paper we will explore how those engaged in transgressive and transactional sex in
early modern England were constructed in public discourse. Our paper will build upon the
work of McEnery and Baker (2016). That work was based on the EEBO corpus (v3) built at
Lancaster University from texts released by the EEBO TCP. This provided almost a billion
words of data for the seventeenth century. We will consider two questions relating to
marginalized groups. Firstly, we will look at how homosexuals, including homosexual
prostitutes, were represented in the period, as this is a group McEnery and Baker (ibid)
did not consider. Secondly, we will consider to what extent public discourse is monolithic
in its representation of sexual transgression. To explore this we will introduce and use a
genre classification of the EEBO corpus developed at Lancaster University. This will allow
us to explore whether what appears to be a general view built from a whole corpus view
of EEBO is, in fact, sustainable when we look across different genres.

McEnery, T. and Baker, H. (2016) Corpora and The Humanities, London: Bloomsbury.

Trewe liegeman versus false traitour: Naming as propaganda strategy in the
Wars of the Roses.
Tamara Peeters

76
When studying propaganda, many of the strategies employed involve positive self-
presentation and negative other-presentation (Lewis 1964: 2). This paper explores this
phenomenon in a small, specialised corpus of English texts which were intended to reach a
wide audience during the period 1450-1499, also known as the Wars of the Roses,. The
focus will be on the way many of these texts feature the identity of a true liegeman to
justify actions or writings, and the way the authors position themselves and the false
traitors they oppose in relation to the king, or England as a whole. This will be done using
a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, which helps to place and interpret the
results in their historical context. Special attention will be paid to the opposing pairs that
are found frequently in descriptions of the self and the other, such as the nouns liegeman
and traitor, or the adjectives true and false. This will provide further insights into the
way the identity of a true liegeman to the king was constructed and used to justify actions
that might otherwise be have been considered treasonous.

References:
Lewis, P.S., 1965. War Propaganda and Historiography in Fifteenth-Century France and
England. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 15, pp.121.

77
S10 Comparative and Typological Studies of English Idioms

The Role of the Great Chain of Being Metaphors in English Idioms
Marcin Kuczok
University of Silesia Poland

In the views of cognitive linguists a significant number of idiomatic expressions in English
are motivated by conceptual metaphor (Gibbs 2007), which is the matter of a mapping
between the source and the target domain in our mind rather than a kind of formal
operation on structures. One group of conceptual metaphors are ontological metaphors,
whose source domain is an entity (Lakoff and Johnson 2003/1980/). It is possible to
clarify ontological metaphors as reifications, vegetalizations, animalizations,
personifications and deifications, which corresponds to the hierarchy of the so-called
Great Chain of Being (GCB), with inanimate objects at the bottom, then plants, animals,
people and G(g)od(s) at the top. As claimed by Krzeszowski (1997), these metaphors play
an important role in expressing the axiological aspect of language, since they decide about
the positive or negative charge of expressions. At the same time, however, they impose
certain restrictions on the possible directions of metaphorical mappings.
The aim of the paper is to analyze how the GCB metaphors function in examples of
English idioms collected from dictionaries (Spears 2000, Siefring 2004). The study will
focus on the types of the GCB metaphors in idioms and on the axiological charge they
provide in the light of Krzeszowskis claims. We will present the typical and untypical
examples of English idioms motivated by the GCB metaphors in order to try and identify
the possible regulations in this kind of metaphorical motivation behind idioms.

Fantastic Variations and How to Translate Them: Style, Language and Other Issues
in UK Contemporary Fantasy Fiction
Linda Barone, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy

The paper, whose title alludes to J. K. Rowlings 2001 book Fantastic Beasts and where to
Find them, deals with language variation, diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, but also the one I
call fantastic namely the typical fantasy attitude to invent evocative proper names and
to make an extensive use of creative allusions and puns in a translation perspective. I will
analyse and discuss works by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling from the
point of view of translation with the underlying assumption that the deeper the
variationist dimension - above all the one connected to wordplays, allusions and
onomastics - the more lacking and ineffective the translation at a pragmatic level. The
desired effect on the reader is often undermined contravening one the most important
principles in translation which is recreating essentially the same effect on the TT
readership as the ST does on the ST audience (Munday 2009: 210).
I will explore how problematic areas in translation can determine the success or the
failure of a translated writer. The case of Terry Pratchetts Disc World saga is emblematic
in that only few of his novels have been translated into Italian and those which have been
did not allow him to become as popular in Italy as he is in UK because some of his
fundamental traits creative allusions and humour based on wordplays vanish in the
passage from the source language to the target language. It is a great pity that Sir Pratchett
cannot be, in the world, what he was for English native speakers up to March 12, 2015, the
day in which Death told him DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, JUST THINK OF IT AS
78
LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH (Pratchett and Gaiman 1990: 198), that is the
second most-read living British author after J. K. Rowling.

On the Idiomatic Usage of Deictic Verbs

Yelena Yerznkyan
Yerevan State University
Yerevan, Armenia
Susanna Chalabyan
Armenian State University of Economics
Yerevan, Armenia

It is widely recognized among linguists that deixis plays a paramount role in the use and
understanding of everyday language. Nevertheless, given its theoretical importance, this
linguistic category is one of the most semantically understudied core areas of linguistics.
Assuming that the 'deictic centre' - the origo - is not always the speaker, deixis is
dealt with here from a much broader point of view and covers a far wider range of
phenomena including different linguistic means: grammatical, lexical, as well as
phraseological. The research is aimed at a contrastive study of deictic motion verbs in
English, Armenian and Russian with special reference to the metaphorization processes
accounting for the rise of their idiomatic usage. Due to the apparently emotional function
of this secondary semiosis process, deictic verbs are very likely to acquire new meanings
for the sake of expressivity. The paper will present how items with a definite prototypical
deictic meaning develop the emotional-evaluative meaning fulfilling a pragmasemantic
function of deictability.
The research is determined by the necessity to study the structural and semantic
features of different types of linguistic signs as well as by the anthropocentric approach
according to which the language is observed not as an abstract system but as a background
for the individuals communicative and cognitive activity.

Idiom and Revision in John McGaherns The Dark
Martin Keaveney
NUI Galway

Although the papers of John McGahern have been deposited at NUIG since 2003, there has
still not been a thorough investigation of his writing process. Research in the Co.Letrim
writer has mainly been limited to political, sociological and aesthetic fields of criticism.
Stanley Van Der Ziel in 'All This Talk and Struggle': John McGahern's "The Dark" briefly
engages with McGaherns perspective strategy in the early novel while John Cronin in 'The
Dark' Is Not Light Enough: The Fiction of John McGahern discusses choice of form in both
The Dark and the debut work The Barracks.
I have spent the past eighteen months examining McGaherns manuscripts with
particular focus on the second novel, The Dark, published in 1965, using the primary
theoretical framework of Process. My paper explores McGaherns method of composition
with reference to his use of idiom to achieve his artistic and narrative objectives. This
79
advances a more sophisticated awareness of McGaherns method of composition to that
previously undertaken by critics.
The work under exploration here is a section of McGaherns his first published
piece: Episodes from a Novel which appeared in X magazine in 1961. The gestation of the
passage which later became Chapter 3 of The Dark demonstrates a meticulous editing
strategy which engages often with phraseological units to compel aesthetic and narrative
execution. The idiomatic approach correlates with McGaherns employment and
refinement of free indirect discourse, compression and expansion to achieve artistic
objectives and clarifies his own theories of creative process which he wrote on in The
Image (Love of the World 5). The methods discovered are seen to serve the author in two
important ways: introducing ambiguity to the text and adjusting the vulnerability levels of
characters.
I isolate four subsections of the chapter and trace their evolution through the
authors deposited archives at NUIG. I also contrast the drafts with the corresponding
piece published in X. Examination of these revisions deepens critical understanding of The
Dark through the archival development of the father and son relationship, and also
elucidates the foundational strategies of the McGahern oeuvre in terms of his repetition of
drafts, his evocation of idiomatic units in his work, experimentations with perspective and
use of narrative devices such as free indirect discourse. It ultimately enriches studies on
the creative process of a professional author.

Structural Traits of Idioms: Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Anahit Hovhannisyan
Gyumri State Pedagogical Institute
Gyumri, Armenia

Idioms are reverberations in the human consciousness of objective reality, stops in the
cognition of the material world. Cognition is not a simple or straightforward process. Full
understanding of the fundamental principles of a given sphere is attained gradually,
sometimes after considerable time had been wasted in beating wrong tracks.
In the present article an attempt has been made to affect a systematic contrastive
analysis of the morphological structure of English and Armenian idioms. The starting point
for our contrastive analysis is the modeling or patterning of idioms. We might say this is
the study of something invisible in target language when this language is viewed from
another, in our case, from native one. Why modeling? It goes with harmony with the aim
of our research as we are interested in structural modifications of idiomatic phrases
(constructions). It's a way of building bridges between grammar and phraseological
preoccupations. By contrasting languages phenomena we can really penetrate into the
specific character of this or that language and understand its internal basic regularities. So
far we have been speaking about structural load of our research; idioms are studied from
different angles: from morphological (part of speech) structure, from the point of view of
the number of constituents and from the point of view of the type of various relations
reigning among the counter- members of idiomatic phrases.
Such an approach will provide much more complete and systematic character to
our research analysis.

80

S11 English Phraseology and Business Terminology: the Points of Crossing

Teaching Types of Semantic Transference in Business English Terms
Tatiana Fedulenkova
Vladimir, Russia

While reading business papers, economic periodicals, etc., students often come across
expressions which are difficult to understand because they are semantically encoded, e.g.:
to be loaded up meaning to have a big bag of fund valuables which are very difficult to
realize, over spot currency addition at long term agreements, loan strings money
given under certain political and economic conditions and restrictions, etc.
Not only beginners but advanced ESP students as well find great difficulty in
decoding such terms sincebeing phraseological units with full transference of meaning
of their componentsthey are indeed very difficult to identify, even when the learners are
experts in business and economics. Let your ESP students try and guess the meaning of
such financial terms as a) above board b) catch a cold c) Ockham's razor and the like and
you will see that they will be unable to do it without your assistance or appeal to
dictionaries that define the meanings of those terms as follows: a) honest and legal
(Longman 2007: 1), b) to lose money in a business deal (Tuck 2000: 80), c) law of
minimal admittance in the economic model.
Even if the student encounters an idiomatic term with a partial transference of
meaningwhen some components of the phrasal term are used in their direct lexical
meaningit is often the case that he/ she needs the ESP teacher's help to disambiguate
the expression. E.g., the set expression sharp practice is often misunderstood, as it appears
to have the meaning of business dealings, which are not honest (Seidl 1983: 204). The
terms kamikaze pricing, Delphi method, easy money, halo effect are also semantically
transformed.
The ultimate practical aim of teaching a foreign language is to help students to
acquire complete mastery of the form and content of the language, so that they can easily
communicate using vocabulary items, idioms and grammatical constructions correctly and
appropriately. To achieve that purpose, types of semantic transference in word
combinations and elements of phraseology are taught first, before ESP classes.

Honey bees and cowslips bells: Applying Shakespeares business ideas to
secondary Legal Studies

John F. Bourke
La Trobe University
Melbourne, Australia

Rosemary Lucadou-Wells
University of Queensland
St Lucia, Australia.

81
This paper posits the application of integrative learning theory across the disciplines of
Legal Studies and English Literature for upper secondary students. The methodology is
qualitative and could be seen as quasi-experimental1. Causal inferences for Business Law
concepts are drawn from selected Shakespearian quotations.
Integrative learning can be seen as a teaching practice where students are
encouraged to make connections between various subjects in the curriculum and
academic knowledge2. Studies have shown that when students make connections between
different subjects in the curricular their engagement and learning is enhanced. This is
particularly true in K to Year 12 students3.
The move to introduce Legal Studies as a subject for Years 11 and 12 students in
Australia can be traced to 1975 when the various state Law societies and educators
articulated the importance of introducing Australian students to the responsibilities and
rights of Australian citizens4.
The paper identifies Business Law ideas in selections from William Shakespeares
works and applies them to Legal Studies for upper secondary students. The selections
demonstrate contemporary Business Law principles. By making connections between the
subjects of English Literature and Legal Studies students are given an opportunity to
develop interdisciplinary understanding and the intellectual flexibility 5 necessary for
survival in an increasingly demanding global environment.
The paper concludes that by linking content, subject boundaries are diminished.
This facilitates reflective learning and enhances problem-solving capabilities.

Phraseological Units in Business English and their Structure
Lia Filatova
Vladimir, Russia
Dealing with Business phraseology of the English language it is not difficult to notice the
fact that there are some words that frequently form phraseological units, e.g.: bear market,
grey market, sick market, thin market, single market, to boom the market, to flood the
market, to bull the market and etc.
Closer estimation shows that most of phraseological units with the words money,
market and partner have the model A+K, where the adjunct is represented by adjectives
(dear, fresh, funk, fractional, floating, hard, hot, idle, senior, easy, black, sleeping etc.) or
nouns (bull, bear, paper and etc.).
The illustrations for the adjectival adjunct are as follows:
a) fresh money additional capital, esp. loan capital, as opposed to old money,
which is exiting capital (Adam 1993:306); b) sensitive market a trading situation that is
easily affected by some outside influence such as war, political change, natural disaster
(Tuck 2000:383); c) nominal partner a person whose name is used for the good of the
company (Tuck 2000:281), etc.
The illustrations for the noun adjunct are as follows:
1 Anoma
Armstrong and Evelyn Ogren, Evaluation Models and Strategies, (Melbourne: Evaluation and
Training Services Australia, 1986)
2 MT Huber, P. Hutchings and R. Gale, Integrative Learning for Liberal Education, (https: // www.aacu.org)
3 SM Awbrey, D Dana, VW Miller, P Robinson, MM Ryan and DK Scott (eds) Integrative Learning and Actions:
A call to wholeness: Studies in Education and Spirituality. (New York: Peter Lang, 2006)
4 Patty Kamvounias, Legal Studies in Secondary Schools: the New South Wales Experience, Legal Education
Review 21 (1994) 5 (1)
5 Project Zero: Interdisciplinary Studies Project, (Harvard: Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2015)
82
a) danger money extra money or high wages paid to people working in
hazardous conditions (Tuck 2000:115); b) bear market a situation in a stock market or
currency market where prices are falling because lots of shareholders are selling (Tuck
2000:52); c) fringe market any market that exist for a commodity in addition to its main
market (Adam 1993:295), etc.
As to the word business, it enters as a component not only in two-word strings but
in a variety of grammatical models characteristic of phraseological units that have more
complicated structures: get down to business, go into business, go out of business, launch a
business, man of business, be open for business, set up in business, open up a business, close
down a business, be in business, etc., e.g.: have a head for business be skilful at
commercial activities, e.g.: He'll get a good price for your car, he's got a real head for
business (Tuck 2000:69).
The ability of these key words to attract other words and form word combinations
and set expressions, which acquire a global meaning due to the global semantic
transformation of components, makes them the center of business communication.

Business English Phraseological Units as Specialized Terms in Specific Domains
Anna Bocharnikova
Tatiana Fedulenkova
Vladimir, Russia

In the sphere of economics and finance there are many set expression with a full or partial
transference of meaning which may be referred to phraseological units. The study of such
expressions is very important, especially in business and finance, to avoid
misunderstanding, because the meaning of the whole word combination cannot be
perceived through the meaning of its components, as in: bilateral monopoly 'a situation
where there is only one buyer and one seller in a market' (Tuck 2000: 271), Occam's razor
'the ruthless analysis of a problem which eliminates all superfluous factors' (Gulland
1994: 198), etc.
Such phraseological units serve regularly as terms in specific domains:
a) economics: token coinage 'a system like the one used now in Britain, where
coins have a value that is much higher than the value of the metal they contain (Longman
2007: 96);
b) banking: secured debenture 'a loan made to a company, using the assets of the
company as security' (Tuck 2000: 378);
c) finance: green shoe 'when the financial institution sells all the available shares
in a company's share issue or secondary offering and then sells more, or the number of
shares sold in this way' (Longman 2007: 239);
d) commerce: price ring 'a group of sellers in the same industry who have agreed
to fix a minimum price for a product' (Tuck 2000: 320);
e) marketing: customer profiling 'the activity of collecting information about the
people that you want to sell products to' (Longman 2007: 421);
f) stock exchange: bed and breakfasting 'selling shares just before the end of the
financial year and buying them back at the beginning of the next to register a loss for tax
purposes (Tuck 2000: 52); etc.
83
The analysis results in about two dozens of specific domains embracing Business
English terminology of phraseological character, which might have its pragmatic value in
the sphere of communication and in teaching as well.

84
S12 - Research Publication Practices: Challenges for Scholars in a Globalized World

Seminar B: Tuesday 8.30 10.30

8.30-8.35 Seminar presentation

8.35-8.55 - A contrastive (English-Czech) study of rhetorical functions of citations in
linguistics research articles (Olga Dontcheva Navratilova, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech
Republic)

8.55-9.15 - Cross-cultural variation in Architectural Engineering and Design: a preliminary
analysis (Maria Freddi, University of Pavia, Italy)

9.15-9.35 - Challenges of scholarly publication: A cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary
study of criticism in academic book reviews (Sonia Oliver del Olmo, Universidad
Autnoma de Barcelona, Spain)

9.35-9.55 - Writing a conference abstract in English: A challenge for non-Anglophone
writers (Renata Povoln, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic)

9.55-10.15 Citation in research writing of native and non-native English speakers: the
interplay of discipline and culture (Jolanta inknien, Vilnius University, Lithuania)

10.15-10.30 Discussion

Seminar C: Tuesday 11.00 13.00
11.00 -11.20 - Non-natives use of signalling nouns to bolster scientific credibility in
English (Genevive Bordet, Universit Paris Diderot Paris 7, France)

11.20-11.40 The practices of a novice Mexican scholar in writing for scholarly
publication (Pejman Habibie, The University of Western Ontario, Canada)

12.00-12.20 - Global and local publishing trends of the Social Sciences and Humanities
from the research policy perspective (Rta Petrauskait, Vytautas Magnus University,
Lithuania)

12.20-12.40 - Research dissemination through academic.edu and researchgate.net:
academic writing perspectives (Josef Schmeid, Chemnitz University of Technology,
Germany)

12.40-13.00 Discussion

Seminar D: Tuesday 17.00 19.00
17.00-17.20 - Publishing in English: ELF writers and textual voices (Marina Bondi,
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

17.20-17.40 - Explaining, defining, concluding: The use of reformulation markers in ELF
and in ENL research articles (Silvia Murillo, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)

85
17.40-18.00 - Evaluation in research article introductions in the Social Sciences written by
English Native Language (ENL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users (Enrique
Lafuente, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)

18.00-18.20 - It would be expected to find differences: An analysis of it-clauses with an
interpersonal function in ELF RAs (Pilar Mur-Dueas, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)

18.20 18.40 Discussion

18.40 -19.00 - Final summary and discussion of seminar

ABSTRACTS

A contrastive (English-Czech) study of rhetorical functions of citations in linguistics
research articles
Olga Dontcheva Navratilova
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

This study explores the rhetorical functions of citations in a specialized corpus of
linguistics English-medium research articles by Czech and Anglophone scholars. Drawing
on the typologies suggested by Thompson and Tribble (2001) and Petri (2007), the
investigation aims at identifying the rhetorical functions of integral and non-integral
citations in the corpus. The findings of the contrastive analysis of variation in the functions
of citations and their distribution across the generic moves of research articles by
Anglophone and Czech linguists indicates that there are divergences in the strategies they
use to create intertextual connections when attributing information or activities to others,
evaluating previous research, indicating gaps, relating their research to the work of others
and making claims aiming at extending existing knowledge. The reasons for these
divergences are related to the intended readership and the linguacultural context in which
Anglophone and Czech linguists strive to construct their identities as members of the
global and/or local academic community.

Rerferences
Petri, B. 2007. Rhetorical functions of citations in high- and low-rated masters theses.
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 6: 238-253.
Thompson, P. & Tribble, C. 2001. Looking at citations: Using corpora in English for
academic purposes. Language Learning & Technology, 5 (3): 91-105.

Cross-cultural variation in Architectural Engineering and Design: a preliminary
analysis
Maria Freddi
University of Pavia, Italy
The proposed paper offers a preliminary analysis of a small sample of research articles
(RAs) in English written both by English natives and native Italian scholars to look for
variation in thematic development and various features of text organisation (Halliday,
Matthiessen 2014), with special focus on linking adverbials (as in Biber et al. 1999). The
RAs are from the Architectural Engineering, Industrial Design and Engineering Design
fields, at the intersection between the sciences and the humanities. Articles from
specialised journals published in the UK and the US are compared to journals published in
86
Italy, with a view to identifying differences and similarity between the writing practices of
the same community of researchers coming from different linguistic backgrounds. Corpus
methods (particularly comparison of frequency distributions from different samples) are
combined with genre analysis and the contrastive rhetoric approach (Connor 1996) as an
effective tool to pinpoint traces of lingua-cultural differences within one field.
References
Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, E. Finegan 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken
and Written English. London: Longman.
Connor, U. 1996 Contrastive Rhetoric. Cross-cultural Aspects of Second Language Writing.
Halliday, M.A.K. and C. Matthiessen 2014 Hallidays Introduction to Functional Grammar.
London: Routledge.

Challenges of scholarly publication: A cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary study
of criticism in academic book reviews
Sonia Oliver del Olmo
Universidad Autnoma de Barcelona, Spain
The growing and generalized use of English in research publication today has created the
need for non-native scholars not only to learn English, but to have a good command of the
discourse features of all research genres (Swales 2004:43).This pressure to publish in
English has made visible the existence of certain rhetorical and epistemological differences
across languages and, in particular, between Spanish specialized discourse and that of the
Anglophone tradition. In this sense, it is within professional discourses, that the
appropriate use of modality becomes vital for authors presenting their knowledge in their
scientific communities. Although hedging typical realizations might be considered modal
verbs, they are not the only devices available. Therefore, this paper based on a corpus of
60 Book Reviews (BR) in English and 60 BR in Spanish sets out to find reasons behind the
existence of a wide range of linguistic forms through functional and conventional
associations. And by showing the factors influencing the choice within hedging
expressions we will explain the meanings conveyed by each lexical and grammatical
choice both in Spanish and English academic BRs in Medicine and Applied Linguistics.

References
Swales, J.M. 2004. Research Genres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Writing a conference abstract in English: A challenge for non-Anglophone writers
Renata Povoln,
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
With the growing internationalization of all scholarship, English indisputably performs the
role of an international lingua franca, and publishing in international journals is now
almost synonymous with publication in English. Since publication can be viewed as
documentary evidence that the writer qualifies for membership of the target discourse
community, the use of English as an additional language has become an important
prerequisite for scholars who intend to present their research to an academic audience at
international conferences. Conference organizers perform the role of gate-keepers who
have the right to accept or refuse an abstract for a presentation and subsequent
publication. Thus scholars from non-Anglophone backgrounds have to master the writing
of this research-progress genre because otherwise they may risk being refused
participation at conferences and publication in conference proceedings.
87
The paper analyses the rhetorical organization of conference abstracts written by
Anglophone writers and others from countries where Slavonic languages are spoken. The
findings of this corpus-based genre analysis reveal cross-cultural variation in the
rhetorical structure of conference abstracts and linguistic realizations of rhetorical moves
applied by abstract writers from different backgrounds. The paper also suggests
recommendations for future conference calls and novice writers who intend to publish in
English.

Citation in research writing of native and non-native English speakers: the interplay
of discipline and culture
Jolanta inknien
Vilnius University, Lithuania
The continuous growth of the importance of English as the lingua franca of the research
world has triggered a number of studies into the disciplinary and cultural factors that
influence the way academic texts are shaped and developed (Flttum et al. 2006, Hyland
2005, inter alia). One of the key elements in research writing is citation, as it performs a
number of functions essential to the scientific exchange of knowledge. The focus of this
paper, based on a self-compiled corpus of 60 articles in English, is on citational practices in
research articles written by Lithuanian and British English speakers in sociology,
literature and linguistics. The study investigates frequency distribution, syntactic
integration and types of citations in the research papers written by scholars of two
different lingua-cultural backgrounds in three different disciplines, but in one language, in
an attempt to find out key influencing factors in the use of citations.

References
Flttum, K., Dahl, T. & Kinn, T. 2006. Academic Voices: Across Languages and Disciplines.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hyland, K. 2005. Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London/New York:
Continuum.

Non-natives use of signalling nouns to bolster scientific credibility in English
Genevive Bordet
Universit Paris Diderot Paris 7, France
In a globalized world, the publishing process is regulated by a strict gatekeeping process.
One decisive criterion is the researchers capacity to conform with the requirements of a
genre. The focus here is set on the use of shell nouns determined by this as a cohesive
device in PhD abstracts written in English by English and French native writers. So far the
role of the PhD abstract has attracted little interest although it provides interesting insight
into the enculturation process of novice researchers in a discipline. This process involves
acquiring the ability to demonstrate credibility through an adequate selection of
keywords. A case in point is the selection of shell nouns determined by this in an
abstract. Based on a comparable interdisciplinary corpus of 500 abstracts, the role of
determined shell nouns is studied so as to 1) assess their impact on the textual cohesion 2)
evaluate the connection between the selected terms and the disciplines epistemological
values 3) consider the influence of the writers linguistic origin on the handling of this
device. This study aims at assessing to what extent non-native (French) writers are at a
disadvantage in achieving cohesion and thus the resulting credibility.

88
The practices of a novice Mexican scholar in writing for scholarly publication
Pejman Habibie
The University of Western Ontario, Canada
Given global competitiveness for quality research articulated through scholarly
publication, this study examined scholarly publication practices of a novice scholar in a
Mexican academic context. The study explored (1) the challenges she faced in writing for
scholarly publication in English-medium academic journals, and (2) the ways in which she
developed the academic literacies necessary for scholarly publication and was supported
in Mexican academic context in communicating her work through scholarly publication.
The theoretical framework drew on the notions of Discourse Community (Swales, 1990)
and Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The methodological
orientation adopted a qualitative case study design. The data were collected through a
semi-structured interview with a Spanish-as-a-first language scholar in a university in
Mexico. Knowledge produced (a) provides insights into scholarly publication practices of
Latin American emerging academics, and (b) contributes to the knowledge base about best
practices to strengthen EAL scholars visibility in global scholarship.

References
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.

Global and local publishing trends of the Social Sciences and Humanities from the
research policy perspective
Rta Petrauskait
Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
The area of SSH is known for their relatively more significant national or regional
orientation. Many social scientists and humanities scholars find it more appropriate to
convey the essence of their subject matters in their mother tongues. Writing in a domestic
language also makes it more accessible to local audiences, to whom the findings are likely
to be more relevant. Research policy of most countries is heading towards a global drive
and a prevailing trend of internationalization of research based on English as a lingua
franca. Research evaluation as the main instrument for research policy at present
undergoes a major shift moving from a traditional bibliometric approach based on citation
indexes and other impact measurements towards alternative means of measuring
research impact, specifically its societal impact. It is worthwhile to observe how this shift
might influence the choice of the publishing language. Moreover, a wide spreading open
access approach has its impact on the role of a language. The paper takes into account the
changing situation around research and its evaluation related to preferred language of
publication in non-English speaking countries. It is based on a wide overview of the
academic journals of SSH, published in Lithuania, the trends of their internationalization.

Research dissemination through academic.edu and researchgate.net: academic
writing perspectives
Josef Schmeid
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany
This contribution puts linguistic publications in a wider frame of academic research cycles,
in which researchers should collaborate to contribute to the advancement of learning. It is
89
not surprising therefore that social media platforms have been suggested as a modern
opportunity to share research data and results, esp. with scholars from less privileged
institutions with limited access to international journals or young researchers with a
limited personal network. This critical evaluation of platforms like academic.edu and
researchgate.net starts from participant observation, includes texts from the on-line and
published debate on the platforms usefulness and finishes with some personal advice for
young and experienced scholars. For the linguist, both platforms are also an interesting
source of data, if we want to analyse differences in national research traditions and
publication genres in a wide sense. The usage of modal verbs (may/might, should, must) or
preferences of personal pronouns (1st person singular of plural, 2nd person) serve as
examples to discuss cultural differences between European (esp. British, German and
Italian) and African and Asian scholars. All these publishing considerations have to be
discussed critically in a European forum.

Seminar D: Tuesday 17.00 19.00

Publishing in English: ELF writers and textual voices
Marina Bondi
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
The paper explores a small corpus of unrevised journal articles written by academic
language users of English for publication purposes (SciELF). The SciELF corpus is
contrasted with a corpus of published articles for general reference. The comparison
highlights differences in markers of authorial voice and in forms of introducing other
textual voices. Authorial voice is seen as a complex set of complementary choices
manifesting the writers presence in the text (forms of self mention and illocutionary
frames) and his/her ongoing dialogue with the reader and the scientific community
(prominently but selectively included by reporting other voices). A preliminary overview
of keywords highlights significant variation in the use of expressions of stance and
epistemicity (both underrepresented in SciELF), logical connectors (e.g. thereby, thus) as
well as in expressions used to introduce other textual voices and report diverging or
converging voices. Closer attention is paid to verbs of reporting, looking at the preference
for prototypical general verbs (study, analyze, emphasize) and the limited use of more
specific or more ambiguous verbs such as assume, predict, suggest, etc.). The results are
discussed with reference to the notions of ELF, EIL and language brokering.

Explaining, defining, concluding: The use of reformulation markers in ELF and in
ENL research articles
Silvia Murillo
Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Reformulation/ paraphrase is a prominent strategy in academic spoken ELF (Mauranen,
2012). In order to explore whether this is also a common strategy in written ELF
communication, in this paper I will contrast reformulation markers and their uses in an
ELF corpus of research papers and in a comparable ENL corpus, focusing on the processes
they introduce (specification, explanation, definition, denomination, conclusion, etc.).
For these purposes, I will analyse the SciELF corpus (2015, University of Helsinki),
a component of the WrELFA corpus which consists of 150 unedited research papers of
both hard and soft science disciplines, and a comparable subset of the articles in ENL of
the corpus SERAC (2008, University of Zaragoza), including articles in Applied Linguistics,
Business Management, Sociology, Mechanical Engineering, Urology, and Food Technology.
90
I will try to assess if any significant differences can be found between the two corpora in
the specific choice of reformulation markers and the processes introduced, and also in the
different similects (Mauranen, 2012) of the SciELF corpus.

References
Mauranen, A. 2012. Exploring ELF: Academic English Shaped by Non-native Speakers.

Evaluation in research article introductions in the Social Sciences written by English
Native Language (ENL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users
Enrique Lafuente
Evaluation is a key rhetorical strategy in article introductions, where researchers require
their whole rhetorical arsenal to carve a niche for their work and increase their chances of
publication. Research indicates that the way authors use evaluative language may be
affected by their linguistic and cultural background. Hence, non-native English researchers
may struggle to comply with the rhetorical expectations of native gatekeepers when trying
to publish their work internationally. The present paper tries to investigate cultural and
linguistic differences in the use of evaluation in RA introductions in the social sciences. To
do this, two comparative subcorpora of RA introductions in the social sciences will be
used, one including published texts written by ENL researchers and a second corpus of
introductions extracted from RAs manuscripts written by ELF users as part of the Sci-ELF
corpus. Concordance output will be produced electronically and read in context to identify
and classify evaluative acts. This analysis will try to identify differences in the use of
evaluation between ENL and ELF users. More specifically it will seek to establish whether
RA manuscripts written by ELF users tend to display preferred functional values, or
significant variations in the type of value and entity evaluated.

It would be expected to find differences: An analysis of it-clauses with an
interpersonal function in ELF RAs
Pilar Mur-Dueas
Publishing in English-medium international journals is becoming more and more
necessary for academics to pursue their scholarly careers and gain recognition within
their field of study. In this context, a great deal of academic knowledge is produced using
English as a lingua franca among peers from different linguacultural backgrounds. It is the
aim of this paper to study written scholarly ELF communication, focusing specifically on a
grammatical structure, the it-clause fulfilling an interpersonal function. This construction
can serve to encode attitudinal evaluation (e.g. it is essential to/that), and epistemic
evaluation (e.g. it may be argued that, it is likely that/to, it is evident that). The
interpersonal use made of it-clauses in the Sci-ELF corpus, consisting of 150 unrevised RA
manuscripts (University of Helsinki, Finland), will be compared to its use in a comparable
corpus of ENL published RAs, a section of SERAC (University of Zaragoza, Spain). The
analysis will focus on its overall frequency of use, the rhetorical interpersonal functions
fulfilled (attitudinal, hedging, boosting), the particular lexical choices made in terms of
evaluative adjectives and verbs, and the degree of modalisation encoded. The analysis will
contribute to a much needed description of ELF in written academic discourse.

91
S13: ESP and specialist domains: exclusive, inclusive or complementary approaches?
Convenors
Shaeda Isani (France)
Miguel Angel Campos Pardillos (Spain)
Marcin Laczek (Poland)
Michel Van der Yeught (France)

SEMINAR A: MONDAY 22ND AUGUST 16.00-18.00
FOCUS: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL APPROACHES

Susan Birch-Bcaas, University of Bordeaux, France
The ESP teacher/researcher and domain-specific expertise: reflecting on necessary skills
and knowledge.
ESP has traditionally been a practitioners movement (Johns 2013: 6) devoting its research to
establishing learner needs, and Hyland (2013: 107) refers to research-based language
education. However, Van der Yeught (2010) describes specialist languages as independent
knowledge domains which are objects of study in their own right. Learner needs are established
by discourse analysis, genre analysis and study of professional communities but what type of
specialized knowledge is required of ESP teachers and what degree of expertise in the domain?
The training of ESP teachers is of particular importance in the current French higher education
context as more and more posts are opened for university lecturers in ESP, but qualified
candidates are lacking.
In this paper, we propose to examine the role of the ESP teacher and the extent to which
knowledge of specialist domains makes for successful ESP teaching. We will focus in particular
on the domain of ERPP (English for Research and Publication Purposes) and courses for Masters
and doctoral students to illustrate the areas in which ESP teachers need to be competent. We
will also discuss the necessary collaboration with subject specialists as inside informants and
team teachers with the growing move towards CLIL (Content and Language Integrated
Learning) courses and internationalization in European higher education.

References
Hyland, K. 2013. ESP and Writing. In Paltridge and Starfield (eds) The Handbook of English for
Specific Purposes, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
Johns, A. M. 2013. The History of English for Specific Purposes. In Paltridge and Starfield (eds)
The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, UK.
Van der Yeught, M. 2010. Editorial ASp, 57.

Galina Gumovskaya, National Research University HSE, Moscow, Russia
LSP: English for Language Pedagogy
In accordance with the LSP classification put forward by T. Hutchinson and A. Waters (CUP,
1987), English for Teaching is an outcome of English for Social Sciences. It pursues academic
purposes in different spheres of knowledge, Language Pedagogy among them. As a teacher, I
have gained appropriate expertise in the Language Pedagogy domain during my twenty years of
experience at Moscow State Pedagogical University. In this respect, my approach to the theme
problematized by S13 seems to be inclusive and it results in successful ESP research-projects of
my Master's degree students in the area of pedagogical terminology and complex interaction
with pupils and peers. The empiric material is the well-known and much discussed issues of The
TKT Course (CUP) and Teaching by Principles, An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy
92
(Pearson/Longman). The research contributes to the development of students professional
competence in Language Pedagogy. Being involved in collective research, students contribute to
the development of principles and approaches to theoretical aspects of LSP as a verbal system of
professional communication. They come to the conclusion that LSP is not fundamentally
different from LGP in terms of linguistic usage but differs rather in terms of particular modes of
language that are common in different professional settings.

Philippe Millot, University of Lyon, France
It goes without saying: Conceptions of competence in English as a professional lingua
franca
The nature of competence in English in professional settings is very often taken for granted:
English is generally seen as a business language used for fulfilling business purposes regardless
of the professional domain. However, some advances in managerial and ESP research suggest
that the contents of competence tend to vary from one professional setting to another, each
socio-professional network having its own way of considering what matters in language
competence. These findings suggest in turn that competence may certainly be defined by a set of
core features but, also, by a very broad set of conceptions defined by the professionals
themselves. In this paper, we present an ongoing study of how French professionals experience
the concept of competence in English as a Lingua Franca in their day-to-day practice. The study
is based on interviews, an online survey, and a corpus analysis. The data originate from various
types of organisations (small and medium-sized companies, and large multinationals) and
various specialised domains such as information technologies, human resource management,
and engineering. Our results show that competence in English as a professional lingua franca is a
multifaceted concept including ordinary talk, professional styles, deviation from Standard
English, as well as organisational and domain-bound terminologies. Teaching in this field should
therefore embrace these realities.

Caroline Peynaud, Grenoble-Alpes University, France
Defining press genres: domain-specific knowledge and ESP competence in question.
Press discourse is a highly regulated type of discourse, made up of specific formats following
precise rules, explicitly defined and imposed by journalists themselves. Numerous textbooks
and professional documents detail the genres that are found in the press and the elements that
compose them. Press professionals thus position themselves as discourse specialists having a
reflective and prescriptive practice related to their writing activity. In this context, what can the
positioning of an ESP specialist studying press genres be? According to Swales (1990: 55),
professionals may produce a nomenclature that can be taken into account in analysing genres.
This paper aims at clarifying the relative role of the knowledge produced by the actors of the
field and of ESP researcher competence in genre analysis.
One of the genres that has been most precisely described by press professionals is the feature
article, defined as a style of writing focusing on people rather than on events, as opposed to hard
news (Ellis, 2001: 85). Confronting the point of view of professionals with the analysis of a
corpus of feature articles evidences the fact that domain-specific knowledge cannot be ignored,
but neither can it be substituted for ESP competence in the study of genres.

References
Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: CUP.
Ellis, Barbara. 2001. The copy-editing and headline handbook. Basic Books.

Begonia Soneira Beloso, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
93
Deciphering Archispeak from a non-native linguist's perspective
There is a reasonable amount of field expertise needed when dealing with an ESP variety. In the
case of Architecture, many practitioners are reluctant to think that their jargon can be learned,
analyzed, taught or understood by an outsider. This is true to a certain extent: a pure outsider
would have difficulty interpreting this discourse due to its technicality and the many linguistic
boundaries drawn by its knowledge community whose gate-keeping strategies go beyond mere
terminological needs. The study of English for Architecture becomes crucial for those non-native
students and professionals who need English as their professional lingua franca when
challenged by a labor market which is as global as the discipline itself. In this context, the role of
the ESP specialist becomes crucial as a course/materials designer. There are a number of
intermediate steps to be followed before even envisaging the possibility of describing this
variety of ESP and most of them have to do with conquering the content of this technical
language mainly through its lexis. This paper aims at displaying the main challenges, tools and
strategies to be followed in order to succeed in this task.

SEMINAR B: TUESDAY 23RD AUGUST 8.30-10.30
FOCUS: EXPLORING INTERFACE TOOLS BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND DOMAINS

Natalie Kbler, University Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cit, France
Bridging the gap between domain-specific and linguistic knowledge in ESP: a context-based
approach
Teaching or doing research in ESP means that the English teacher has to adapt to the different
domains s/he teaches in. As it is difficult for ESP teachers or researchers to acquire domain-
specific knowledge in all domains, we argue in favour of an approach which allows them to
adapt to any domain in which they have to teach or do research. This paper explores a context-
oriented linguistic approach (Gledhill & Kbler 2016), which enables linguists and practitioners
to acquire specialised knowledge in ESP. First, we explain how the corpus-driven methodology
adopted here develops into three phases: becoming familiar with the specialist domain,
identifying the lexico-grammatical patterns specific to the specialist domain, and getting used to
the specific phraseology of the domain (Kbler 2014). This approach relies on the assumption
that ESP phraseology differs from English for General Purposes and that phraseology is different
according to the specific domains (see, for example, Tribbles local prosodies, 2000). We
intend to show the necessity of acquiring the theoretical and methodological approach corpus
linguistics provides, in order to acquire specialist knowledge. We demonstrate, with a few
examples taken from our teaching experience and contacts with experts, how this corpus
approach works and how it helps linguists and teachers to take an informed stance towards
experts in the domain. Finally, these examples, relying on linguistic evidence, allow us to explain
why acquiring specialist knowledge (Van der Yeught 2010) and interacting with experts is
necessary for ESP teaching and research.

Gledhill, Chris & Kbler, Natalie. 2016. What can linguistic approaches bring to English for
Specific Purposes? Asp, 69, 2016: 65-95
Kbler, Natalie. 2014. Mettre en oeuvre la linguistique de corpus l'Universit. Les Cahiers de
l'ACEDLE:
Revue
RDLC,
Vol.11,
n1,
pp.37-77.
ISSN:
1958-5772,
<http://acedle.org/spip.php?rubrique230>
Tribble, C. 2000. Genres, keywords, teaching: Towards a pedagogic account of the language of
project proposals. In Rethinking Language Pedagogy from a Corpus Perspective, L. Burnard &
T. McEnery (eds), 74-90. New York: Peter Lang.
94
Van der Yeught, Michel. 2010. "Editorial", ASp [on line], 57, retrieved 22 February 2016. URL:
http://asp.revues.org/930

Olga Ranus, Poznan University of Life Sciences, Poland
Coaching principles and techniques as means of access to specialised domains in ESP
Coaching is defined as a development process through which a person is supported while
achieving a personal or professional competence result or a goal. It is also described as the art of
facilitating the performance, learning and development of another. Translating it into the realm
of language teaching, the role of a teacher is to support and to motivate students to make their
own conscious decisions about their learning processes. With its focus on defined goals,
Coaching and related disciplines such as Neurolinguistic Programming can be of great
importance when it comes to teaching English for Specific Purposes where content knowledge
and specialist domain are of unique relevance. Although Coaching and NLP have its sceptics
(particularly as far as teaching applicability is concerned), there are sound reasons to believe
they are compatible with ESP classroom practice. The purpose of the presentation is first to
describe the role of the ESP teacher as a language coach and, second, to show how Coaching
principles and techniques can be used in teaching ESP to Engineering and Life Sciences students.

Steven Breunig, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Literate expertise: A complementary strategy for ESP
To address the conflict between the requirements of language learning and domain-specific
expertise within English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this paper presents a complementary
strategy based on the theoretical construct of literate expertise (Scardamalia & Bereiter 1991).
Literate expertise focuses on the dynamics between language and domain knowledge.
Specifically, it highlights the interactive role of writing and reading for transforming domain-
specific knowledge through developing an elaborate set of problem-solving strategies for
engaging with texts, even texts embodying linguistic and domain knowledge unlike ones own.
Following an introduction to literate expertise, the paper reviews relevant research on language
and literacy in different disciplines (e.g. Shanahan et al. 2011), to develop a complementary
strategy for ESP based on literate expertise. It ends with a presentation of a pedagogical
experience for L2 students of English Studies and a consultation between an ESP practitioner
and an expert within the specialized field of medicine at the University of Southern Denmark.
The theoretical and practical implications are related, including macro-textual and micro-
structural elements (Braidwood & McAnsh 2013). For ESP practitioners and specialists as
language learners, literate expertise provides a theoretical frame for reflection and contributes
to practice (Belcher 2006), by stimulating meaning construction within and across specialized
domains for enhancing knowledge and for communicating in a conceptually coherent way.

References
Belcher, Diane. 2006. English for Specific Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined
Futures in Worlds of Work, Study, and Everyday Life. TESOL Quarterly. Vol. 40. No. 1. 133-156.
Braidwood, Eva & Suzy McAnsh. 2013. "The flowering of EAP/ESP: Customised support for the
development of communicative competence in writing in the disciplines. In Language
Learning in Higher Education. Vol. 2. Iss. 1. 173-198.
Scardamalia, Marlene & Carl Bereiter. 1991. Literate expertise. In Toward a general theory of
expertise. K. Anders Ericsson and Jacqui Smith, eds. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
172-194.
95
Shanahan, Cynthia & Timothy Shanahan, Cynthia Misischia. 2011. Analysis of Expert Readers in
Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics and Chemistry. Journal of Literacy Research. Vol. 23.
No. 4. 393-429.

Charlne Meyers, University of Mons, Belgium
Metaphors as Linguistic Keys to Access Knowledge
Metaphors are an essential part of LSP that shape, among other aspects, terminology and
phraseology. Indeed, metaphors in science can be constitutive of a theory (Boyd, 1993 [1979])
or even form coherent webs (rseaux cohrents) (Prandi, 2012), revealing the conceptual
essence of a particular domain.
Until recently, metaphors were only seen as popularization tools to help novices understand a
specialized domain. But studies tend to show that experts use metaphors in specialized contexts
(Resche, 2012; Vandaele, 2002; Oliveira, 2009). Even so, metaphors are not often taken into
account, especially in teaching specialized translation. We argue that awareness of metaphors
should be emphasized in translation classes as they can help draw conceptual links between
language as it is used by experts and field-specific knowledge, both aspects being essential to
translators.
Taking as a primary hypothesis that metaphors can help translators understand the logical
structure of a text as well as the characteristics of the concepts they define, we intend to show,
through the analysis of examples from trainee translators, that metaphors can give a powerful
and quick insight into knowledge in a sight-translation context with preparation time being
limited to 10 minutes.

References
Boyd, R. 1993 [1979]. Metaphor and theory change: What is metaphor a metaphorfor ? in A.
Ortony (dir.), Metaphor and Thought. 481-532. Cambridge: CUP.
Oliveira, Isabelle. 2009. Nature et fonctions de la mtaphore en science : lexemple de la
cardiologie. Paris: LHarmattan.
Prandi, M., & Rossi, M. 2012. "Les mtaphores dans la cration de terminologie". Terminologie:
textes. Discours et accs aux savoirs spcialiss. 7-19. Brest: Glat.

Maria Angeles Ruiz-Moneva, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Teaching ESP in Spain in Technical, Legal and Medical Domains
The aim of this paper is to briefly analyse the current panorama of teaching ESP in Spain and
determine whether there are significant differences depending on the branch of knowledge
concerned. Recurrent traits have been found regarding aspects such as the facility to cope with
learners needs, or the importance of familiarising learners with the specific lexis, genres and
also the discourse and rhetorical conventions of specialised professional registers.
On the basis of my teaching experience, I shall focus next on the areas of Computing, Agricultural
Engineering, Medicine, Economics and Legal English. First, in the case of Computing, learners
were far more interested in practising oral and written skills than in technical vocabulary. This
is certainly due to the fact that the basis of most of such lexis is English, and so learners are
already familiar with it. Second, in the fields of Agricultural Engineering, Medicine, or
Economics, a discourse approach based on the specific text-related functions was proven to be a
successful teaching focus. Most importantly, it helped establish communication between
learners with a specialist background and teachers with training in philology and linguistics.
Finally, in the area of Legal English and legal translation, the approach adopted was based on the
rhetorical features and conventions associated with each type of legal document. It was
extremely helpful to apply translation techniques along the lines proposed by Alcaraz and
96
Hughes (2002). Learners progressive familiarisation with the distinctive traits of the English
legal system, in contrast to the Spanish one, was also found useful. Moreover, in all cases,
students have shown increasing interest in acquiring transversal skills, so that, apart from
dealing with specialised texts, they also show interest in such activities as job interviews,
drafting CVs, letters of application, etc.

SEMINAR D: TUESDAY 23RD AUGUST 17.00-19.00
FOCUS: APPROACHES THROUGH SPECIALISED DOMAINS

Katia Peruzzo, University of Trieste, Italy
Legal English in the classroom: the IUSLIT experience
In 2011, the University of Trieste set up the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and
Translation Studies (IUSLIT) organised into two sections, Legal Studies and Studies in Modern
Languages for Interpreters and Translators, which has given a new boost to research on legal
translation and interpreting. One of the projects where the need for collaboration between ESP
and domain-specific expertise has clearly come to the fore is the translation of the Italian Code of
Criminal Procedure into European English (Gialuz et al. 2014), completed by an
interdisciplinary team of translators and lawyers. In the light of this project and based on
teaching experiences carried out in both IUSLIT Sections, this paper provides some reflections
on the importance of specialised knowledge in ESP teaching and argues for collaborative
academic efforts in order to train two types of ESP practitioners: (1) translators with sufficient
knowledge to understand both the pitfalls of legal English and the multi-layered legal scenarios
in which English is actually used, and (2) lawyers sensitive to how English is actually used in
different legal contexts. Such collaborative attitudes in the learning environment make it
possible for the two professional profiles to work together more effectively by both raising
awareness of the role of English as Europes lingua franca and spurring further research in this
field.

References
Gialuz M., Luparia L. & Scarpa F. (eds). 2014. The Italian Code of Criminal Procedure. Critical
Essays and English Translations. Padova: Cedam.

Miguel Angel Campos Pardillos, University of Alicante, Spain
Legal English in Europe: the evolution of English vocabulary as a response to non-native
culture-specific items
The traditional approach to the analysis and teaching of Legal English and its translation has
focused on its specific contextual framework, the common law system. Thus, most studies have
dwelled on the fact that many terms designate institutions or procedures (e.g. solicitor,
queens counsel, trust) which do not exist, or are substantially different, in other systems.
However, this approach to legal English as a rara avis may lead us to disregard the fact that
English is also used for international communication between non-native speakers, and that the
same specific referential problems also occur when describing many other legal languages and
systems, even within the same legal tradition. However, since the untranslatable inevitably has
to be translated, the English language used in international contexts has risen up to the task of
acting as a lingua franca, which has resulted in a number of terms which either did not exist in
English, or calques modifying the present usage of existent words. We shall examine a number
of such creations, both as a description of the state of the language and as a factor to consider in
our teaching materials so that they are more useful for international communication and for
drafters and translators.
97

Jessica Stark, Aix-Marseille University, France
Disciplinary knowledge and language specialisation: the case of English for diplomacy
This presentation addresses the issue of the intersection between disciplinary knowledge and
language specialisation in English for diplomacy. The question of whether a form of disciplinary
knowledge for diplomats exists at all has long been debated (Busk 1967; Smith 2011).
Diplomacy is often presented as an activity where practice and experience lead to "tacit" forms
of knowledge (Loriol et al. 2008) the so-called "art of diplomacy" which can be considered
more important than disciplinary knowledge per se. By drawing on insights provided by the
writings of diplomats themselves, we suggest that they do master a type of overarching
professional knowledge rooted in specific communicative practices. These involve cross-cultural
interaction and negotiation skills that may have an impact on language specialisation in the
domain (Kurbalija 2002).

References
Busk, Douglas. 1967. The Craft of Diplomacy: Mechanics and Development of National
Representation Overseas. London: Pall Mall Press.
Kurbalija, Jovan. (ed). 2002. Knowledge and Diplomacy. Malta: DiploPublishing.
Loriol, Marc, Franois Piotet & David Delfolie (2008). "Le travail diplomatique. Un mtier et un
art". Rapport de recherche pour le ministre des Affaires trangres et europennes (MAEE),
Universit Paris I Panthon Sorbonne-CNRS, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Travail UMR
8593.
Smith, Raymond E. 2011. The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books.

Fanny Domenec, University Paris 2, France
ESPs added value in approaches to corporate discourse
The latest ABC conference, which gathered scholars from various fields ranging from discourse
analysis and technology development to management and stakeholder relations, brings
evidence of the increasing need for multidisciplinary approaches to specialized varieties of
English. This paper aims to determine and illustrate the relevance of English for Specific
Purposes (ESP) in such a diverse field of research. The main issues addressed are: a) the
multidisciplinary nature of ESP, b) its application to corporate discourse and c) the need for
inclusive approaches to study specialized discourses and milieus.
A literature review explains how ESP uses language as a starting point to understand textual
evolutions in communicative practices, but also the culture of the milieu under study and the
general context (Van der Yeught 2010, Resche 2013, Isani 2014, Williams 2014). To characterize
the specific contribution of ESP to the study of corporate discourse, a comparative approach is
adopted, contrasting a sample of papers in discourse analysis and management with a selection
of papers in ESP. Results suggest that by bringing insight into the production and reception of
specialized discourses, ESP is both innovative and inclusive. As such, interactions between ESP
researchers and their peers in other fields of English studies or in specialist domains should be
strongly encouraged.

References
Isani, S. 2014. Ethnography as a research-support discipline in ESP teaching, learning and
research in the French academic context. ASp 66, 27-39.
Resche, C. 2013. Economic Terms and Beyond: Capitalising on the Wealth of Notions. Bern: Peter
Lang.
Van der Yeught, M. 2010. ditorial. ASp 57, 1-10.
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Williams, C. 2014. The future of ESP studies: building on success, exploring new paths, avoiding
pitfalls. ASp 66, 137-150.

Maria Teresa Musacchio & Raffaella Panizzon, University of Padua, Italy
Learning the language of emergencies: introducing post-graduate students to the
translation and adaptation of a specialised magazine
One of the milestones to be achieved in the training of advanced language and translation
students is the ability to acquire domain-specific knowledge, terminology and phraseology at
some degree, as well as the ability to reframe concepts and adapt them to the system of
knowledge of a target culture in a relatively short amount of time. Nowadays, teachers can make
use of a number of online and offline resources to guide learners in this process such as corpora,
termbanks, manuals, journal articles, online tutorials and the like. In the present work we
discuss the complementary approach applied to introduce post-graduate language and
translation students at the University of Padua to the body of knowledge necessary for the
translation from English into Italian of the magazine of the European project Slndil (607691)
on emergency management (EM), and to the successful management of language resources such
as corpora and termbanks. Challenges arising from the specific features of this field as well as
from inherent cultural differences in the conceptualisation of EM will be discussed. The project
was addressed to a real-life lay and semi-specialised audience and the Italian translation was
released in January 2016 to the Italian project partners.

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S14. Teaching Practices in ESP Today

Convenors
Danica Milosevic, College of Applied Technical Sciences, Nis, Serbia
Cdric Sarr, Universit Paris-Sorbonne, France
Alessandra Molino, University of Turin, Italy,
Shona Whyte, Universit de Nice, France

Session A Wednesday 24 August 14:00 to 16:00 : Teaching ESP in business and
humanities/social sciences

14h00-14h25: Barbora Chovancov, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Soft skills and mediation in legal English: Towards a new methodological approach
in ESP
In the last couple of decades, the field of English for Specific Purposes has become well
established in the academia, as attested by the growing number of courses as well as
textbooks that are catering to this segment of ELT. While ESP theory has emphasized the
necessity of paying close attention to the students immediate and future contexts of
language use, and thus carrying out relevant needs analysis (Huhta et al. 2013), we can see
not infrequently that the practice has been lagging behind. Thus, many ESP syllabi are
still concerned with teaching general English that is merely enriched with a significant
component of terminology of a given field.

This paper argues that one of the central components of ESP courses, as revealed by
the process of transferred needs analysis (Chovancov 2014), consists of soft skills. Those
go beyond fluency of speech and accuracy of terminology since they involve the students
ability to effectively communicate and negotiate in work-related professional contexts.
This is particularly acute in the area of law where a significant amount of work consists of
legal professionals mediating technical information to lay people. Identifying this situation
as intralanguage translation or mediation (CEFRL), the paper presents several activities
for developing this area of soft skills and demonstrates that this approach combines
several desirable effects that range from the use of authentic materials, presentation of
believable scenarios and practice of reformulation rather than verbatim reproduction of
discipline-specific content (such as citing acts and regulations).

14h25-14h50: Gaetano Falco, Universit degli Studi di Bari A. Moro, Italy
Developing a cloud-based sharing knowledge-environment for learners in English
for Economic and Financial Purposes
Ever since its birth in the 1960s, research on ESP teaching practices has been the concern
of different disciplines, e.g. rhetorical studies (Trimble 1985), needs analysis (Dudley-
Evans & St. John 1998; Flowerdew 2013), genre studies (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993,
Dudley-Evans 2000), discourse analysis (Hyland 2000), corpus linguistics (Flowerdew
2014). This paper suggests a methodology for teaching English for Economic and Financial
Purposes (EEFP); a multidisciplinary approach is recommended, which integrates
theoretical contributions from cognitive linguistics (Evans and Green 2006) and
ethnography (Dressen-Hammouda 2014) and takes advantage of new information
technologies, with a view of achieving user-generated contents (Stone 2009). The proposal
stems from a 10-year-long experience as a teacher and researcher of translation of EEFP in
an MA course at the University of Bari. Considering that: a) EEFP entails proper decisions
at terminological, syntactic and genre level; b) the involvement of a specialist is a sine qua
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non to improve students cognition; c) multimodality can support students learning, our
aim is to use an emic perspective, which is notoriously collaborative (Dressen-
Hammouda 2014), in order to develop students encyclopedic knowledge in EEFP. For this
purpose, students are trained to use Cmap Tools to build concept maps on specific subjects
and share them in the cloud for feedback from experts in Economics and Finance.

14h50-15h15: Irina Keshabyan, University of Murcia, Spain
Intercultural Competence in Teaching Business English
This work explores the importance of Intercultural Competence in teaching Business
English (BE), as its main aim is to show the role of this type of competence with respect to
the awareness of cultural differences to communicate successfully in a foreign language,
English in this case, in distinct business contexts. To achieve this, some theoretical
background on the concepts of Communicative Competence, Intercultural Competence,
and BE, as a part of ESP, is offered. Also, the relationship between Intercultural
Competence and BE is examined. To give an overall view of the Communicative
Competence the works of Hymes (1966) and Bachman and Palmer (1980) are analysed. At
the same time, the works of Hofstede (2010) and Frendo (2005) amongst others provide
an insight into different dimensions of culture and the growing importance of Intercultural
Competence in teaching BE. Newton et al (2009) emphasise the intercultural factor in
communicative language teaching and learning so as to enable different people to
communicate successfully in distinct contexts. In this respect, it is important to understand
that BE needs a specific approach to teaching as it varies from general English and
represents a variant of International English. In fact, learners need to do business in
English, not just speak about business in English (Frendo, 2005). Finally, a sample study is
presented to show how intercultural competence can be introduced into the BE course
design.

15h15-15h40: Linda Terrier & Christelle Maury, Universit Toulouse Jean Jaurs,
France
Meeting the challenges of teaching specialised varieties of English to first year
students in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences: a preliminary study
In order to try to meet the challenge of putting together a curriculum that would allow for
an introduction to specialised varieties of English while taking into account the
specificities of first-year students in the Humanities and in Social Sciences, the teaching
team at our University has decided to build a single English course for all first year
students of ESP (2000 of them each year), regardless of their English level (which ranges
from A0 to C1). This course was built following the research on learner-centred
approaches and environments and on learner autonomy. Students are in particular asked
to complete two projects which are to be presented orally during the final exam: the first
project is personally-oriented while the second one is domain-specific. For this second
project, students are asked to develop a project around their domain of study.
For the 2016 ESSE conference and the first seminar on Teaching Practices in ESP Today,
we will analyse in what ways this specific course actually meets the challenges of
introducing first-year Humanities and Social Sciences students to relevant varieties of
specialised English. To this purpose, we will be analysing the eight hundred project
books that the students will be handing in during their final exams in order to determine
to what extent students have entered the realm of a specialized variety of English. This will
be measured using three criteria: the link between their academic discipline and the actual
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theme they have chosen for their project; the lexical fields they have developed; and the
degree of specialization of the documents they have chosen (using criteria such as source,
domain-specificity and level of expertise in the field required to grasp the content of the
document). We will then correlate the degree of entrance into the realm of a specialized
variety of English with two independent variables: that of academic discipline and that of
initial level of expertise in English. The underlying hypothesis is twofold: first that some
academic disciplines within the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences may favour the
introduction of specialized varieties of English to first-year students; secondly, that the
better the initial level in English, the easier such an introduction will be. Finally, we expect
that overall motivation for the course (as measured by the final grade) will influence the
extent to which the students have been able to refine their knowledge of a specialized
variety of English.

15h40-16h00: Viviana Gaballo, University of Macerata, Italy
A Holistic Approach to ESP Teaching and Learning
Integrating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into the ESP classroom has
become common practice in this Information Age and Knowledge Society.
As part and parcel of the learning process, technology makes a wide range of tools
available to learners, encouraging new ways of sharing and constructing knowledge. CMC
has become an essential feature in ESP settings for its great capacity in building an online
community of practice that extends beyond classroom boundaries. Out-of-class activities
now complement classroom learning by involving learners in using the foreign language
for real communication purposes.
While current literature on ESP generally addresses only one theoretical foundation or one
research methodology (e.g., discourse analysis), this paper responds to the need for having
multiple theoretical perspectives coalesce to allow a more holistic view of ESP pedagogy,
and for combining social and cognitive constructivist approaches.
While focusing on the triangulation of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC),
Networked Learning (NL), and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as
applied to ESP classes in BA and MA Political Sciences and Communication Studies
programmes, this paper provides examples of how ESP learners content-related and
communicative competence can be enhanced by the synergic action of CLIL, CMC and
Networked Learning.

Session B Thursday 25 August 08:30 to 10:30 : ESP teaching for specific skills and
in technical domains

08h30-08h55: Sophie Belan Universit de Nantes, France
"Examining the effects of form-focused pre-task activities in a Business English task-
based blended-learning programme"
This presentation will focus on a task-based blended-learning programme implemented by
a team of researchers and teachers from the Applied Foreign Languages department of the
University of Nantes, France, to try and find solutions to the issues they faced in their 1st
year Business English classes: overcrowded classes, leading to limited individual feedback,
lack of motivation and high drop-out rates. Based on a socio-constructivist and cognitivist
approach, the programme combines classroom sessions with distance group work using a
Moodle learning platform. Students carry out several business-oriented collaborative
"real-world" tasks (Ellis 2003). Feedback on oral and written productions is given in the
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form of advice and suggestions. In the post-task phase, students are encouraged to use
form-focused micro-tasks (Demaizire & Narcy-Combes 2005) in an online resource
center. Previous studies have focused on students' and teachers' representations (Narcy-
Combes & McAllister 2011; McAllister, Narcy-Combes & Starkey-Perret 2012; McAllister &
Narcy-Combes 2015), on the effects of the programme on accuracy, fluency and complexity
of written production (McAllister 2013 ; McAllister & Belan 2014) and on the students' use
of the virtual resource center (McAllister 2013; Starkey-Perret et al. 2015). Following
these studies, changes have been made in the programme, the latest being the introduction
of contextualised form-focused pre-task activities.
This paper will present the results of a study carried out between January and May 2016
to determine the effects of the new form-focused pre-tasks on the acquisition of the
targeted forms.

08h55-09h20: Savka Blagojevi - University of Ni, Serbia
Explicit Teacher Instruction for ESP Students on Academic Lecture Listening
Comprehension
The paper describes an empirical study aimed at investigating the influence of the explicit
teacher instruction for improving ESP students listening comprehension skills of the
lectures within their study fields. Such skills are vital for non-native English speaking
students who attend study programmes and classes delivered in English and should be
given more attention, especially in the ESP courses at masters level. The empirical study
involved two groups (14 students each) of master students in psychology, chosen on the
basis of the same language performance. The first group was given the listening
comprehension instructions, (presentation and practice of listening strategies) during 10
teaching hours, while the second the control group, did not receive any explicit teacher
instruction. After that, the listening comprehension of the two groups was tested and
compared. The obtained results showed that the students who were exposed to teacher
instruction significantly outperformed the control group, and greatly benefited from being
instructed. Yet, in order to get more general conclusion and better insight into the role of
teacher instruction for improving lecture listening comprehension of ESP students, the
procedure described in the study should be applied to ESP students from different study
fields and the results discussed.

9h20-9h45: Franoise Raby, Universit Toulouse 3, France
The Twin Emergence Hypothesis for L2 teaching at Toulouse FabLANG
In the wake of the development of fablabs in education (BLICKENSTEIN, 2013), the
FabLANG was created in June 2015 at the technological institute of Toulouse: IUT A. It is a
place where innovative teaching methods are collaboratively created by LSP teachers with
a view to linguistically preparing LSP students for their future activity in the workplace. At
the same time, FabLANG researchers draw from the paradigm of emergent and dynamic
theories to evaluate these new work arrangements or methods. The LSP model of the Twin
Emergence Hypothesis will show how linguistic and pragmatic emergence mesh within
FabLANG activities. Presentation of the model will be based on empirical evidence
gathered from video and audio recordings of students at work in the context of the
FabLANG.

9h45-10h10: Danica Milosevic, College of Applied Technical Sciences, Nis, Serbia
Necessity for audio-visual stimulus: the use of video materials in English for
technical sciences (ETS)
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The modern world is facing a rapid development of technology and technical devices on a
daily bases. What seems to be a state of the art technology today becomes an obsolite and
discardable piece of science tomorrow. Living in the digital era, ETS practicioners have an
obligation towards their students to follow the trends in cutting edge technology in order
to provide them with the topics and language inputs that are of actual interest to the
professionals in this specific domain. It would be hard to do that if ETS practicioners, who
are by no means experts in technology, could not rely on new- achievement- in -science -
and -technology- video materials as additional resources found on the Internet. In the said
area of expertise, a video material is sometimes an indispensable tool for obtaining more
tangible pieces of information on technical devices and modern technology, than those to
be found in scientific books or magazines. Visual presentations can dispel numerous
doubts which arise in understanding of such a complex technical material quite
successfully. The aim; therefore, is to show the benefits of video materials for ETS
practicioners and their students likewise, by reflecting upon some concrete examples from
practice.

10h10-10h30: Alicia Otano, Universidad de Navarra, Spain
English for Professional Practice: ESP for future Spanish architects
This paper presents the experience of designing and teaching an ESP course for students
on the Global Architecture Program at the University of Navarra, Spain in particular,
meeting the specific needs of such students, who are proficient in everyday colloquial
English (CEFR C1C2) but tend to have limited competence in academic and professional
communication skills. What the students need to master are the technical lexical fields and
distinct registers required for accurate and appropriate communication in the global
workplace.
This paper explores the content development process for this 3 ECTS credit elective
subject, including background research to determine the prospective student profile and
the close collaboration with other professors at the University of Navarras School of
Architecture to define student knowledge and needs, and to build a recommended
bibliography.
Although the subject design process was initially defined by the program development
department at the School of Architecture, student involvement in the selection of material
and active participation in project presentation and critique has become equally important
as a shaping force. Their input and responses enhance overall interest, motivation and
ongoing participation. This subject reflects what can be done with a functionally fluent ESL
group that needs to learn to communicate professionally as architects in a globalized
economy.

Session C Thursday 25 August 11:00 to 13:00: Narratives of Teaching ESP; Health
and social services

11h00-11h25: Shona Whyte, Universit de Nice, France & Cdric Sarr, Universit
Paris-Sorbonne, France
From 'war stories and romances' to research agenda: towards a model of ESP
didactics

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In today's networked world where English is a basic skill, essential for communication in
many spheres of academic, professional and social life, the need to move beyond
anecdotal, romantic views of language learning and use has never been more pressing.
Master (2005) called for the field to build on empirical research findings instead of "war
stories and romances" in order to construct a viable theoretical ESP framework, while
Douglas (2010) sees a complementary practical need: "defining and refining the concept of
specific purpose language teaching is an ongoing task for practitioners" (Douglas, 2010).
However, terminological confusion makes this is a challenging enterprise for those
involved in teaching and researching ESP. This paper begins with a discussion of key
terms in ESP teaching, including didactics and pedagogy, acquisition and learning, applied
linguistics and language education, with the aim of defining a current interpretation.
Taking ESP in French education as our example, we explore the role of English in higher
education (cultural studies versus specific purposes training; Braud et al., 2015, Whyte,
2013) compared with secondary school level (language and culture versus content and
language integrated learning CLIL). The paper identifies research themes emerging from a
range of contexts covered in a new special interest group in ESP didactics (DidASp) within
the French ESP research association GERAS. The goal is to propose a new model for ESP
didactics at the intersection of modern languages, languages for specific purposes and
second language acquisition. The present paper offers first steps in this direction with
implication for ongoing research in ESP teaching and learning.

11h25-11h50: Bouchra Brahimi, Blida University, Algeria
The Use of Storytelling as a Teaching Strategy to Enhance ESP Students Linguistic
Proficiency: Case Study of Second Year Pharmacy Students at Blida University-
Algeria
The use of narratives in a learning context plays a pivotal role in expanding students
horizons. The introduction of storytelling in the world of ESP will bring about a prominent
effect on students linguistic knowledge. With regard to ESP teaching, it is of utmost
importance to focus on the authenticity of the teaching material to present the language
components in context rather than making the students acquire the language system
through isolated grammar structures and vocabulary. This paper suggests using story-
based instruction with pharmacy students to enhance vocabulary acquisition and
grammar mastery. The aim of the current study was to shed light on the importance of
storytelling in promoting pharmacy students linguistic knowledge. A group of 40 second
year students was selected then taught using the storytelling strategy. The results
emerging from a focus group discussion held by the end of the teaching sessions revealed
that students were highly motivated and satisfied with this teaching strategy which gave
them the opportunity to discover the imaginary side of the scientific field and helped them
to internalize some vocabulary words and recognize grammar structures.

11h50-12h15: Elena Sasu, Universit de Poitiers, France
English for the Health Sciences in France: A National Overview and a Local Case
Study
This paper will focus on the French national approach of English language teaching for the
health sciences as observed in practice, with sources ranging from the recommendations
of the French national Groupe dEtude et de Recherche en Anglais de Spcialit (GERAS)
Health Sciences group, existing bibliography within the national context, ministerial
directives, university learning agreements, to the local and personal approach.
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More particularly, the acute need for English in the Pharmacy and Medicine university
careers will be examined from the perspective of:
-
Teaching strategies (peer teaching, role-plays, etc.)
-
Language certification: compulsory for certain university careers or Master
programmes, admissions for Management Degrees in private schools or international
programmes, resulting in the obvious need to create a specific certification for health
sciences students
-
Critical appraisal of medical research articles: compulsory for the national
residency exam starting 2016-2017
-
Scientific reading: the vast majority of the bibliography young doctors/residents
and researchers in medical and health sciences need is in English, but the French key-word
approach used for national exams for which they train for six years, is not in the least
sufficient; context and co-text are as important as the medical science itself.

12h15-12h40: Rebecca Franklin-Landi, Universit de Nice, France
Teaching good practice through bad television fiction: using FASP at the medical
faculty
In 1999 Michel Petit first published an article defining FASP (fiction substrat
professionnel) as a tool in the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Since then
this subject has been developed and applied to different fields of ESP by various experts in
France (Isani in ELP, Charpy in Medical English). During this period the original definition
of professional literary fiction has also been expanded upon in order to include movies
and television series anchored in a particular professional milieu. We will briefly present
the evolution of this genre before focusing on a sequence from an American medical
television series to show how it was used in the classroom in order to reinforce good
practice through the identification of on-screen professional faux-pas and/or the
recognition of correct procedures. Questionnaires were given to the students before,
during and after viewing the extracts in order to identify an evolution in their attitude to
professional fiction as well as a possible progression in their medical practice awareness.
We shall compare and contrast the results obtained with the students attitudes to this
type of learning situation in order to show that television FASP is an interesting and
pertinent pedagogical tool in the ESP classroom.

12h40-13h00: Jane Helen Johnson, University of Bologna, Italy
Constructing an ESP course for Social Services undergraduates: corpus tools to the
rescue
While appropriate language and discourse is acknowledged as fundamental for successful
social services work (Thompson 2010), the lack of existing material on the market for
teaching ESP to Social Services students at undergraduate level (Kornbeck 2003, 2008)
prompted this researcher to explore various corpus linguistics techniques to put together
a meaningful language course for undergraduate students at an Italian university.
Corpus linguistics has been exploited in an ESP/EAP framework particularly for
investigating genre and vocabulary (e.g. Krishnamurthy and Kosem 2007; Hyland and Tse
2007; Ghadessy et al 2001; Scott and Tribble 2006; OKeefe et al 2007; Breeze 2015).
However discourse analysis has received less attention in the ESP classroom. Corpus-
Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington et al 2013), with its focus on how language is used
to influence others beliefs and behaviour, may be an appropriate tool for developing
material within such an ESP course, enabling creation of awareness-raising activities for
106
use in the classroom as regards the effects of different language choices in a discourse
context. For this purpose, a corpus of material drawn from the content area of social work
(Flowerdew 1993) has been put together. The talk will discuss the utility and classroom
application of such material.

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S15. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL
EDUCATIONAL NEEDS CHANCES AND CHALLENGES
Convenors:
Ewa Domagaa-Zyk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Nuzha Moritz, University of Strasbourg, France
Anna Podlewska, The Medical University of Lublin, Poland

The seminar has been designed as a space for discussions and sharing for linguists interested
in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to children, adolescents and adults with
special educational needs (SEN). For many years in the past D/deaf, blind, intellectually
challenged or dyslexic students were excluded from learning foreign languages in special
schools. Today they participate in mainstream education on a par with their peers. This
situation creates both significant chances and new scientific problems and methodological
challenges. The purpose of the seminar is thus to share research results and ideas about the
following issues: 1). Conceptual representations for words in English in individuals with
sensory or cognitive challenges; 2. Teaching and learning strategies to enhance both
motivation and language performance; 3. The role of oral communication and sign
languages in EFL classes for the D/deaf.

Why start teaching English early to deaf pupils?
Patricia Pritchard
Statped vest, Bergen, Norway

This paper will discuss why it is necessary to begin teaching English early, and how sign-
bilingualism can be used in the classroom. English skills should include both the
development of English literacy and provide pupils with a means of face-to-face
communication. The choices pupils have between different language modalities, due to
great variations in learning styles and hearing and speaking skills, will also be discussed.
The choice of oral language used in direct communication should match pupils
individual needs and can range from BSL/ASL, Signed English, English speech, chatting
or combinations of the above.
Method
A study (Pritchard, 2004) showed that teaching and using British Sign Language (BSL) is
feasible and can provide language awareness and motivation. A teaching program for
second graders will be described where different modalities were used in direct
communication. Also how reading and writing skills were introduced. Teaching strategies
used included BSL and phonic reading based on the awareness of English sounds (visually,
tactile, auditory) and their written symbols and typical spelling patterns.
Conclusion
Results of the teaching program will be presented as a standardised test of BSL
development, an assessment of reading and a film.

Deaf Young Adults English Literacy Development in a Peer-Supported Virtual
Learning Environment
Huhua Rita Fan
University of Central Lancashire

Overwhelming evidence indicates the unsatisfactory English literacy attainment of Deaf
learners, and this issue is especially pertinent in countries with few dedicated resources
108
such as India. In such contexts with a thin resource base, there is a challenge of setting up
teaching, learning and assessment that is tailored to the needs of Deaf learners.
Underpinned by the notions of bilingual-biculturalism, ethnography, peer-to-peer
learning, and functional multiliteracies, this research explores the design concept of a
Virtual Learning Platform for Deaf young adults in India, the SLEND (Sign Language to
English by the Deaf). The aim is to investigate learning experience and learning outcomes.
Eventually, a Virtual Learning Ecosystem for Deaf adult learners is proposed.
By documentation and analysis of the project proposal, project meeting minutes and
focus group discussions, the research identifies the characteristics of the learning platform
SLEND and its context, from the viewpoints of both researchers in the UK and Deaf project
staff (Research Assistants and Peer Tutors) in India. Meanwhile, the efficiency of the
SLEND is tested by examining Deaf learners responses through questionnaires and field
observation. Furthermore, Deaf Indian learners English literacy learning attainment is
benchmarked against an internationally-accepted standard, adapted from the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). These data include both
summative elements (pre-test, post-test and delayed-test along with self-assessment skills
questionnaires) and formative elements (can-do statements for each session and
observations of natural language use).

Bringing film to English as a foreign language (EFL) for the deaf and hard of hearing
class.
Anna Podlewska
The Medical University of Lublin

There are many convincing reasons for bringing film to English as a foreign language (EFL)
for the deaf and hard of hearing class. In the first place, moving pictures are increasingly
available through DVD, including the DVDs that accompany various English courses, the
Internet, and TV broadcasting. In addition, video watching is, for the majority of students, a
pleasure in itself an activity that they associate with relaxation. Film motivates students
by engaging them with the story it tells and thus provides a stimulating framework for
classroom discussion and communication. It also exposes the classroom audience to
authentic and varied language as well as a wide range of paralinguistic behaviour.
Moreover, moving pictures add variety to the heavily reading biased EFL for the deaf and
hard of hearing classes. Finally, the medium of film is a rich source of the natural mouth
movements of speech necessary for lipreading practice. The value of film as a language
teaching and learning resource in the EFL for the deaf and hard of hearing classroom can
be described with reference to the usefulness of selected film clips and before-, while- and
after-you-watch activities, as well as in terms of viewing techniques and their role in the
acquisition and development of language skills and competences. The aim of this paper is
to discuss all of the aforementioned perspectives.

The cultural competence challenge: Enhancing deaf and hard-of-hearing English
learners general knowledge
Mgr. Zuzana Foniokov, Ph.D. and Mgr. Lenka Kroupov Zuzana Foniokov
Support Centre for Students with Special Needs, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

As instructors of English for students with hearing impairments, we have identified a
pressing need to address, alongside language skills, also the cultural competence of our
students. We have repeatedly observed that our students lack cultural knowledge and
109
hence often experience comprehension difficulties when reading texts that refer to specific
cultural phenomena, even such that are generally well-known among intact learners.
For this reason, we have designed a course in American and Deaf American Culture which
is going to focus on raising cultural awareness of deaf and hard-of-hearing English
learners. This paper aims to present our project and reflect on the possible benefits of such
a course. As part of the project, students will explore the US (and US deaf) culture through
a series of interactive activities and workshop sessions comprising reading short stories
(including US Deaf literature), film/documentary screening sessions (with English
subtitles) and post-screening discussions, individual project work, a cooking session,
interactive language exercises (using e.g. cartoons, adverts). The topics will include US
culture, US Deaf culture, food culture, entertainment, family, ethnic and cultural diversity,
consumerism, major feasts, and others. Apart from the cultural competence, the course
will enhance the participants skills in the English language. Furthermore, thanks to the
project activities we hope to extend the learning outside the classroom and show students
possibilities for developing their own ways of acquiring a foreign language.

Multilingual perspective in EFL for d/Deaf learners
Jitka Sedlkov
English Department, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno

The presentation deals with the concept of multilinguality and the potential of employing
the multilingual perspective in foreign language learning and teaching of d/Deaf and
profoundly hard of hearing (HOH) learners. Although multilingualism and multilingual
didactics have received increasing attention, it has not been investigated in detail as a
useful perspective in foreign language learning in the specific group. First, the question of
the role of national sign and spoken languages in foreign language acquisition of d/Deaf
and profoundly HOH learners will be discussed. It will be illustrated with data from
interviews conducted with d/Deaf young adult learners concerning their language history
and reading in English as their foreign language (EFL) as well as verbal protocols
produced during EFL reading tasks. Subsequently, pedagogical implications will be drawn
based on the multilingual perspective, which stresses the importance of building on
previous language learning.

Willingness to communicate of deaf and hard of hearing participants of a Polish-
British project Multilingual getting together
Anna Nabiaek
Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna, Poland

Willingness to communicate (WTC), considered by many authors the primary goal of
language instruction, is defined as language learners' readiness to initiate discourse at a
particular time with a specific person or persons, using an L2. Communication anxiety is
one of the leading factors affecting WTC. Lowered levels of anxiety seem to lead to greater
WTC and in turn more frequent and successful communication in the L2. In case of people
with hearing loss anxiety seems to be particularly severe, especially in interactive
hearing/non-hearing integration groups. The aim of this presentation is to present the
results of a project in which a group of Polish hard-of-hearing students interacted with a
group of supportive native speakers (staff and students of Deaf Studies from the UK). The
English-speaking group encouraged and stimulated students' efforts in the use of a foreign
language. While engaging in a tour of Poland - visiting Lublin, Warsaw and Pozna - both
110
groups deepened their knowledge of Polish and British Sign Languages while
communicating primarily in the English language.

Deeper and deeper - how best to improve the vocabulary skills of postgraduate deaf
and hard of hearing students.
Beata Gulati
Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, Poland

The author of this article faces the challenge of teaching deaf and hard of hearing students
specialized English. The action research aims to discover the strategies used for
vocabulary development for the hearing impaired. The class atmosphere, meaningful
context, repetitions lead from unknown through acquainted to established vocabulary.
Direct as well as indirect vocabulary instructions are implemented in order to study and
revise high frequency words that appear in students textbooks and more complex
concepts that are unknown to them and not connected with their everyday life
experiences. Lessons become creatively organized practice sessions to use vocabulary in a
variety of activities. The expanded Frayer Model, multiple meanings defining, recognition
of figures of speech (idiomatic expressions, personifications), word and mind maps, songs,
films, video clips with subtitles, songs in sign language, underlying important words in the
text, word games and puzzles, are only a few of them. Depth and breadth of vocabulary
knowledge increases students ability to communicate, to understand what they read, to
succeed academically as well as in their future career.
key words: postgraduate, deaf and hard of hearing students, vocabulary.

Enhancing oral communication in EFL classes for the Deaf and hard of hearing
students
Nuzha Moritz
University of Strasbourg - France

The dream of every teacher is to have a dynamic, creative and productive class. Using
cartoons to teach deaf and hard of hearing is interesting, fun, and could enhance both
motivation and language performance. The focus of this presentation is the use of cartoons
to teach English sounds and intonation to deaf and hard of hearing students. As cartoons
come in a variety of forms they are widely used in teaching foreign languages and
considered to be highly productive and successful. Cartoons are normally used in their
written forms to teach grammatical structure, vocabulary, storytelling etc. In this pilot
study we would like to show how the combination of audio and video stimuli in cartoons
could enhance auditory and expressive speech skills which contribute to a desirable
attitude and stimulate deaf and hard of hearing students to action as well as providing
enjoyment and good learning skills. In a previous research we had shown some reasons of
the unintelligibility of deaf and hard of hearing students which is due to some extend to
pronunciation errors and confusion between some sounds and inappropriate intonation.
Cartoons are not only colourful and entertaining they contain a wealth of sounds, voices,
onomatopoeia, emotions and cultural material which can be exploited for teaching oral
communication to the deaf and hard of hearing students.

111
S16: The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders
of Languages and Cultures
Convenors: Giuseppe Balirano, Giuditta Caliendo, Paul Sambre

Giuseppe Balirano
University of Naples LOrientale
De-queering Proxemics: A semiotic reading of the representation of masculinity in
Neapolitan organised crime fiction

The recent Cinema and TV screening of the Neapolitan Camorra seems to be spreading a
somewhat incorrect interpretation of queer masculinity in non-verbal interactions among
Camorra mobsters. Non-verbal forms of communication are a major constraint for audiovisual
translators when adapting a complex multimodal product into other languages (Chiaro et al.
2008). In particular, very little attention has been paid to the way the Neapolitan crime syndicate
has been discursively re-semiotised and therefore mis-perceived in English-speaking contexts
through translated audiovisual products. When non-verbal communication crosses national,
cultural and linguistic boundaries via subtitling, some cultural misinterpretations may, in fact,
prevent the full appreciation of the source text since the way in which space is used and
interpreted is always a culture-bound factor (Kendon 1977; 1990).
Based on an integrated multimodal methodology (Kress et al. 1991), which comprises both
quantitative and qualitative analyses of a large multimodal corpus of films, TV series and
documentaries produced in Italy and subtitled in English where criminals micro-space is left
to the interpretation of foreign viewers , this paper posits a different semiotic reading of the
misinterpreted male homosexuality in the filmic semiotisations of Camorra mens proxemics.
Chiaro, Delia; Heiss, Christine; Bucaria, Chiara (2008). Between Text and Image: Updating
Research in Screen Translation. London: John Benjamins Publishing.
Champagne, John (2014). Italian Masculinity as Queer: An Immoderate Proposal. Gender and
Sexuality in Italy, 1-2014.
Hall, Edward T. (1963). A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior. American
Anthropologist 65 (5): 10031026
Hall, Edward T. (1966). The Hidden Dimension. Anchor Books.
Kendon, Adam (1977). Studies in the Behavior of Social Interaction. Lisse: Peter De Ridder
Press.
Kendon, Adam (1990). Conducting Interaction: Patterns of behavior in focused encounters.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen (2001). Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Messina, Marcello (2015). Matteo Garrones Gomorra: A Politically Incorrect Use of
Neapolitan Identities and Queer Masculinities?, Gender and Sexuality in Italy, 2-2015.
Giuseppe Balirano, PhD in English for Special Purposes, is Associate Professor in English
Linguistics at the University of Naples LOrientale. His research interests and publications lie
in the fields of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Humour, Masculinity Studies and
Audio Visual Translation. He is the director of the inter-university research centre, I-LanD, for
the linguistic investigation of identity, language and diversity. His recent publications include:
Language, Theory and Society (2015), Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, discourses
112
(2015), Masculinity and Representation (2014), Variation and Varieties in Contexts of English
(2012), and The Perception of Diasporic Humour: Indian English on TV (2008).

Media Representations of Italian Mafias as Global Criminal Actors: a multimodal
critical discourse analysis
Giuditta Caliendo
Universit de Lille 3

This paper investigates the discursive representation of organized crime from a critical
perspective, highlighting the constitutive role of language and multimodality in
constructing the global identity of the two most powerful Italian crime syndicates today,
the Camorra and the Ndrangheta.
The analysis draws on a corpus of international video documentaries describing their
criminal activities and released after 2007, when a series of crucial events gave these two
crime syndicates international visibility. The main research hypothesis of this study is that
the process of identity construction of the Camorra and the Ndrangheta as global criminal
actors is performed via multiple modes of meaning-making in the documentaries under
scrutiny. Particular attention is devoted to the discursive construction of these
organizations idiosyncratic practices, sets of beliefs and modus operandi that make them
unique and autonomous vis--vis the more widely known Cosa Nostra.
This contribution addresses the lack of work on the representation of crime in Critical
Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Machin/Mayr 2012b; Tabbert
2015). As claimed by Machin and Mayr (2013: 356): While there has been extensive
research on media representations of crime in Media and Cultural Studies and in
Criminology this has been a neglected area in Critical Discourse Analysis.

Machin, D./Mayr, A. 2013. Personalizing Crime and Crime-fighting in Factual Television: an
Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images. Critical Discourse
Studies, 10:4, 356372.
Machin, D./Mayr, A. 2012a. The Language of Crime and Deviance: An Introduction to Critical
Linguistic Analysis in Media and Popular Culture. London: Continuum.
Machin, D./Mayr, A. 2012b. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal
Introduction. London: Sage.
Machin, D./Van Leeuwen, T. 2007. Global Media Discourse. A Critical Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Tabbert, U. 2015. Crime and Corpus. The Linguistic Representation of Crime in the Press.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Van Leeuwen, T. 1996. The Representation of Social Actors. In Caldas-Coulthard
C.R./Coulthard M. (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis.
London: Routledge, 32-70.

Giuditta Caliendo is Associate Professor (Matre de confrences) at the University of Lille
3, France, and a former Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Washington, USA.
Her research interests include institutional discourse, legal translation, critical discourse
analysis and genre analysis. She is a member of the teaching board of the PhD School
Mind, Gender and Language (Languages, Linguistics and ESP curriculum) of the
University of Naples Federico II and co-editor of the volumes: Urban Multilingualism in
Europe (with R. Janssens/S. Slembrouck/P. Van Avermaet), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
113
forthcoming; The Language of Popularization: Theoretical and Descriptive Models (with G.
Bongo), Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. Genre(s) on the move: Hybridization and Discourse Change
in Specialized Communication (with S. Sarangi/V. Polese), Naples: ESI, 2011.

The Discursive Representation of the Ndrangheta in the British Press
Mirko Casagranda
University of Calabria

Together with the Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia, the Ndrangheta is one of the most
notorious criminal syndicates in Italy. Originally from Calabria, since the second half of the
twentieth century it has partly spread in Northern Italy, Europe and North America also
due to the massive migratory movements from what is still known as one of the poorest
regions in Italy. Although this criminal organisation deals especially with illegal business
such as smuggling and drug dealing, it is also known for its strict influence on the social
system of some Calabrian communities, which are controlled by the Ndrangheta clans.
Several publications on its hierarchical structure and its impact on Calabrian culture have
been published and it has recently made headlines all over the world too. This paper deals
with the coverage of the Ndrangheta in the British press, with a specific focus on the
online version of The Guardian. Multimodal critical discourse analysis will be employed in
order to analyse the ways in which the Ndrangheta is discursively constructed in Great
Britain. Such discourse, moreover, stigmatises unlawful behaviour by shaping a political
and cultural representation of Italy which, in turn, contributes to the construction of
British identity as well.

Fairclough, Norman, 1995, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language,
London: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman, 2001, Language and Power, London: Longman.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen, 2006, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design, London: Routledge.
Kress, Gunther, 2010, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary
Communication, London: Routledge.
Lirola, Maria Martinez and Jan Chovanec, 2012, The dream of a perfect body come true:
Multimodality in cosmetic surgery advertising, Discourse & Society, 23:5, 487-507.
Machin, David and Andrea Mayr, 2012, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal
Introduction, London: Sage.
van Dijk, Teun A., 1998, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage.
van Dijk, Teun A., 2014, Discourse and Knowledge. A Sociocognitive Approach,

Mirko Casagranda, PhD, is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of
Calabria. His areas of interest include Postcolonial Englishes, Critical Discourse Analysis,
Translation Studies and the Linguistics of Names. Among his publications, the
books Traduzione e codeswitching come strategie discorsive del plurilinguismo
canadese (2010) and Procedure di naming nel paesaggio linguistico canadese (2013). He is
a member at large of the Executive Council of the American Name Society.

114
The language of fear: cybercrime and the borderless realm of cyberspace in British
news
Massimiliano Demata
Universit di Bari Aldo Moro

Cybercrime is popularly perceived as the work of a faceless, invisible enemy who can
strike anyone unexpectedly, and whose consequences may be dire as it can involve
financial scams, hacking, identity theft and harassment. Cybercrime tops the list of
Emerging Crimes published by the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).
This document defines cybercrime as an emerging form of transnational crime and
highlights the difficulty to contain it by claiming that it takes place in the borderless realm
of cyberspace (emphasis mine).
On the basis of a corpus of texts from British newspapers, this paper argues that
cybercrime is a highly problematic area in discursive representations of crime. Unlike
older criminal organizations who have a national identity (e.g. the Italian and Russian
Mafias, the Japanese Yazuka, the Colombian drug cartels), cybercrime syndicates are
located in different regions of the world. Their crimes are ubiquitous, unexpected, and
often unpreventable, and exploit the opportunities provided by a global communication
network as well as a globalized economy. News events about cybercrime fuel narratives
within a fear society, in which fear of technology is aligned with fear of crime. The result
is a complex discursive representation: cybercrime syndicates are still framed as an
outgroup (as in traditional media representations of criminal organizations), but they are
portrayed, verbally and visually, as an obscure and menacing force, with the real risks
posed by them inflated or misunderstood, and with a language which both reflects and
feeds the publics desire for shocking information.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, New Delhi, Sage.
Moore, S. D. H. (2014) Crime and the Media, London, Palgrave.
Richardson, J. E. (2008) Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse
Analysis, London, Palgrave.
Tabbert, U. (2015) Crime and Corpus: The Linguistic Representation of Crime in the Press,
Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
Yar, M. (2013) Cybercrime and Society, 2nd ed., London, Sage.

Massimiliano Demata is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Bari, Italy. He
took his DPhil in English at the University of Oxford, where he also taught extensively, and
in 2014 he was Fulbright Visiting Professor at Indiana University. He has published a book
on the language of George W. Bush and several essays on British and American political
discourse, translation and ideology, and computer mediated communication, as well as
essays on the Gothic Novel and Byron. In 2002 he co-edited, with Duncan Wu,
British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review. Bicentenary Essays.

Documenting Drug Kartels. An Analysis of Secrets of Mexicos Drug War (Elena
Cosentino 2015)
Inge Lanslots
KU Leuven

115
Since President Felipe Caldern declared the War on Drugs in 2006, the depiction of the
U.S.-Mexican Border and of Mexican (as well as of other Latin American) immigrants in the
U.S. seemed to have taken an even more negative turn.
Through the analysis of Elena Cosentinos Secrets of Mexicos Drug War (2015), the
present paper will investigate how documentaries depict this complex phenomenon,
which implies the crossing of national, cultural and linguistic boundaries. Cosentinos
documentary addresses the power of drug kartels across borders as well as the issue of
collusion and double dealing on the part of US law enforcement. Of particular interest is
the discursive representation of the social actors involved, such as representatives of law
enforcement (drug enforcement, border patrol, magistrates), criminals (drug and human
traffickers) or penitents, victims, immigrants, Mexican and U.S. citizens.
The analysis will focus on how the reality of these actors, who communicate in English
and/or Spanish, is translated within the documentary genre raising awareness about their
ramifications on and about the need to fight the drug kartels in a globalized society.

Adriaensen, Brigitte & Valeria Grinberg PLA (eds). (2012). Narrativas del crimen en
Amrica Latina. Berlin: LitVerlag.
Allum, Felia, Francesca Longo, Daniela Irrera & Panos A. Kostakos. (eds). (2010). Defining
and Defying Organized Crime. Discourse, Perceptions and Reality. London: Routledge.
Ansley, Fran & Jon Shefner (eds). (2009). Global Connections and Local Receptions: New
Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States. Knoxville, TN: University of
Tennessee Press.
Cosentino, Elena. (2015). Secrets of Mexicos Drug War. UK: BBC
Daz-Cintas, Jorge & Gunilla Anderman. (2008). Audiovisual Translation: Language Transfer
on Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Fairclough, Norman. (2007). Language and globalization. London: Routledge.
Gentzler, Edwin. (2008). Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in
Translation Theory. London: Routledge.
Hernndez, Anabel. (2013). Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords And Their Godfathers.
Translated by Iain Bruce and Lorna Scott Fox. Introduction by Roberto Saviano.
Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
Machin, David & Andrea MAYR. (2013). Personalising Crime and Crime-fighting in Factual
Television: an Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images. Critical
Discourse Studies. 10(4): 356372.
Remael, Aline, Pilar Orero & Mary Carroll. (2012). Audiovisual Translation and Media
Accessibility at the Crossroads. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Shohat, Ella & Robert Stam. (2003). Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational
Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Vulliamy, Ed. (2010). Amexica: War Along the Borderline. London: Bodley Head.
Ward, Paul. (2005). Documentary. The Margins of Reality. London/New York: Wallflower
Press.
Wood, Andrew et alii. (eds) (2004). On the Border. Society and culture between the United
States and Mexico. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Inge Lanslots is assistant professor in Discourse Analysis and Italian Culture/Translation
at KU Leuven. She is specialized in cultural memory and genre studies. Her research deals
with the representation of discourse on mafia-like organizations, migration, Italys 1968,
the G8 2001 (Genova). She is also co-editor of Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani and
the Moving Texts Series (Peter Lang).
116

The multimodal representation of Sicilian and Calabrian anti-mafia grassroots
movements in global English video discourse
Paul Sambre
KU Leuven

The present contribution zooms in on TV news video coverage about grassroots Italian
anti-mafia movements and their civil representatives, as they call for an alternative, less
repressive framing of resistance against the mafias of their Sicilian (Corleone, Palermo) or
Calabrian (San Luca, Reggio Calabria) region, and represent peaceful resistance to Cosa
Nostra and the Ndrangheta (Friedman, Epstein & Wood 2012), in contrast with more
traditional images of Cosa Nostra, Camorra and Ndrangheta which display powerful,
invisible mafia bosses and sometimes powerless crime fighters. In global English discourse
about the mafia, other voices gradually appear: those of commercial and civil anti-racket
movements, rural grassroots initiatives on seized Cosa Nostra and Ndrangheta assets and
properties, and school teachers courageously breaking the rules of silence in education
(Superti 2009, Di Maggio 2011, Crowther 2014). We describe thematic issues, social actors
and discursive multimodal resources used in this new discourse of resistance (Machin &
Mayr 2013, Van Leeuwen 2005), based on a corpus of English video news coverage (Al
Jazeera, France 24 English, BBC ), through the theoretical critical discourse analytical lense
of Faircloughs (2006) ideas about the impact of local grassroots initiatives on dominating
global (institutional) discourse.

Caliendo, G., Lanslots, I., Sambre, P. 2016. La Ndrangheta, da Sud, oltre frontiera, a Nord.
Sul discorso distopico intorno ad una malavita organizzata. Civilt Italiana fc.: 135-
145.
Crowther, N. 2014. Rising up against the racket: Palermitani facing the Sicilian mafia head
on. Journal of Public & International Affairs 25: 131-139.
Di Maggio, U. 2011. Libera Terra: I beni confiscate alle mafie per lo sviluppo locale.
Sociologia del Lavoro 123: 177-190.
Fairclough, N. 2006. Language and globalization. London and New York: Routledge.
Fiandaca, G. 2007. Women and the Mafia: female roles in organized crime structures. New
York: Springer.
Friedman, J., Epstein, R., Wood, S. 2012. The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making. Santa Barbara:
Praeger.
Jewkes, Y. 2015. Media and Crime. London: Sage.
Machin, D., Mayr, A. 2013. Personalising Crime and Crime-fighting in Factual Television: an
Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images. Critical Discourse
Studies 10(4): 356372.
Puccio-Den, D. Difficult remembrance. Memorializing mafia victims in Palermo. In: P.-J.
Margry, C. Sanchez-Carretero (eds.), Grassroots memorials the politics of
memorializing traumatic death, 51-70.
Sambre, P. fc. Hermneutique du sujet et commmoration de deux homosexuels
perscuts. Albrecht Becker et Pierre Seel dans le documentaire Paragraphe 175. In
D. Rochtus, B. Van Huffel (eds.), La France, LAllemagne et lOrdre Nouveau.
Approches politiques et littraires, Leipzig : Leipziger Universittsverlag.
Superti, C. 2009. Addio Pizzo: can a label defeat the mafia? Journal of International Policy
Solutions. 11: 1-11.
Van Leeuwen, T. 2005. Introducing social semiotics. London and New York: Routledge.
117

Paul Sambre is an assistant professor at the University of Leuven, where he teaches
discourse studies and Italian linguistics. He is a member of MIDI, a research group for the
study of multimodality in discourse and interaction. His research is at the intersection of
cognitive and critical approaches to discourse studies. He examines multimodal grammar
from a construction grammatical view and, in the critical tradition, works on global
discourse about Italys mafias and European Capitals of Culture.

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S17 Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation in Diasporic Communities of
Practice

SPEAKING ORDER
17.00-17.30 - Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation: the case of Greek Cypriot
and Italian adolescents in the UK; Siria Guzzo (University of Salerno) Chryso
Hadjidemetriou (University of Stockholm)
17.30-18.00 - The formation of the Broken Plural by bilingual Iraqi-English children from a
sociolinguistic perspective; Alyaa AL-Timimi (University of Essex)
18.00-18.30 - Young Bristalians: language & identity in a multicultural city; Anna Gallo
(University of Naples "Federico II")
18.30-19.00 - On The Functional Approach to Absolute Constructions in Scientific Prose
Style (with Special Reference to Engineering Research Articles); Minoo Khamesian (Babol
University of Technology)

Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation: the case of Greek Cypriot and
Italian adolescents in the UK
Siria Guzzo University of Salerno Chryso Hadjidemetriou University of Stockholm

The present study investigates language maintenance and shift in two European
immigrant communities in the UK, namely the Italians of Bedford and Peterborough and
the Greek Cypriots in North London. Specific attention will be paid on exploring and
discussing their longstanding migration to the UK, cultural heritage and identity
construction. In this respect, the speech of 3rd generation informants will be investigated,
with particular attention to their use of WAS in standard WERE contexts of positive polarity
and their use of quotative markers. In the wake of a great deal of research (Ferrara and
Bell, 1995; Tagliamonte and Hudson, 1999; Macaulay, 2001; Buchstaller, 2004; 2005;
2006; Buchstaller and DArcy, 2009; Cheshire et al. 2011; Fox, 2012), this study specifically
analyses be like and its new competitor this is + speaker (Fox, 2012) aiming at
investigating their pattern(s) of use and questioning whether new or old quotatives foster
linguistic innovation among the speech of young adolescents of immigrant background in
England. Moreover, Cheshire and Fox (2009:1) found that in inner London, variation in
adolescent speech is strongly influenced by ethnicity, resulting in a lower overall
frequency of was levelling, and in negative contexts, a missed pattern of levelling to
both wasnt and werent. Earlier results from the Greek-Cypriot adolescents show a lower
frequency in usage of WAS in standard WERE contexts of positive polarity. The analysis
compares the results from the Greek-Cypriot study with the London English project data
and also takes into consideration the friendship networks, social integration, and heritage
identity positioning comparing and contrasting the results from the Italian dataset.
This paper reports work-in-progress. Ethnographic fieldwork and observation as
well as audio recordings within the Greek and the Italian informants have been ongoing
since September 2011. The present corpus consists of fourteen 13 to 19-year-old speakers
of Italian origin, both males and females. The informants were selected on the basis of
their social network (Boissevain, 1974) and in accordance with the friend of a friend
technique (Milroy, 1987; Eckert, 2000) In addition, twenty-eight adolescents attending a
supplementary Greek school in Enfield aged between14-18 year old were interviewed as
part of a larger project examining issues of language contact, language variation and
change, and the role of the community language (i.e. Cypriot Greek) in identity-
construction. The majority of the adolescents were born in London to Greek Cypriot
119
parents who in turn were either born or migrated to the UK at some point in their adult
life.Indeed, data collected in London, Bedford and Peterborough will be compared and
contrasted in order to verify to what extent the speech of young speakers of European
immigrant origins share the same trends.

Keywords: multilingualism, language contact, heritage community, past tense BE,
quotative system

Boissevain, Jeremy. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1974.
Buchstaller, Isabelle. The sociolinguistic constraints on the quotative system British
English and US English compared. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh, 2004.
. Putting perception to the reality test: the case of go and like. University of
Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. Papers from NWAVE 32. 10 (2005): 61-76.
. Diagnostics of age-graded linguistic behaviour: the case of the quotative system.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (2006): 3-30.
Buchstaller Isabelle and Alexandra DArcy. Localized globalization: A multilocal,
multivariate investigation of quotative be like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13 (2009.): 291-
331.
Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Susan Fox and Eivind Torgersen. Contact, the feature pool
and the speech community: the emergence of multicultural London English. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 15(2011): 151-196.
Cheshire Jenny and Fox, Susan. (2009) Was/were variation: A perspective from London.
In Language Variation 21: pp. 1-38
Eckert, Penelope. Linguistic variation as social practice. Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Ferrara, Kathleen and Barbara Bell. Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of
constructed dialogue introducers: the case of be+ like. American Speech 70 (1995): 265-
290.
Fox, Susan. Performed narrative. The pragmatic function of this is + speaker and other
quotatives in London adolescent speech. In Quotatives. Cross-linguistic and cross-
disciplinary perspectives, edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Ingrid Von Alphen, 231-257.
Amsterdam: John Publishing Company, 2012.
Macaulay, Ronald. Youre like why not? The quotative expressions of Glasgow
adolescents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(2001): 3-21.
Milroy, Lesley. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

The formation of the Broken Plural by bilingual Iraqi-English children from a
sociolinguistic perspective
Alyaa AL-Timimi, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex

This paper investigates the acquisition of a most intriguing system of nominal plurality in
Arabic, the Broken Plural (BP), in the speech of bilingual Iraqi-English children. BP is an
irregular plural form, derived by altering the consonant and vowel patterns inside the
singular noun/adjective. There is no fixed suffix to be added, or a general rule to derive
it.Monolinguals acquire it from their environment; they learn it spontaneously as they
grow up and expand their vocabulary.

The study includes 11 bilingual children living in the UK and control groups: 9
120
bilingual female adults living in the UK, 9 monolingual female adults and 18 monolingual
children living in Baghdad. Data collection combined quantitative and qualitative
techniques. The researchas a whole addresses the issues of how reduced Vernacular Iraqi
Arabic (VIA) input can affect the formation of BP, the range of strategies that the bilingual
children use to recoup their lack of knowledge and the correlation between these
strategies and social variables, viz. parents level of education, language used at home
(input), contacts, and attitudes.
The data were analyzed into correct and incorrect responses based on monolingual
female adults performance. The incorrect responses (repair strategies) were classified into
various categories including: overgeneralization (used more frequently by bilinguals as a
default form but was least favoured by the monolingual children); and the employment of
rudimentary semantic strategies rather than morphological markers (e.g.
repetition/singular, new words (Aljenaie, et.al.2010)).
The findings show a strong correlation between the social factors and the repair
strategies.Bilingual childrens attitudes towards English positively correlate with their low
proficiency in VIA; parents attitudes towards VIA, religion and identity as core values;and
parentscommand of Englishwere also found to play a crucial role in nurturing or
impairing the use of VIA, which in turn affects acquisition of BP.

-Aljenaie,K., Abdalla, F. & Farghal, F. 2010 . Developmental changes in using nominal
number inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic. Kuwait University, Kuwait. First Language 31(2),
222239.

Young Bristalians: language & identity in a multicultural city
ANNA GALLO, UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES FEDERICO II

It is generally acknowledged that identities are flexible and multi-layered, with their
variability being significantly conveyed though language. Drawing upon few sociocultural
descriptions of Italian communities in the South-West of England (Bottignolo, 1985)
andon earlier sociolinguistic research on Italian communities in the UK (Tosi, 1984;Guzzo,
2010), this work will offer some preliminary results about language behaviours of young
Bristolians of Italian descent, included in a wider investigation on multicultural urban
youth language. This analysis will take into accounthow community language and culture
evolve in multicultural urban contexts. Itwill explorethe process ofidentity-construction
through language among 3rd generationBristalians, i.e. Anglo-Italians in Bristol, and it will
serve as a starting point to reflect uponhowlanguage contact and multicultural social
networks may affect their language choices. By means of ethnographicand sociolinguistic
approaches, this investigation will analyse part of alargercorpus consisting of interviews
and questionnaires, collected via friends of friends technique (Boissevain, 1974).
Asyoung peoplehave proved to be preciousinformants in theinvestigation of language
maintenance and shift, showingdifferent degrees of identity variation through language,
this studywill investigate young Bristalians languageprimarily looking at code-mixing and
a/an allomorphy. Pluralization strategies might also be taken into account.

Boissevain, J. 1974. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions. Oxford: Basil.
Bottignolo, B. 1985. Without a bell tower. A study of the Italian immigration in South West
England. Roma: Centro StudiEmigrazione.
Guzzo, S. 2010. Bedford Italians at Work: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Italians in Britain.
Recanati: La Spiga Edizioni.
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Tosi, A. 1984. Italian in the English education system: Policies of high- and low-status
bilingualism. In C. Bettoni (ed.) Italian Abroad. Studies on Language Contact in English-
speaking Countries. Sidney: Frederick May Foundation of Italian Studies, pp.147-169.

On The Functional Approach to Absolute Constructions in Scientific Prose Style
(with Special Reference to Engineering Research Articles)
Minoo Khamesian
To be able to learn and use English,the lingua franca of science and technology, for
effective international communication, one must begin by becoming acquainted with the
basic language of his profession. In this respect, written academic discourseis a
considerably broad notion which requires consideration of various aspects both on the
linguistic and extra-linguistic planes. The present work through linguostylistic analysis, i.e.
both semantic and metasemiotic levels, investigated the functional aspect of absolute
constructions in technical writing.It useda corpus of approximately 300 pages of
engineering research articles of different spheres, i.e. civil, mechanical, and electrical
engineering published in international journals.The results revealed that the distinctive
morphosyntactic structure of absolute constructions is a purely linguistic factor
whichwould provide to serve functions far beyond linguistics proper. Otherwise stated,
absolute costructions, being concise and laconic (the trait provided by the morphological
or formal peculiarities of non-finite verbs) are capable of communicating complete
informative line within a sentence. They contribute to the beneficial evolution of the
discourse, making it compact and neat, giving an opportunity to fit more information into a
smaller volume.In addition, due to their frequency in this style, they need to be paid their
deserved attention while teaching EAP to engineering students.
Key words: absolute constructions, functional style, engineering research articles

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S19 The Fast and the Furious: The Amazing Textual Adventures of Miniscripts

Forms of Micro-textuality in the Victorian Novel: George Meredith and the Aphorism
Prof Anna Enrichetta Soccio
University G. dAnnunzio of Chieti, Italy
The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the master among Germans, are forms of
eternity wrote Frederic Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols (1889). As one of the shortest
literary genres, the aphorism stays somewhere between literature and philosophy:
however, it needs to be both in order to be fully understood. A great number of well-
known English novels contain aphorisms, maxims, wise sayings and novelists are deeply
aware of the importance of aphorisms in narrative showing that the relationship between
short and longer forms of writing can be very simple or else very complex. George
Meredith is a Victorian novelist whose works are outstanding examples of the complex
interaction between long narrative and aphorism. Since his first novel, Meredith manages
to construct his stories in which not only does he use text-in-the-text strategies but he also
develops mini-texts and mini-narratives on their own which are in the longer narratives
but not of the longer narratives. My paper will explore such experiments in The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel (1859), Diana of the Crossways (1889) and One of Our Conquerors (1890) in
which we find actual books of aphorisms that, while developing the story and
commenting on it, constitute an entirely different level of writing. They have their own life
and can be read even outside the main narrative as they convey specific views of the world
that give shape and significance to the contradictions and complexities of the Victorian
society.

Cut Short: Microtextualizing the Great War Dead
Dr. Janet L. Larson
Rutgers University, USA
In Epitaphs of the War (1919), a collection of disconnected verses, most two to six lines,
Rudyard Kipling exploits the microtextual features of the ancient epitaph form
compressed expression, rapid reading time, tight focus and necessary exclusionsto
convey what was shockingly new: the incomprehensible brutality with which modern
industrial warfare cut lives short. Rather than creating characters, Kipling stages 35
voiced focalizations, given generic, vocational, or geo-locational titles indicating the wars
human range and global sweep, that tell in turn the death experience inscribed on a
tombstone or speak from the spot where the victim fell. Invert[ing] the scale of epic, each
epitaph is a laconic mini-story; many voices are emotionally flat; and no proper names
tether speakers to individual identitiesidentity itself is often uncertain or self-divided,
its focal lens cracked. Except for one verse detailing missing body parts, bodies are missing
too.
In a work made entirely of short forms, Kiplings poetics of minimalism and absence
multiplies the microtexts effects while refusing a sense-making structureno overall
sequential logic, connecting narrator, or patriotic framing. For Kiplings
microtextualizations also foster an incredulity towards metanarratives that withdraws
ideological support for the contemplation of wars psychology, socio-politics, and
phenomenology up close.
Kipling once dubbed Epitaphs naked cribs of the Greek Anthology and wrote many
memorial inscriptions for the Imperial War Graves Commission. The microtexts tight
focus frames Epitaphs admirable speakers respectfully. But this poem cannot sustain
purity of diction and singleness of thought excellencies of the epigrammatic styleas it
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ranges from the stoic, the earnest, and the poignant through the confessional, darkly
ironic, grisly, irreverent, and scatological. High poetic diction is succeeded by the
vernacular, smooth rhymes by doggerel. Microtextual compression also undermines
memorial gravitas by increasing the speed with which the poem shuttles through
incommensurate focalizations.
If Epitaphs largely denies itself the solace of good forms, its naked encounters with the
dead enlist the contemporary reader, another ghost occupying a spectral gap as an
unarticulated subject of address, to experience him/herself as more than a witness as
a living casualty of a continuing disaster. Explosive punch lines deliver blows to the head,
heart, and sensessome shorts in sequence fire at the reader like a machine gun. As Jung
perceived, long afterwards this conflict was still being fought in the psyche. Although
Epitaphs offers some comforts, its microtexts conduct a poetic counter-assault on affective
distancing, revisionism, and expedient forgetting of a war that wasnt over when it was
over, certainly not for Kipling when he published these unofficial memorials in 1919.

Information fractals: textual patterns in BBC news alerts
Sara Gesuato
University of Padua, Italy
Nowadays, information is produced and spread at a fast pace so as to keep the public
constantly informed on current events. This is done, for instance, by delivering brief news
alerts to the interested readership via email. This paper examines the information
structure of 100 BBC news alerts (about 10,000 words), collected over a 3-month period.

The typical BBC news alert comprises an email message with a briefest news
update, and a link to an expanded news report. Both components include smaller
information units. The email message presents a succinct news update in the subject
heading (an shot dead in attempted robbery), and a slightly expanded version, with
information about contextual circumstances and/or the source of information, in the body
of the text (Killer of four-year-old Daniel Pelka found dead at prison in Yorkshire, says Prison
Service). Both are realized as clauses (often with ellipsis of the finite verb in the predicate)
and contain no function words except for prepositions.
The news update on the website comprises: a) a main telegraphic heading, which
may coincide with the email subject heading (Judge to review police handling of child abuse
inquiries; Junior doctors begin second 24-hour strike over contract); b) a photo/video-clip
with an optional caption in italics, which provides background information (The four-piece
Warrington-based band were officially formed in May last year) in a complete sentence; c) a
secondary expanded heading, also realized as a complete sentence (A disease linked to the
Zika virus in Latin America poses a global public health emergency requiring a united
response, says the World Health Organization); and d) a longer report, with further details,
realized as a set of mutually relevant one-sentence-long mini-paragraphs, each expanding
on the immediately preceding text segment ("Tonight is a victory for courageous
conservatives," he declared, to great applause, as he railed against Washington, lobbyists and
the media. /// He took 28% of the Republican vote, beating his rival, the frontrunner Donald
Trump, and Marco Rubio. [].)
BCC news alerts are stretchable, yet segmented news pills. On the one hand,
virtually each new portion of the text recycles and enriches the previous content, as if
zooming in on details of a repeatedly presented fractal-like narrative structure. On the
other, the conceptually unitary longer reports present content in incremental steps, each
of which is however graphically realized as a distinct self-standing mini-text. The
redundant and fragmented nature of the news alerts meets the needs of a news
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consumer with a fast-paced daily routine. These information chunks are minimally
distracting (they require a short attention span) and disposable (each cyclically provides
more of the same content) so that the flow of incoming information can be interrupted at
any of the multiple exit points of a recurrently expandable news narrative.

Blurring the Line between Obituary and Epitaph: the Spna Funerary Inscriptions
Andreea Bratu
University of Craiova, Romania

Like all the other mini-texts that refer to someones death (obituaries, eulogies, various
types of funerary inscriptions), epitaphs are used to capture the essence of that persons
achievements and personality. In spite of this manifested purpose to highlight positive
aspects of the dead persons life, humorous epitaphs have been used ever since Ancient
Greece in an attempt to alleviate the suffering caused by the loss of someone dear.
The presentation will focus on atypical examples of funerary inscriptions, a unique
combination of obituaries and epitaphs found in Spna, a Romanian village famous for
its Merry Cemetery. Engraved on the crosses and accompanied by corresponding images,
the texts take the form of short narrative poems told by the dead persons in an ironic, yet
sweet, almost nostalgic tone. While reviewing the peasants life and death, these texts
mirror social and historical realities of the past century and underline social identity,
relations and events. In order to establish the characteristics of these humorous
inscriptions, various aspects of epitaphs (structure, function, voice, style) are considered
in the analysis.

Key words: epitaph, narrative voice, text structure, humour, the Merry Cemetery.

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S20
A Poetics of Exile in Poetry and Translation

Co-convenors
Penelope Galey-Sacks, Valenciennes University
Sara Greaves, Aix-Marseille University
Stephanos Stephanides, University of Cyprus

Monday 22nd August: 16h00 18h00

16h
Valrie Baisne (France)

The Poetics of Exile in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry
16h20
Zornitsa Lachezarova (Bulgaria)

Translating Bulgarian Poetry into English : transforming exile into a dimension of

home.
16h40
Stefania Michelucci (Italy)

Flying Above California : spaces from above in two poems by Thomas Gunn.
17h Penelope Sacks-Galey (France)

The Ocean Home : Exile in George Szirtes Dead Sea Sonnets
17h20 Leonor Maria Martinez Serrano (Spain)

A Walk in the Woods, or Poetry in Translation : Robert Bringhursts The Lyell

Island Variations.
17h40 Charlotte Blanchard (France)

Translation as Exile : the arrested welcoming of Adrienne Richs work in France.

Valrie Baisne
Universit Paris-Sud, France
The Poetics of Exile in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry

With colonisation and immigration as the foundations of its non-indigenous culture, the
theme of exile plays a central and complex role in the literature of New Zealand. In the
colonial period, displacement and dislocation were familiar experiences as well as
powerful sources of poetic invention while today, diasporic existence remains an appeal to
a lot of artists. This is reinforced by the countrys geographical isolation, for as the poet Bill
Sewell asks, How can anyone be at home / on the edge of the world? For a long time
poets felt they were living in a barren wasteland, waiting to leave for other shores like the
Godwit, a migratory bird often mentioned in New Zealand literature. Today, while poets
enjoy a deeper connection to place, exile surfaces as a trope bridging the distance between
places, but also between world and word. This paper will explore the poetics of exile in
several twentieth and twenty-first century New Zealand poems, with an emphasis on those
by Janet Frame, for whom exile was felt as a permanent condition.

Valrie Baisne is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Paris Sud. She holds a
PhD in English from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published several
articles and essays on womens autobiographies, diaries and poetry, and she is the author
of Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet
Frame and Marguerite Duras (Rodopi, 1997), and Through the Long Corridor of Distance:
Space and Place in New Zealand Womens Autobiographies (Rodopi, 2014).

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Zornitsa Lachezarova
Sophia University St. Kliment Ohridski , Bulgaria
Translating Bulgarian poetry into English: transforming exile into a dimension of home

This paper focuses on the process of translating poetry from Bulgarian into English in an
attempt to define the exilic space inhabited by the translator during this creative work.
The specific features of this space include the deliberate alienation from both languages
and cultures as well as from the text itself, with the purpose of establishing and organising
a new dimension, a middle-ground which bridges the gap between the original text and its
prospective English-speaking audience. To this end, the translator harnesses an array of
tools to aid him in this voluntary estrangement from both worlds, while meticulously
striving to avoid the complete detachment of his own perceptions from the cultural
realities of the original text. Thus, the space of exile, the transition space from one text to
another acquires a new image: it is a safe space where the creative process is given its own
freedom and time. The formation of this new space parallels the re-construction of the
original in a context which is no longer alien to it. The exilic nature of the process initiates
the necessity to foster a new benign environment where the ideas, feelings, and form of
the original can thrive undisturbed, and the exile of a poem becomes its home.

Stefania Michelucci
Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche, Genoa, Italy.

Flying Above California : spaces from above in two poems by Thomas Gunn.
Starting with theoretical premises drawn from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology,
and adopting a method similar to the close reading of Anglo-American tradition, the paper
examines Thom Gunns poems about the experience of flying. Whereas in his early poetry
the predominant theme is the expression of desire for freedom from the painful prison of
the intellect, in the poetry written in the United States, we note a gradual opening to
human relationships and to Nature, which is also Gunns vindication and revaluation of his
own nature, of his long repressed and hidden homosexuality. From here on we see the
increasing vitality that informs his mature works, in which the poet celebrates the
liberating experience of LSD and the happiness he felt within the gay community.
Characterized by that rigorous intellectual honesty and sincerity that give Gunns voice its
unmistakable tone, his poetry constitutes a unique artistic experience in that it seeks to
mediate between opposite poles: old Europe and contemporary America, traditional metre
and free verse, and the language of the present and the lessons of great writers of the past,
in particular the Metaphysical Poets.

Stefania Michelucci is Professor of English Literature at the University of Genoa. Her
publications include The Poetry of Thom Gunn: A Critical Study (2009), Space and Place in
the Works of D.H. Lawrence (2002), the critical edition of Twilight in Italy and Other Essays
by D.H. Lawrence (1997), and numerous articles on XIX and XX century authors. With
Michael Hollington she has edited Writing and the Idea of Authority (2006). She has also
worked on the relationship between literature and the visual arts and has published
essays on Czanne, Lawrence, Ruskin, Thom Gunn and Caravaggio. With Paul Poplawksi
she has edited a special issue of the D.H. Lawrence Review on Lawrence and the arts (2016).
Her current research includes a study of Innocence in Thomas Trahernes poetry and a
book on The Representation of British Aristocracy between the xixth and the xxth century.

127

Penelope SACKS-GALEY,
Univerity of Valenciennes, France

The Ocean As Home : Exile in George Szirtes Dead Sea Sonnets
Poetry, like philosophy, is often a question of selfhood in progress and as such, embodies
the Self as it relates to the Other of outer reality. It can then be defined as the creative
tension between the before of Memory and the the perhaps of Desire. The poet
constantly experiences this tension as both threateningly exilic and potentially fulfilling, to
the extent that melancholy and promise inhabit the poems dwelling. Exile is a geography
of the mind, at once temporal, spatial, affective and effective.
This exile is further exacerbated by the gap betweeen feeling, thinking, and expression.
The materiality of language is alien to expression of pure feeling, far more than to that of
pure thought. Images are more opaque, more complex than concepts. Yet poetry, as a
medium, doubly corresponds to the exiles condition of negotiation and compromise, since
it encourages cohabitation of both emotion and philosophical reflection through its
combining of image and concept, of loss and desire, all the while maintaining that
particular level of imperfection, or lacking that corresponds to loss of the fatherland. To
this extent, the ocean, as personified in the Dead Sea Sonnets of the Hungarian/English
George Szirtes is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the language voyage of exile.

Penelope Galey-Sacks is Reader of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
Valenciennes, specialising in the poetics of modernism and experimental poetry. She has
published extensively on pre-modernist and modernist poets and especially on the visual
works of Apollinaire, E. E. Cummings and the theory and practice of the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. She is also a poet, writing and publishing her poetry in
French ; some of it has recently been translated into Italian and Spanish. She is the author
of the paper Songlines and Entropy in Ron Sillimans Ketjak in the collection tudes
anglaises (ed. Penelope Galey) N2/2012 Flirting With Form: Experimental poetry and
contemporary audacity, available from http://www.klincksieck. Forthcoming is a
theoretical work on the creative imagination : The I-maginary : presence, passages (Ed.
Hermann, Dec. 2016).

Leonor Mara Martnez Serrano
University of Crdoba, Crdoba, Spain

A Walk in the Woods, or Poetry in Translation: Robert Bringhursts The Lyell Island
Variations
Seemingly written in response to the fragmentary epigraphs from various poets writing in
different languages, The Lyell Island Variations is one of the most ambitious poem
sequences in Canadian poet Robert Bringhursts entire literary corpus. In its definitive
incarnation in Selected Poems (2009), the sequence consists of nine poems that constitute
an exercise in intertextual gymnastics on the part of the poet, or, to borrow Bringhursts
words, an album of mere mistranslations. They pay an astonishing homage to a number
of pre-eminent poets from different literary traditions, as the use of textual thresholds in
different languages found in the epigraphs placed as brief quotations at the beginning of
each single poem makes clear. When translating from other languages and traditions,
Bringhurst (a true cosmopolitan and a tireless traveller) is not an exile anymore, because
128
he feels at home amid the voices of the ancestors. To place Pindar next to Michelangelo,
Rilke, Valry, Celan, Char or Neruda is certainly an act of intellectual bravery, as well as a
forceful statement on his own poetics. To a serious poet like Bringhurst, it is of the essence
to make poems that are firmly grounded on what has already been accomplished by the
literary ancestors in the past.
The Lyell Island Variations are brought together under the name of an island in Haida
Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), an archipelago off the coast of Alaska
and British Columbia and home to the Haida, one of the native peoples of North America.
This paper explores how in The Lyell Island Variations the poet is trying to rescue
strange remnants of visions and tattered fragments of wisdom from voices speaking
different human languages.

Leonor Mara Martnez Serrano works as a Lecturer in the Department of English and
German Philology at the University of Crdoba (Crdoba, Spain), where she pursued her
doctoral studies and gained a PhD in Canadian Literature. She is a member of the research
group Writs of Empire: Poetics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary Literatures in
English at the University of Crdoba, too. Her research interests include Canadian
Literature, World Poetry (European, American and Canadian poetry), High Modernism,
First Nations and Oral Literatures, Philosophy & Ecology, Literary Translation, and
Comparative Literature.

Charlotte Blanchard
PhD student, Bordeaux University, France

Translation as exile: the arrested welcoming of Adrienne Richs work in France
Unlike in German, Spanish, and Italian, Adrienne Richs poetry has never been published in
a collection in French. A few of her poems have been published in magazines or on the
internet. Thus only fragments of her work are available in French. Her poetry is in an in-
between situation: an introduction in French has been initiated but it has not been yet
been fully assumed. To understand why this exile is aborted, I will study the context of
reception in the source and target cultures, and compare her work with other translated
female poets from the same period. Using the tools developed in the sociology of
translation, two main directions will be explored: Richs activism as a hindrance to
welcoming her work in French, and the publication of translated poetry in France.

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S21. Shakespearean Romantic Comedies: Translations, Adaptations, Tradaptations

Convenors
Mrta Minier (University of South Wales UK)
Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University Italy)
Iolanda Plescia (Sapienza University of Rome Italy)

Written in a mature phase of Shakespeares career, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It
and Twelfth Night represent the quintessence of romantic comedy, a successful genre that
since Shakespeares time has unfailingly met the tastes of audiences all around the world.
The seminar aims to explore the language of Shakespearean comedy in this specific sub-
corpus and the particular challenges it poses not only in translation from language to
language (interlingual translations), but also in transit and transfer to modern audiences
within the same language (intralingual translations) and from one medium to another
(intersemiotic translations) in the English-speaking world and beyond. Specific takes on
textual hybrids - tradaptations - are among the topics of the seminar.

Translating, Standardizing, Correcting and Improving Shakespeare: Aland Durbands,
John Philip Kembles and Francis Gentlemans Versions of Twelfth Night
Holger Klein, University of Salzburg, Austria
The Internet motto of the dual-text series Shakespeare Made Easy reads: "Taking the fear
out of Shakespeare". Teaching experience confirms that there is quite a need for this, and a
modern paraphrase is one way towards this goal. Like Gayle Holste for Much Ado and As
You Like It, Alan Durband presents his version of Twelfth Night as only the first step on the
road to understanding and appreciating Shakespeare's original. Leaving aside the book's
other elements, my paper will look at the lexis. Thus, for instance, "too much" for "excess"
(1.1) and "bear [...] denial" for "bide [...] denay" (2.4) work, but "if you cheek him" for "if
thou thou'st him" would require annotation.

As we know, earlier periods were much less cautious and modest. I shall give most
attention to Kemble, whose changes cover scene switches (like 1.2 before 1.1, a common
feature), additions, mostly of stage directions, cuts for various reasons (reduction of
length, elimination of obscurities, sometimes of vulgarity or indecency or blasphemy e.g.
"God" becoming "heaven" in 2.3), limited modernization such as "an" for "and" meaning 'if'
(passim) or "kick-shaws" for "kicke-shawses", 1.3, and near-systematic standardization,
notably "Duke" for "Count".

It would seem difficult to try and pin down Kemble's copy text, though there
probably was one, he is e.g. hardly likely to have decided at times between F1 and F2 on
his own. Some changes can safely be attributed to Pope, others to Capell, etc. As a kind of
substitute for such bibliographical searching I shall also look at Francis Gentleman's
version, antedating Kemble by some forty years, thus roughly from the same phase of
Shakespeare reception.

The reading version of Durband whose changes can also be categorized shows
assumptions about the lexical range of today's new readers of Shakespeare. The
performance-driven versions of Kemble and Gentleman contribute to our insights into
tastes and attitudes of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century.

So-taming the Shrew: A Modern Adaptation of Shakespeares The Taming of the
Shrew
130
Kbra Baysal, Kastamonu University School of Foreign Languages, Turkey

Planned as a remaking of Shakespeares romantic comedy play, The Taming of the Shrew,
the film produced by the BBC in the Shakespeare Retold Series in 2005 is directed by
David Richards and stars Shirley Henderson in the role of Kate and Rufus Sewell as
Petruchio. Reflecting a very modern, innovative and funny version of the original play
along with a modern language preserving the general frame of the key dialogues in the
play, the film presents some distinct changes as well as new perspectives to the play, such
as clarifying its originally ambiguous end, or imagining what may have happened in Kate
and Petruchios marriage afterwards, which indeed come to satisfy and further tingle the
expectations of the modern audience while keeping the most crucial points like names,
places and the general plotline as they are in the original source, which possibly serves to
preserve the credibility of the film as a Shakespearean adaptation.

Translating Shakespeares As You Like It into Modern English: Challenges and
Rewards
Gl Kurtulu, Bilkent University, Turkey

Shakespeares popularity and authenticity throughout centuries in different nations and
countries is quite evident, however as the time period between the audience and
Shakespeares plays widens various problems appear in terms of translation and
adaptation of his plays. Use of language in his plays is not only problematic for foreign
speakers but poses challenges also to native speakers. Translators who translate
Shakespeares works into other languages or into modern English face challenges in
keeping the meaning of his language and maintaining the poetic style of the playwright. As
You Like It, a romantic pastoral comedy is one of those problematic plays in terms of
adaptation and translation, which illustrates historical and cultural differences, and
deviation and transformation in English language.

Translating Shakespeares Green World into the Moving Pictures
Radmila Nastic, University of Kragujevac, Serbia

Shakespeares mature comedies are dramatic representations of the workings of human
imagination towards the fulfilment of dreams and desires, Norhtrop Frye famously wrote.
The fulfilment takes place away from everyday world of the city and court, in a natural
environment where envy and ambition are weak. This natural world is usually
represented as a forest or some other miraculous though not unreal space, like Illyria in
Twelfth Night. This green world, whose origins go back in time to the beginnings of
literature and mythology, is paradigmatically represented in As You Like It. My
presentation undertakes to study how well this world translates into film. A preliminary
research showed that among its best renderings are the BBC versions (The BBC
Shakespeare series), and that their success is due both to the excellence of the setting and
the skill of the leading actresses. Helen Mirren in the 1978 As You Like It, and Felicity
Kendall in the 1980 Twelfth Night, masterfully visualized the miracle of love, which is
central to the plays, while the scenes of action were made both probable and fantastic.

Intersemiotic and Interlinguistic translation of Twelfth Night: Adaptation and
Dubbing
131
Roberta Zanoni, University of Verona, Italy

The filmic adaptation of Twelfth Night enables us to discuss several features of
intersemiotic translation, while its Italian dubbing allows us to consider a particular kind
of interlingual translation, destined to cinema. The main characteristic of dubbing is, in
fact, not only that it partakes in the already very complex passage from a language to
another, but also that it presupposes the need to adapt to a multimodal medium. The
Italian dubbing of the film, thus, will be analysed both in the light of the reference to the
source text and in its presence inside an intersemiotic translation. The faithfulness of the
film to the play will also be taken into consideration, in particular concerning the role of
the language displayed in it. This attention will be of great importance when considering
the Italian text which should respect the sound patterns of English in order adapt to the
mouth movements of the characters without, at the same time, altering the content and the
complexity of Shakespeares words. The focus of the analysis will be to evaluate whether
the translational passage has fulfilled these goals and to further develop the knowledge of
such a complex and controversial translational practice such as dubbing.

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S22. ANACHRONISM AND THE MEDIEVAL
Co-convenors: Lindsay Reid and Yuri Cowan

Chronos to Kairos: Representation of History in William Shakespeares Troilus and
Cressida
Evrim Dogan Adanur, Atlm University

William Shakespeare is one of the greatest anachronists. Together with all the historical
inaccuracies for the sake of dramatic effect, he also uses intentional, unintentional, and
necessary anachronisms in his plays. While writing his version of the Homeric tale of
the Trojan War, Shakespeare brings together the controversies of the rampantly changing
early-modern world from a feudal to a capitalist one in Troilus and Cressida. In a tale
stemming from the antiquity and transformed, even reproduced during the medieval age
through the romance tradition, Shakespeare brings together the old and the new in his
handling of the medieval/feudal Trojans and early-modern/capitalist Greeks. The
chivalric medieval age finds its representation especially in Trojan Hector and the
modern in Greek Ulysses. This paper examines the ways in which the past and the
present are culminated in Troilus and Cressida and the chronos is transformed into
kairos with the juxtaposition of contemporary ideologies in a seemingly Homeric world.

Chaucers Ghoast: Ovidian Tales and Vernacular Spectres in Early Modern
Literature
Lindsay Reid, National University of Ireland, Galway

In 1672 a book compiled by an anonymous lover of antiquity was printed in London.
This volume bore the curious title Chaucers Ghoast: Or, A Piece of Antiquity. Containing
Twelve Pleasant Fables of Ovid. The works title page also featured the well-known Horatian
line Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, &c., thereby suggesting the authors learned
interest in resurrecting ancient texts. Despite the classical veneer of this epigraph,
immediately palpable in the works very title is a sense of counter-chronological slippage.
The ghost of Chaucer turns out to be Ovid, with the Roman represented as the original
author of the volumes faux-Middle English Pleasant Fables. The oddities in attribution
do not end here, however, for Chaucers is not the only vernacular spectre haunting the
text. Rather, the volumes purportedly Ovidian tales are actually lightly modernized
(uncredited) versions of twelve stories excerpted from the work of another medieval
English author altogether: Gower. I draw upon this matrix of authorial (mis)attributions
and the concomitant language of spectrality in this seventeenth-century text to speculate
about the ways in which these poets identitiesone Roman, two English, one ancient in
our contemporary sense, two medievalwere anachronistically intertwined in the early
modern English popular imagination.

The Danish Boy Anachronism in William Wordsworths Ghost Poem
Robert William Jensen-Rix, University of Copenhagen

William Wordsworths poem The Danish Boy: A Fragment, first published in Lyrical
Ballads of 1800, is a landscape vignette featuring a ghost playing his harp in a Lake District
landscape. This ghost is an anachronism, a temporal asynchronicity, which encroaches
upon the present. Wordsworths poem can be seen to follow a fad for adapting Norse
stories focused on the supernatural. But, the paper will argue that the ghost in the poem is
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not played for cheap thrills; rather he represents the uncanny power of skaldic song,
which haunted the present not least as a recurrent topic in eighteenth-century
antiquarianism. Wordsworths poem rehearses a recognisable romantic scenario of loss
and separation, in which the harper functions as a symbol of a once-held poetic power.
However, as a ghost whose song is heard in the present, the harper stirs the hope that the
voice of the past is not entirely silenced. The fact that Wordsworth had originally planned
to use the poem as a preamble to a longer medieval-style ballad makes it interesting to
explore the Fragment as comment on reviving the past (anachronistically) in modern
literary production.

Weary is the knight who is her thrall: The Anachronistic Quest of the Birmingham
Guild of Handicraft (1894-1896)
Koenraad Claes, University of Kent

Several little magazines of the British Fin-de-Sicle have an element of anachronism
whereby not only their literary contents but also the illustrations, ornaments and
production methods conspicuously referred to age-old models instead of to the art and
literature of their day. While some critics at the time dismissed this tendency as escapist
and derivative, for the Arts and Crafts Movement this was not a mere affectation, but a
means to propagate alternative modes of artistic production modelled on pre-modern
practices. A prime example of this phenomenon is the hand-printed Quest (1894-1896)
issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, which can be considered a periodical
analogue to the books of Morriss contemporaneous Kelmscott Press. Though produced in
one of the leading industrial cities in Britain, it featured articles on guild socialism and
village architecture as well as medievalist literary contributions that were allegories of its
aesthetic and political principles, decorated with engraved initials and illustrations that
hark back to medieval manuscripts and the earliest printed books. This paper will show
that the Quests anachronistic obsession with the idealized Middle Ages was an aesthetic
statement meant to reinforce its political struggle against the flaws it found in late-
Victorian society.

Playing at History: Anachronism and Crusader Kings 2
Yuri Cowan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The Paradox Studios grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings 2, which enables the
player to take control of a medieval dynasty, playing successive individuals over the
course of their lives day by day, month by month, and year by year, has become a minor
phenomenon in the gaming world. Although the game begins at an historical starting point
such as 1066, the break with history is almost instantaneous. The borders of counties,
duchies, and kingdoms in medieval Europe, Asia and the Middle East begin to mutate as
soon as play starts, dictated not just straightforwardly by war and technology as in a
traditional strategy game, but by the rules of feudal succession, religion, marriage, and of a
complex system of individual diplomacy based on past interactions and on personal traits,
including all the seven deadly sins and cardinal virtues. This paper will consider Crusader
Kings 2s anachronistic break with history in the light of emergent gameplay, in which
the possibilities and constraints of the game dictate a rich tradition of narratives written
by players describing their experiences, and will examine how the game makes mundane
activities like marrying, seducing, having children, dying, converting, feasting, and
scheming reshape the course of history.
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S23. 'The Inhuman Self Across Early Modern Genres: Textual Strategies 1550-1700'.

Co-convenors: Anna Maria Cimitile, Jean-Jacques Chardin, Laurent Curelly

Jean-Louis Claret (Universit de Provence, France): "From the cloven pine to the
weeping logs: trees in Shakespeares Tempest."
Surprisingly, the construction of the individual self in the Renaissance was sometimes
carried out thanks to its transposition into some exterior elements: trees, that occupy a
central part in such founding texts as the Bible or Homers Odyssey, stand out against the
sky and sink their roots into the nurturing soil. In this respect, they invite comparison with
humans who try to inherit their vegetal life force and wish their blood had the
irresistibility of sap. The metaphor of the tree was a topos that Shakespeares characters
regularly resort to: they compare themselves to trees or use them to assert their position
in the world. It is particularly important in The Tempest. They are both the origin and the
end, ranging from the womb of a cloven pine that keeps Ariel prisoner to the living logs
that weep for having wearied Ferdinand. (III,1, 18-19) But Prospero also refers to his
past life in Milan as a growth that was impeded by Antonio, that is the ivy which had hid
(his) princely trunk. (I,2, 86) In Elizabethan drama, the humanist refashioning of man is
surprisingly conveyed by the transformation into trees and then the departure from these
welcoming though petrifying hosts.

Yuki Nakamura (Kanto Gakuin University, Japan): Personified Abject in Early
Modern English Revenge Tragedies
This seminar paper analyzes horror images of early modern English revenge tragedies,
focusing in detail on the characterizations of both revengers and villains and their actions
and behaviours, exploring the nature of horribleness, or what Julia Kristeva calls abject, as
a preliminary step to the age of Enlightenment. Wendy Griswold states that horror in
revenge tragedies achieves its impact by violating what is regarded as natural by mixing
cultural categories (Renaissance Revival 1986, 78). The same discourse can be found
among art historians and film critics who maintain that horror originates from actions of
crossing the boundaries between human and in-human. Moreover, in the genre of revenge
tragedies, horribleness is personified by not only tyrants and villains but also revengers
who transform into villains through inhuman actions of revenge. These revenging
protagonists are, at first, human and represent the notion of the modern self or individual
in that they are autonomous and self-aware in their conflicts with tyrannous power. At the
same time, however, their transformation is an essential factor in the whole system of a
revenge tragedy because revengers, like Hamlet and Hieronimo, need to go to ruin in order
to serve as a scapegoat for the state or societys restoration of order at the end of the
drama. Personification of the in-human and its contrast with what is human is a
representation of the Renaissance idea of order, and furthermore is a sign of forthcoming
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

Carmen Gallo (University of Naples LOrientale, Italy): Human invention and
divine agency in George Herberts The Temple
The paper means to focus on George Herberts The Temple (1633) in order to investigate
the rhetoric strategies and meta-poetical figures revolving around writing and self. In
particular, it means to show the struggle for authorship between the religious poet, who
meditates on the possibility of his own language and invention to praise God, and God
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himself, which presents himself as the all-pervading Logos, continuously claiming his
power as Creator. Through the analyses of poems belonging to the central section, The
Church, the paper will provide textual examples of the way in which the borders of the
writing self are wittingly negotiated and performed in the space of the poem. The
construction of his own identity as human being endowed with the divine power of
language and fictional creation is indeed a pivotal key of Herberts complex religious
experience, as he finds in the scriptural model (Psalms) its best rival and contender. As it
will be shown, if biblical quotations and divine intrusions (direct speech by God are
reported in the texts) seem to undermine human invention and pretence of creation,
audacious plays on form and content overturn conventional hierarchies and deconstruct
unexpectedly through the wit he pretends to abhor - the topos of divine inspiration.
Finally, the focus on writing and the subjective confrontation with Scriptures will also be
evaluated in the larger context of the Reformed attention to the Word, and in the light of
the epistemological shift due to the sacramental crisis following the Eucharistic debates on
Christs real presence in the world.

Raymond-Jean Frontain (University of Central Arkansas, USA): Travel,
Transgression, and the Dangers of Festive Self-Presentation in Coryats Crudities
Thomas Coryate was a Renaissance transgressor extraordinaire. Born in a small village in
Somersetshire, he traveled close to 10,000 miles, much of it on foot, in only nine years,
eventually carrying the name of his beloved Odcombe to the furthest reaches of
Eurasia. The son of a village parson, he used his wit to gain entrance to Prince Henry's
household, where he was appointed Gentleman of the Privy Chamber
Extraordinary. Rarely in possession of money, he prided himself on the access that his
oratorical skills earned him to the great and powerful, and boasted of the orations he was
allowed to offer to members of the Royal Family, to English ambassador to India Sir
Thomas Roe, and to the "Great Mogul" himself. Obsessed with language and its power to
refashion the reader's or listener's perception of the writer/speaker, he pushed a
developing English lexicon past existing limits, uninhibitedly fashioning words to meet his
personal needs; indeed, as Ben Jonson slyly puts it in "A Character of the Authour"
prefacing the _Crudities_, Coryate "is a great and bold Carpenter of words, or (to expresse
him in one like his owne) a _Logodaedale_." Sensitive to the criticism he incurred when
crossing these boundaries, he happily played the fool, seeking to disarm through self-
mocking humor his better educated reader's, or more socially powerful listener's, possible
resentment. Yet the most curious feature of his temperament, biographer Michael
Strachan notes, is his fury not to be taken seriously by those whose favor he courts- -that
is, to be taken for the fool that he so willingly played. If Coryate's presentation of his
_Crudities_ bears witness to the defensive power of his festivity against the dangers
incurred in transgression, placing Coryate in the margin of the ludic humanist tradition of
More, Erasmus and Rabelais, then the failure of that festive self-presentation may
illuminate a peculiar problem of Renaissance self-fashioning: how an intelligent, well
informed, quasi-humanist text is unable, finally, to survive its author's self-presentation
outside the text.

Armel Dubois-Nayt (Universit VersaillesSaint Quentin, France): Jane Angers
Protection for Women (1586): Redefining the female sex in the Querelle des femmes
The so-called female controversy or Querelle des femmes was in fact a debate about the
superiority/ inferiority of the sexes or the equality between them. In that respect it was
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more a gender controversy that opposed the self and the other. Beside the two sexes, the
controversy also placed man and woman in relation to the inhuman and more particularly
to the animal. This paper will take the example of Jane Angers Protection for Women
(1586) to establish how the first defence of women, authored by a female personae, clearly
redefined the female self and did so by reappraising the sexes in relation to the animal. It
will look at Angers and her opponents reading of the genesis creation narrative but also
compare the extent to which on both sides of the debate, pamphleteers use animal similes,
metaphors and comparisons to defend or attack the sexes. It will argue that in that respect
not only did Jane Anger redefine the female sex, she also started a feminist tradition that
downgraded mankind as opposed to womankind to the animal kind.

Claire Labarbe (Universit Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle/Paris Ouest Nanterre La
Dfense, France): Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Human Metamorphoses and the
Characters of Nature
In this paper, I would like to focus on two seventeenth-century publications which,
although they may seem to us to belong to separate fields of study, both evoke various
curious changes in the form of man. The anonymous character pamphlet A Strange
Metamorphosis of Man, transformed into a Wildernesse. Deciphered in Characters came out
in 1634. The format of this duodecimo collection of short descriptive essays reflects the
contemporary craze for miniature books which aimed to encapsulate the entire world of
man in the nutshell of a limited series of characters. John Bulwer's sligthly later
Anthropometamorphosis, Man Transformd; or, the Artificial Changeling (1650) is an
anthropological quarto volume which tapped into the contemporary disciplines of medical
anatomy and human physiognomy.
These two publications illustrate the two possible forms of early modern transformation
or metamorphosis recently explored by Susan Wiseman in Writing Metamorphosis in the
English Renaissance 1550-1700 (2014). Whereas the 1634 pamphlet stages an imaginary
substitution whereby man is replaced by nature, Bulwer examines the different modes of
alteration through which man's nature is reshaped and distorted. The word changeling
in Bulwer's title does not refer to one person exchanged for another but rather to a person
changed from itself. I would like to argue that in describing man's various shapes as so
many deviant corruptions of his nature, Bulwer aimed to validate the social supremacy of
one particular type of man, the English gallant. Bulwer's ideal model of a natural man is
paradoxically constructed through a rejection of cultural otherness, whose manifestations
the author condemns as so many instances of barbaric art and animal depravity.
Conversely, the 1634 pamphlet metaphorically substitutes man for the infinite works of
nature and, by doing so, expands the boundaries of the self. The author's conception of
man's symbiotic relation to the material and natural world he inhabits acts as a
philosophical challenge to the centrality of man. This anonymous series of character
metamorphoses thus undermines the critical understanding of the early modern self as a
social construct modelled under the exclusive pressure of constraining religious and
political forces.

Tim Mc Inerney (Universit Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France): Sons of
Ham: Nobility in Early Modern Race Thinking
Few concepts have influenced understandings of the human body more than that of race.
And yet, the notion of race as a biological unit of mankind was not proposed until the end
of the eighteenth century, and had already been debunked by the end of the 20th. Before
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this time, race existed as a heterogeneous, and curiously genealogical dimension of the
Great Chain of Being world-view. In early modern Britain, races of men signified diverse
understandings of linear descent all bound up in a complex web of Biblical providence,
natural order, and above all social rank. This paper explores how the traditions of nobility
established a template of genealogical hierarchy that would become fundamental to early
constructions of racial identity. It examines how the ideals of pure blood and breeding
could be used to categorise different types of human being, and how these ideals steadily
pervaded contemporary naturalism and human variety theory. Works discussed include
Thomas Sydenhams Treatise on the Gout (1684), Hugo Grotiuss Dissertation on the Origin
of the Native Races of America, the Comte de Boulainvilliers tat de la France (1722) and
Maurice Sheltons An Historical and Critical Essay on the True Rise of Nobility, Political and
Civil (1718).

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S24. Renegade Women in Drama, Fiction and Travel Writing: 16th Century - 19th
Century
Convenors: Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo) and Efterpi Mitsi (National
Kapodistrian University of Athens)

Unruly Women and Female Rule: Cecilia Vasas Journey to England 1564
Anna Swrdh (Karlstad University)

This paper examines the representation of Princess Cecilia Vasa (15401627) as
transgressor of boundaries in a contemporary manuscript account of her journey from
Sweden to London in 156465, James Bells Narrative of the Journey of Princess Cecilia,
Daughter of Gustavus I of Sweden. Cecilia Vasa was a great admirer of Elizabeth I (1533
1603), and had learnt English and corresponded with the queen before her journey took
place. She remained in London until May 1566, and Bells narrative seems to have been
written during or soon after her visit. Several of Cecilias activities in connection with this
journey would justify a description of her as a renegade woman in the extended sense of
that term, behaving in unconventional or nonconformist manners. This article focuses on
how Bells narrative can be seen as contributing to such an understanding of her.
Examining its representation of Cecilia from a rhetorical perspective will, for example,
show how features such as narratorial commentary and classical references are used to
cast Cecilia in an almost mythical or epic guise. In this way, Bells narrative can be seen as
an early example of the fictionalisation of Cecilias life encountered in novels from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the paper will also suggest that a more political
understanding of the narrative is possible.

Artful Renegades Staging Femininity to Undermine the Power Structures of the
Court
Ingrid Pfandl-Buchegger (Universitt Graz)

In the early 16th century, when stage performances were under constant accusation of
lewdness and licentiousness from the Church and civic authorities and performers were
all male and still considered morally suspect, King Jamess wife, Anna of Denmark, used the
stage to pursue a sophisticated artistic way of undermining the absolute authority of her
husband and promoting her personal interests in the power struggles at court. Anna
challenged the masculine dominance at the most prestigious and expensive form of court
entertainment, the masque, by usurping the dance floor with her ladies in waiting for
several years. In the graceful and harmonious performance of the elaborate courtly dances
and revels in these allegorical spectacles, the queen carefully designed her public
appearance to display an image of assertive and independent feminine sensuality.
Masques were a multi-medial synthesis of poetry, music, dance, costumes and stagecraft,
which during the reign of James I, were used not only to celebrate memorable occasions
(such as triumphs or weddings), but had also become important political and diplomatic
events, usually performed around Christmas (on Twelfth Night), or on Candlemas, and
created by the best artists of the court. As such, they provided an occasion for the monarch
to exhibit the wealth and sophistication of the court, and for the courtiers to represent
their rank in society through an appropriate public appearance in front of domestic and
foreign dignitaries.

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In this presentation, I would like to analyse some of these female masques especially
commissioned by Anna and discuss them not only as rare instances of female performers
at Whitehall. I would also like to examine how Anna tried to execute her own power
schemes and counteract the male favourites of her husband and their influence at court. In
the true manner of Renaissance self-fashioning, she used these performances to forge an
image of a strong queen for herself in public (a queen who even dared to exhibit a visibly
pregnant body on the stage), and, additionally, by surrounding herself with her most
faithful ladies (mostly allies in her ill-famed Catholic faith) and thus trying to provide them
with royal protection against religious persecution, she managed to create a strong sense
of connectedness.

Homelesse Wayfarynge Women can onlie bring forth but Horribly Disfigured
Children: Monstrous Births and Female Marginality in Early Modern England
Luca Baratta (University of Florence)

One of the most relevant cultural phenomena in Europe, at the dawn of the early modern
period, was the spread, during the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, of an
apocalyptical imagery known as prodigy canon. A consequence of this incredible
attention paid to the supernatural was the proliferation of printed texts, which shared the
same interest for the marvellous. Monstrous births played a central role in this pervasive
imagery: deciphered symbolically and allegorically as manifestations of Gods wrath, they
became a harsh weapon in the propaganda war of the various religious and political
groups, which fought each other in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

One of the fields in which this kind of publications was more frequently employed was that
of the social control of women. Many authors of street literature intentionally used
monstrous births to show in a bad light women who did not respect specific models of
behaviour, through the syllogism according to which deformed children were the
manifestation of their mothers secret crimes. In most cases, these secret crimes dealt with
sexual morality. The present paper aims at investigating two pamphlets, printed in London
in 1609 and 1615, in which the monstrous birth was ingeniously exploited to stigmatise a
different type of guilt: the conscious marginality of the female protagonists, two
wayfarynge women.
During James Is reign, vagrancy had become cause of great concern for the
authorities in London. The Parliament had set about tackling the problem, introducing a
series of Acts which acknowledged that the care of the poor was the communitys
responsibility, but no remedy had been offered by these legislative measures: beggars
continued to grow in number from day to day, while their presence was perceived as a
danger for the state. And if this was true in every circumstance, it was much more evident
when the vagrant was a woman. Begging women were considered to be a serious
menace for the stability of family relationships (heads of families could be tempted by
these anonymous ladies), unable to work and, if pregnant, a double burden for the hosting
community. By definition women that continuously cross the boundaries of different
communities, these female beggars can be considered particularly representative
examples of what Eric R. Dursteler has defined Renegade women.
Profiting from a recurring theme in the early modern English street literature, the
two documents taken into account in this paper contributed to the debate about female
vagrancy, interpreting the occurrence of a monstrous birth as the result of the mothers
conscious extraneousness in social life. God himself, for the zealous authors of these
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documents, would punish these women, who independently chose to live at the margins of
society, thus avoiding any form of social control. Where the law was unsuccessful, the
fright of a supernatural wrath would maybe manifest itself to support the state.

The Lure of Crossing the Divide Between Christianity and Islam: Christian Women
and Muslim Men on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage
Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo)

I propose a reading of three seventeenth-century English plays, each of which is concerned
with the uneasy relationship between Christianity and Islam at a time when the ill-defined
entity generally known as the West today was not in the ascendant and apprehensions of
the expansionist Ottoman Empire and its dependencies in North Africa played an
important role in Western European political and cultural life. Within this context,
renegadism emerged as the focus of a wide range of anxieties about the crossing of
religious, political, social and cultural borders particularly by women, who were
conventionally perceived as morally weak and therefore likely to be seduced by Oriental
luxury and/or the possibility of gaining political power and influence in the East by sexual
means. The figure of the actual or potential renegada or apostata shapes the plots of all
three plays.
Written in 1624, The Renegado, or the Gentleman of Venice by Philip Massinger is
considered to have introduced the subgenre of the eroticized captivity narrative to the
English stage (Michael Neill). While representing the dangers of sexual and religious
renegadism for both women and men, the play ends with the triumph of Christianity over
Islam: the captive Venetian Paulina retains both her chastity and her faith while the
Ottoman Princess Donusa chooses to convert to Christianity and elope with her Christian
lover. Powerful Muslim men, such as the Viceroy of Tunis and the Pasha of Aleppo, are
effectively thwarted in their sexual and political schemes.
The Tragedy of Mustapha, Son of Solyman the Magnificent (1665) by Roger Boyle, Earl
of Orrery, builds upon a passage from Richard Knolless The General Historie of the Turkes
(1603), which denigrates the excessive ambition of the Sultans wife Roxolana and her
undue influence over him. As a plotting Oriental woman Roxolana is contrasted with the
virtuous Queen of Buda who represents proper femininity. There are potential rather
than actual conversions in this play. The Ottoman princes Mustapha and Zanger fall in love
with the Queen, which makes her a potential target for conversion to Islam. However, it is
also suggested to her that she should attempt to convert Mustapha to Christianity and thus
radically transform the Ottoman Empire.

The Siege of Constantinople (1675) by Henry Neville Payne similarly reinterprets a
story from Knolles Historie. It contrasts the renegade Calista with the virtuous Irene who
is rewarded with a marriage to the Christian Thomaso. The apostata, on the other hand,
experiences death at the hands of Sultan Mahomet, whom she believes to have ensnared
sexually. In the three plays history and political fantasies become entangled as their
authors strive to represent Christian and Muslim identities in a world torn by conflicts.

Dangerous Games. Masquerade, Carnival and Cross-dressing as discourse for re-
negotiating identity in Aphra Behns Plays
Tiziana Febronia Arena (University of Catania)

In the English Restoration, the female body was a sexual object for male consumption. As
De Lauretis (1987) argued, the construction of gender is the product of its representation
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so that the construction of womans body followed those canons which encouraged
patriarchal binary thought, where the feminine pole has always been regarded as the
negative one. In her plays, Aphra Behn alters this social stability, in the liminal space, on
the stage and during Carnival, breaking gender barriers and encouraging female resistance
against social fixed roles. Her lady Cavaliers create a discourse of their own and try to
create a new female identity exploring the possibility of roving among no fixed genders.
Through the use of masquerade and cross dressing, Behn is able to perform the question of
the fluidity of gender and to expose the illusion of representation, preparing the ground
for subverting the binary patriarchal system and introducing a different vision of
woman/women. The Other, the masqueraded character, the woman, real or fictive,
becomes a source of ambiguity, hence of threat because it becomes a relevant tool offering
access to power and secret knowledge.
Aphra Behn shows gender mutability and instability, anticipating what Judith Butler
(1990)would argue about gender, that is, that gender does not denote a substantive
being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific set of
relations. Identity is in Behns works assumed as a role, thus, masquerade is a
dissimulation, a veil that hides the truth, a mask that covers the true nature of
woman(Rivire). The uncontrolled mask becomes the site of both resistance and power.
Gender itself was displayed as a liberating expression of how all identity can be moulded
and manipulated at will. Behns comedies reflect, respond and raise questions about
womens concerns and the possibility of a female agency.

Antifeminism and the Religious Clash of Christianity and Islam in Samuel Johnsons
Irene
Samia AL-Shayban (King Saud University)

This paper proposes to read Johnsons Irene as an antifeminist play. Central to this reading
is renegadism as represented by the heroine Irene. The play, which seems from the surface
to be concerned with religion, unfolds gender identity discourse where masculinity is
superior and femininity is inferior. To undermine the renegade Irene and her decision to
convert to Islam, Johnson dramatizes a complex and multilayered attack on femininity.
This is done through different manipulations of the three characters, the Christian Greek,
Irene, Mahomet, the Turkish Sultan and Aspasia, the Christian Greek. Irene is dramatized
as the archetypal female sinner, the biblical Eve. The Muslim Turkish Sultan Mahomet is
presented as an effeminate version of the archetypal tempter, Satan. The Christian Aspasia
is stripped of her value as a woman and given the gendered role of a patriarchal man. The
metaphorical Eve, Irene, falls to the temptation of the effeminate devil, the Turkish Sultan,
and renounces Christianity to embrace Islam in return for the title of Queen. To furnish
Aspasia with moral and religious credit, as a contrast to Irene, it is essential to deny her
identity as a woman, who is by nature a sinner, and give her the identity of a man. With
such approach it becomes apparent that Johnsons target of attack is not Irene the
renegade, but Irene the woman.

Here womans voice is never heard: The Ambiguous Fate of Renegade Women in
Romantic Hellenism
Efterpi Mitsi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

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In a footnote to The Giaour, Byron, explaining the not uncommon practice of having
faithless women drowned in the Ottoman Empire, mentions [t]he fate of Phrosine, the
fairest of this sacrifice [and] the subject of many a Romaic and Arnaut ditty. In 11 January
1801, Euphrosyne Vasileiou, a Greek woman married to a wealthy merchant of Ioannina
and alleged lover of Ali Pashas son Mouktar, was drowned in the lake of the city together
with 17 other women, all accused by Ali of immorality. Her tragic end inspired numerous
Greek folk songs, poems, novels, operas and films, as well as travellers and poets like
Byron, becoming an ambiguous symbol of feminized Greece. On the one hand, Phrosine as
the victim of the Muslim oppressors cruelty and despotism represented political
persecution; on the other, in the accounts of British travellers flocking to the court of Ali,
such as John Cam Hobhouse, William Martin Leake, C.R. Cockerell and Thomas Hughes, she
exemplified the renegade woman, betraying family, religion and nation.

By exploring the conflicting narratives of Phrosines story in travellers tales together with
Byrons Giaour (1814), as well as its resonance in Mary Shelleys Greek tales, The Evil
Eye (1829) and Euphrasia: A Tale of Greece (1838) -- both influenced by Byrons Tale,
my paper seeks the absent presence of renegade women in the intersections of Romantic
Hellenism and Orientalism. Just as the changing narrators in The Giaour create
contradictory points of view on the tragic love of Leila and the Giaour (a stray renegade
himself), the history of Phrosine has been distorted, fragmented and lost. Like Leila, the
Circassian faithless harem slave, she is given a sexual and mythical presence but is
deprived of identity and voice; she emerges in the text only to be drowned, still haunting
her storytellers.

An unconventional explanation for a conventional ending: Lady Audley and the
transgression of the boundaries of sanity
Sarah Frhwirth (University of Vienna)

Lady Audley, the doll-faced, angelic-looking protagonist of Mary Elizabeth Braddons
sensation novel Lady Audleys Secret (1862), is an archetypal renegade woman. Not only
does she transgress moral boundaries dictated by nineteenth-century society, but also
trespasses a vast number of legal boundaries by committing bigamy as well as a number of
acts of violence, like pushing her first husband into a well or burning down the house in
which her nephew, who is about to expose her, is sleeping. Her eventual cry of surrender
You have conquered A MADWOMAN! after her nephew has been able to bring forward
sufficient proof of her crimes heralds the allegedly insipid ending of a novel which despite
its outrageous and daring contents ends in accordance with nineteenth-century ideas of
poetic justice by locking up the transgressive heroine in a lunatic asylum. Whereas many
feminist critics have argued against Lady Audleys alleged hereditary insanity, I am going
to contend that the novel in fact contains ample evidence that not only acquits the novels
author of catering to the tastes of nineteenth-century moralisers, but also confirms Lady
Audleys hereditary strain of madness and the assumption that she has already crossed the
boundary between sanity and insanity well before the books controversial ending.

Aleksandar Radovanovic, Angel on the Stage: Notions of Femininity and Social Purity
in Oscar Wildes Lady Windermeres Fan
When Lady Windermeres Fan premiered in 1892, Oscar Wilde captured the attention of
the Victorian audience not merely by serving them with a disarmingly witty, yet
appropriately conventional melodrama, but also by engaging them in the ongoing public
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debate about the woman question. The polarizing issue of womens rights looms as the
background of Wildes examination of the vulnerable position of women in a society
designed as a sexual marketplace. Pairing a prudish daughter with a worldly mother,
Wilde juxtaposes the stereotypes of a pure woman and a woman with a past. His play
toys with expectations of fidelity, sexual double standard and mercantile nature of marital
arrangements, thus challenging gender roles and stressing the subjective nature of moral
outlooks on femininity. Observing modification of ingrained gender codes as part of the
Victorian cultures progression towards modernity, Wilde stages a social transition from
an idealized angel in the house to a decadent New Woman on the stage.

Constance Fenimore Woolson, aka Miss Grief
Theodora Tsimpouki (National Kapodistrian University of Athens)

In 1879 at the age of thirty-nine, grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, Constance
Fenimore Woolson set foot in Europe, where she remained until her death in 1894.
Although she had acquired a taste for travelling at an early age, it was after the death of
her mother that she crossed the Atlantic for the first time, leaving behind the idea of a
permanent home and adopting instead a nomadic way of life. Like her close friend Henry
James whom she met in Italy, Woolson became an acute observer of the conflicts arising in
transitional cultures, as well as of cultural norms for gender and sexuality in late
nineteenth-century. An ambitious female writer herself, desiring recognition in a male
dominated world, Woolson became increasingly frustrated by the social and artistic
prejudice women were forced to endure.

Drawing on the intersubjective and textual relationship of the two authors, in this
article I will focus mainly but not exclusively on her most anthologized story, Miss Grief
(1880). As Anne E. Boyd notes, the story has enjoyed renewed attention from feminist
scholars who elucidate its indictment of the male establishment for suppressing the
voices of women writers. It also reveals much about Woolsons own relationship with
men who dominated the literary world. A close reading of the story affords great insight
into Woolsons specific experience as an active participant and an agent of her literary and
personal life.

I seek vengeance no longer. No man is worth it!: Gendered Rebellion in The Young
Diana (1918)
Erin Louttit (Independent scholar)

Marie Corellis novel The Young Diana appeared rather late in her career, some years after
the highly successful late-Victorian novels for which she is now best known. Jilted by her
fianc and despised by her parents, the eponymous protagonists personal worth is
measured by others exclusively by her feminine youth and beauty. She escapes this
conventional and oppressive environment by faking her own death in order to volunteer
for a dangerous experiment conducted by an amoral scientist who sees her worth as a
scientific subject. The worldview in which she has been raised, and to which she initially
conforms, embodies the limiting, stereotypical Victorian female roles of daughter, fiance
and spinster. Her determination to challenge this restrictive ideology is plain: Corellis
protagonist seeks out the figures who self-confessedly value women for their youth,
beauty, money or domesticity, and enacts an explicitly gendered retaliation. The novels
plot, combining the domestic, science fiction and social commentary, charts the heroines
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awakening to and fighting against the social limitations placed upon her, setting her apart
from her society by subverting that societys conventions.

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S25: Picturing on the Page and the Stage in Renaissance England

Convenors: Dr Camilla Caporicci (Humboldt Fellow at LMU, Germany and University of
Perugia, Italy) and Dr Armelle Sabatier (University of Paris II, France)

Seminar chaired by Armelle Sabatier. Wednesday, August 24th

8.30-8.45: Cristiano Ragni (University of Perugia, Italy): An edifying speaking picture.
Defending drama in Elizabethan Oxford.

8.45-9.00: Professor Ladan Niayesh (Paris University Diderot): "Mapping the stage,
staging the map in early modern drama"

9.00-9.15: Emanuel Stelzer (Bergamo University): Seeing vs Looking at Staged Portraits
in Early Modern English Theatre and Drama

9.15-9.30: discussion

9.30-9.45: Ilaria Pernici (University of Perugia): Hero the fair and amorous Leander:
how Christopher Marlowe drew a picture of two symbol lovers

9.45-10.00: Camilla Caporicci (Humboldt Fellow at LMU, Germany and University of
Perugia, Italy): Many there were that did his picture get. The miniature in Shakespeares
work

10.00-10.15: Fiammeta Dionisio (University of Roma Tre): The Portraits of Imogen: The
Flight of the Image and the Recovery of the Imaginary in Shakespeare's Cymbeline

10.15-10.30: discussion

Abstracts:

Cristiano Ragni: An edifying speaking picture. Defending drama in Elizabethan
Oxford.
In Renaissance England, when playgoing became more and more part of the daily life, a
heated controversy on the morality of drama broke out. It was fuelled by Calvinist
extremists, the Puritans, who condemned plays for their supposed empiety and evil.
Resulting from the fierce iconoclasm of the radical exponents of the Reformed Church,
these attacks ended up condemning drama for its creating dynamised verbal pictures,
whose powerful impact on the audience the most alert Puritans did not fail to highlight. In
this paper, I would like to investigate the theoretical framework of the controversy on
drama, by showing how Puritans criticism specifically condemned the latters visual
nature. I shall like to focus on one of the least studied controversies, the one between the
theologian John Rainolds and the jurist Alberico Gentili, which broke out in Oxford at the
beginning of the 1590s. Having written treatises against Catholic idols where he drew
inevitable parallels with drama, Rainolds ended up condemning the concept itself of
mimesis with a fierceness yet unseen in previous controversies. In his correspondence
with Gentili, he went on to attack both the academic and the public plays precisely on the
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basis of their visual nature and of the dangers these images represented for the audience
(But one thing is to recite and one is to act). In this regard, I will show how Gentilis
replies also stressed the visual nature of drama, but in a clearly positive light. The jurist
carried out his personal defence by stressing how drama was a branch of poetry, which he
praised as a pictura loquens, a speaking picture. By showing his likely tribute to Philip
Sidneys Defence of Poesy, Gentili highlighted how it was precisely thanks to its dynamised
verbal pictures that drama was indeed a prefect means to educate the audience and not
something to be condemned indiscriminately.

Professor Ladan Niayesh: "Mapping the stage, staging the map in early modern drama"
"Taking its cue from D. K. Smiths The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England
(2008), this paper purports to analyse the theatrical transpositions of early modern
cartographys new resources in imaginative precision and rhetorical manipulation, such as
the birds eye perspective and the panoramic view. Such devices insert the spectators
within their representational fictions and make them participants in the enterprise of
spatial reconnoissance and appropriation, somewhat in the manner of the two human
figures taking up measures in the foreground of William Cunninghams view of
Norwich, printed in his Cosmographical Glasse (1559). The phenomenon appears in well-
known standards like Tamburlaine and King Lear, but also in several now lesser studied
heroic plays produced for the public theatre in the same period, such as The Four Prentices
of London and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, which I will more specifically use
as examples.

Emanuel Stelzer: Seeing vs Looking at Staged Portraits in Early Modern English Theatre
and Drama
There are 75 English plays dating from 1566 to 1641 that feature the staging of a portrait.
The idea that seems to emerge from studies on staged pictures (Tassi 2005, Elam 2010,
Wassersug 2015) is that they were to be seen, not looked at. It seems that most of these
pictures were either invisible to the spectators or so small that players had to produce in
the minds of the audience the mental image of such objects through ekphrasis. It is
interesting to ponder whether this was absolutely true: whether sizable pictures were
only exceptions on the early modern English stage or if there was a tradition of displaying
such visible artefacts. The effects that the spectators experience when looking at actors
looking at a miniature or at a sizable portrait are very different in terms of proxemics and
kinesics. Moreover, each type of picture speaks differently according to the perceivers
visual culture. Using the critical tools offered by material and visual culture studies, and
the semiotics of theatre and drama, I will discuss how key features of staged portraits can
be reconstructed from textual and paratextual hints (such as contemporary stage
directions) and how they can be evaluated on the basis of criteria such as size, price, and
gender.

Ilaria Pernici: Hero the fair and amorous Leander: how Christopher Marlowe drew a
picture of two symbol lovers.
Hero and Leander were two well-known characters in the Elizabethan Age, especially
thanks to the appreciation of classical works, such as Musaeus Grammaticus epyllion Hero
and Leander and Ovids epistolary oeuvre, Heroides. Christopher Marlowe takes and
reworks the two figures, symbols of love and deep desire but also misfortune, and pays
homage to them with a rich descriptive passage in the first 90 verses of his poem, Hero and
Leander. Here, the two lovers bodies and garments are illustrated with meticulousness,
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with details embracing all five senses: fabrics, flowers, precious stones. Theyre enhanced
with connections to other works (like Ovids Amores or Polizianos poetry), sometimes
reminding us to Correggios majestic paintings or Mantegnas abundances. Also, theyre
coloured with the chiaroscuros of the more or less explicit references to Narcissus,
Pelops, Cynthias myths. In this paper, I would like to highlight how Marlowe doesnt just
take advantage of the many available sources: thanks to his exceptional talent he invents,
re-invents and creates his own mythology, and hides other new meanings in these few
lines. My aim is thus to analyze and focus on this portion of text, to explore its numerous
literary, artistic, mythological aspects. In particular, I would like to demonstrate its
complexity and to offer a reading as exhaustive and thorough as possible of this portrait of
two portraits.

Camilla Caporicci: Many there were that did his picture get. The miniature in
Shakespeares work
The miniature, whose enormous success among the English aristocracy reached its peak in
the second half of the sixteenth century, was not only an important element within the
sophisticated language of the Renaissance court, but, considered in the light of Horaces
ut pictura poesis, presents certain characteristics which make it the perfect pictorial
counterpart of the Petrarchan sonnet. Shakespeare, by considering the miniature from a
variety of different standpoints, demonstrates a special awareness of its multifaceted role
within the Elizabethan culture. While in Hamlet the reference to the kings picture in
little exemplifies the political use of the miniature, in A Lovers Complaint the poet
highlights its function in the Renaissance courtly love-game. On the other hand, while in
The Merchant of Venice the celebration of Portias miniature links the Petrarchan sonnet
and the miniature as two forms of art answering to the same aesthetic principles, the
idealistic aesthetics at the base of this paragone is called into question in Twelfth Night and
in Loves Labours Lost, where Shakespeare links the rejection of the Petrarchan
representation of the beloved to a specific kind of visual portrayal, epitomized in the image
of the lady walled about with diamonds.

Fiammeta Dionisio: The Portraits of Imogen: The Flight of the Image and the Recovery of
the Imaginary in Shakespeare's Cymbeline
The aim of my work is providing a steamlined view on the fragmented proliferation of
portraits of the heroine in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, where different aspects of femininity
conflate without the effect of rendering a coherent image of woman. My analysis will start
with an example of the poet's use of ekphrasys, the scene of the violated bedroom of
Imogen, where she appears, to the man who had sneaked in, as an artwork among other
works of art. In this close space, a ceiling fretted with golden cherubins, tapestries on the
walls representing Cleopatra, and sculptures of Diana, ambiguously superimpose on the
silent image of the sleeping heroine. I will then examine the complex threefold nature of
Imogen as Diana (as Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, Selene, the lunar divinity, and
Hecate, the guardian of women in labour and childbirth as well as the Lady of sorcery and
witchcraft) by drawing parallels both with the composite iconography of Queen
Elizabeth's portraits and with Correggio's Camera di San Paolo at Parma. In addition, I will
focus on the intertwined motifs of rape and theft emerging through the pages of the drama.
In this late Shakespearean play, the theme of the theft of artworks and the obsessive
attempt to define a lost sense of femininity run parallel with the 'cultural amnesia' of the
visual art that affected the Elizabethan era with the phenomenon of iconoclasm. In
addressing a number of issues connected to the problem of representation, the Bard
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explores the limits of Petrarchism and Metaphysical poetry and wittingly inserts the
flourishing theatre art at the centre of a debate concerning the superiority of the 'sister art'
of poetry over the lost 'sister art' of painting.

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S26. Icons Dynamized: Motion and Motionlessness in Early Modern English Drama
and Culture

Co-convenors:
Gza Kllay, Etvs Lornd University, Budapest, Hungary
Attila Kiss, University of Szeged, Hungary
Zenn Luis Martnez, University of Huelva, Spain

Two Instances of John Donnes Iconography-Based Kinetic Conceits
Cora Alonso, Jess (Universidad Nacional de Educacin a Distancia, Madrid)
Some critics studying the visual in Donnes poems have pointed out that his conceits are
kinetic because they are characterised by the use of verbs of movement, and in this they
contrast with the static nature of the visual materials from which they seem to derive. To
my mind, however, this assertion is wrong. In my paper, I analyse two examples of Donnes
iconography-based kinetic conceits, and I prove that Donne does not dynamise static icons.
In fact, their kineticism reproduces the dynamic effects author-intended in the first case
but accidental in the second one of two specific visual sources that can be clearly
pinpointed because the conceits kineticism also works as iconicity, i.e. the reproduction
with words of details of the images the conceits are based on. These conceits are lines 15-
18 in To Sir Edward Herbert, at Julyers, that are based on the reversibility of Giuseppe
Arcimboldos painting The Cook (1570), and lines 25-26, 31-32 in To His Mistress Going
to Bed, modelled on the accidental movement illusion of the woodcut illustrating Cesare
Ripas allegory of Obligo [Obligation] in his Iconologia.

Jess Cora has worked in higher education since 1993 teaching English literature for the
most part, especially English Renaissance Literature. Currently, he works at UNED, the
Spanish distance and online education university, and he is finalising a protracted Ph. Diss.
on Donnes To His Mistress Going to Bed as an iconography-based encoded political text.

Understated Performance and the Audience's Imagination in Shakespeare's Drama
Guron, Claire (University of Burgundy)
Hamlet's advice to the players not to "tear a passion to tatters" (Hamlet, 3.2.10) is often
taken as a meta-theatrical expression of Shakespeare's attachment to a naturalistic style of
performance. More specifically, Hamlet's words reflect awareness of one of the main
pitfalls of tragic performance, i.e. eliciting laughter, rather than "pity and terror", through
overacting. This paper examines one of the ways in which Shakespeare's playtexts helped
the players navigate this pitfall. At several crucial moments in the plays, the audience is
made to imagine the emotion a character is experiencing, without the player needing to
actually perform that emotion through voice, gesture or facial expression. In addition to
sobriety of performance, this allows Shakespeare to show the audience a character in the
process of restraining his emotions, an ability essential to such dissimulating characters as
Iago and Angelo, for example. In this paper I will explore the devices through which the
audience is made to imagine the inner turmoil roiling outwardly impassive figures, and
discuss the mixture of empathy and irony resulting from such modes of spectatorship. This
will also lead me to consider the semiotic status of the player's body when its performing
function is thus co-opted by the audience.
Claire Guron is Senior Lecturer at the University of Burgundy (Universit de Bourgogne)
in Dijon, where she teaches Elizabethan literature, literary translation, and drama. She has
published several articles on exile, memory, knowledge and the semiotics of character in
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Shakespeare's plays. She has also co-edited an online collection of essays on Shakespeare
and Italy and another on naming in early modern literature. She is currently interested in
issues of audience participation and reception in early modern drama.

Mysticism as Colonial Gaze: Missionary Narrative and Iconography
Hbner, Andrea (Etvs Lornd University, Budapest, Hungary)
Colonial encounter appropriated various discourses of European narrative and
iconographic tradition in the movement of culture clash. The narrative of mostly Jesuit
mystic writings in the New World are not only theological writings but also the discourse
on the object (land and people) of the mission. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya s burning desire
to be the fellow in this noble task seems to be the channel through which mystical
impression is experienced operating or operated by colonial enterprise. The noble task,
the 16th century White Mans Burden (Kipling) is a Spiritual Conquest as the title of his
book tells us. Conquest is a religious excercise if Montoyas title is interpreted against the
title of Loyolas book Spiritual Excercises where all prayer is recommended to be visualised
and sensualised for a deeper religious experience. The staged emotions and passions of the
baroque often dramatise divine ecstasy like in case of Berninis St Theresa. The mystical
tradition of the mendicant missionary orders like the Franciscans and the Dominicans
seem to prove that mysticism is also in a way an interpretation and representation of
colonial experience, a dramatised impression of the lands conceived as vacant (Said) in
terms of conversion and conquest. Inquisitional commission (Frank Graziano) may be
understood as culture shock, as fear and agression in psychological sense elevated into
religious realms or as the register in which the unknown can be translated into domestic
terminology. In an interdisciplinary - historical, cultural and social-psychological-
approach my paper wishes to investigate the phenomenon through the mutual
interrelations of text and picture in the theoretical framework of social representation
(Moscovici), cultural memory (Halbwachs, Assmann) and gaze theories (Lacan, Urry, etc).
Through the Franciscan woman mystic Saint Angela of Foligno, the Dominican Saint
Cathrine of Siena and the Jesuit Saint Theresa of Avila a female mysticism and missionary
attitude will be considered in terms of a gendered reading of colonisation.
Andrea Hbner is a university lecturer in cultural studies, art history, cultural
anthropology, literature and social psychology. Her main fields of study are mostly
interdisciplinary approaches in the interconnections of pictorial and written tradition in
esoteric tradition, emblem art, iconography-iconology, cultural memory, social
representation, gaze theories, picture anthropology, architectural phenomenology,
postcolonial theory, orientalism, narrative psychology, theology and culture, culture clash
and ICC. She regularly participates at international conferences with lectures and has got
numerous publications in the above mentioned fields.

Kllay, Gza (Etvs Lornd University, Budapest, Hungary)
Gza Kllay got his Ph.D. in Literature and Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium in 1996. He
went through the habilitation process in 2003, and became full professor in 2007. He has
been teaching at the School of English and American Studies (SEAS) of Etvs Lornd
University, Budapest since 1985, giving lectures and seminars on Renaissance English
drama and cultural history, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and
philosophy. Current research areas include the relationship between literature and
philosophy, Shakespearean tragedy and Hungarian literature. His recent publications
include Nonsense and the Ineffable: Re-reading the Ethical Standpoint in Wittgensteins
Tractatus (Nordic Wittgenstein Review (1)103-130 2012).
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https://elte.academia.edu/GezaKallay/Papers?s=email#add/close. He delivers a sub-
plenary lecture at ESSE Galway entitled Is There a Metaphysical Turn in Shakespeare
Studies?

Stuck between Life and Death: Anatomia Vivorum as a Freezing of Time on the
English Renaissance Stage
Kiss, Attila (University of Szeged, Department of English)
There appears to be a passion for the staging of prolonged performances of horrible
deaths on the early modern stage. In revenge tragedies, the acts of murder and mutilation
are repeatedly presented as elaborate studies of the process of dying. The causes of this
obsession can be found just as much in contemporary representational questions as in the
spectators appetite for gory spectacle. In this paper, my intention is to examine the
cultural semantics that established a background to this experimentation with the dying
body. The questions and anxieties of the early modern thanatological and epistemological
crisis appear in the attempts of the tragic agents to freeze the continuity of time in order to
witness the moment when their victims, in a performance of anatomia vivorum enter the
passage from life to death.

Attila Kiss is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department in the Institute of
English and American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where he is also co-
director of REGCIS, the Research Group for Cultural Iconology and Semiography
(http://szeged-english.hu/en/research/regcis). His publications include Contrasting the
Early Modern and Postmodern Semiotics of Telling Stories (Edwin Mellen, 2011), and
Double Anatomy in Early Modern and Postmodern Drama (Szeged: JATEPress, 2010). The
focus of his current research is on the representations of anatomy and corporeality in
English Renaissance revenge tragedies.

Words, Action and the Task of the Translator: Alexander Neville's Elizabethan
Oedipus
Luis Martnez, Zenn (University of Huelva, Department of English)
Jasper Heywoods English renderings of Senecas Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560) and
Hercules Furens (1561) pose three models of literary translation in the early modern
period. While Troas opts for rhetorical amplification and dramatic additions as the basis of
a highly ornamented style that exceeds the letter of the original, Hercules Furens shows
exactly the opposite i.e., a literal, austere text that is presented facing the original Latin
text on the verso pages of the first octavo edition. Thyestes stands midway between the
other two, both chronologically and stylistically, somehow signalling a path in Heywoods
artistic evolution. This paper analyses Heywoods translations by considering their literary
context and their stylistic features. On the one hand, these three plays are coetaneous with
the first original English tragedy, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackvilles The Tragedy of
Gorboduc (1561), and a look at their prefatory materials, particularly those of Thyestes,
evinces Heywoods endeavour to construct a discourse of origins for the genre in English
and thus a vernacular poetics of tragedy. On the other, the allegedly un-theatrical nature of
the original plays i.e., the belief that they were not written for the stage is taken here
as a case in point to interrogate the motionlessness of Senecan tragedy. Heywoods
amplifications, additions, repetitions, etc. are here assessed as dynamising strategies,
particularly for their direct relation to recurrent themes in Seneca, like physical pain and
the passionate processes that his protagonists undergo. Heywoods rewriting of Seneca is a
vindication of the translatability of the original as a starting point for a modern idea of
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tragedy that privileges character ethos through the exploration of the passionate
nature of the tragic self and violence as the ultimate drive of stage action.

Zenn Luis-Martnez is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of
Huelva (Spain), where he teaches medieval and early modern English literature. He is the
author of In Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). He has published articles and book chapters on Renaissance
and Restoration literature. He has edited Abraham Fraunces The Shepherds Logic and
Other Dialectical Writings (Cambridge: MHRA, 2016) as part of the Research Project
English Poetic and Rhetorical Treatises of the Tudor Period, of which he has been leading
researcher.

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S27 English Printed Books, Manuscripts and Material Studies

Co-convenors
Carlo Bajetta, Universit della Valle dAosta, Italy,
Guillaume Coatalen, Universit de Cergy-Pontoise, France

This seminars focus is on the physicality of English printed books and manuscripts,
whether they be strictly literary or not. We are particularly interested in how particular
editions and manuscripts shape the texts interpretation and reading practices. Research
topics include, and are not restricted to, finding rare editions and manuscripts, archival
work, book and manuscript collections, printing practices and scribal work, paleography,
manuscripts as books, the coexistence of manuscripts and printed books, editing printed
books and manuscripts, electronic versus printed editions, editing and digital humanities.
Bibliographical and manuscript studies have been on the cutting edge of literary theory
and papers on authorship, the constitution of the text or hermeneutics are welcome.

Material collections of rare books in English and the digital humanities :
bibliophiles, and collectors in Britain, France and the USA at the turn of the 19th
century

Susan Finding, MIMMOC, Universit de Poitiers

This paper will examine the origins of four collections of rare works on economic history
which were cited as exemplary by the economist J. M. Keynes, and the historian E. P.
Thomson, and which form the most significant & well-known collections of founding
economic, social and political philosophy texts outside the British Library.

These collections were assembled between 1880 and 1935 by four men, three of whom
were professors of economics: a Frenchman, and Englishman and two Americans :
Auguste Dubois (-1935), Henry S. Foxwell (1849-1936), Edwin Seligman (1861-1939)
and Henry R. Wagner (1862-1957). They donated or sold their collections, often
catalogued or serving as a basis for a bibliography, to university libraries. Poitiers
University holds over three thousand items in several languages donated by Dubois of
which nine hundred are in English. Seligman sold his collection to Columbia in 1929, while
Wagner donated his to Yale. Foxwell's collection became the Goldsmith-Kress collection
containing over sixty thousand works, held by London University and Harvard's Baker
Library, digitalised and available through ECCO (although the quality of the online
versions is no better than that of the 1970s microfilms that were uploaded to the web).

Research on the way in which these collections were formed shows that they were using
specialised booksellers in London, a flourishing sector, with eight thousand sales of private
libraries taking place in Britain between 1675 and 1900. Booksellers the collectors
specifically used as suppliers include Stevens, Halliday, Maggs, Quaritch and Kashnor. Lon
Kashnor (18801955) was himself a collector and specialist, whose sold his collections
either in thematic blocks or complete, notably forming the basis of the National Library of
Australia's collection of 16th to 19th century British economic & social texts (12000 items)
and that of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (4000 items).

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Issues discussed will include choice of works for inclusion in the collections, sytematic
acquisition and completeness of collections, duplication and uniqueness, expertise,
provenance and purveying. Current work on the Dubois collection in Poitiers also raises
the question of selection of works to put online, and how to provide a critical apparatus for
the electronic version.

Come Martin A note on this edition: books that evolve from one version to the next
Publishing a new edition of a book is usually a trivial matter: it mostly happens when the
previous edition is out of print, or when there are errors in the current version that need
to be corrected. But in a few instances, a new edition means changing parts or the
entirety of a books content, thus making each edition exist as a distinct entity.
Three examples of this practice would serve as a basis for my analysis: A Humument,
initially published by Tom Phillips in 1970, is gradually changing with each subsequent
edition, until the initial content is completely replaced; House of Leaves by Mark Z.
Danielewski supposedly went through different first editions before being published,
and three different versions of the book existed before it settled into a so-called
definitive edition; Tristram Shandy, one of the English books with the most different
editions, was given a new and innovative layout in 2010 by London publisher Visual
Editions, adding to its existing visual qualities and thus effectively changing the way one
reads the famous novel. These three books highlight the importance of seemingly
innocuous choices when editing a book, such as its format or its fonts. They also remind
one that even though text seems inert once it is fixed on the printed page, it can be
reinvented and reinvested with the power of transformation and surprise.

When the book writes back: margins, comments, and readers responses
ALESSANDRA PETRINA
Universit degli Studi di Padova

Verses are wholly deduct to Chambers, and nothing esteemd in this lunatique Age, but
what is kept in Cabinets, and must only pass by transcription.
With these lines Michael Drayton expressed his unease, in an age of transition
between manuscript and print, at the newly exalted status assumed by manuscript
circulation, which made their contents rare and precious, as though the world unworthy
were to know. Such a stance is not unique to Drayton, and challenges the traditional
critical attitude towards early modern printing as a mark of the professional writer, since
Drayton appears to attack it as an early marketing manoeuvre. At the same time, the image
of the verses deduct, diverted or conveyed into a chamber, evokes the idea of a small
community in which the manuscript word becomes object of sharing and exchange.
The scribal community postulated by Harold Love in his The Culture and Commerce
of Texts is thus not only responsible for a controlled and close circulation of the
manuscript, but also for its multiplication and germination into variants, glosses and
paratexts a phenomenon readily observable in early modern English manuscripts, where
individual works become loci of discussion intervention, commentary. The procreation of
the readers responses constitutes in itself a test.

Alessandra Petrina is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Universit degli
Studi di Padova, Italy. She has published The Kingis Quair (Padova, 1997), Cultural Politics
in Fifteenth-century England. The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden, 2004), and
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Machiavelli in the British Isles. Two Early Modern Translations of the Prince (Farnham,
2009); she has also edited, among other books, The Medieval Translator. In principio fuit
interpres (Turnhout, 2013); Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England
(Farnham, 2013), The Italian University in the Renaissance (special issue of Renaissance
Studies, 2013), and Natio Scota (special issue of Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2012).
She is co-editor of Scottish Literary Review, European editor of Renaissance Studies, and
member of the Advisory Board of the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations Series.

The Possibilities and Limitations of the Digital Folio Extensions of Selected Abbey
Theatres Prompt Manuscripts
Dr. Grzegorz Koneczniak
Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toru, Poland

In the presentation I would like to discuss selected problems which I have encountered in
the process of completing the book Prompting In/Ex/Tensions inside the Manuscript and
the Digital Folio. An Exploration of Selected Early Abbey Theatre Production Books.
Specifically, I would like to focus on the possibility of creating digital folio prompt books as
the prototypical extensions of the theatrical production manuscripts from the beginning of
the twentieth century. Such prompt manuscripts, created for the premire performances
of the plays staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, contain unique combinations of typed
and handwritten textual, typographical and graphic elements. Their uniqueness makes it
impossible to transfer them into the digital folio format which could be regarded as an
alternative, and that is why I consider such prototypical prompt books, designed for
mobile devices, the extensions of the original manuscripts. In the S27 seminar I would
like to share the points and selected analyses included in the manuscript of Prompting
In/Ex/Tensions inside the Manuscript and the Digital Folio before its publication.

ESSE Galway August 22-26 2016: Seminar on printed books, manuscripts, and material
studies

Defined by the company you keep? The shifting manuscript contexts and meanings
of The Passion of Saint Christopher.
Simon Thomson, Ruhr Universitt Bochum

Anglo-Saxon manuscripts rarely give clear guidance on how their texts should be read,
with limited punctuation, very few titles and rare (sometimes mendacious) naming of
authors. Recent work has engaged with the shaping of meaning by layout and rubric, and
with the interpretative influence of images and other design work.6 Thomas Bredehoft,
meanwhile, has argued that the general absence of paratextual apparatus means that
See e.g. Thomas Gobbitt, 'Codicological features of a late-eleventh-century manuscript of the Lombard Laws',
Studia Neophilologica 86 (2014): 48-67; Teemu Immonen, 'The changes in the pictorial decoration of the Rule of
St Benedict at Monte Cassino in the 10th and 11th centuries', Studia Neophilologica 86 (2013): 83-103; Nick Baker,
Engaging with the Divine: Evangelist images as tools for contemplation, in Making Histories: Proceedings of the
Sixth International Conference on Insular Art, York 2011, ed. by Jane Hawkes (Donnington: Shaun Tyas, 2013), 229-
41.
157
many Anglo-Saxon texts he takes Beowulf as a provocative test case were not produced
as, and should not be read as, texts or copies at all, but as books or unique artefacts.7
One obvious paratextual feature that has not, yet, been widely considered is the
selection of surrounding texts. Some form of, as yet poorly understood, quasi-editorial
decision-making was involved in the selection of texts for a copying project, which has
clear interpretative implications. Thus Cotton Julius E.vii, by incorporating the non-
lfrician lives of St Mary of Egypt and of the Seven Sleepers into lfrics Lives of the Saints,
is making a claim for their orthodoxy and significance. And the so-called Wonders of the
East has one meaning when found in the company of scientific, encyclopaedic texts, as it is
in Cotton Tiberius B.v, and quite another when surrounded by stories of monsters and
heroes, as it is in Cotton Vitellius A.xv.
In this paper, I will discuss some of the different manuscript contexts for the Passion of
Saint Christopher during the late Anglo-Saxon period. Christopher is an ambiguous figure,
a dog-headed cannibal turned Christian preacher, martyred by the emperor Decius, whose
narrative can be interpreted in quite different ways. Looking at Latin, Old English, and
Celtic manuscripts, I will argue that manuscripts shape the reinterpretation of this text by
recontextualisation, and that this has implications for how readers were expected to
interact with books and their contents in the period.

Peter Bocsor: The Manuscripts that Burst Open a Canon
This paper discusses the eventful history of the manuscripts of Raymond Carvers second
collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) that
paved the way for literary minimalism. The posthumous emergence of the manuscripts
quickly pushed Carvers breakthrough volume into the center of debates about authorship
and canon formation, and what has become known as the Carver Controversy, the
scholarly agitation over the extent of the contributions of Carvers influential editor,
Gordon Lish to the writers success and to that of the aesthetics of less is more, finally
resulted in the unusual inclusion of significantly different parallel versions into the Carver
canon.
The comparative analysis of the parallel versions makes writing seem as a collective act of
social manufacturing and allows us to identify the various paradigms of authority behind
the competing, often conflicting practices of writing, editing, rewriting and posthumous
publication. The paper argues for the need to turn to critical understanding when
identifying the primary readings, and to regard the inherent polyphony of a literary canon
as a call for a renewed effort of understanding, rather than a threat to our more often
than not projected image of its author.

The Digital Orationes Project: The Affordances of a Restoration Manuscript
Prof. Anthony W. Johnson bo Akademi University, Finland

Originally funded by the Academy of Finland, the Digital Orationes Project is an ongoing
interdisciplinary initiative intended to bring an important unpublished Early Modern
manuscript into the scholarly arena. Preserved as Lit. MS E41 in the archive of Canterbury
Cathedral, this was compiled shortly after the English Civil War and represents one of the
most substantial unpublished sources of English School Drama from the period. The texts
include some 656 folio pages of short plays and dramatized orations in English, Latin and
Greek, alongside works by major authors such as Horace or James Shirley.
7
The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from 'Beowulf' to 'Maus', Oxford Textual Perspectives
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
158

The overall aim of the project has been to make available a state-of-the-art digital archive
to a wider audience, and simultaneously to create new affordances for its scholarly users.
To do this we have critiqued and responded to palaeographic and digital best practices,
and attempted to accommodate the physical affordances of the manuscript into the edition
as closely as possible. Concentrating on Kress and van Leeuwens notion of affordances
(what may best be achieved through the different materialities of manuscript, printed text
or digital form), the present paper accordingly reflects on the new potentials (as well as
losses) opened up by the digitization of manuscript materials.

The Early Modern medical treatise under study: the case of G.U.L MS 303 Treatise on
the Diseases of Women.
Soluna Salles Bernal1
University of Mlaga
The early Modern period witnessed the flourishing of scientific prose written in the
vernacular, both printed and manuscript (Taavitsainen & Pahta, 2011). Within the latter
we come across with an outstanding material, a hitherto unedited medical treatise dated
in the second half of the 17th century and entitled Treatise on the Diseases of Women.
The witness, housed in the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University Library and
catalogued as MS Hunter 303, was originally written in French by the famous physician
Jean Libault in 1582 (Young & Aitken, 1908). The English version is authored by an
unknown W. H. Gentleman, and it consists of three books (pp.1-958) written with a
humanistic script in paper. This study proposes to analyse the palaeographic and
codicological features of the witness, as well as to present the electronic edition of its
semi-diplomatic transcription (Petti, 1977), which can be consulted at the Malaga
Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. The confluence of early modern
manuscripts and 21th-century technology makes it possible to unveil the invaluable
material stored in libraries.

The Mlaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. 2013.
http://modernmss.uma.es.
Petti, A. G. (1977). English literary hands from Chaucer to Dryden. Harvard University
Press.
Taavitsainen, I., & Pahta, P. (2011). Medical Writing in Early Modern English.
Young, J., & Aitken, P. H. (1908). A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of the
Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons.

Medical Manuscripts in the Hunterian Collection: The Case of Glasgow University
Library, MS Hunter 1351
Jess Romero-Barranco
University of Mlaga

MS Hunter 135 belongs to the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University
Library. It is a hitherto unedited sixteenth-century volume containing five treatises on
alchemy, geography and medicine (Young and Aitken 1908: 122): Medica Qvaedam (ff.
hv-32v), De Chirvrgia Libri IV (ff. 34r-73v), Medica Qvaedam (74r-159v), Practica
Chirvrgiae (ff. 159v-208v) and Medica Qvaedam (ff. 208v-234v). The English part of the
volume (ff. 34r-121v) is currently being transcribed and will be incorporated to The
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Mlaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose, which freely offers electronic
editions of early Modern English Fachprosa.

The present paper has the following objectives: 1) to present the shortcomings
and decisions during the editing process of MS Hunter 135; 2) to discuss the benefits of
electronic editions as opposed to printed editions; 3) to provide a palaeographic and
codicological analysis of the witness; and 4) to study the instances of intertextuality
found among the folios of the manuscript.

References:
The Mlaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. 2013.
http://modernmss.uma.es.
Young, John and P. Henderson Aitken. 1908. A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the
Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: James
Maclehose and Sons.

S28 Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Romantic infancy in-between freedom and control: Locke, Rousseau and their
Romantic legacies
Martina Domines Veliki, University of Zagreb
This paper aims to depart from Locke's treatise on education, Some Thoughts Concerning
Education (1693) and Rousseau's famous response, mile ou de l'ducation (1762). Upon
having read the French translation of Locke's treatise (Penses sur L'ducation des Enfants,
1721) Rousseau claimed that it was the first book on education he had read and that the
subject was entirely new to him. Therefore, he hoped that after the publication of his own
book, the new subject of infancy and education of a young man would finally be given
extensive place in contemporary philosophical thought. According to Rousseau, childhood
is still an unknown stage in human life and despite all the writings which are made for
public utility, it seems that the first utility has been utterly disregarded the art of raising
human beings (Preface, mile). The main temptation of this paper will be to establish a
dialogical correspondence between the two works by focusing on the ideas of control and
freedom in the eighteenth century social discourse. This type of correspondence would
hopefully prove fruitful in elucidating the meaning of childhood and infancy in the works
of Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the final recognition of
childhood as being socially constructed.

A limited privilege of strength: Thomas De Quinceys childhoods.
Cian Duffy, Copenhagen University

In essays spanning a quite remarkable range of subjects, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859),
the English Opium-eater, repeatedly returns to the topic or trope of infancy. Such returns
might be thought natural enough in a writer who was most celebrated in his day as an
autobiographer and biographer, and whose work has, consequently, often been
approached from biographical perspectives of one sort or another. But it is not merely in
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life-writing that De Quinceys interest in infancy is prominent: the trope also features in
essays on subjects so ostensibly diverse as the history of language and the history of the
earth; the development of political economy and the development of personal identity; and
the history of art and the history of the universe.
Looking at a representative (if also necessarily brief) sample of De Quinceys
engagements with infancy, this paper will situate those engagements in relation to wider
transformations taking place in the European episteme in the early nineteenth century. De
Quincey rejects altogether the kind of stadial constructions of infancy developed by
Enlightenment thinkers, in which infancy (of individuals, societies, languages, etc.) is seen
as a discrete developmental stage to be outgrown. But neither is he wholly comfortable
with the more genetic (we might as well call it romantic) model implied by Wordsworths
famous dictum that the child is father of the man. Rather, De Quincey is often concerned
to examine which latent potentials do not develop from infancy as well as to understand
why they have not developed in a kind of proto-evolutionary thinking which this paper
will link to the emergence of disciplinarity in the early nineteenth century and its impact
on the ways in which knowledge came to be structured.

John-Erik Hansson, Republic and Empire: Politics in William Godwins Histories for
Schools and Young Persons
In 1805, William Godwin founded the Juvenile Library, a business which was to occupy
him for the next 20 years. There, he published celebrated books for children such as
Charles Lambs Tales from Shakespeare (1807). In addition to selling the works of others,
Godwin wrote and published a dozen works of his own, for the use of children both in
schools and at home. The books Godwin wrote covered a wide variety of genres, from
fables to works on English grammar, two biographies and three histories: a History of
England (1806 abridged in the Outlines of English History in 1809), a History of Rome
(1809) and eventually a History of Greece (1821). It is an analysis of these three books
that I intend to offer in this paper. These histories, like the rest of Godwins writings for
children, have only received a cursory glance in the scholarship. However, as I will show in
this paper, they contain interesting clues concerning what Godwin might have been trying
to achieve, beyond sustaining his numerous family, in writing for children at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. More specifically, I will assess Godwins treatment of republic
and empire in all three works, by looking at his way of dealing with the English Civil War
and Cromwells Commonwealth, his discussion of the laws of Minos, Lycurgus and Solon in
the History of Greece, and what his general plan for the History of Rome, subtitled From
the Building of the City to the Ruin of the Republic, actually is. I contend that, while Godwin
does not offer a full and open defence of republicanism and condemnation of imperial
conquest, these works do seem to point in that direction.

The literary rituals and the birth of a romantic man
Barbara Kaszowska Wandor (University of Silesia)

The subject of the paper are the peculiar lying-in rituals which are described in Jean-
Jacques Rousseaus mile, or Treatise on Education. Although the work has been
approached theoretically in a number of ways, no study has considered this specific image,
all the more the way it was adapted in the XIXth century literature. The present analyses
employ the concepts of the ritual and the liminality formulated by Victor Turner. An
attempt is made to interpret the functions of the image as a metaphor of the cultural
antropogenesis. First, it is analyzed in the wider context of the descriptions of mythical
161
and sociocultural birth rituals, which could be found in the ancient and early modern
literature (i.a. the works of Plato, Lucretius, Pausanias, Saint Augustine, humanistic
educational treatises). We point to the striking common elements of all these images, such
as their drawing the affinity between the lying-in and the funeral rituals. Next, we
demonstrate the creative elaboration of such classical topoi in the works of Rousseau, who
reuses it in his project of the total decomposition of the humanist tradition. Finally, it is
concluded that the maternal and infantile figures, projected in such descriptions by
Rousseau, have a great impact on romantic social imaginary (applying the term of Charles
Taylor).

Scepticism versus Neoplatonism: The Cases of Feral Children in the Romantic Age
Rolf Lessenich, University of Bonn
William Blake, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley propagated a Neoplatonic view of the
child as a prophet and poet close to the world of ideas, man's original home, imbued with
the noble savage's natural goodness and rhythms of nature and subsequently spoiled by
life experience and the process of growing up. Romantic Scepticism with its scorn of
Plato's idealistic philosophy, however, contested this view, and found confirmation in the
finding and experimental treatment of two feral children that went through the European
press: Victor of Aveyron (found in France in 1798) and Kaspar Hauser (found in Germany
in 1820). They turned up scratched, bleeding, speechless and savage in the negative sense
of a lack of enculturation, showing no symptoms of natural rhythms and innate
benevolence. Mary Robinson's poem The Savage of Aveyron (MS 1800, 1804), written in
sickness three months before her death, features a lonely speaker meeting a lonely boy
exposed to nature's cruelty. Instead of a benevolent Wordsworthian nature never
betraying those who entrust themselves to her care and ever conversing with her
solitaries so as to exclude any feeling of desertion, nature in Robinson's poem does not
integrate or protect man. The paper will explore the challenge that Romanticism's dark
underside, variously called Negative Romanticism, Pyrrhonic Romanticism, Romantic
Disillusionism, Romantic Scepticism, or Romantic Byronism, aggressively advanced
against Neoplatonic Romanticism in its view if children and childhood.

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S29 The Politics of Sensibility: Private and Public Emotions in 18th Century
England

Chairs:
Elena Butoescu / University of Craiova, Romania / elenabutoescu@yahoo.co.uk
Alexander Zimbulov / University of Dsseldorf, Germany / zimbulov@phil.hhu.de

PLEASURE, PASSION AND THE GOOD LIFE IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Alexandra Ileana Bacalu
University of Bucharest, Romania

My concern is to investigate the early eighteenth-century emphasis on the sensitive
dimension of emotion the vocabulary of pleasure and pain, the analysis of passions as
sensations or impressions, the erosion of the cognitive component of mental and
affective activity and to trace its impact on the ways emotions were classified, analysed
and described in the context of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. One central
line of investigation shall be the claim, shared by several thinkers of the eighteenth
century, that one and the same passion may have several manifestations in terms of what
has been variously called its sensitive, qualitative or phenomenal dimension, despite
not modifying its underlying cognitive structure, i.e. the value judgement upon which it is
built. Thus, attention to the sensitive component of emotion generates awareness of the
versatility of the passions and results in more fine-grained analyses of these. My paper
then aims to examine the ways in which this particular eighteenth-century shift in
conceiving and describing emotion is linked to emerging pictures of the good life which
redefine the relationship between pleasure and virtue. My purpose is not just to identify
the precise emotional regimes which were deemed descriptive of the good life, but to
pay particular attention to discussions of the affective labour which men had to perform
towards it attainment, as well as to the manner in which these single out particular
practices, professions and personae. I aim to examine the realignments which this nexus of
ideas undergoes across a variety of genres, namely philosophical treatises on human
nature and the passions, their popular and practical counterparts, as well as treatises on
virtue and happiness, with focus on the English space.

Alexandra Ileana Bacalu is a PhD student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and
Literatures, University of Bucharest, working on the therapeutic dimension of literature in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Her research interests include
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on the
history of literature, psychology and medicine.

THE COURTSHIP PLOT IN THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL: UNDERSTANDING THE
ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY POPULAR ROMANCE
Inmaculada Prez-Casal
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Even though contemporary popular romance fiction can be traced back to the eighteenth
century and the novel of sentiment, criticism has missed the importance of the courtship
plot and its similarities and differences with todays romance novels. In order to cover this
area in popular romance studies, the present paper analyses the characteristics of the
163
courtship process in the work of key writers in the sentimental tradition such as Samuel
Richardson or Charlotte Smith, so as to better understand the origins of the romance
genre. This essay takes a new approach through the study of courtship as of one of the
most significant elements in the novel of sentiment, and connects it with twentieth and
twenty-first century romance novels, a genre which has inherited many of its features,
including the predominance of feelings, the ideal of companionate marriage, and the
distribution of gender roles. Thus, this paper departs from more traditional analyses of
sentimentalism and their customary focus on the creation of the "Domestic Woman", at the
same time it inaugurates new lines of research that connect the past with the present.

After graduating in English Language and Literature in 2013, Inmaculada Prez-Casal
specialised in English Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela with an MA on the
contemporary American romance novel. Her research focuses on Gender Studies and Cultural
Studies, as well as popular literature and literature by women. Currently, she is working on
her PhD at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

CHARITY, PIETY, AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH PAMPHLET
Elena Butoescu
University of Craiova, Romania

In late Stuart and Georgian Britain charitable London was shaped both by economic forces
and by the various cultural meanings people attached to its space. Both economic and
social geography were changing in London after 1700 and the streets were populated with
vulnerable people driven into poverty. The greatest age of the pamphlet reflected, among
others, one of the essential shifts that marked the transition of London from an urban
mass into a civilised and refined metropolis: public benevolence. As this article is less
about charity per se than it is about the relationship between the institutional policies of
benevolence and the pamphlet, my intention is to look at how the practices and laws of
public charity operated in London and how pamphlet literature made the case for the
implementation of some insurance schemes by the government. This paper argues that
even if the concept of Pietas Londinensis existed via private or casual philanthropic acts,
charitable societies and institutions had not been set up until the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, issues related to charity and public or private benevolence were heatedly
debated and questioned in the pamphlets written by Daniel Defoe and other anonymous
writers, who put forward various proposals with the purpose of healing common social ills
and mobilising public opinion in favour of the poor and the wretched. Pamphlets revealed
the absurdity of a system which threw debtors into prison, where they could not find any
means of earning the money they owed to their creditors.

Elena Butoescu is a Lecturer in British Literature (Eighteenth Century) at the Department of
British, American, and German Studies, University of Craiova, Romania. She earned her MA in
British Cultural Studies at the University of Bucharest and her MA in Colonial and
Postcolonial Studies at the University of Leeds. In 2011 she defended her PhD thesis in the
field of eighteenth-century British literary studies at the University of Bucharest. Her
research interests include print culture and modernity, travel literature, cultural theory, film
and postcoloniality, as well as British travellers to the Romanian Principalities. She has co-
authored An Imagological Dictionary of the Cities in Romania represented in British Travel
Literature (1800-1940), Trgu-Mure, Romania, 2012.
164

THE CHARITY SERMON IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
Regina Maria Dal Santo
Ca Foscari University of Venice, Italy

This paper aims at showing the development of charity sermons in the Long Eighteenth-
century, underlining how the politics of rationality (what is best for the country regarding
the provision of the poor?) gradually changes into a politics of sensibility based on the
sense of sight and on the spectacle the young destitute children could offer. The paper
points out the changes which occurred in the rhetoric, vocabulary and focus of sermons. In
particular, it analyses in detail these elements in sermons written from the year 1671 to
the year 1801, underlining:
- Changes in the adjectives used to describe the objects of charity and how these
were influenced by sensibility issues dating back to the second half of the
eighteenth century
- Changes in the rhetoric used to address the audience, shifting from arousing their
fears to moving their pity
- Changes in the focus of the sermon, from the benefits of the audience to the benefits
of the destitute poor
The analysis will also present the way in which children are preferred as objects of
charity, not only for their young age and their capacity to arouse pity, but also for their
innocence and incapability of lying about their sufferings. Moreover, they are also chosen
for their malleability and still uncorrupted nature, highlighting how they could become
good and industrious subjects.

Regina Maria Dal Santo is an independent scholar cooperating with the University Ca
Foscari in Venice where she completed her PhD in 2014. Regina has been researching
sermons in the long eighteenth century since her graduation in 2006 and has published on
Latitudinarian Happiness in Sterne (The Shandean, 2015) and John Tillotson, Self-love and
the Teleology of Happiness (English Literature, 2015).

THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY IN HENRY FIELDING
Dita Hochmanova
University of Brno, Czech Republic

As it has been illustrated by Nancy Armstrong and other scholars, various 18th-century
magazines, manuals and also fiction proved to be a powerful means of influencing the
morality of the developing middle class reading public. The paper explores strategies of
transmitting male and female role models via novels, specifically the novels by Henry
Fielding, whose unique approach to interpersonal relationships challenged the
predominant materialistic concepts of male and female social roles at his time. By using
a complex system of stylistic methods devised to guide his readers judgment, Fielding
mediates traditional notions of gender, re-thinks their value and places them in the
context of new sensibilities with the aim to stress the importance of reciprocity in human
relationships and their quality defined by emotional response. On the other hand, his texts
also address the issues of sympathy and its failure to generate action within the system of
social hierarchies. Fielding therefore consciously exposes his readers to sentimentalist
thoughts, urging them to see emotions as a healthy response and the basis for bonding
165
between people, and at the same time, he points to the limits of sensibility as well as the
danger of its excess.

Dita Hochmanova is a doctoral student at the Department of English and American Studies
at Masaryk University of Brno. Her research focuses on the work of Henry Fielding in the
context of satire and sentiment, but her interests also include the development of the novel as
a genre.

SENSIBILITY AS SYMPATHY IN JANE AUSTENS SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
Vitana Kostadinova
University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria

This paper discusses an alternative type of sensibility as embodied by Elinor, the heroine
of Jane Austens Sense and Sensibility. Traditionally, Elinor is associated with sense, but
readers learn in the very first chapter of the novel that she possesses the strong feelings of
the rest of her family. Certainly, quite a few critics have made a point of "Jane Austen's
insistence that sense and sensibility must work together" (Hardy). Still, the private
public dichotomy sheds new light on the juxtaposition of emotions and rationality. Elinor's
feelings are private, whereas Marianne wears her heart on her sleeve, but even so, these
are just modes of handling sensations. What marks out Elinors sensibility more than
anything else is her compassion for others; Mariannes is decidedly egotistical, by
comparison. In his Dictionary of the English language (1756), Dr Johnson defines sympathy
as fellow feeling; mutual sensibility; the quality of being affected by the affection of
another and establishes the link between compassion (painful sympathy) and sensibility
that Jane Austen explores in the character of Elinor.

Dr Vitana Kostadinova is a senior lecturer in English at the Paisii Hilendarski University of
Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She is the author of Byron in Bulgarian Context (Plovdiv, 2009), a
monograph in Bulgarian, and co-editor of Byron and the Isles of Imagination: A Romantic
Chart (Plovdiv, 2009), a collection of essays in English. Her publications include the
Bulgarian contributions to the Byron and Shelley volumes in The Reception of British and
Irish Authors in Europe series. Dr Kostadinova's current research interests bring together
translation, culture and Jane Austen.

NEGOTIATING LAUGHTER AND TEARS: SENTIMENTAL CITIZENSHIP IN STEELE'S
CONSCIOUS LOVERS
Alexander Zimbulov
University of Dsseldorf, Germany

Restoration-type satire had modelled a culture of amusement at the depravities of human
nature mixed with the admiration for an aristocratic rake's ability to refine them into a
paragon of wit. Richard Steele regarded such disengaged laughter as deeply reactionary:
a distorted passion feeding the antisocial impulses (pride, malice, fear) of Hobbesean
man who only understands the rule of the stronger. Steele's work, in contrast, should pave
the way to the 'bourgeois' vision of sentimental citizenship at the juncture of social feeling
and social duty. Paratexts to the triumphantly successful Conscious Lovers (1722) link the
image of a willing people bonded to the crown by a love which, in turn, prompts Great
166
ones to obey, with cultural exercises in empathy ensuring genuine social ties. Polite
audiences are invited to showcase their emotional capacities as a kind of passport
qualifying for responsibilities in the new body politic. The play indeed revolves around the
moral ideal of a self-governing citizen fervently advancing various social commitments: its
hero carefully reconciles family interests with his personal inclinations, refuses a duel for
the sake of friendship, protects the virtue of a damsel in distress, puts decadent aristocracy
in its place and aligns himself with the hardworking merchant. The 'sentimental' impetus,
however, consistently stumbles over incongruities of erotic desire and economic interest
which emphasise just how unusual if not downright absurd the protagonist's actions
seem. There is jolly comedy when courtship almost fails over lectures on charity, but also
some larger-scale satire on the very politics of sensibility. Above all, interweaving
monetary and moral rhetoric plays heavily on the irony that the Lockean republic, while
consolidating around the protection of its citizens' economic interests, should so much
praise their disinterested benevolence.

Alexander Zimbulov (M.A. Comparative Literature, LMU Munich) is a PhD student and
lecturer at the Chair of Modern English Literature at the HHU Dsseldorf (2012-present). His
interests in research and teaching include: libertine literature and the history of ideas in the
17th and 18th century; sentiment and satire; rise of the novel; aesthetics and art theory;
feminist readings.

167
S30: "And when the tale is told": Loss in British and Irish Narrative Fiction from
1760 to 1960.
Convenors: Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo) & Barbara Puschmann-
Nalenz (Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum)

Tuesday 8:30 to 10:30

Introduction: Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz & Ludmilla Kostova

Objects May Appear Further Than They Are: Loss of Idealism in Joyce's Araby
William Blick (Queensborough Community College, CUNY)
Few say more with less than Joyce. From his epic novels and meditations on life, to his
brief snapshots, Joyce has the power to draw up epiphanies and crises in his characters. No
story recreates the sense of childhood loss better than Araby. With aspirations to enjoy a
day at the local bazaar, the narrator realizes that everything is not what it seems when you
are a child. Often what once was, isn't, and what is, may not remain. It is the purpose of this
paper to demonstrate the loss accompanied with childhood innocence that Joyce
demonstrates through a wide range of technique in such brief number of words. As noted
critic, Harry Stone suggests, if Portrait of Young Man is Joyces Bildungsroman, than Araby
is his portrait of an artist as a young boy. Stone goes onto to say, The boy in "Araby," like
the youthful Joyce himself, must begin to free himself from the nets and trarmnels of
society. The boy must dream "no more of enchanted days." He must forego the
shimmering mirage of childhood, begin to see things as they really are. (Stone, 348). In a
singular instance, Joyce conjures all the disillusionment of maturity and hones it to sharp
edge and a bitter pill that we all must swallow. Once the protagonist loses his idealism, he
cant get it back. That is the reality that Joyce conveys so eloquently.

Stone, Harry. "Araby" And The Writings Of James Joyce." Antioch Review 71.2 (2013): 348-
380. Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.

Loss, Wasted Opportunities and Negative Effects of Self-Sacrifice in May Sinclairs
Life and Death of Harriett Frean
Brygida Pudeko (Opole University)
In Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) May Sinclair portrays the life of the only
daughter of upper middle-class parents whose life is roughly contemporaneous with that
of Sinclair herself, and who is very clearly educated for the role of Angel in the House.
Harriet has been so thoroughly taught by her parents to practice self-sacrifice and self-
denial that she becomes emotionally impoverished and totally lacking in individuality. She
has neither the intelligence nor the strength of character to rebel against her parents
values. As a result of these inabilities, she becomes a mere shadow of her parents, and is
driven to some pathetic deceptions to protect herself from the realisation that her values
are questionable or that her life has been empty or wasted. The novel is a criticism of a
whole social class and of the parents ideal of family life, since their trying to adhere to the
ideal of the holy family suffocates and sterilizes the child. Harriett does not become a
finer person as a result of her self-sacrifice. Her giving up Robin is destructive both for her
and for the other people involved, and the ideal of self-sacrifice is viewed as the
mechanism whereby Harriett is crushed both as a woman and as a human being.
Loss of Innocence in Elizabeth Bowens Novels: Tragedy or a Step to Maturity?
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Maria Rodina (Lomonosov University, Moscow)
The paper deals with the process of growing up understood as loss of innocence in the
novels by the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899 1973). The fact of becoming
mature and giving up childhood dreams and illusions is often quite a painful experience
for Bowens young characters. The loss of innocence is a wide abstract notion which
includes in different cases other various forms of loss such as loss of identity, people,
beliefs, values, places, etc. The presentation covers the following novels by Elizabeth
Bowen: The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), The House in Paris (1935), The
Death of the Heart (1938). The characters under consideration are children, teenagers or
young people who suddenly face the realities of the adult world and have to react. The
question is whether this loss as it is portrayed by the writer is negative or positive. On the
one hand, it may be seen as a shaking and tragic experience causing the death of the
heart (as one of Bowens novels is called) and transforming a young and beautiful soul
into a corrupted and evil one. On the other hand, one can see it as a natural process of
becoming older and wiser.

A Novel without a Hero Is It a Loss?
Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum)
William Thackeray's Vanity Fair reached its original readership in the form of a serialised
novel published in Punch magazine in 1847-48. It was directed to readers who lived about
one generation removed from the time of the story the Napoleonic Wars. While the
spatio-temporal setting, which includes the Battle of Waterloo, seems well-suited for a
representation of a heroic central character the subtitle already announced the lack of
such a protagonist.
The first question is after the reasons for this negation. The author's preference for
portrayals of several female characters is obvious. The antagonists Becky Sharp and
Amelia Sedley are not exhibited as 'black and white', and the panoramic view of society
contributes to blocking the emergence of a heroic protagonist.
Second, the effects. What does the absence of a hero/ine do to the novelistic
representation? I wish to argue that the 'disappearance of the hero/ine' reveals itself as an
integral part of Thackeray's assessed intention to 'unscrew the old framework of society',
including a literary and reading culture which stressed the individual. Moreover, the
satirical extradiegetic third-person narrator not only exposes human weaknesses, thereby
preventing the heroic, but has also gained an opportunity for frequent metafictional
comments, which subvert the building of reader illusion.

Closing Statement (Co-Convenors)

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S31. Regional and World Literatures: National Roots and Transnational Routes in
Scottish Literature and Culture from the 18th Century to Our Age
Co-conveners:
Gioia Angeletti (University of Parma, Italy)
Bashabi Fraser (Edinburgh Napier University, UK)

Transnational, Transcultural Blair in Spain
Mara Eugenia Perojo-Arronte, University of Valladolid, Spain

Hugh Blair was one of the first Scottish men of letters to acquire a wide popularity abroad,
mainly through his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Together with the ossianic
compositions, in whose popularisation Blair himself had a direct hand, and which were
also promoted in the Lectures, the latter were instrumental for giving Scotland a cultural
and literary resonance all over Europe. However, both the Lectures and their abridgments
also became important vehicles for a wide dissemination of English literary works which
were seminal for the transition from French cultural dominance to Anglophilia in early
European Romanticism. At the same time, Blairs work underwent a singular
nationalization process in the translation practice for its adaptation to the new national
contexts, thus raising issues of national identity and controversial alignments. A Spanish
version of the Lectures and an abridgment were published in Spain at a crucial time for the
shift in the cultural paradigm, giving way to a harsh controversy that acquired a political
dimension. The aim of this paper is to explore the centrality of Blairs work and its protean
nature in this transcultural and transnational process as it happened in Spain at the turn of
the eighteenth century.

Staging Contemporary Identities. Repertoire of the National Theatre of Scotland
through the Prism of Multimodal Discourse Analysis
Paula Sledzinska, University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Since its inaugural performances in 2006, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) has
occupied a significant position in Scotlands cultural landscape. Through its innovative
structure of a touring theatre without walls, the company has challenged popular
perceptions of national theatres as elitist monuments of national culture. The NTSs
innovative take on its national format is nevertheless most fully expressed in its literary
and musical repertoire which defies essentialist identity categorisations. This paper
explores the NTSs discursive treatment of Scottish identities their contemporary
character and relevance in the broader context of the national and trans-national
imagining. It is particularly preoccupied with the multicultural and multilingual reality of
Scotlands urban centres largely shaped by powerful waves of intra- and inter-national
migrations. Drawing on Gunther Kresss and Theo van Leeuwens developments in
multimodal discourse analysis, I explore literary and musical discourses proposed in the
NTSs repertoire. Focusing on one of NTSs most successful musical plays, Glasgow Girls
(2012, 2013, 2014), I argue that the company confidently rejects old boundaries, national
tales and iconographies, proposing a bold take on the global circumstances, influencing the
formation of Scottish identities today.

The Sense of (Un)Belonging: David Greigs (Un?)Scottishness in Pyrenees and
Damascus
Maria Elena Capitani, University of Parma, Italy

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David Greigs biographical journey and theatrical trajectory blend his Scottish roots with
wider routes. Born in Edinburgh in 1969, he was raised in Nigeria. After graduating from
Bristol University, Greig felt that he had to settle permanently in Scotland in order to
become a writer, thus stressing how roots are crucial to the textualisation and creative
(re)negotiation of identity. Scotland as well as the fluid notion of Scottishness can be
defined as a present absence pervading Greigs drama. Focusing on Pyrenees (2005) and
Damascus (2007), two plays in which Scotland exists exclusively in absentia and/or in
relation to the Other, this paper explores Greigs linguistic and cultural geographies of
(trans)national identity. Set in non-places outside Scottish borders (two hotels located in
the South of France and in Syria, respectively), these plays offer a globalised version of
Caledonian culture and identity, made up of clichs and frequently subsumed by
Britishness. Permeable, multifaceted, protean and (un)written sous rature, Greigs Scotland
functions, in David Patties words, as the silent partner in a never-to-be-completed
conversation; as though the country has no substance in itself, but acquires meaning only
through a process of continual re-engagement

Indo-Scottish Connections in the Cosmopolitan Historical Novel: the Case of Amitav
Ghoshs Ibis Trilogy
Elena Spandri, Universit di Siena
In attempting to move beyond a competitive model of comparison between centre and
margin, European and non-European cultures, recent Postcolonialism has increasingly
committed to notions of differentiated modernities, as well as on the power of critical,
rather than imitative, recontextualizations of Western historical and philosophical
tradition [see Appadurai 1996, Chakrabarty 2000, Gankoar 2001, Damrosch 2014]. One of
the discursive sites that has most conveniently lent itself to such significant adaptations is
the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which championed an advanced and pluralistic
idea of modernity by locating it at the core of modern experience heterogeneous
temporalities and multiple geo-politics. The paper will focus on the fictionalized use of the
Scottish Enlightenment social and economic thought in Amitav Ghoshs historical trilogy,
with specific focus on River of Smoke (2011). In attempting to build an inclusive and non-
hegemonic history of the 19th century Opium Wars, Ghosh revives both the methods of
conjectural history and the intellectual implications of the stadial theory, and upholds a
discourse on empire that is underpinned by Adam Smiths notion of commercial
cosmopolis. The paper will examine the wide-ranging narrative solutions and ideological
scope of Ghoshs revisiting, so as to shed light on one of the contemporary artistic and
intellectual sites in which Scottish Enlightenment culture still proves relevant and
inspiring for an accurate and sympathetic understanding of the trajectories of both world
history and world literature.

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S32.The Sublime Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of the Sublime in British Literature
since the 18th Century

In the words of J.B. Twitchell, the sublime has always been a complicated and ambiguous
category. Nevertheless, a tension between the knowable, familiar world and the constant
pressure of the unknown, the incomprehensible and uncontrollable, analysed in Edmund
Burkes influential study, remains a significant attribute of the sublime. The view of the
sublime as a loss of a meaningful relation between words and the intensity of individual
experience of reality (reflected in particular rhetorical devices) permeates aesthetics from
Romanticism to postmodern art. The seminar is concerned especially with the eighteenth
to nineteenth centuries (the Gothic, Romantic and Victorian traditions) but also with their
influence on modern literature. Aesthetical discussions (Burkean and Wordsworthean,
Kantian, poststructuralist) are welcome as well.

Co-convenors: Eva Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly University, Eger, Hungary and Kamila
Vrankova, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic

Transgressing the Boundaries of Reason: Burkes Poetic (Miltonic) Reading of the
Sublime
Eva Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly University, Eger, Hungary
In the 18th century, the aesthetic quality of the sublime was discussed and thematised by
varied authors who focused on the relation between the human and the divine,
emphasising the creative power of imagination in the aisthesis of the sublime experience. It
seems that the interpretation of the sublime displays the limits of the human mind, while
also speaking of the possibility of transgressing those limits either in the imaginative
functioning or the bodily experience. In my paper, after a thorough introduction, I focus on
Edmund Burkes A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. Although the Lockean clear and distinct ideas greatly influenced Burke in his
philosophical argumentation, John Miltons poetic impact is emphatically displayed in the
dark and obscure rhetoric of the work. Discussing the Miltonian obscurity, Burke is able
to provide a complex sense not only to the concept but also to the self since he lays special
emphasis on the importance of writing the self and readingthe writing and the reading
self.

Defying the Male Sublime: Mary Shelleys Approach to the Sublime in the Novels
Frankenstein and Lodore
Antonella Braida, Universit de Lorraine, Nancy, France

Since Jonathan Bates seminal monograph Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991), critics
have accepted and encouraged ecological readings of British Romantic writers and poets,
including Mary Shelley. This paper intends to show that her approach to nature in her
fiction is intrinsically entangled with the debate on the sublime. Thus in Frankenstein,
Clervals Wordsworthean poetry of nature is contrasted with Frankensteins scientific
approach to extreme natural phenomena like storms, often associated with the sublime. In
Lodore, male characters feel challenged by the natural world into rejecting their own
systems of values in favour of a return to Jean-Jacques Rousseaus state of nature beyond
and before culture and property. Female characters, on the other hand, are invited to
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follow Cornelias hard-learnt philosophy that nature is the refuge and home for women
(Lodore, pp. 442-3).8
The paper will illustrate the interplay between Mary Shelleys proto-ecological sensibility
with the prevailing aesthetic discourse of the sublime in the novels Frankenstein and
Lodore.

From Rhetoric to Imagination and Terror: John Dennis and the Revelations of the
Sublime in Early 18th-Century British Literary Aesthetics
Zoltn Cora, University of Szeged, Hungary

The presentation examines the literary aesthetic interpretation of the sublime by John
Dennis, and how he managed to widen its originally rhetorical category. The English critic
elevated terror and religious passion (the idea of God and Enthusiastick Terror) as primary
sources of the sublime, while exploring the distinct characteristics and excessive depth of
the relations and reactions of senses and emotions. Although as a neoclassicist, Dennis
emphasised rhetorical efficiency in carrying out the sublime effect, yet he also presented
the neat intricacy human sensibility and psychology might yield to the aesthetics of the
sublime. The reinterpretation of Longinus Peri hypsous reinvigorated French and British
classicist literary debates. Within this controversy the aesthetic theory of Dennis holds a
similar proposition as reinterpreted later in Burkes and Kants theories: a scheme which
serves as a representation of the unity of terror, astonishment and joy on a deeper, half-
subconscious level (sub-limen). In this reflective and affective aesthetic interpretation the
reality of the sub-limen cannot be perceived directly; hence, an invention of the reality of
the sublime becomes possible in the human mind, which opens up a vista for gaining an
aesthetic though valid knowledge of the world, through the terroristic aspect of sublimity.

Towards a Postcolonial Aesthetics: The Postcolonial Sublime in Salman Rushdies
novel Midnights Children
Christin Hoene, The University of Potsdam, Germany

There has recently been a surge in critical interest in the overlap between aesthetic theory
and postcolonial studies. In 2014, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing published an
interview with Robert Young on that topic and, a year later, an article by Bill Ashcroft. In
that article, Ashcroft argues for reclaiming aesthetic theory in the context of postcolonial
art, arguing that it produces an aesthetic engagement between producer and consumer
which allows for a cross-cultural engagement.
Y
et, a critically comprehensive category of postcolonial aesthetics still remains to be
developed. My presentation on the postcolonial sublime in Salman Rushdies novel
Midnights Children is a step in that direction. Analysing the sublime in the novel in
reference to both Kant and Lyotard, I advance the category of the postcolonial sublime,
which in the text acts as an aesthetic device to present the unpresentable and which thus
allows the protagonist to provide testimony of both his personal experience in a newly
postcolonial India and of the country itself. Also, and more broadly, I want to map out the
possibilities that aesthetic categories such as the sublime offer us to better negotiate the
political dimension of aesthetic theory in a postcolonial context.

8 Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. by Lisa Vargo, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997.
173
Sage, Hero, Ironist: Thomas Carlyles Complex Engagement with the Sublime and
the Ironic
Nataliya Novikova, Moscow Lomonosov State University, Russia

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the debate about the literary sublime by bringing it
into focus together with its seeming antagonist, irony. While the one is associated with the
sweeping powers of transformative experience and the other is concerned with the ability
to see shrewdly through any kind of pathos, both seek to enlarge the boundaries of
individual consciousness at the same time verging on the brink of self-destruction. The
same paradox underlies their controversial relations with language since both the ironic
and the sublime in rhetoric point to the deficiency and/or excess of verbal expression.
Departing from certain points made in theoretic discussions (e.g. Booth 1974, Shaw 2006),
the primary concern of the paper is to look at Thomas Carlyle as an outstanding example
of double engagement with the ironic and the sublime discourse. Special attention will be
given to a rich interplay of prophetic, visionary, grotesque and satirical figures in Sartor
Resartus and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.

The Gothic, Romantic and Victorian tradition with respect to the poetics of the
sublime. The Space of Transylvania and Victorian London in Bram Stokers Dracula
Alice Sukdolov, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic

In my presentation I would like to analyze the perception and construction of space in
Bram Stokers most famous novel. The first setting, Transylvanian forests surrounding
Draculas castle, can be understood as a form of sublime space with respect to the Gothic
atmosphere of the unknown, terrifying and beautiful. In this respect Edmund Burkes
study can be used in my analysis. As for the theoretical background, I would like to use
Deleuze and Guattaris categories of defining space (i.e. the notion of the smooth and
striated space) to trace the basic intertwining of the two categories. The general notion of
space in Dracula can be understood as the space which becomes smooth with the presence
of the Gothic aspect, presence of the Other, unknown sublime and perversely beautiful. My
presentation would further explore the topic of the sublime space of the sea which appears
in Dracula before his ship reaches the English shore. However, the question of the space
sublimity of the English soil and especially the city of London remains unanswered.

H. G. Wellss Scientific Romances and the Late-Victorian Urban Sublime
Christophe Den Tandt, Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

This paper interprets Herbert George Wellss early science-fiction novels as instances of
the late-Victorian urban sublime. The argument suggests that Wellss works bring into
play two components of the rhetoric of urban sublimitythe oceanic and the gothic
sublime. Wellss vision of the present and future indeed depicts cities either as boundless
fields defying representation or as breeding grounds for evolutionary monsters. The paper
examines two issues raised by Wellss use of this urban idiom. First, it attempts to situate
Wells within a specifically Victorian tradition. This requires charting the course of the
urban sublime through the evolution of Victorian social fiction. It also implies defining
Wellss status within the sketchily defined movement of British literary naturalism as well
as within the discourse of the Victorian social sciences. Secondly, the paper evaluates the
174
impact of Wellss rhetoric of sublimity on the authors politics. One wonders indeed how
this urban idiom plays with regard to Wellss elitist brand of socialism. Finally, the paper
highlights to what extent the urban sublime could serve as a transitional stage between
the romantic and the postmodern sublime, and to what extent early science fiction
contributed to this evolution.

The Ethical Aspects of the Sublime in Modern English Fantasy (Rowling, Pullman,
Higgins)
Kamila Vrankova, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic

The theme of the paper is inspired by the fact that the transformations of the aesthetic
category of the sublime, as defined by various scholars in different cultural and
philosophical contexts, involve a thorough concern with an ethical aspect of the sublime
experience. Examples can be found in Longinus, Dennis, Burke, Kant, or in Lyotard. In my
paper, particular aspects of the sublime are explored in the connection with several texts
of modern English fantasy fiction for young-adult readers. The interpretation of these
texts attempts to show that modern fantasy literature revives the sublime both as an
aesthetic concept and as an ambiguous, intense experience. The links are searched
between J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series and the Burkean concept of terror, between
Philip Pullmans trilogy His Dark Materials and the Kantian idea of imagination, between
Fiona Higginss Black Book of Secrets and Lyotards emphasis on the unknown and the
unspeakable. The concern with the child hero (and the child reader) is observed with
respect to the theme of tension between the individuals limited physical capacities and
the overwhelming (and possibly destructive) experience of vastness and power.

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S33. Peripatetic Gothic

The chest in the attic: Jealousy and Revenge in The Romance of Certain Old Clothes
Michela Vanon Alliata

It is now a well-established fact that Henry Jamess Gothic or supernatural fiction in
general, from The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, his earliest ghost story (1868), to The
Jolly Corner (1908), his last, far from representing a lesser or peripheral form of writing, is
integral to the Jamesian canon, connected as it is to the great dynamic forces which play
through his work in its entirety.
A key figure of 19th-century literary realism, an unusual and unanchored American who
enjoyed a restless, peripatetic upbringing and translatlantic lifestyle, James throughout his
career wrote eighteen tales that deploy either explicitely or implicity images of the ghostly.
Given Jamess disturbing explorations of the dark side of human nature, his recurrent
exploration of the disquieting discrepancy between social appearances and hidden
personal realities, it is no surprise that even in his realist major novels metaphors and
tropes drawn from the Gothic abound. Central to much of Jamess fiction are not only
renunciatory gestures, scruples of consciousness, advances and retreats, but silent wars
between people who hate where they pretend to love, who devour where they feign to
give, and who negate where they seem to help.
Written while he was in Cambridge where, as he remarked to his brother William, life
was about as lively as the inner sepulchre, The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, despite
the initial light tone of a comedy of manners, is a sharp-edged anatomy of jealousy,
rapacity and bitter rivalry over love between two sisters with a spectacularly Gothic
closure in which retributive justice is finally dealt. Though at the time James was only
twenty-five, this eerie tale already shows an author of great imaginative scope, vigilant in
his methods, dark in his concerns.

Let the Peripatetic Vampire Child In: Gothic Permutations
Maria Holmgren Troy
The figure of the vampire is a peculiarly transnational phenomenon as it moves,
sometimes with supernatural speed, between different countries, parts of the world, and
media. As the title indicates, my point of departure for discussing the permutations and
functions of the vampire child in different settings will be John Ajvide Lindqvists
bestselling Swedish vampire novel Lt den rtte komma in [Let the Right One In] (2004),
which was translated into English in 2007. The Swedish film adaptation of the novel,
directed by Tomas Alfredson and with the screenplay written by Lindqvist, was first
screened in 2008; it reached an international as well as national audience to great acclaim.
In 2010, Matt Reevess American film adaptation, or remake, was released under the title
Let Me In. In my presentation, I will not only comment on the Swedish vampire child Elis
movement between different media and translation into the vampire girl Abby in the
American film, but also suggest that Eli might have a forerunner in Thai-American S. P.
Somtows eternally twelve-year-old vampire Timmy in Vampire Junction (1984), which has
been considered a splatterpunk novel.

Maria Holmgren Troy is Professor of English at Karlstad University, Sweden. She is the
Director of the Culture Studies Group (KuFo) at this university. Much of her research has
dealt with memory and trauma in literature. Other areas of research interest are 19th-
century American fairy tales and contemporary gothic fiction. Together with Elizabeth
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Kella and Helena Wahlstrm, she is the author of Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship, and
Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (Manchester UP, 2014). Troys other
publications include Space, Haunting, Discourse (co-ed. 2008); Collective Traumas:
Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-Century Europe (co-ed. 2007); Memory, Haunting,
Discourse (co-ed. 2005); In the First Person and in the House: The House Chronotope in Four
Works by American Women Writers (1999); and essays on works by, among others, Octavia
Butler, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Pat Barker.

Deep calls unto Deep: Some Reflections on Nautical Gothic
David Punter
The theme of nautical, or maritime, Gothic is currently attracting a great deal of attention.
There are many writers cited, from Melville through Conrad to William Hope Hodgson.
Matters being thought about include the terror of the sea; the persistence of shipboard
superstitions; the oceans as representative of fate; the profession of the sea as the widow-
maker; histories of the pirate; the practice of marooning; and so forth.

In this paper, I want to centre these discussions around a novel which was immensely
popular in its time, but although it became a very well-regarded film (starring Jack
Hawkins) has now largely faded from view: Nicholas Monsarrats The Cruel Sea (1951).
Here, against a backdrop compounded partly of storm and gale and partly of fears of
enemy attack, men survive (or in many cases do not) experiences of estrangement, of exile
from home, in the most harsh of environments. Monsarrat has constant recourse to
Coleridges Ancient Mariner, which redoubles the sense of the curse which hangs above
all seamen as they navigate their way across impossible, unthinkable depths; he also
assembles a group of anecdotes, typical of which is the episode of the Dead Helmsman,
that constitute the terrifying coordinates of memory, as it is constantly reinvented in the
absence of landmarks. Here is the peripatetic in the sense of a journey which may never
reach an ending, or only one in which we are surrounded by past shipmates whose graves
will never be marked.

Gothic Horror Fiction Elements in Pedro Almodovars The Skin I Live In (2012)
Jelena Pataki, University of Osijek

The aim of this paper is to explore the elements of Gothic fiction in the critically acclaimed
Spanish director Pedro Almodovars 2012 film The Skin I Live In. The film is often viewed
as a distinctly modern piece of art in that it dwells on contemporary issues referring to
complex ethical and moral dilemmas connected to genetic engineering and the
disintegration of an individuals identity. However, despite the undeniable presence of the
said issues, the idea is to show that the films structure is in fact solidly built on a much
older, Gothic fiction matrix featuring many of its well-established, easily discernible motifs
and conventions. Starting with the classic Gothic topos a helpless heroine set in an eerie,
claustrophobic architecture and a grotesque atmosphere evoking a feeling of imminent
doom the paper will consider the films portrayal of concepts such as death, doubles and
dreams in order to show that the work of the Spanish director bears many similarities to
the canonical Anglophone genre. Inevitably, the paper will explore the distinct parallel
between Mary Shelleys seminal Gothic fiction text, Frankenstein, and the contemporary
counterparts of its mad scientist and his Creation embodied by Almodovars Dr. Robert
Ledgard and his Vera.
177

Jelena Pataki holds a degree in English and Croatian language and literature as well as in
translation. She is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Cultural Identity Studies at
the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, and a member of the
Croatian Association for the Study of English (CASE). Her field of study is Anglophone
literature and culture, with a special emphasis on fantasy and dystopian literature. She
also works as a freelance translator. Her published translations include Croatian
translations of Anne O'Briens The Virgin Widow (Nevina udovica, Zagreb: 24sata, May
2015) and Maya Bankss Shades of Gray (Nijanse sive, Velika Gorica: Stilus knjiga d.o.o
(24sata), July 2015), Pam Jenoff's The Winter Guest (Zimski gost, Zagreb: 24sata,
November 2015), Karen Swan's Christmas in the Snow (Boi u snijegu, Zagreb: 24sata,
December 2015).

Mary Shelleys Gothic rambles in European countries and languages
MARIA PARRINO

Some contemporary critics maintain that we need to challenge the tyranny of the Anglo-
American narratives of the Gothic and show the importance of translation and European
writing in the development of the Gothic novel (Horner, 2002). There are two questions
which emerge from such a consideration: first, is the idea of Europe the natural result of
geographical boundaries or is it a geopolitical and economic outcome, a construction in
theory? (Dainotto, 2007). The second question concerns the issue of translation at large,
not only in terms of language but also in terms of migration of motives, themes and
imagery. By focusing on the issues of translation and migration it is possible to shift from a
nation-centered to a peripatetic perspective of Gothic novels and novelists. This paper
examines the issues of writing and translating in Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein,
unarguably one of the Gothic novels which has been most translated across languages and
genres. By analyzing Mary Shelleys readings of European literature and her personal
rambles in European countries, this study aims to trace contaminations between her life
and her literary production. How did Mary Shelleys readings influence her writings
(Mathilda from Alfieris Mirra; Valperga from Machiavellis Life of Castruccio Castracani)?
Did she who studied Latin, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian ever question the issue of
translation? Why did she offer to translate into English Alessandro Manzonis novel I
Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)? How did she who made the most famous Gothic creature a
multilingual traveller narrate her own migration into foreign countries and foreign
languages? The study suggests the extraordinary and unsettling power of crossing
geographical, language and literary borders.

Three is a Crowd? Poland and the Anglo-French Transfusion of the Gothic
Agnieszka Lowczanin
The import of terror, a two-way, fast-flowing literary traffic between England and France
in the eighteenth century, greatly shaped what we now recognise as Gothic fiction
(Wright). Partly, it can be seen as an expression of Gallo- and Anglomania, mutual aesthetic
fascinations which, as the century neared its end, became affected by political upheavals
and patriotic propaganda and evolved into mutual phobias. However, for the aristocracies
of Central and Eastern Europe, Gallomania was often a bridge to Anglomania, and in many
aspects the two remained complementary (Butterwick, 56). This presentation will focus
on the Polish fascination with England, fostered by the last Polish king, the Anglophile
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Stanislaw August, and on the importance of the French detour in the import of Gothic to
the territory of Poland at the time of the genres inception.

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S34: The Fiction of Victorian Masculinities and Femininities

The Bourgeois Male as the Product of Patriarchy in Charlotte Bronts Shirley
Mehmet Akif Balkaya, Aksaray University, Turkey
The aim of this paper is to analyse the conditions of repressed women and the differences
in gender through the portrayal of the hierarchical microcosm with prejudices and
conflicts derived from gender discrimination and classism as represented in Charlotte
Brontes novel Shirley (1849). Victorian Era is represented as a male-dominated society in
which women are neglected and degraded in such a way as even the writer Charlotte
Bronte could publish her novel under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Bronte presents the
status of women who are oppressed and silenced, and regarded as incompetent by the
bourgeois male through the characters Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. This paper
also aims to discuss the concept of marriage as putting forth that marriage was regarded
as an economic integration in the Victorian Period. For instance, the factory owner Robert
Moore associates marriage with economics as marriage is degraded to a commodity which
could be bought and sold between the same class members Although Shirley advocates the
development of women, she ascribes patriarchal attributes to women who are repressed
by the prejudiced social rules which prohibit women from going to universtiy or choose
their occupations. It will be concluded that Victorian man is prejudiced and narrow-
minded as a product of the patriarchal values.

Fallen Women and Prostitutes in Neo-Victorian Fiction Revising Her-story
Eliana Ionoaia, University of Bucharest, Romania
Neo-Victorian novels offer a revised her-story for silenced female characters Sarah
Waters Tipping the Velvet discusses lesbianism in the Victorian context as well as
prostitution, while Katy Darbys The Whores Asylum and Michel Fabers The Crimson
Petal and the White focus on the situation of prostitutes. Another avenue of investigation
relates to the life-stories of famous literary fallen, mad women such as Bertha Mason (in
Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea). Finally, John Fowles The French Lieutenants Woman and
Alasdair Grays Poor Things deal with fallen women who are given a voice and the power
to control their destinies, while also touching on the topic of prostitution. This alternative
history moves from the patriarchal perspective of the Victorian Age history to a
narrative empowering of the female characters in Neo-Victorian fiction by means of
revising their life stories. The situation of prostitutes and fallen women is present in
numerous Neo-Victorian writings, as it was missing from their Victorian counterparts.
Victorian writers would have seen the prostitute and the fallen woman as an improper
subject matter for their books, being introduced in the pages of novels only as negative
examples. The opposite is true for Neo-Victorian novels which empower both fallen
women and prostitutes. To a certain extent, however, the Neo-Victorian works still uphold
the dichotomy between the bias against sexualised women and approval for the same
behaviour on the part of males.

The alchemy of writing: George Eliot and The Lifted Veil
Loredana Salis, Universit di Sassari, Italy
Since its first publication, George Eliots dismal novella The Lifted Veil (1859) has received
cursory attention from both critics and Eliot scholars, and where readings of it have been
proposed, they have focussed primarily on the authors aesthetics and concern with
realism, on her sources and interest in mesmerism and phrenology, on her preoccupation
with the achievement of sympathy through literature. Some have examined the role of the
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protagonist, who is often seen as an unreliable narrator, a victim of Victorian sexual bias,
the artist manqu and, at best, a cynic.
While these readings shed a light on a text that is undeniably peculiar, they nevertheless
neglect Eliot s own gender politics and the way she plays with and challenges her readers
assumptions in relation to gender roles. Taking the couple Latimer/Bertha as exemplary of
the writers aim, this paper contends that The Lifted Veil draws the reader into a less
comfortable yet enchanting territory where nothing is predictable and the alchemy of
writing takes place. A deliberately and provocatively disturbing narrative of an outr kind,
the tale testifies Eliots impulse for experimentation, for transgression, and ultimately
dismissal of cultural expectations.

Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh: Woman and Poet Both Complete
Hande Seber, Hacettepe University, Turkey
Realising the lack of an established female poetic tradition, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
took the male poetic tradition as her starting point. She made use of its literary forms and
themes to build for herself and for her poetics a place, and thus to bring to the fore the
female voice which had been silent for centuries in literature through idealisation and
suppression. Her female identity and concerns about her gender were always in the centre
of her poetic vision. Aurora Leigh, which was published in 1856 and marked the climax in
her poetic career is significant within this context as it presents a Victorian womans
determination and struggle to become a poet despite all the restrictive gender roles
imposed on her by the society. Through her fictional character Aurora, who is usually
associated with the poet herself, Elizabeth Barrett Browning mirrors her own poetic
progress and determination, and at the same time presents her concerns about womans
place in life and art. This presentation, therefore, aims to discuss and illustrate Auroras
attempts to question and challenge the fictions of Victorian femininity after she feels
herself [w]oman and artist, either incomplete (II. 4), and her success in reshaping an
identity both as a woman and a poet.

Uncovering Hidden Hands: female factory workers in the early Victorian Novel
Carla Fusco, University of Macerata, Italy
Female workers represent a fundamental contribution to workforce to the extent that it's
true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a lot. However, despite the unfair
exploitation of many women, in factories similar to manslaughter, the latter have been
often neglected and reduced to liminal characters by Victorian novelists. Victorian writers
prefer to focus their attention on men and children workers considering the female ones
as threatening enough to subvert the social order.
An interesting exception of the early Victorian period is represented by the writer
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna whose fiction works as a medium of social criticism. Her most
popular novel is entitled Helen Fleetwood, but she is also the author of the semi-fictional
book, The Wrongs of Women. The latter deals with a reform novel which shows a
controversial view on female working conditions. On one hand she indeed deplores the
inhuman treatment of female labours, but, on the other hand she also argues that female
employment provokes the consequent increase of male unemployment!
My paper aims to investigate the role of Tonnas text and her attempt to alleviate working-
class suffering.

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Margaret Hale of Gaskells North and South Challenging Gender Norms
Gillian Alban, Istanbul Aydin University, Istanbul, Turkey
The restraints hedging nineteenth century women writers in attempting to express
themselves against the expectation of them to be domestic angels, often led to their
writing under pseudonym in order for their writing to be objectively evaluated, and when
the Bront sisters identity was uncovered, their characters were castigated as
outrageously passionate women. In contrast to such trailblazers, Elizabeth Gaskell, still
referred to until recent times as Mrs Gaskell, was seen as a dove by contemporary
patriarchs. But however respectable Gaskell presented herself, as well as Charlotte Bront,
in her biography, Gaskells character of the novel North and South, Margaret Hale,
powerfully challenges contemporary gender norms. She remains outside female
definitions in this novel, in contrast to her cousin Edith, and the mill owner daughter,
Fanny, who, grasping a life of marriage and domesticity, are presented as weak foils in
relation to her. Margaret remains indifferent to contemporary expectations throughout,
returning home to become the mainstay of her effeminate father and her conventional
mother. Assuming full responsibility for her own behaviour causes some confusion during
the riot and subsequently, but she persists in her independence and is adamant that she
will create her own lifestyle after the death of her parental figures, living her life
accountable to a higher moral and intellectual order than readily available through
contemporary expectations.

Cycling Towards Gender Fusion: Women and Bicycles in the Fin-de-Sicle
Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
If the Victorian period was a time when the sexes drew further and further apart, as
Virginia Woolf writes in her novel Orlando, these rigid gender-role divisions between the
two sexes were beginning to dissolve as the nineteenth century was drawing to its close.
Among the various factors that contributed to bringing the two genders closer again was
the cycling boom of the 1890s. Cycling allowed women freedom of physical movement,
demanded a new clothing style, and became directly associated with the womens struggle
for suffrage. Soon, bicycles became associated with the image of the New Woman, the
mannish amazon that was challenging canonical perceptions of masculinities and
femininities in the fin-de-sicle. The aim of this essay is to explore how the introduction of
bicycles revolutionized the fixity of gender roles in Victorian England and how this change
is reflected both in written and pictorial representations of the time.

Instances of Male Domination in the Poetry of G.M. Hopkins
Adrian Radu, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania
As known, Hopkins was a devout religious spirit, possessed in an obsessive way by the
Catholic dogma whose central figure, Jesus Christ, became a pivotal element in very many
of his poems, a cherished finality of the poets symbolism. The figure of Christ becomes
repeatedly crucial, an icon of power having not only cosmic dimensions, but also worldly
and human overtones. For Hopkins, the images of Gods power are also images of beauty
of holy things but also of worldly, common or natural things, which are, after all, Gods
creation, the object of His will. Many of Hopkinss representations of God are placed on
transcendental coordinates, made to echo his love for Christ. The human side appears as
instances of male magnificence in poems such as Harry Ploughman or Felix Randall.
Harry Ploughman is thus a tormenting celebration of masculine beauty with his muscular
torso and limbs and the force that he emanates when ploughing the ground. Felix in Felix
Randal is totally involved with the material world, depicted as he is in the prime of his
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energy, nearly innocent even in his sins, physically outstanding in a crowd of other
muscular labouring men, an almost unspoiled expression of self-possession and ultimate
felicity. The aim of this essay is to discuss such instances of Hopkinss mood of adoration,
in whose centre is a man who might be either a representation of Jesus Christ the toiler or
the human materialisation of Hopkinss concealed homoeroticism.

Subverting Traditional Models while Exploring Womens Sexuality in Not Wisely but
Too Well (1867), by Rhoda Broughton
Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
Man must be pleased, but him to please/ Is womans pleasure: this quotation from
Coventry Patmores highly praised narrative poem significantly entitled The Angel in the
House (1854) perfectly epitomizes the Victorian ideal of womanhood, grounded in
modesty, dedicated submissiveness, and untainted innocence. Respectful daughters,
virtuous wives, and affectionate mothers, Victorian ladies were apparently content to
perform their household duties. Sensation novels, particularly popular among ladies, were
considered rather disturbing by Victorian literary critics since they placed the most
atrocious crimes in the sacred haven of middle and upper-class domesticity. Besides,
unlike Gothic narratives set in a remote past and in faraway countries, they featured
contemporary, realistic settings, alarmingly close to the readers experience. Whats more,
the conventional lady in distress, threatened by the dark villain of the tales of terror, was
frequently replaced by an angel-like, seemingly harmless creature, who was actually the
unexpected executor of savage crimes. This paper sets out to investigate the way Not
Wisely but Too Well, a sensation novel by Rhoda Broughton (Sheridan Le Fanus niece)
successfully undermined the above-mentioned ideal of womanhood, thus creating a
scandal.

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S35. Dickens Society Seminars at ESSE2016: Reading Dickens Differently

Tuesday 23 August, 8:30-10:30: Reading Dickens Wistfully

Gillian Piggott (Portsmouth University)
Dickens and Urban Exploration
As Benjamin puts it, the work of art is always in a state of becoming, and can never be
completed; and, as we know, Dickenss works since their creation have successfully borne
an infinite variety of interpretations, re-readings and critical models.9 What, in such a
context, would it mean to read Dickens differently? The most current response to this
question is to bring technology and contemporary ideas to Dickenss text. The Dickens
Journal Online Project is a fine example of the former, bringing Dickenss works up to the
minute with digital images of the journals editorials and adverts; crowd editing and
participation; a serialised reading project with online blogging and discussion; even the
option for readers to become writers and actors by taking on a novels character and
during the unfolding narrative, Tweeting in a characters voice. But while this might at
first appear to resemble a case of prying an oyster from its shell10 in terms of forcing the
work closer towards us in the present, as in all cases of bringing contemporary ideas to
bear upon the past, there is always a reciprocity at play - the past at the same time haunts
us. After all, serialized reading was at the centre of the DJO project, in that sense the
attempt was made to replicate the original experience of Dickenss audiences in the 19th
century. And by improvising and Tweeting Dickens characters, DJO readers replicate the
same acting technique Dickens used himself to draw his writing closer to the truth about a
character: like the actor he would speak aloud and listen to the characters dialogue in
front of a mirror, make expressions and gesticulations, mould and deliver that character
into the world through performance.
In terms of viewing Dickens through contemporary experience or ideas, what if Dickenss
walking habits, his relationship to the city and his depiction of it were read through the
lens of one of todays urban practices, such as the phenomenon of Urban Exploration, a
project I hope to take up in a forthcoming paper? Does the intensity Dickens craved in his
urban walking practices make him a Professional Infiltrator whose Night Walks and
Uncommercial adventures are intelligible in the light of concepts such as Recreational
Trespass , embodied artistic urban intervention or even the Surrealist drive? 11
Certainly Dickens, as Pinder suggests of urban exploration, seeks to open up the
marvellous buried within the everyday and, along with the Situationists, he valorises
in the city, hidden meanings and associations. (both quotations, Pinder).12 But again, it
seems we cannot escape the past. As UrbEx guru Bradley Garrett makes clear: Urban
explorers, despite their declarations of novelty, owe a great deal to urban provocateurs of
9 Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, (1920), Romantic poetry is a
progressive universal poetryThe Romantic way of writing is still in the process of becoming; indeed, this is
its proper essence that it is eternally coming to be and can never be completed, in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Vol 1, 166-200, (152). CHECK THIS PAGE REFERENCE
10 Benjamin uses the phrase prying an object from its shell in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, in Illuminations, 211-244 (217).
11 Bradley Garrett, Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration, Transactions,
(2013). p. 5. Derive etymology and definition.
12 David Pinder, Old Paris no more: geographies of spectacle and anti-spectacle, Antipode, (2000), 32, 357-
86 (379).
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the past.13 Perhaps the most obvious way of reading Dickens differently, is to see his
works through the eyes of another culture. Yet, even Lebanese students, who found
sentimentality and the melodramatic the most legible and convincing aspects of
Dickenss works, determined that I, as their teacher, should revisit my modernist dismissal
of these aesthetic modes, with a view to learning how the Victorians might have
experienced them. The remainder of the paper will enlarge upon and work through these
issues.

Peter Orford (University of Buckingham), Speculation and Silence Recreating
Dickens by instalment in online projects
There has been a recent spate of online reading projects that have approached Dickens in
instalments, either a month or a week at a time, in accordance with the original serial
publication of his novels. Such endeavours have tried, in reintroducing the gaps between
the plot, to recreate the anticipation and speculation through online discussion; this
element of reader engagement between instalments is a vital, yet frequently overlooked,
aspect of the original success of these books, in which the enforced silence between
instalments generated reader response and discussion to further flesh out the stories and
embed them in the public consciousness. In the case of Dickenss final, unfinished, novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, such speculation remains rife and unstifled without the
closure of Dickens missing instalments. This paper will go on to show how, far from being
a failure, this unintentional openness of Drood affords modern readers the opportunity to
appreciate the effect of a Dickens novel in progress, rather than the arguably false model
of the completed texts.

Francesca Orestano (University of Milan)
Dickens Today: Icon and Antonomasia
The investigation I propose dwells on two modes, distinct and often mixed, of evoking the
great Victorian writer. These occur both in the visual domain (videogames especially) and
in the verbal domain (guides, fiction). To evoke Dickens as icon suggests a visual
representation of his features on the one hand powerful and incisive, fully and
immediately recognizable, but, on the other hand, lacking detail and accuracy, because of
its recourse to a very general and static notion of the writers physical aspect.
The other way of reading Dickens today occurs through the rhetoric device of
antonomasia. This figure of speech provides us with a name the name of a famous person
used as epithet, and ideally containing the whole list of his or her qualities or
characteristics. The name Dickens, not only in videogames but also in recent fiction, is
there to replace, or to carry the weight, of the entire Victorian era, of the capital of the
British Empire, its streets, bridges and slums; Victorian ways of life; social issues; divorce;
prisons; coaches to and from London.
Both as icon and by antonomasia Dickens appears in contexts that profit from his
many and varied prerogatives. In the game Assassin Creed Syndicate, Dickens is part of the
historical trailer, together with other icons of his age, such as Queen Victoria, and other
writers, scientists, inventors, eminent Victorians. While appearing with an immediately
recognizable physique du role, against an immediately recognizable background, both
obtained from period photographs, daguerreotypes, etchings and maps of London during
the 1830s, our writer gets stereotyped and imprisoned within an unchangeable clich. In
13 Urban explorers, despite their declarations of novelty, owe a great deal to urban provocateurs of the past;
urban exploration and infiltration are intimately connected to canonical critical spatial practices, (Garrett
paraphrasing Rendell, ibid.
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addition to this his name, recurring as a magic mantra or litany, is used to suggest a whole
universe of ideas and themes, related to his fiction and journalism, but drastically reduced
by the mechanism of the antonomasia. Today neither his many portraits nor his writings
are part of the popular culture scenario: like his face on a banknote, his iconic presence
adds value to a videogame and his name is enough to tell volumes of stories.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Juliet John, Dickens and Mass Culture
Tabish Khair, A Thing about Thugs
Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: the Victorian Fight against Filth
Gustave Dor, London, a Pilgrimage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LSlmIAB1oM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RPipiC9jHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgK49NnX41c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ZLLocM8Ro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8rI8GXI0Y0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84g9-UQ6C0k

John Jordan (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Is David Copperfield a Chartist novel?
Is David Copperfield a Chartist novel? Although the answer it produces is probably no,
posing the question in this blunt form has the advantage of shifting attention away from
the novels familiar autobiographical elements toward its class politics and the broader
historical context it evokes. My paper for the ESSE Dickens Society seminar sketches the
outlines of an approach to reading Dickenss favourite child differentlyas melodrama
rather than Bildungsroman and as an historical novel directly in the tradition of Walter
Scott. The paper addresses questions of violence, both literal and figurative, and asks why
Mr Dick is so obsessed with King Charles head.

Claire Wood (University of York)
Pictures and pop-ups: narrative play in A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickenss A Christmas Carol (1843) is a wonderfully playful text. Blind-mans buff,
Yes and No, and forfeits are among the games played in the course of the story; buildings
are described as playing at hide-and-seek; and even before his transformation Scrooge
enjoys playing on words. This playfulness also operates at an extradiegetic level: in the
opening pages the narrators jocular digressions and asides invite the reader to reflect
upon gaps between language and meaning (is there anything particularly dead about a
door-nail?) and draw attention to how narrative works (that Marley is dead must be
distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate).
While many adaptations preserve Carols playful humour, Dickenss sportive subversion of
literary conventions rarely translates.
This paper proposes to examine narrative playfulness in A Christmas Carol by
exploring two twenty-first century adaptations: the Classic Comics graphic novel (2008)
and Chuck Fischers pop-up edition (2010). Both retain Dickenss original text, but seek to
engage new audiences by dramatically expanding the visual content. The former replaces
John Leechs eight illustrations with hundreds of full-colour comic panels, while the latter
enables the reader to take control of the story, uncovering scenes from Scrooges past by
lifting concealed panels. How do these media replicate the novellas strange narratological
effects and what new forms of narrative play do they enable.
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Tuesday 23 August, 17:00-19:00: Reading Dickens Earnestly

Leon Litvack (Queens University Belfast)
Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round

In July 2015, a momentous event occurred in Ghent, Belgium: an antiquarian bookseller,
Jeremy Parrott, revealed to a group of scholars the existence of an annotated set of the
First Series of All the Year Round, which featured the names of the authors of the individual
pieces. There was a great deal of excitement about this find, and a flurry of sensational
media coverage. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Parrot remarked:

At first I spotted Percy Fitzgerald, who I knew was a long-time Dickens collaborator. I
thought thats interesting, I wonder if it was by him. . . . Then I saw Henry Morley,
Wilkie Collins, Mrs Linton. . . then the second or third volume I opened had a
Christmas story in it, and looking in the margin of the Christmas story, I thought,
hang on, this isnt just a name, this is Dickenss signature. And that was the oh my
God moment, when I thought this isnt just an annotated set, it is Dickenss own set.

Some months earlier, in May 2015, before the discovery was made public, I (as Principal
Editor of the Dickens Letters Project) was contacted to pronounce on whether the entries
were genuine, and whether or not the handwriting was Dickenss own. The reports which
appeared in the media in July 2015 claimed that the entries were indeed in Dickenss hand,
and that Parrott had discovered a literary Rosetta Stone or Enigma, which once and for
all solved the mystery of who wrote what in Dickenss journal. The result, it was claimed,
would be a large-scale revision of generations of scholarship to accord with what the facts
could now tell us about the 300-400 contributors of some 2500 articles, stories, and
poems.
A more careful consideration of the facts reveals that the situation is far more
complex than what the initial, sensationalist reporting was able to convey. For example,
graphological analysis of the marginalia demonstrates that the entries are clearly not in
Dickenss hand. Also, some of the names of the contributors are misspelled, perhaps
indicating a second-hand familiarity with the personalities concerned. This illustrated
paper, based in part on my personal scrutiny of the annotated set, will tease out what can
be incontestably demonstrated about this case, and will reflect on the issues the find raises
for Victorian periodicals research. It will also demonstrate that simply knowing the
identity of a particular author does not resolve all the issues; for instance, there were
many cases in which Dickens himself, and members of his staff, contributed significantly to
the revision and improvement of pieces from the raw state in which they were received
from the individual authors. This paper will examine such issues, and will demonstrate
that the added information contained in the annotated set (which appears, by all accounts,
to be genuine) opens up rather than closes down further possibilities for research on
All the Year Round.

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Marginal annotation identifying Charles Dickens as the author of

To Be Taken for Life, chapter 8 of Dr. Marigolds Prescriptions,
All the Year Round 14 Extra Christmas Number (7 December 1865): 46.
By kind permission of Paul Lewis.

Authenticated Dickens signatures from letters to W.D. Morgan, dated
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6 February 1861 (top) and 19 March 1868 (bottom).
By kind permission of Robin Morgan Lloyd.

David Paroissien (University of Buckingham)
Charles Dickens, Thomas Babington Macaulay and the Politics of Reform

Macaulays speech in the Commons on the evening of 2 March 1831, writes Boyd Hilton,
served as a turning point in the parliamentary debates about reform. Delivered the day
after Lord John Russell had moved leave to bring in a bill to amend the representation of
the people in England and Wales, Macaulay rose to address the House about the case put
by the opponents of reform. On this and on five subsequent tense occasions between 2
March 1831 and 28 February 1832, he dissected their objections at length with forensic
precision. No extant evidence documents Dickenss attendance in the press gallery on
those dates as a reporter for The Mirror of Parliament; nevertheless, I will argue, Dickens
owes an indelible debt to Macaulay, whose reform rhetoric, tropes and arguments appear
to have influenced the formation of the novelists own ideas about the past, the role of
history writing and the ability of fiction to add something to the popular understanding of
past events. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, read in the context of Macaulays
essays and speeches, acquire a resonance and validity they are often denied as
contributions to historical discourse. By the same token, Macaulays 1828 essay History
and other writings shed light on Dickenss familiarity with the challenges of
historiography, an awareness that surfaces explicitly in Barnaby Rudge and elsewhere in
Dickenss fiction.

Chris Louttit (Radboud University)
Boz without Phiz: Reading Dickens with Different Illustrations

Jane Rabb Cohen, Michael Steig, Robert L. Patten and a great number of other scholars
have made us aware that to appreciate Boz fully we must read him alongside Phiz. As a
result, as Malcolm Andrews has claimed, Dickenss novels, more than any of his
contemporaries, have come to seem incomplete without their original illustrations (97).
Critics have been slower, however, to explore the numerous illustrated editions completed
after Dickenss death; as Robert Patten notes there have been no comprehensive
assessments of the illustrations ... to reprints or editions published after Dickenss death
(47). In this paper, Ill begin by explaining why we need to recover these neglected
posthumous illustrated editions, and reflect on how they make us see Dickens differently.
More speculatively, Ill then begin to explore the theoretical benefits and challenges of
drawing further attention to this forgotten archive of Dickens illustrations that could arise
through the creation of a digital scholarly edition. My suggestions for this hypothetical
edition will frame it in relation to the achievements of existing illustration-focused
resources such as Visual Haggard and The Illustration Archive; I will also discuss how a
Dickens resource might pose different challenges to those faced by digital editions such as
these.

Andrews, Malcolm. Illustrations. A Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. David Paroissien.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 97-125.
Patten, Robert L. Publishing in Parts. Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies. Eds.
John Bowen and Robert L. Patten. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 11-47.

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Lillian Nayder (Bates College),
A Tale of Two Brothers: Reading Differently Dickenss French Revolution

An account of the French Revolution of libert, galit, fraternit and of the uncanny
twinning of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, A Tale of Two Cities is a story of
brotherhood in various forms; it is also a novel written in the wake of the final breakdown
of relations between Charles Dickens and his next youngest brother Frederick (1820-
1868), eight years his junior. Reading Dickens differently in the context of the novelists
own fraternal dynamics my paper reconceives the meaning of power, rebellion, freedom
and self-sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities, approaching that work in the context of the
insurrection of the novelists brother in the late 1850s. With Fred representing himself
as an oppressed figure subject to Dickenss lash in his letters from the time and the
novelist depicting Fred as a rebel lacking any respect for authority, this tale of two
brothers illuminates the well-known novel in a new way. Often seen as a double of his
famous older brother so much like him, in fact, that Earth will not hold us both, as the
novelist comically put it in the 1840s14 Fred plays the part of Carton to Dickenss Darnay
in the novelists reconstruction. Imaginatively recasting their relationship in his fiction,
and in a way that allows him to bring Freds rebellion to a heroic and ennobling end,
Dickens constructs a wish-fulfillment fantasy that severs his blood tie with Fred their
doubling now an uncanny and unaccountable resemblance while also redeeming his
feckless and insubordinate twin. He paradoxically salvages his idea of his brother in
disavowing their relation. My paper enables us to read Dickens differently not only by
approaching A Tale of Two Cities in an new and illuminating context, drawing on
unpublished and little-known sources in the process, but also by enabling us to consider
the famous novelist through the eyes of a younger brother.

Wednesday 24 August 14:00-16:00: Reading Dickens Generously

Michael Hollington (University of Kent at Canterbury)
Reading Dickens through D.H.Lawrence (with a focus on The Lost Girl)

This presentation is the first draft of part of a larger project with the provisional title
Dickens among the Modernists, which aims to document and explain the resurgence of
Dickenss reputation in the early part of the 20th century through the examination of
particular readings of his work by significant writers and intellectuals, particularly in its
initial stages, those associated with Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire during the First
World War and the years immediately following it,

D. H. Lawrence is one of these Garsington writers. The role of another in this
resurgence, that of his quondam friend and associate Katherine Mansfield, is now quite
well established, the pioneering work of Edward Wagenknecht having been reinforced in
recent years by Angela Smith, Holly Furneaux and myself. Thus it is appropriate to begin
by noticing Lawrences perception that her work was inspired by Dickens. According to
Frieda Lawrence in a letter to John Middleton Murry, Lawrence said Katherine had a lot in
common with Dickens, you know when the kettle is so alive on the fire and things seem to
take on such significance. The least one can say about this remark is that Lawrence had
read Dickens with sufficient attention to be able accurately to identify a cardinal feature of
his work and identify its traces in that of a Modernist contemporary.
14 Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 volumes, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and
Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 196502002), 4:192.
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The extent of Lawrences familiarity with Dickens can in fact be documented by numerous
references in his letters and elsewhere to which I shall draw attention Jesse Chamberss
testimony that as young people they read Dickens together and thought David Copperfield
pre-eminent, the reference to Great Expectations in a letter of 1917 or to A Tale of Two
Cities in The Lost Girl, etc., etc. Yet the overall picture is riddled with ambivalence. In one
characteristic letter of 1913 Lawrence first retracts a previous objection to Dickenss
characters I am jealous of them, he says here - but then goes on to say, but there is
something fundamental about him that I dislike.

The obvious distinction to make here is between jealousy of the art and dislike of
the man, whom he describes disparagingly as a mid-Victorian. Thus the case of Lawrence
as a representative Modernist reader of Dickens is particularly instructive because he can
be seen to be wrestling with that antipathy towards eminent Victorians characteristic of
his generation, but also as someone willing to admire some aspects of the writers
achievements, and (I hope to show) to draw inspiration from them. In this respect
Catherine Carswells testimony is precious: Nobody who ever heard him describe the
scenes and persons of his boyhood, or watched him recreate with uncanny mimicry the
talk, the movements and the eccentricities of the men and women among whom he grew
up, can doubt but that Lawrence, if he had liked, might have been a new kind of Dickens of
the Midlands. Following others, and with particular reference to the novel The Lost Girl
and the short story The Rocking-Horse winner, I shall argue that Lawrence did in many
respects choose to become a new kind of Dickens, a modernist one who did the police in
different voices - as well as other creatures animate and inanimate, and perhaps above all
children.

Charlotte Wadoux (University of Kent & Universit de Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Rewriting as rereading Dickens in Lynn Shepherds Tom-All-Alones

Dickens seems to be a privileged hypotext for Neo-Victorian writers who present us with
new outlooks on the Dickensian canon, either as counter narratives or as filiations
(Thieme, 2001). The case of Lynn Shepherds 2012 novel, Tom-All-Alones, follows from
Dickens as it deploys one aspect of Bleak House: the detective genre.
This paper studies the hermeneutic strategies developed by Shepherd to impose on her
reader a new understanding of Dickens. She magnifies the subgenre of the detective
subplot in Dickens, turning her reader into a detective. An equivalence is set between the
figure of the detective and that of the reader, the first being detective as reader and the
second reader as detective (Naugrette, 2015): Charles Maddox, a young detective, reads
the signs that will lead him to the solution of his case, while the reader is looking for
intertextual traces (Ginzburg, 1980). As such, the experience of reading becomes a process
remindful of Compagnons (1979) work on quotation. I show that this work produces a
new text, Tom-All-Alones, which itself produces a new reading of Bleak House in which
the theme of containment (represented by Esther) is interpreted as the restriction of
female characters to the madhouse.

Compagnon, Antoine. La seconde main: Ou le travail de la citation. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Print.
Naugrette, Jean-Pierre. Dtections sur Sherlock Holmes. Paris : Le Visage Vert, 2015. Print.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. (1853) Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008. Print.
Ginzburg, Carlo. Signes, Traces, Pistes - Racine Dun Paradigme de Lindice, Le Dbat
1980/6 (n6) pp. 344. Print.
191
---. Clues: Roots as an Evidential Paradigm in Clues, Myths and the Historical
Method. (1986) Tr. By John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1992. Print
Shepherd, Lynn. Tom-All-Alones. London: Corsair, 2012. Print.
Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing back to the canon. London: Continuum, 2001.
Print.

Daria Steiner (Justus Liebig University Giessen)
Hero or Fraud: An Intertextual Challenge of Dickens from a Neo-Victorian
Perspective -- A Case Study of Joseph OConnors Star of the Sea

References and allusions to Charles Dickens as a social figure and a distinguished Victorian
writer keep occupying not only a range of contemporary television adaptations and video
games, but also remain a leading intertextual phenomena analyzed in the framework of
neo-Victorian studies. This paper is based on the assumption that the overarching
tendency to quote and question the Victorian classic roots in a postmodern narrative
strategy employed by many contemporary authors of historical fiction which lies in a
paradoxical unity of nostalgic and ironic self-reflexive reconsideration of cultural history
labelled as historiographic metafiction (cf. Hutcheon 105-110). Joseph OConnors Star of
the Sea (2002) is a bestselling contemporary historical novel which revolves around the
Great Hunger of Ireland of 1847 and the issues of silence around the famine in Victorian
fiction. Dickens not only takes appearances in this novel, but is also an alter-ego of the
main narrator, Dixon. Based on a structural intertextual analysis of references to Dickens
and his literary heritage, this paper aims to look into the controversial representations of
narrators functions in contemporary historical fiction as illustrated by a case-study of Star
of the Sea. It will be thus argued that allusions to Dickens stem from an ambivalent
objective to, on the one hand, imitate the authors style and narrative techniques, and, on
the other hand, ironically question and challenge these phenomena in contemporary
context.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. NY: Routledge, 1988.
OConnor, Joseph. Star of the Sea: Farewell to Old Ireland. London: Vintage, 2003.

Melissa McCoul (University of Notre Dame)
Playing at Being Dead: Charles Dickens, Child's Play, and Temporality

In this paper, I argue that death, like play, is imagined by Victorian authors as ultimately a
social experience, inscribed on and through children's bodies. Play and death are not
counter-intuitive, but closely and temporally related. Using Charles Dickens as a case
study, I examine the surprisingly rich connections between child's play, embodiment, and
death in the Victorian novel. Playing with lifelessness allows Dickens, by means of child
characters, to soften the boundaries between some otherwise obdurate dichotomies:
adult/child, play/earnest, living/dead. For Jenny Wren, overburdened with the care of her
bad child, come up and be dead is a sort of refrain and and unanswerable riddle, an
invitation (often accepted) to step across the magic circle and play at the unimaginable.
Little Nell plays at forging incongruous relationships between her own childish innocence
and the ghoulish remnants of history which surround her in the Old Curiousity Shop,
succeeding so well that her death finally is more sweet than sorrowful, a literalization of
Jenny Wren's playing at being dead. Ada Lovelace, in Bleak House, is, of course, very much
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alive, but while accompanying Mrs. Pardiggle on a charitable mission, she sorrowfully
plays with the young mother's dead baby as if it were a doll. Ada's play is respectful,
sorrowful, and serious, but it is play, nonetheless. In these three child characters, we see
examples of children both playing at being dead, and playing with the dead. In both cases,
child characters are granted a playful and temporally flexible relationship to the worlds of
the living and the dead which is foreclosed to their adult counterparts. The slow-witted
adult may not understand the game, but for the cottage girl, not only is it perfectly possible
to play at being dead, it is perfectly satisfying to play with the dead.

Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester)
Dickens and Hypocrisy
Do we know what 'hypocrisy' means - as a form of acting, or putting on a mask, as a
relation to language and to the self? How does it affect men and women differently? And
who is liable to it? And why should it have been such a topic of fascination to Dickens,
producing so many examples? And then, how does Dickens' interest in the phenomenon of
hypocrisy feed into a history of the subject? - assuming, as I do, that hypocrisy is not
simply an historical form of behaviour. This paper attempts to put Dickens' writings into a
history of representations and constructions of hypocrisy. It takes Nicholas Nickleby --
Dickens' most theatrical or melodramatic novel and therefore most interested in masking -
- as a prime text for this, and puts hypocrisy into literary and cultural contexts which
relate to Dickens' precursors in writing.

Wednesday 24 August 16:30-18:30: Reading Dickens Acutely

Dominic Rainsford (Aarhus University)
Our Disproportionate Friend

There is a revived vigour and urgency, at present, in the question of levels of readerly and
scholarly attention: from the stratospheric perspectives of distant reading and its
analogues within the digital humanities, to the reborn close reading that figures centrally
in the massive reforms-in-progress in the United States school system (see PMLA, May
2015). Meanwhile, devoted and meticulous work on Dickenss texts (editions, companions,
etc.) continues apace, while students capacity to absorb large novels allegedly shrinks. In
this talk I shall relate these various features of the current scene to what would seem to be
permanent questions of scale and focus within, or for, Dickens scholarship, including the
following: the question of what it means to spend far more time reading this particular
writer (as many of us do) than all of his contemporaries put together; the paradox of being
regarded as an expert on someone only a microscopic fraction of whose writings you can
quote from memory; and numbering, measurement, proportion and scale as themes and
issues that demonstrably exercised Dickens himself. I shall attempt to pursue this
discussion in, around, and at various distances from Our Mutual Friend.

Andrew Mangham (University of Reading)
Dickens, Things, and the Burden of Interpretation

This paper will argue that one method of reading Dickens differently is to acknowledge
how the author was, himself, a penetrative reader of his thing-filled world; a reader,
moreover, who was well aware of the powers and limitations of his interpretative
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strategies. Where I differ from accounts like Elaine Freedgoods The Ideas of Things (2006),
is in my insistence that critical, recuperative strategies are not felt solely by those who
have felt the benefits of historicist criticism, but that the hermeneutic, epistemic and
philosophical questions attached to the fugitive meanings of things were asked with
equal complexity by the Dickens novel itself.

Freedgood argues that the force of history will give objects a life of their own []. The
history of pewter in the nineteenth century its place in early metal recycling, for example
might render the pewter pot in Sketches resonant (pp. 16-17). The problem with this
interpretation, for me, is that it misses how things, in Dickenss work, were almost always
resonant. Drawing on hermeneutic strategies that had been developed through theology
and science, Dickens explored his own position as someone observing, then representing, a
thing with a range of possible interpretations. Questioning, like Freedgood, what things
reveal about intepretation, I insist that the anxious self-scrutiny properly associated with
reading was as present in the nineteenth-century novel as it is in twenty-first century
literary criticism.

Jonathan Grossman (UCLA)
Metric Dickens
What could possibly connect the standardization of measurement with that eccentric
author, Charles Dickens? In this paper, I argue that standardization in metrology,
especially the establishment of the Imperial Yard in 1824 and of the meter during the
French Revolution, represented the creation of universality through the circulation of
particulars (to borrow a description from historian of science Joseph OConnell). I then
look closely at Charles Dickenss novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities
(1859). In A Tale of Two Cities state executions get standardized during the French
Revolution by the guillotine. Surprisingly, in the novel the guillotine turns out not to be all
that bad. Or, at least it points to the future, to standardization having clearly become a
means of constructing community by 1859 through this radically different means of
creat[ing] universality through the circulation of particulars.

Victor Sage (University of East Anglia)
Edges of Discourse: Prolegomena for an edition of Our Mutual Friend

Two front-rank contemporary English novelists have struck me as redolent of Dickens;
one is Salman Rushdie - Im re-reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories as I write this
abstract, and I am struck all over again by Rushdies defence of Story in The Satanic Verses
and what it owes to Dickens; and the other, is Nicola Barker, who knows very well that she
owes the anarchic carnival of her texts to Dickenss famous love of the streaky bacon: ie
the idea that everything in the act of narration needs to be explicitly and noisily
represented in the surface formation and, in her case, even the typography, of the text.
Recent work (Peters, Dickens and Race, 2015) has yet again multiplied the contexts and
thus stretched the range of Dickenss discourses and given him a new relevance: his
commitment to science in the 1840s, stemming from his review of Hunts The Poetry of
Science, leads eventually to his friendship with Owen, and his defence of Richard Owen in
Household Words and All The Year Round. This commitment to Science is also the basis of
his late satire of progress and development. Owen himself has now been rehabilitated
among scientists (Padian, 1997) to an extent, and we can see much more clearly how, from
the late 1850s onwards, Dickens had a purchase on the notion of progress and
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development from the point of view of Victorian ethnology and anthropology and Natural
Science and that he deliberately invokes in Our Mutual Friend the Gothic idea of
degeneration and the nightmare of a society that is actually regressing into the mud and
slime while it sees itself as performing at the tip of the spearhead of enlightened
civilization. Compare Herbert Spencers optimistic hymn to the division of labour in
capitalism with Dickenss absurdist portrayal of the primitive nature of specialist jargons
in Bleak House, an irony which has an almost Socratic ring about it. This critique of
progress is made on several fronts at once beyond his attacks on Utilitarianism: through
the defence of the Fancy of the Child, and the associated attraction towards exoticism and
travel in the Arabian Nights theme; and this leads readers on to the question of savagery
and barbarism within civilisation, a theme which is very topical at the present time.
(Todorov, 2013). This paper will consider the relation (struggle or dance ?) between these
different discourses and their interaction through Dickenss texts with his defence of
the Imagination.

Georges Letissier (Universit de Nantes)
The Possibility of a Somatic Experience of Charles Dickenss Fiction Writing

To what extent does the body come into the experience of reading Dickens? Can embodied
reading contribute to curing a suffering patient? Conversely, may physical, bodily pain be
induced from the experience of going through an extract, short-circuiting the more
rational functions to stimulate sensory ones? Such questions are of course relevant to
neuroscientists. Increasingly though, literary specialists too are turning their attention to
this field of investigation which somehow renews reception theory: Hans Robert Jauss
(1978, 1988), Wolfgang Iser (1976), or Michel Charles (1977).
Victorian criticism has shown an interest in the activity of reading by retrieving and re-
evaluating largely forgotten quasi-scientific studies that were published at the time
(Dames, 2007). This paper purports to adopt another perspective by drawing from the
type of criticism that has been used in the case of contemporary American writers: Dennis
Cooper, Mark Z. Danielewski; James Frey; Chuck Palahnuik (Patoine, 2015) to see how
cogent it may be to Dickens. There is hardly any risk of anachronism because this
biocultural approach can only be tested from the receiving end of the act readerly
communication, i.e. to what extent todays reception of Dickens is also mediated by
neurophysiological response? The first step, the only one that may be reasonably
attempted at this early stage, would be to appraise Dickenss own awareness of this
phenomenon by sampling passages from his fiction writing.

Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel, Reading, Neural Science & the Form of
Victorian Fiction, O.U.P., 2007.
Pierre-Louis Patoine, Corps/texte. Pour une thorie de la lecture empathique, Lyon: ENS
ditions, 2015.

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S36: Desire and the Expressive Eye in Thomas Hardy"

Dr Trish Ferguson
(Liverpool Hope University)
"Machinations versus mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardys 'On the Western
Circuit"
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hardys reading included articles and
reviews published in Mind: a Quarterly Review of Philosophy, a publication that provided a
forum for debate on contemporary issues in philosophy and psychology. In the wake of the
publication of Darwins On the Origin of Species, these disciplines explored questions
related to the role played by evolution in our existence and the nature of human emotions.
This paper will contend that in On the Western Circuit Hardy examines desire in the
context of debates over free will and determinism, positing that desire places humankind
in a conundrum that involves both loss of an individuals volition and also an increased
capacity for exerting free will to secure the object of desire. This paper will also contend
that in On the Western Circuit, Hardy explores how regulatory systems, such as the law,
can contain and manage desire, ultimately considering the act of writing itself as a tool
through which desire can be analysed and controlled.

Hakan Yilmaz
(Hacettepe University, Ankara/Turkey)
"The Gaze and Desire: Appropriation of Freedom in Thomas Hardys Tess of the
dUrbervilles"
The gaze/look (le regard) is regarded as the most dominant manifestation of the Others
subjectivity by Sartre. It constitutes the fundamental relation between the self and the
Other and enables one to not only experience the Other in his/her subjectivity but also
undergo an affective transformation intermediated by the Other. Moreover, the gaze
manifests a certain desire to manipulate and appropriate the person to whom it is
directed. However, as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, it would be wholly
inaccurate to say that desire is a desire for physical possession of the desired object
(385). In this respect, the gaze harbors a deeper (not physical) desire to get hold of ones
freedom as freedom in such a subtle way to make one willingly give in to the gazer. In
Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles, the eponymous heroine is exposed to different
gazes (mostly male, especially those of Alec and Angel) all of which denote a common
fundamental desire to possess Tess not physically of course because the desire for
physical possession (or sexual desire) is a degraded secondary manifestation of a more
fundamental desire for others freedom. Therefore, this paper will argue that, in Tess, the
gaze functions as a powerful medium to expose the fundamental desire of human beings to
appropriate others freedom.

Rosemarie Morgan
(Yale University, USA)
"Pathways of the Past: Visual Imprinting and Hardy's 'Wonder of Women'"
This study takes a brief look at the action of semantic memory as transferred via Hardys
consciousness/imagination to his portrayals of female characters. Memory transference
and imaginative reconstruction, shaped by the critical period of Hardys self-confessed late
psychosexual development (circa 26 years old) awakened, arguably, by his deep sexual
attachment to his cousin (Tryphena, aged 16) --- generated a lifelong linkage between
sublimating the desire for his lost prize in literary form and displacing it (through
196
psychic energy) via the imaginative construct of her incarnation. Taking the cue from
Nicholas Hillyards comprehensive research into the Tryphena /Hardy relationship (About
Tryphena, 2014), this study moves on to examine the complex interaction of memory and
imagination and Hardys constant reckoning with desire.

milie Loriaux
(Universit d'Artois, France)
"Hardys lesson : mind your desire(s) since creation is My (illusion)"
This paper sets out to understand both Hardys writing process and his vision of how
mans desires might engender counterfeit impressions. In other words, how man might be
misled by his desires. To attempt such a reading, we will mainly focus on the poem The
Collector Cleans his Picture (CP 617-618).

In this poem, the narrator, a rural parson, collects works of art. One of them he has
got from a trader in ancient house-gear (l. 16) with no scent of beauty or soul for
brushcraft (l. 17). Yet the main character in the poem is not the parson(-antiquarian) but
the painting itself. The latter is the very point of attention which mesmerizes the collector.

Gradually, the cleaning of the picture, finally rubbed (l. 33), will reveal illusive
desire(s) in the eyes of the parson. Indeed, there are inner contradictions within the poem
between the biblical quote, under the poems title, referring to Ezechiels desirable
oculorum (XXIV : 16) and, in the poems picture, the goddess Venus (l. 29), who turns out
to be a lecherous character. The biblical quote is almost blasphemous as the poem is
outside the Judaeo-Christian world. Venus, alias Astarte and Cotytto (l. 30), is in reality a
hag (l. 34). The mans look on his picture is a reflexion of his own being, made of his own
desires, which are mere illusions, a lure (l. 32). Hardy teaches his reader that this is not so
much the eye which is expressive but what the collector is closely gazing at, which
provides him or men , various impressions, if not inconsistencies. Consequently,
Hardys lesson can be analysed in the context of Vednta : the creation is My or illusion.

Hardys eye on his own poem is also interesting to study in terms of re-writing. The
words are meticulously culled and changed by the poet, allowing us to enter Hardys own
process of writing. For instance, leering is not the same as originally gazing (cf. l. 33). We
will therefore focus on the change of words from the manuscripts to the various editions in
order to disclose Hardys re-writing and the impact it may have on the poem.

Catherine Lanone
(Universit Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle)
"Feeling yet unseeing: revisiting Eurydice's dancing shades in Thomas Hardy's
poetry."
This paper deals with one of Thomas Hardy's moments of paradoxical desire, hovering
between seeing and unseeing, apparition and dissolution, memory and death. In several of
Hardy's poems desire is most intense and acute as the speaker can almost feel a presence
that vanishes at the same time, a flickering yet piercing sensation that the past is almost
there yet were he to turn around it would vanish. Revisiting the myth of Eurydice, such
poems posit desire on the brink, the very threshold between being and non being, as the
eye is most intense when searching for what always lies just behind, just out of reach, a
fitting metaphor for the elusive and metamorphic nature of desire itself.

Anna West
(University of St Andrews)
"Deflection and Desire: Gazing at Animals in Thomas Hardys Fiction"
197
In his essay 'Why Look at Animals?', art critic John Berger talks about the gaze between
humans and animals, arguing that while the gaze of animals has the power to surprise
humanswho see themselves being seen through the animals' gazethis look has been
'extinguished' with the marginalization of animals from society. In Hardy's novels, humans
who encounter animals face-to-face and eye-to-eye often find themselves uncomfortable
being seen through the gaze of the animal: Mrs Yeobright shudders under the gaze of the
adder in The Return of the Native (1878); Arabella reacts by cutting the pig's windpipe
when his gaze fixes upon her during the pig-killing scene in Jude the Obscure (1895). What
seems significant here is the refusal of the gaze: the desire not to see oneself being seen
through the eyes of another, a desire that extends to interactions between humans in the
novels. (Clym, for example, avoids Eustacia's eyes as he helps her with her bonnet strings
during their last face-to-face encounter in The Return of the Native.) Specifically, this paper
looks at the relationship between desire and the refusal of the gaze: why characters look
and why they look away, what happens when the gaze flickers, is deflected, or becomes
indifference.

Jane E. Thomas (The University of Hull, UK)
"Thomas Hardy: Writing Desire"
In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles
In The Freudian Unconscious Lacan focusses on the stumbling, the impediment the
failure in language in which he locates the discovery or surprise wherein the poet seeks
to push beyond the apparent limits of language in order to grasp at and perfect a fleeting
moment of plenitude. Such stumblings, in Hardys poetry, are often indicated by the
broken line, the ellipsis, the ejaculation and the symbol. For Lacan, desire inheres in the
gap between signifier and signified it is what cannot be represented in language and yet
strives for material form in the only medium available to it (in written texts at least). The
urge to move beyond the constraints of language into the pre or post linguistic realm
carries with it the threat of incoherence, dissolution, silence. This paper seeks to explore
the resonance and implications of stumblings, spaces, fissure in some of Hardys great
poems of loss and desire: the Poems of 1912-13.

Annie Ramel
(Universit Lumire-Lyon 2, France)
"The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy's Fiction"
The eye in Thomas Hardy's fiction is often felt as a menace, like the "oval pond" in Far from
the Madding Crowd, glittering "like a dead man's eye" (p. 33). The unblinking eye can be an
"evil eye", full of voracity, endowed with a Medusean power, the power to petrify or to kill.
Indeed eyes do kill in Hardy's stories: Mrs Yeobright is killed by the "bad sight" of her
daughter-in-law looking at her from a window and not opening the doorthe "small black
eye" of the live adder later regarding her being a duplicate of Eustacia's "ill-wishing" dark
eyes. At what point does the gaze, which normally makes manifest the "positive, dynamic
and productive dimension of desire" (J. Thomas), turn Medusean? Jacques Lacan's concept
of the unspecularizable "object-gaze" will help us to understand this. A further question is:
how does the writer manage to deflect the mortifying gaze of Medusa, and to what extent
can a literary work, like a painting, work as a "dompte-regard" (Lacan, Le Sminaire XI, p.
100)?

Phillip Mallett
(University of St Andrews, U.K.)
198
"A womans flush of triumph lit her eyes: Hardy, Darwin, and the blush."
Whether or not Hardy knew Darwins detailed study of blushing in The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), A Pair of Blue Eyes, published a year later, offers a
virtual typology of the male and female blush. His three principal characters, Elfride,
Stephen and Knight blush, flush or turn pale with pique, triumph, jealousy, perplexity,
mortification, vexation, embarrassment, anger, gladness, and shame; their faces become
rapid red, vivid scarlet, crimson, vermillion, an angry colour, lively red, lily-white, pale,
livid, cold, heated, and bright. Ten years later, with some justice, Havelock Ellis remarked
that Hardy disliked dealing directly with mental phenomena, and was only willing to
recognize the psychical element in its physical correlative. But that way of expressing it
does not resolve the question of how, in terms of my title, a physical response (flush)
relates to the psychical one (triumph): whether one causes the other, is a function of the
other, or simply is the other. This paper seeks to explore what Hardy might have meant
by a flush of triumph.

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S37. The Finer Threads

Group 1 Contemporary Practices

Mary Burke, Associate Professor of English, the University of Connecticut, USA
Unstitching history: The Irish textiles and lace industries and the selling of mid-century
Irish fashion exports

Amy D.Wells, Senior Lecturer, Universit de Caen-Normandie, France
From Fiction to Video Games: Contemporary Needle Arts Across Genres

Mrio Semio, PhD student in English, University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies,
Portugal
We call this the stem stitch: Embroidered Narrative in Philip Terrys Tapestry

Carine Kool, PhD student in English, University of Rennes 2, France
Embroidery in Contemporary Visual Arts: A naturally revolutionary art or An art
language for the millennium?

Group 2 Victorian Tradition

Risn Quinn-Lautrefin, PhD student in English, University of Paris-Diderot, France
[T]hat pincushion made of crimson satin : embroidery, discourse and memory in
Victorian literature and culture

Rachel Dickinson, Principal Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
John Ruskin and the acicular art of nations

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Professor in English Studies, Universit de Pau et des
Pays de lAdour, France
Against the inevitable wear and tear of time: Weaving and/as designing
according to William and May Morris

Mary Burke, Unstitching history: The Irish textiles and lace industries and the
selling of mid-century Irish fashion exports

The coming to prominence of the Carrickmacross lace used in successive British royal
wedding gowns was part of a broader Famine-era attempt to expand the lace and related
industries and promote industrial schools that taught poor girls those skills. When famine-
relief infrastructural improvement projects are considered, one might say that modern
Ireland was kick-started by that catastrophe. Of course, this version of history considers
male labour only, ignoring the women working at home who laid the foundations for later
iterations of the lace, textile and fashion industries in which women played leading roles,
and, by extension, aspects of the success of post-1950 tourism. Newly-modish traditional
lace and textiles were deployed in mid-century Irish couture, and I will track how the
sophisticated marketing - often through Irish state agencies - of 1950s quality ready-to-
wear and couture exports to the US (and to American visitors to Ireland), deployed a
defanged version of the history of Irish textiles and lace that auto-exotically exploited the
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colonial image of Ireland as premodern. A depoliticized juxtaposition of the elite and the
peasant suffuses fashion shots of 1950s Irish couture, a denial of the complexity of the lace
industrys colonial-era pairing of peasant craftswoman and aristocratic patroness.

Rachel Dickinson, John Ruskin and the acicular art of nations

In a public letter of 1884 , art and social critic John Ruskin reflects on educational reforms
needed, not just in Britain but for the inhabitants of every spot of earth (Fors Clavigera
Letter 95; Works 29.496). He sets out a universal curriculum of sorts, covering such
disparate subjects as music, elocution, reading, arithmetic, geography, geometry, drawing,
zoology and botany. Throughout, he moves from the individual, to the national, to the
global. He draws the curriculum to a close with lastly of needlework [] the acicular art of
nations (509). Then, he begins to outline plans for a museum; the last lesson becomes
our first Museum room as he interweaves the broad curriculum already outlined with a
discussion of types of needlework (510). Using this letter as a starting point, this paper
outlines some of Ruskins theories on education and the improvement of society all as
seen through the eye of needlework.

Carine Kool, Embroidery in Contemporary Visual Arts: A naturally revolutionary art
or An art language for the millennium?

Embroidery can be defined as an addition, through a needle and thread technology, to a
ground in order to create an embellishment. But it is as important to differentiate it from
other needle and thread-using techniques with which it is often confused, such as lace-
making, knitting, crocheting, and tapestry. The differentiation is even more necessary that
these techniques have emerged simultaneously with embroidery in the field of
contemporary art at the beginning of the 21st century.

However, art historian and Chief Curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New
York, David Revere McFadden, clearly made the distinction by exhibiting separately
artworks in knitting, crochet and lace (Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting) from
embroidered artworks (Pricked: Extreme embroidery) in 2007-2008. Qualifying them as
the emergence of an artistic language for the Millennium, he acknowledges that they also
document a shift in the way art functions in our lives. Indeed, artists, men and women
alike, use embroidery in a wide variety of approaches to create artworks to the antipode of
our grandmothers doilies, attesting in so doing the statement of late art historian Rozsika
Parker on embroidery as A naturally revolutionary art.

Risn Quinn-Lautrefin, [T]hat pincushion made of crimson satin : embroidery,
discourse and memory in Victorian literature and culture
In this paper, I explore how Victorian embroidered artifacts have acted as depositories of
memories in literature and culture. If, historically, women had always plied the needle, the
nineteenth century saw the spectacular expansion of decorative craft collectively known
as fancywork, of which embroidery was a major component. The invention of Berlin wool-
work, alongside the circulation of paper patterns and the ready availability of modern
haberdashery goods made what had once been a skilled activity with elite associations a
popular and ubiquitous pastime.
A reflection on time seems to transpire through these text-iles. The practice of
embroidery, in the mid-nineteenth century, staged a tension between historicity and
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modernity, allowing middle-class women to engage in modern modes of production while
imagining themselves as aristocratic ladies of the past. Circumventing the dominant print
culture, it provided women with an alternative locus for expression with which to write
their own narratives. In this sense, Victorian embroidered artifacts are discursive tools in
their own right, providing material memories of womens history. Because they are
intimately linked to the bodies and psyches of the women making them, these objets act,
explicitely or implicitely, as souvenirs. By stitching and marking, Victorian women were
effectively safeguarding memories of their own selves in history.

Laurence Roussillon-Constanty Against the inevitable wear and tear of time: Weaving
and/as designing according to William and May Morris

In his 1877 conference delivered before the Trades Guild of Learning entitled The Lesser
Arts William Morris, building on Ruskins principles and ideas, encouraged craftsmen to
have quiet confidence in truth and beauty and value their craft as much as any form of art.
In his own practice and through the development of The Firm Morris repeatedly showed
how his aesthetic and social ideals could merge and produce useful and beautiful artefacts
and pieces of furniture. Among them, textiles and tapestries particularly illustrated his
quest for genuine craftsmanship and authenticity and his wish to enlarge the sphere of
needlework which had been hitherto reserved to women. Following on his example his
daughter May (Mary) Morris greatly contributed to the development of embroidery within
Morris & co not only through her own practice but also in her teaching and writing. This
paper will explore William and May Morriss understanding of embroidery not only as a
domestic skill but as a way to reclaim, revisit and reinvent the past, envisaging the work of
the needle as a craft as much as a critical response or gesture.

Mrio Semio, We call this the stem stitch: Embroidered Narrative in Philip Terrys
Tapestry

Shortlisted for the first edition of the Goldsmith Prize, which aims to reward innovative
works of fiction, Tapestry (2013) takes the Bayeux Tapestry as its starting point. While the
framing narrative of the text appropriates the historical account of the Norman conquest
and the creation of the tapestry by English nuns under the supervision of Bishop Odo, the
novel also explores the myriad of images found in the margins of the tapestry and
transposes them into stories told by the nuns to each other in the process of stitching.
The Bayeux Tapestry informs the very structure of the novel, not only as it mirrors the
double depiction of both the historical events and the hidden stories in the marginalia, but
also in the way a mixture of invented Middle English, Oulipian techniques and magic
realism is able to convey the sense of colour and texture which characterise the famous
tapestry.
Drawing on this, this paper will thus seek to provide a reading of Terrys novel,
focusing on how the text produces its own version of an embroidered narrative and on
how that narrative ultimately paves the way for a reflection on our notions of art and
history.

Amy D.Wells, From Fiction to Video Games: Contemporary Needle Arts Across Genres

Cross stitch is enjoying a revival, particularly amongst the hipster generation. Works like
Subversive Cross Stitch: 50 F*cking Clever Designs for Your Sassy Side (2015) have moved
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the historical needle working practice from grandmothers dusty shelves to chic, hip wall
art. While it is not as easy to find cross stitching characters as it is knitting (Knit Lit) or
quilting ones (Quilting Mysteries), the retro-attitude present in contemporary hipster
fiction reinvests the importance of crafting and DIY. Furthermore, the visual appeal of
ideas organized into grids and lines of xs attracts users from a variety of media: cross
stitch even appears as the graphic backdrop for the 2013 video game, Cross Stitch
Casper. In this paper, I will rapidly evoke the tradition of the stitching protagonist and the
transfer of this archetype onto the main-stream craft and hobby fiction genre. From there,
I would like to make the distinction between the presence of needle arts in fiction genre
and the DIY genre. A final aspect of the paper will examine the popularity of twenty-first
century workbooks, which weave sassy commentary with patterns, going beyond the
traditional grid manual.

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S38. Work and its Discontents in Victorian Literature and Culture
Convenors: Federico Bellini and Jan Wilm

Tiziana Faitini (Leibniz Institute of European History of Mainz, Germany)
The Hierarchy of Professional Occupations in Minor 19th Century Texts on
Professionalism

Attitudes to work in Victorian culture seem to have been polarized: it was both exalted and
despised, through a dialectic that manifests in the hierarchisation of the professions, in the
context of the economic and social processes of professionalisation that affected 19th
century England. During this period, as the practice of professionalism was establishing
itself, the various professions jostled for recognition and status, thus leading to a dynamic
in which the hierarchy of professional occupations was being continuously rewritten; in
particular, some professions came to be associated with liberality and leisure, highlighting
the dialectic between work and idleness. This dynamic appears in a number of
contemporary literary works, in which the choice of a profession and comparisons
between different occupations are often depicted. It also appears in the minor, but
meaningful, textual production on professionalism in the 19th century. These works range
from explicit discussion of professional ethics (patterned on Thomas Percivals Medical
Ethics [1803]), to discourses on professions by prominent professionals for important
occasions, to didactic handbooks addressed to parents and dedicated to the choice of the
profession. This paper will discuss this textual production, focusing on its hierarchization
of occupations, the criteria on which this process is based and the struggle for the status of
profession which it reveals.

Mara Jos Coperas-Aguilar (Universitat de Valncia, Spain)
Work and leisure: implementing experiments in nineteenth-century factories

The nineteenth century was marked, both in Britain and the United States, by the fights of
the working classes to get the conditions at their work places improved. One of the most
important struggles was that connected with the reduction of their working hours, and the
idea that fewer hours of work could increase efficiency in their employees started to
spread among some manufacturers. At the same time, some factory owners (Samuel Greg
and Thomas Aston in Britain or the Pacific Mills in the United States) also began to
implement some measures to increase the intellectual and physical welfare of their
workers. These kinds of actions are reflected in novels such as Elizabeth Gaskells North
and South, through the experiments that Mr Thornton carries out, and Elizabeth Stuart
Phelpss The Silent Partner, whose protagonist, Perley Kelso, creates new facilities and
introduces some leisure activities for her workers. In this paper we would like to discuss
some of these initiatives both in real life and in literature and analyse the extent to which
they were successful or not. Although usually well meant, they were not always accepted
by those to whom they were addressed or they did not fulfil the expectations of those who
put them into practice.

Ralf Haekel (Georg August University Gttingen, Germany)
Draculas Legacy Revisited

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In his 1982 essay Dracula's Legacy, Friedrich Kittler interprets Bram Stoker's novel as a
clash between an aristocratic past represented by Count Dracula and a bureaucratic
present and future embodied by the group around Mina and Jonathan Harker. Kittler
concludes that Dracula is a novel about a media struggle that those in power of the
typewriter and the phonograph cannot but eventually win. So, bourgeois bureaucratic
forces represent a re-structuring of work at the turn of the 20th century, most powerfully
represented in the negotiation of the new woman able to use the new storage media of
bureaucratic office life in order to battle the representative of ancient political power.
Whereas Kittlers theory looks forward to the 20th century, this paper uses the
trope of Dracula's medial struggle representing a fundamental reconfiguration of the
public work sphere to look back at its Romantic and Victorian origins: in the wake of the
industrial revolution and the differentiation of society and labour, the undead in John
Polidoris The Vampyre, Sheridan le Fanus Carmilla, and in penny dreadfuls such as Rymer
and Prests Varney the Vampyre represent an obsolete form of exploitation and a threat to
upcoming bourgeois forms of labour, which may be seen as indicators of the gradual
change of the work sphere and its medial representations in the 19th century.

Jan Wilm (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)
The Work is in the Dying, is in the Living: The Ghost as Figure of Leisure in Victorian Ghost
Stories

A spectre is haunting Europe, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in late 1840s
London, the spectre of communism. Around the same time, while labourers were being
exploited in inhumane working environments in factories to facilitate the industrial
revolutions upsurge, Victorian Britain and Ireland were haunted by a great number of
other spectres, spectres of the dead. This paper examines the dynamics of work and
leisure against those of the work of dying and the work of mourning. By drawing on short
stories by Oscar Wilde, Sheridan LeFanu, Charles Dickens, and Saki, among others, it will
be argued that ghosts are doomed to work at life long after their life has ended, and how it
is the Victorian society and its history of ideas and culture which put a politically pointed
spin on the image of a ghost haunting those yet corporeally intact. Against this argument
will be weighed the idea that the dead are dancing (or shuffling) on the volcanos lip of
death as a form of leisure, at liberty to roam in the world of idleness and freedom, yet
always precariously close to tumbling back into the pit of toil and drudgery that Victorian
labourers have called life.

Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy)
The mill will not stop: Pains and Pleasures of Print Culture Professionalism in Mary
Elizabeth Braddon

Novelist, editor, and journalist Mary Elizabeth Braddon made a direct experience of the
pains and pleasures of Victorian print culture professionalism. Publicly blamed for her
scandalous private life, she raised controversies with unorthodox professional choices,
while adhering to a stoic Victorian work ethic that led to her enormous productivity, her
full-time employment in print, and her overt critiques of the acolytes of idleness and
leisure!
A thriving member of the rising professional class, Braddon aligned herself with the
ideal of middle-class industry, which she frequently praised in quasi-Smilesian tones. Still,
there are, in her narratives, traces of a counter discourse worth examining. Through the
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voices of fictional alter egos employed in the periodical press (writers, editors, journalists),
Braddon manifested her worries about some dark sides of the Victorian celebration of
labour, especially those emerging in the world of periodical presses. So, she participated in
a socio-cultural and aesthetic debate that involved many of her contemporaries, including
Dickens and Collins, who similarly fictionalized their professional experiences and doubts.
This paper explores ideological implications raised by the counter discourse woven
by Braddon, which is particularly evident in her novel Dead-Sea Fruit (1867-8). Her
characterization and use of metaphor not only unveil some discontents of labour by
exposing the enslaving mechanisms of the Victorian print industry. They also raise
questions on the best approach to creative writing an occupation which, though pursued
with zeal, also depends on leisure.

Heidi Liedke (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Even Idleness is Eager NowWork, Leisure and Idleness in George Eliots
Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda and her Travel Diaries

At first glance, in Victorian times, the terms leisure and work were more unambiguously
positive terms, while idleness was a negative one. Yet sometimes, even within this one
historical period, the terms were used interchangeably which necessitates a fine-tuning.
This paper discusses George Eliots Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda and her personal travel
diaries to show how they provide insightful sources for a nuanced assessment of the
concepts leisure, idleness, and work, as well as their interrelations. Several passages in
Adam Bede, for example, show the development the terms and their meanings underwent,
while many aspects of the work particularly dwell on the notion of speed. In fact, the
included argument that the steam-engine did not create leisure for mankind but rather a
vacuum for eager thought to rush in anticipates the sociologist Hartmut Rosas concept of
social acceleration and makes the temporal turn of the 1990s and early 2000s appear
less novel. Eliot articulated the paradox of free time bringing about less free time already
in the mid- nineteenth century.
Finally, Eliot herself presented a counter-idea of how a Victorian woman could
enjoy idleness and use it for creative purposes when she traveled Europe with George
Henry Lewes. While they sat out to collect material for their books and were indeed busy,
efficient travelers, they actively sought moments of inspiring idleness. Eliots assessment
of idleness, leisure, and work thus presents a multi- dimensional depiction of these
concepts in the context of the Victorian age.

Tiana Fischer (Georg August University Gttingen, Germany)
Against the Emergence of the Economized, Working Modern Self: A Foucauldian Analysis
of the George Eliots Depiction of the Technique of the Self in Middlemarch Over the

course of the nineteenth century, British society saw a radical re-definition of Dasein. This
was directly linked to the industrial revolution, the after-effects of Enlightenment
philosophy, and the secularization and economization of society, science, and the self, thus
inducing paradigm shift concerning work around 1800. Previously linked with
prominently Protestant and Calvinist ethics, work received a secular, capitalist frame of
reference when it became functional and economized. In one fell swoop, working also
became a technique of the self, constituting the subject in its subjectivity in this world
rather than promising post-mortem remuneration.

This new ideal of a working subject a product of Enlightenment philosophy as
well as social Darwinism, paradoxically only constituting itself when incessantly working
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on its own improvement and that of society at large was primarily negotiated in
literature, which had the strongest focus on Bildung and character (re-)formation. George
Eliots Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, yields a meticulous, critical, and
philosophical investigation of the Victorian techniques of the self, which are subject of
this paper. Using Foucauldian theorems, it will be argued that Eliots depiction of
characters and their self-realisation struggles, such as those of self-denying Dorothea
Brooke, provide a strong case in point of the early repudiation of this emergent ideal of the
economized modern self, whose performative constitution became synonymous with
working on Dasein evermore in pursuit of progress.

Susan Jaret McKinstry (Carleton College Northfield, USA)
My Work is the Embodiment of Dreams: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris
Redefine Art and Labor
The Pre-Raphaelites believed in the intersection of all arts verbal, visual, fine, applied,
and practical; and their aesthetic theory was matched with social action designed to
transform the relationship between art and work in the Victorian period Their work is
recognized as a rebellion against the ugliness of Victorian industry, a rejection of the
confining aesthetics of the Royal Academy, or a demonstration of artistic ekphrasis, but an
examination of the aesthetic and commercial practices of William Morris, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites artists and writers shows their radical notions of the
essential connection between art and work. The unity of work and art is exemplified by
Morriss palace of art, Red House, designed and built by Morris and friends in 1859. In
his writings, Morris linked art and labour through architecture: architecture transforms
the lines of the architects vision into the lines of the completed building. Rossettis sonnet
cycle The House of Life, with its rarely-published hand-drawn design for the introductory
sonnet, also connects the lines of drawing, writing, and architecture as he works to
construct his poetic house. Despite their differences, Morris and Rossetti conceived of art
as material and imaginative work combined into consumer product. In Rossetti and
Morriss aesthetic practice, dreams are embodied: work as art and art as work are united.

Federico Bellini (Universit Cattolica Milano, Italy)
Over-work and Under-work in Victorian Medicine and Literature

Going through Victorian medicine manuals one may be surprised at how, especially during
the last decades of the nineteenth century, work was considered both a source of health
and a potential cause of illness. On the one hand, work was seen as necessary for a healthy
lifestyle, and as such was often administered by doctors to their patients. On the other, the
acceleration of life produced by industrialization and urbanization fostered the belief that
an excess of work, too, could compromise health. In Diseases of Modern Life, for instance,
Benjamin Ward Richardson addresses both induced diseases from physical strain, and
diseases from sloth and idleness warning against the intense precipitation of labour
typical of modern life, as well as against the mostly female phenomenon of idleness,
which know[s] nothing of true happiness, for life with inactivity is a physical burden.
This paper intends to make sense of this tension between opposite medical views of work
and trace its reflection in several contemporary literary works, focussing in particular on
The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad, News from Nowhere by William Morris, and
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

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S39: Impressions 1860-1920

Convenors:
Bndicte Coste (University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comt, France)
Elisa Bizzotto (University of Venice, Italy)
Sophie Aymes (University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comt, France)

Respondent: Francesca Orestano

17:00 Batrice Laurent (Universit des Antilles, France) Catching the Fugitive:
Possessive Desire in Impressionist Art and Photography (1860-1890)

In 1856, a writer for the Athenaeum engaged in the debate whether photography should be
considered as an art per se, or as the handmaid of painting. To this critic the answer was
clearly the second option: Machinery can copy science, - can catch shadows, and keep
them when caught, - but it takes a human heart to conceive the Transfiguration, and a
human brain to plan the Last Judgment.
This critic suggested a hierarchical segmentation of the human being, locating brain, heart
and hand in separate strata, and, assuming that art was concerned with the upper two,
he rejected the proposition that the mechanical pursuit of catching shadows could be
considered artistic.
This paper purposes to study how mid-Victorian considerations about painting and
photography, reflected in the Athenaeum critics assessment, evolved in late-Victorian
Britain. Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monets painting that gave its name to the
artistic movement, was instrumental in making part of the public aware of certain
phenomena of optics. This painting of the Thames, together with subsequent works by the
French artist intended, precisely, to pin down (his) impressions before the most fleeting
of effects (Monet, 1926). It was therefore the mechanical impression of the image on the
mind via the retina that interested Monet and his fellow Impressionists. This phenomenon
was also what fascinated photographers most, what they sought to imitate by means of
material devices, and what nurtured many debates at the Royal Photographic Society
(founded 1853). In fact, nineteenth-century photographers and Impressionist painters
shared a scientific urge, informed by contemporary culture, to understand the mechanism
of image-making. In response to this desire, they opposed the more traditional way of
conceiving art as composition, and proposed instead to split reality into a myriad of
juxtaposed particles.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, painting and photography had a
very close, if unequal, relationship. George Davison (1854-1930), a proponent of
impressionistic photography, reconciled them when he explained in Impressionism in
photography (1890) that art and photography share the same principles, based on the
same physical laws. The purpose of both painter and photographer was, therefore, to
capture the fugitive movement, the evanescent light, the residual image, and the fleeting
impression.

17:15 Elisa Bizzotto (University of Venice, Italy) Aestheticist Impressions Abroad:
Late-Victorian Little Magazines and their Italian Imitations

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In my contribution, I intend to focus on such well-known British little magazines of the fin
de sicle as The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884-92), The Yellow Book (1894-7) and The
Savoy (1896) and to draw closer critical attention to their reception in contemporary and
early-twentieth century Italian journals. Following the critical perspectives proposed
through the years by Timothy Hilton, Ian Fletcher and Marysa Demoor, my analysis will
briefly concentrate on the origins of these magazines in The Germ (1850), the short-lived
journal of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that established the model for following
ephemeral Aestheticist publications by young artists articulating radical aesthetic and
social stances. Like The Germ, these fin-de-sicle impressions represented ideal sites for
artistic experimentation, essentially based on a close dialogue between verbality and
visuality which included an enthusiastic rediscovery of the art of printing. After
contextualising The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book and The Savoy within
British culture, my contribution will consider their seldom if ever investigated impact
on some Italian periodicals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
characterised by aesthetic experimentalism and radicalism and paying special attention to
the printing craft. These were the Cronaca bizantina (1881-6), which combined word and
image in arts-and-crafts style, and Il Convito (1895-6), whose Proemio, authored by
Gabriele DAnnunzio, evoked the tones of Arthur Symonss Introduction to The Savoy and
shared the aesthetically dissident spirit of its programmatic pronouncements. British little
magazines inspired other Italian publications such as Il Marzocco (1896-1932), which in
its turn-of-the-century season pursued Aestheticist-Symbolist interart principles,
Leonardo (1903-7), where late-Pre-Raphaelite visual preciosity merged with an interest in
philosophy and mysticism, and eventually Lacerba (1913-5), which exalted genius across
the arts and arts autonomy in a final endorsement of Futurism. Through their
commitment to cross-artistic exchanges and aesthetic novelty and unconventionality, The
Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book and The Savoy ultimately paved the way to
European avant-gardes.

17:30 Fausto Ciompi (University of Pisa, Italy) How Impressionistic is Conrads
Impressionism?

Since Brunctiers 1879 article on Daudet, incidentally one of Joseph Conrads favourite
authors, the expression literary impressionism has been widely used by critics for
describing and discussing such different phenomena as the subjective rendering of
external reality (the roman phnomnologique, as R-M Albrs defined it), the
fragmentation and fluidification of matter, the erosion of contours and the flou effect, a
complete immersion in the ephemeral life of things. As such, literary impressionism has
often been associated either with realism or naturalism as opposed to symbolism in that
the latter transcends the ephemeral and aspires to the ideal and the absolute (Dcaudin).
Critics, especially John Peters who has authored several essays on this issue, have often
adopted the term impressionism in order to identify Conrads peculiar treatment of the
epistemology of broken time as a chain of non chronological events interrupted by
sudden holes. Conrads multiple-point-of-view technique has also been traditionally
interpreted as a symptom of his philosophical relativism. His adoption of the primitive
eye perspective has been regarded as an impressionistic attempt at the cultural
estrangement of colonial history. His radical relativism in political issues has been
contradictorily seen both as the product of bourgeois fear of revolution and repressed
desire of anarchist subversion.
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My paper intends to problematize some of these assumptions concerning Conrads
impressionism by showing how his narrative style as displayed in some of his capital
works (Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer etc.) either verges on expressionism
or provides a new kind of impressionism. This new aesthetic mode, which joins the
connotative strength of symbolism and the mimetic (im)precision of a new realism, tends
to Modernist Impressionism. In Conrads modernist impressionism the sensual pleasure
of mimetic description, typical of Ur-Impressionism, hardly surfaces, because even the
beauty of nature is a lie if it does not reflect by contrast the ugliness and negativity of what
Conrad used to call a merely spectacular, indifferent universe.

18:15 Claire McKeown (Universit de Mulhouse, France) Fleeting Impressions: The
Northern Lights of Early English Modernism

Henry James refers frequently to the impression as a mode of reception, although his
critical writings initially reject impressionist painting. In the 1902 short story
Flickerbridge the narrator, an artist, refers to the North light of the newest
impressionism when reflecting on modern painting styles. While James could be referring
to the relatively Northern (by French terms) light and climate of Ile de France, significant
in the development of plein air and impressionist painting, the expression is more
obviously an evocation of the Northern light associated with the Nordic countries. While
distant from the creative buzz of Paris and Berlin, Scandinavia was increasingly linked
with avant-garde creation in the late 19th century. In the UK, the literary figure most
associated with the Scandinavian avant-garde is Ibsen, whose reputation for modernity
was reinforced by writers like Edmund Gosse and George Bernard Shaw. Contemporary
critics also compared Ibsens particular form of realism, perhaps somewhat
approximatively, with impressionist art. James himself also wrote on Ibsen, and his
transition from dismissal to praise of the Norwegian writer was rather similar to his
changing perspectives on impressionism. This Nordic reputation for modernity is also key
to the writings of George Egerton. Norway is the setting for her radical representation of
female experience, as well as for aesthetic experimentation through a style heavily focused
on sensory and visual impressions. Egertons writings interact directly with Scandinavian
literature: Keynotes is dedicated to Knut Hamsun, and the story Now Spring Has Come
begins with the purchase of a modern Nordic novel.
This paper will treat the late 19th century fascination with both impressionism and
Nordic culture as part of the shift towards a new aesthetics. Despite their apparent
distance, both were part of the contemporary zeitgeist, and a source of interest for writers
and critics in Britain. Through contemporary literary and critical perspectives, I will
attempt to identify the ways in which these parallel symbols of newness contributed to the
development of modernism.

18:30 Sophie Aymes (Universit de Bourgogne-Franche-Comt) Working up from the
black towards the light: Modernist wood-engraving and photography

In this paper I propose to examine the revival of autographic wood-engraving up to the
early 1920s as described in contemporary handbooks, reviews and artists writings.
Working up from the black towards the light is a common way to describe the basic
process of the craft in wood-engraving manuals. The tip was given as such by Clare
Leighton in Wood-Engravings and Woodcuts (1932), one of the best examples of such
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publications in the interwar period. Wood-engraving as process works through gradual
subtractionas you cut away from the blockin order to produce an image that is
printed from a matrix. Each scratch on the surface of the woodblock prints white, which is
why you have to develop a negative visual image of the final picture. This accounts for the
recurrent use of the trope of revelation and processing (in the photographic sense of the
word) in such texts.
I will discuss the way autographic wood-engraving defined itself as against photography.
The two forms of art were seen as antithetic by the pioneers of the revival, and yet there is
a strong medial affinity between them. I will draw from the works of Edward Gordon Craig
and Paul Nash to examine how the trope of the print as imprint gained currency among the
Modernist avant-garde in Britain. My contention is that this aesthetic strategy underscored
a medial contest but also revealed that autographic wood-engraving was photographys
other.

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S40: The Neo-Victorian Antipodes

Dr Mariadele Boccardi (University of the West of England) Othering Domesticity,
Domesticating Otherness: The Neo-Victorian Antipodes.
At the height of Victorian migration to Australia, as Janet C. Myers shows, the antipodes
were the subject of a discursive domesticating effort, whereby the geographical reversal
implied in the very word antipodes was countered by replicas of British customs, laws,
building types, social structures, place names on the part of the emigrants. Neo-Victorian
constructions of the antipodes along the axis of sameness and otherness refract the
conceptual self-definition of settler societies by a double movement of identification and
difference, which is in turn metonymically rendered in plots where domesticating the alien
environment (whether discursively by means of exploration and mapping or practically by
agriculture and pastoralism) is central to fulfilling the characters identities. My paper
examines the consistencies in the treatment of domesticity and otherness in Neo-Victorian
works by both Antipodean and British writers from Patrick Whites Voss to Peter Careys
Oscar and Lucinda to Kate Grenvilles The Secret River; from Matthew Kneales English
Passengers to Jem Posters Rifling Paradise. I argue that contemporary narrative
constructions of the antipodes attempt, with postcolonial self-awareness, to recover the
otherness of the antipodes and place it at the centre of their representational efforts.
Paradoxically, however, in so doing the novels satisfy the desire for exotic yet familiar
novelistic elements that result in their being co-opted into the domesticating environment
of British literary prizes.

Dr. Therese-M. Meyer (Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg) Gender and the
Neo-Victorian Antipodes: Two Novels by Catherine Jinks.
A focus on the binary of Home as a place of inclusion and exclusion, of domestic
suppression and comforts, is typical of Neo-Victorian postcolonial novels, as Elizabeth Ho
(2012), following Rosemary Marangoly George (1999), has shown in her analysis of
Careys Jack Maggs. Novels that centre on the domestic life of female protagonists can then
be expected to tap even more into the rich seams of the Antipodean Neo-Victorian. The
questions of place and community in the face of invasion and dispossession (cf. Hodge and
Mishra 1991), the threat and loss of children (cf. Pierce 1999), and the critique of the
systemic abuse of women unites to recalibrate representations of the Victorian colonial
female subject from a distinctly Antipodean point of view. I propose the inclusion of two
contemporary Australian novels in this canon which have so far eluded critical notice but
which represent strikingly different examples of this Antipodean Neo-Victorian emphasis
on gender. Catherine Jinkss two Neo-Victorian novels, The Gentlemans Garden (2002) and
The Dark Mountain (2008), use well-researched nineteenth-century historical protagonists
to narrate strong women that emerge from Neo-Victorian sexual trauma and betrayal to
agency and self-determination. Not contained either by the conventions of romance or the
trope of liberation through solitariness, Jinkss protagonists are set to reclaim the domestic
space from its unheimlich Victorian past.

Nina Juergens (University of Stuttgart) Skulls, Fish and a Red Dress: Objecting
Materialities in Richard Flanagans Goulds Book of Fish and Wanting.
In the wake of the so-called material turn, the importance of materiality and material
culture in the interpretation of postcolonial issues has received heightened awareness, and
not only in museums and other traditional loci of material accumulation. In my talk I will
focus on the role of material objects in Richard Flanagans historiographic metafictional
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accounts of 19th century colonial Tasmania, the novels Goulds Book of Fish (2001) and
Wanting (2008). Both works negotiate Victorian material cultural practices connected to
scientific discourses of appropriation such as collecting, classifying and cataloging. They
construct an antipodean otherness whose underlying binaries between other and self,
object and subject are rendered precariously brittle, as they are perpetually contested by
human desires that threaten to cross dividing lines. The results are narratives that
foreground the brutal effects of the supposed disinterestedness of scientific practices by
denying individuals agency and humanity. It is through the narrativisation of material
objects, however, that those patterns of subjugation and objectification are transcended
and agency is partially reinstalled. The skulls collected by the Surgeon and Lady Franklin,
the fish painted by Gould or the red dress of Mathinna: these objects receive a presence
that continue to challenge antipodean (re-)writings of past and present.

Dr Ruta Slapkauskaite (Vilnius University) Through a Glass, Darkly: Object
Memory in Peter Careys Oscar and Lucinda.
Peter Careys Oscar and Lucinda has been generously praised for how its marked
fascination with the eccentric, the exquisite, and the fabulous is conveyed through the
metafictional as well as magic realist aspects of the narrative as a (post)colonial parable.
Taking its cue from the analytical concerns for the issues of cultural transplantation and
legitimisation of British colonial presence in Australia, this paper examines the novels
visual saturation and its alignment with material culture as facets of memory work
inscribed in the narrative. To the extent that the story is organised around the figure of the
glass church, the house of prayer has both material and metaphorical significance for the
refraction of memory that unfolds in Careys novel. Read within the conceptual framework
of Thing Theory, representations of Victorian engagement with material culture may
reveal new implications for how cultural continuity sought legitimation in the colonial
economy. Above all, our reading of the narrative as a way of thinking through things may
shed new light on the central dichotomy of the physical vs. the metaphysical, wherein the
memories the characters invest in things are reaffirmed, questioned or even discounted by
what things remember themselves.

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S41. Tracing the Victorians: Material Uses of the Past in Neo-Victorianism
Convenors:
Dr. Rosario Arias (University of Mlaga, Spain)
Dr. Patricia Pulham (University of Portsmouth, UK)
Dr. Elodie Rousselot (University of Portsmouth, UK)

This seminar addresses the notion of the trace, delineated by Jacques Derrida and Paul
Ricoeur, to engage with the tangibility of the Victorian past in contemporary culture. The
trace has attracted renewed critical interest in the last few years, particularly in
connection with the interplay of past and present in todays cultural production. However,
the potential of the material object (the trace) to reanimate the past has received scant
attention in neo-Victorianism. Papers dealing with the presence and (in)visibility of the
Victorian past in contemporary literature and culture, materiality and the sensory turn,
as well as museum studies and thing theory in relation to the Victorian trace, are
particularly encouraged.

Haunting Houses and Eloquent Objects in American Neo-Victorian Fiction
Dr. Dara Downey
Ridley Pearsons The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001) (written under
the pseudonym of fictional academic Dr. Joyce Reardon, as part of the publishing campaign
for Stephen Kings miniseries Rose Red), focuses on the eponymous Ellen Rimbauer, and on
the apparently murderous nature of the vast house her husband has had built for. Partly
on the urging of her African maid Sukeena, Rimbauer ultimately undertakes to appease
Rose Reds malevolence by continually adding to and remodelling it. The result is a
labyrinthine muddle of different styles and floorplans, in which doors and staircases lead
to blank walls or sudden drops, and corridors lead the uninitiated along strange and
unpredictable journeys through its supernaturally extended interior. Through these
corridors may or may not drift the ghosts of those who have gone missing there, ghosts
that continue to make their presence felt well into the present day in which the book and
miniseries are set.
Mirroring the real-life Winchester Mystery House in California, the books late-
Victorian pile can therefore be read as kind of Foucauldian heterotopia, occupying multiple
clashing temporal and ontological registers. This paper argues that, along with Toni
Morrisons Beloved, Karen Joy Fowlers Sister Noon, and Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea, this
complex attitude to time makes possible an equally complex negotiation of historical race
and gender roles. In particular, it allows for a nuanced exploration of African-American
ritual and belief, including voodoo and obeah, depicted in these texts as both frightening
and liberating, and, specifically, as operating directly through material objects, and
through houses themselves.

Dara Downey lectures in literature in University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin.
She is the author of American Womens Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave, 2014), and
a number of articles on American Gothic fiction, including the work of Charles Brockden
Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Mark Z. Danielewski.
She is currently working on a monograph about servant figures in American uncanny
fiction, which is part of a larger project on race and religion in American supernatural texts
and popular culture. She co-edits The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and is the
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Treasurer of The National Association for English Studies and The Irish Association for
American Studies.
Painted Traces: art, madness and talismanic returns in the neo-Victorian novel
Kate Mitchell (The Australian National University)

Have you ever had this feeling that the lives people lived in the past are still real? (Kostova,
2010: 437).
Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde
were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets
and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as
trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect
us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present?
A number of neo-Victorian novels explore these questions by depicting art work in
their narratives. Here, the work of art is often talismanic; it provides (a fantasy of) access
to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative
reconstruction, if only partially. As vestigial remains, these traces manifest a past that is at
once absent and present. They exist within complex relationships: to the narrative in
which they are embedded, which can only tell, and not show the paintings power; to the
artist who paints and the viewer who beholds them, for whom the line between
enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and to the past, whose relationship to the
present they both manifest and construct. This paper explores these depictions of artwork
as historical traces in neo-Victorian fiction, with close reference to Elizabeth Kostovas The
Swan Thieves (2010). In this novel, which depicts a contemporary artist driven mad by a
historical painting, the artwork is truly material trace; its activity in this case the
paradoxical concealment and revelation of a dark secret continues into the present, even
as the present relentlessly, madly, pursues the trace, with its promise of the presence and
preservation of the past.

Kate Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her
research is focused on nineteenth- and twentieth - century literary and cultural history,
neo-Victorian fiction and the historical novel. She is author of History and Cultural Memory
in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Palgrave 2010) and, with Dr Nicola
Parsons (University of Sydney), co-editor of a collection of essays entitled Reading
Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Palgrave 2013). Her articles on
historical fiction and memory have appeared in Neo-Victorian Studies and in a number of
edited collections and journals.

Ghosting Oscar: Tracing Wildean Celebrity in Contemporary Fiction and Theatre
Dr Patricia Pulham (University of Portsmouth)
In the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century, the enduring interest in Oscar Wilde
appears to have reached new heights, expressed in biography, fiction, drama, film and
even music. The ubiquity of Wildes personality and production in contemporary media
may be understood in terms of the rise of celebrity culture. As critics including Elana
Gomel and Lindsay Livingston have argued, the rise of the artist as celebrity is
epitomized by Wildes own career and by the time of his first trial in 1895, Wilde was
already a celebrity.15 Furthermore, it is worth noting that the fictionalisation of Wilde
15 Elana Gomel, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author, Narrative 12:1
(January 2004): 74-92, p. 78; Lindsay Adamson Livingston, To be said to have done it is everything: The
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began in his own lifetime. In her 2007 monograph, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian
Fiction, Angela Kingston demonstrates that between 1887 and 1899, Wilde appeared in
the works of 32 of his contemporaries.16 Given this early coalescence between life and art,
it is unsurprising that, as Gomel argues, The Picture of Dorian Gray may be read as Wildes
prescient commentary on his own posthumous transformation into cultural icon (p. 79).
Considering himself in relation to the characters in his novel, Wilde famously
commented, Basil is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian is
what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps. In Dorian: An Imitation (2002), Will Self in
one sense fulfils Wildes desire. In this paper Id like to consider the ghosting of Wilde in
Selfs novel and Craig Willmans recent play, The Picture of John Gray (2014), focusing
primarily on the beautiful boy to explore the importance of celebrity in neo-Victorian
writing.

Dr Patricia Pulham is Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Her
research interests centre on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, art and culture,
with a particular focus on decadent writing and aestheticism, queer studies, late-Victorian
Gothic fiction, and the neo-Victorian novel. She is author of Art and the Transitional Object
in Vernon Lees Supernatural Tales (Ashgate Press, 2008), and has published on a range of
other nineteenth-century writers including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and
Olive Custance in academic journals such as the Yearbook of English Studies and
the Victorian Review. She has also co-edited several collections of essays
including Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010) and Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum,
2011). Most recently, with Praic Finnerty, she co-edited Decadent Crossings, a Special
Issue of Symbiosis, 16.2. (October, 2012), and was lead editor of a four-volume facsimile
collection: Spiritualism, 1840-1930, published by Routledge in January 2014. She is
currently writing a monograph on the Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature, which is
contracted to Edinburgh University Press.

Theatrical Oscar Wilde and the Possibilities for the (Re)Construction of Biography, Auto/Biography Studies
24:1 (Summer 2009): 15-33, pp. 17-18.
16 Angela Kingston, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
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S42 Reinterpreting Victorian Serial Murderers in Literature, Film, TV Series and
Graphic Novels
Convenors Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. dAnnunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy) and
Gilles Menegaldo (Universit de Poitiers, France)

Rosario Arias
Doubling and Reinterpreting (Victorian) Serial Murderers in Margaret Drabbles
Fiction
In this paper I aim to analyse the cyclical pattern of serial murders that took place in
Britain between 1975 and 1981, fictionalised in Margaret Drabbles trilogy, The Radiant
Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991), which, arguably,
doubled and repeated Jack the Rippers Victorian serial murders. Even though the idea of
serial killing seems to have gained new relevance in contemporary culture, I would like to
focus on Drabbles trilogy (also regarded as neo-sensation, following Kelly Marsh), which
stands in a liminal position since it clearly looks back to the nineteenth-century past, as
well as to the postmodern emphasis on deviance and criminality. Drabbles novels
fictionalise the Yorkshire Ripper (named as the Horror of Harrow Road), the English
mass murderer whom the media between 1975 and 1981 represented as the son of Jack
the Ripper (Onega 293). In December 2015 there was a controversy about the possibility
that the Yorkshire Ripper should be transferred from a mental hospital to prison. It
remains clear that this case still feeds on todays curious morbidity for serial killers.

Pierpaolo Martino
Oscar Wilde, Gyles Brandreth and the Murders at Reading Gaol
In an essay entitled "Pen, Pencil and Poison" (1889) Oscar Wilde focuses on the notorious
writer, serial murderer and forger Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847), whose
criminal activities reveal, according to Wilde, the soul of the true artist; as it is well known,
for the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, art must exceed any moral or ethical
judgment. Interestingly, Wilde recently turned into the protagonist of Gyles Brandreth's
series "Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries" (2008-2012), a postmodern rewriting of Wilde's
epopee, in which the Anglo-Irish writer becomes a detective working with celebrities such
as Conan Doyle in order to solve complex murder cases, showing how the theme of serial
killing has turned into a central concern of Neo-Victorian literature and culture. In the last
volume of the series, entitled Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (2012) Wilde is
portrayed as both a 'criminal' sentenced to two years of hard labour for gross indecency
and detective who tries to uncover the serial killer responsible for the deaths of two
prison wardens. In short, in Brandreth's narrative Wilde seems to inhabit a liminal space,
which can be accessed by the contemporary reader herself in order to activate a process of
re-definition of such ideas as deviance, guiltiness and 'outsideness'.

Vera Shamina
Metaphors of Postmodernism in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Dan Leno and the Limehouse
Golem by Peter Ackroyd and The Decorator by Boris Akunin
Postmodern fiction is marked by an intense interest in Victorian period, especially so in its
sensational aspects connected with crime, violence and mystery. Therefore we have a
revival of Victorian crime novel in a new image. On the one hand the authors try to
recreate the atmosphere of the period, introduce a lot of intertextual allusions and
references to the well-known Victorian novels, exploiting most popular subjects of the 19th
century literature, but on the other, as Ill try to show in my presentation, they use these
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plots as implicit metaphors of postmodernist art as such. It will be shown on the example
of two Neo-Victorian novels - Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd (1994)
and The Decorator by Boris Akunin. The latter has been greatly influenced by English
literature at large and Ackroyd in particular, which can be clearly seen from the
comparative analysis of the aforementioned novels. Both novels give their versions of the
story of Jack the Ripper but what is more important in our case, they employ akin plot
structures, images and artistic devices, which in fact become metaphoric actualization of
postmodern techniques such as collecting, cataloging, imitation, creating simulacra,
dismemberment, aestheticizing of mutilation and deformation. At the same time the very
choice of a disgusting maniac as the central character, his/her punishment by death may
on the one hand suggest certain self-irony and implicit criticism of postmodernism, and on
the other, the assumption that by dismembering old texts a writer is able to create a new
fine piece of art.

Carolina Abello Onofre and Christophe Chambost
Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015) and The Woman in Black (James Watkins,
2012), or How Serial Murderesses Reinvigorate the Ghost Story in Past-Ridden
Victorian Great Britain
The Woman in Black and Crimson Peak are both rooted in the literary gothic tradition. On
the one hand, TWIB revisits traditional ghost story elements by bringing up a vengeful
murderess ghost. On the other hand, CP reimagines the dramatic stories set up in the mid-
Victorian times and reshapes the usurper villain from the eighteenth century romance by
empowering the female figure.
This presentation will show how Guillermo Del Toro uses the idea of the mad woman in
the castle so as to explore one of his favorite themes: life beyond death. Crimson Peak
(2015) can indeed be seen as the continuation of the directors thoughts in The Devil s
Backbone (2001) in which the exchanges between the living and the dead were already in
the foreground. It is interesting however to note the specificities of the quite rich historical
context in Crimson Peak, with the representation of the conflicting relationship between
the energetic 19th century American society and its former mother country in which the
entropic Victorian codes have a hard time hiding the deterioration of social and family
values. But the film is far from being merely some historical account of the development of
the Western World. Indeed, Crimson Peak also (and mainly) enables Del Toro to scrutinize
the relationship between (weak) men and (strong) women, the latter not hesitating to
resort to serial murders so as to both protect their (decaying) social rank and (degraded)
family values. This stress on female serial killers will also allow us to consider other
Victorian ghosts and murderesses in the 21th century British cinema with The Woman in
Black (James Watkins, 2012), in which mad women no longer hesitate to leave their attics
and come back from the dead to kill innocent young victims so as reclaim what they think
is their due.

Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris
Whitechapel's Eery Strain of Police Procedural: a Mythology of Violence with
Complex Connections to the Past
In Whitechapel, showrunners Ben Court and Caroline Ip focus on the impossible ties
between a string of bloody murders committed in contemporary East London and the
citys criminal history. The first series directed by the British film and television director S.
J. Clarkson most specifically focuses on the gruesome legacy of serial killer Jack the Ripper.
It unfolds as a metafictional Jack the Ripper story filmed on location where the original
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killer operated and shaped by an intradiegetic Ripperologist (Steve Pemberton starring as
Ed Buchan) who uses the Past as a map just like the detectives and the viewers. In this
eery type of police procedural, the showrunners Court and Ip show how the figure of the
serial murderer, an inescapable trope in todays cinema and TV shows, brings back to
the surface some of the characters and society's submerged tensions. They question the
figures troubling contiguity with its environment and the disturbing way in which it is
somehow created by it. The fear factor is deliberately amplified thanks to a horror movie
aesthetic grafted onto a cop show structure. The fascination for the evil deeds of the Past is
fully exposed as the historical precedents are explored according to the rules of modern
criminal profiling. Tapping into a rich criminal stories reservoir, Court and Ip literally
create a new form/ula spanning the gap between the (pre-)Victorian era and today. As the
Past helps shed light on the present, there is also a great deal of speculation as to how
modern forensics and serial killer profiling could have helped solve the cases. The third
series features six episodes where the detectives also use murders from the Past to solve
current crimes such as the Ratcliffe Murders by John Williams (1811), Dr Crippens (1910)
and Mary Ann Cottons murders (1852-1873). All are used as case studies in the appeal of
perversity and engineering what Janet Staiger calls perverse spectators in her
eponymous 2000 book.

Deborah Bridle-Surprenant
Resuscitating criminals, monsters, witches and detectives in Penny Dreadful
(Showtime)
For a few decades now television has emerged as a solid contender to the cinema as a
quality medium for fiction. TV series have flourished and become a multi-faceted tool in
which screenwriters and show creators explore a very wide range of genres and topics.
The newfound popularity of the Victorian era has of course found its way into television as
well. It is particularly interesting to note that the popular culture and intellectual mindset
of the Victorian era were pervaded by a taste for sensationalism and a morbid curiosity for
crime and criminals, features that are also prominent in todays fiction set in or inspired by
Victorian times.
The TV series Penny Dreadful is named after the popular Victorian cheap and low-quality
stories involving sensational murders, supernatural entities and clever detectives. It stages
a set of characters coming straight from nineteenth-century fantasy literature Dracula,
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde while also exploring the
themes of lycanthropy, witchcraft, spiritualism and demonic possession.
I will seek to explain how Penny Dreadful can be seen as the perfect embodiment of todays
fascination with the Victorian era and more particularly with its killers, monsters and
detectives. The serial quality of the format is reflected in the motif of the serial murderer,
and the plot moves forward with the murders accomplished by the characters and the
investigation that they launch. The series works as a blood-drenched palimpsest whose
every page or episode brings us viewers face to face with well-known figures and
demons that we love to fear. The title itself works as an homage and as an admission of our
fascination for the macabre and the lurid. At the same time, it reminds the viewers of the
original penny dreadfuls, which were often rewrites of Gothic thrillers and adaptations of
existing stories. We are therefore faced with an object of popular culture conceived as a
mille feuille of references raising questions regarding its reception: how does the story
work and progress as an independent self in spite of its heavy network of referentiality?
What keeps us viewers intrigued and makes us eager for the next episode, just like readers
of Victorian penny dreadfuls? How does the series play into the contemporary audiences
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taste for thrills of the past in the modern setting of todays television? As TV reviewer and
critic Jeff Hensen writes about the second season: All the characters are walking, talking
literary references, yet the scenarios speak to the nostalgia- swamped Franken-Pop of
today.

Sophie Mantrant
Hiding Hyde in Penny Dreadful, Season 1
When the first season of Penny Dreadful was released, director John Logan was sometimes
accused of plagiarizing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the most obvious
similarity being that both are literary mash-ups that re-interpret famous characters of
Victorian fiction. What hasnt been mentioned so far (I think) is that John Logan may have
found in another Alan Moore book, From Hell, the hypothesis of the non-Englishness of
Jack the Ripper: Some people reckon a red Indian must have done it. Is Buffalo Bill still
staying in England, incidentally? (From Hell). The first season of Penny Dreadful stages a
Wild West showman and contains several comments on the genocide of Indians. I hope to
be able to account for these elements in my analysis of the partially hidden Jekyll-and-
Hyde figure in the first season.
My presentation will centre on the character of Ethan Chandler, who is a
combination of Quincey Morris (the American character in Dracula) and Jack the Ripper,
within a series that repeatedly echoes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in its emphasis that the devil
is in all of us. While the series clearly indicates which main fictional stories it
appropriates (Dracula, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray), Ethan Chandler is not explicitly
presented as the Jekyll/Hyde character, and only in the last episode is he shown
transforming into a beast. He is, however, the character who carries the theme of play-
acting, as he first appears in his role as sharpshooter in a Wild West show and is
subsequently often referred to as an actor. The theme of play-acting and re-presentation
is brought to the fore in the self-reflexive Grand-Guignol theatre. Ethan Chandler and his
lady friend (a prostitute) are among the spectators watching a play entitled The
Transformed Beast, in which a young woman is murdered by her werewolf suitor. The title
of the play seems to refer to Ethan Chandler rather than to what is shown on stage: he is
the beast transformed into an American actor watching an actor transforming into a beast.
It is important to bear in mind that, before he became an actor, Ethan Chandler served in
the Indian Wars [ideological perspective to be explored].

Stella Louis
Nurses, Witches and Vampires in Penny Dreadful TV Series: Women as Victims of the
Victorian Murderess Society
When the first episodes of John Logans Penny Dreadful TV series begin, situating the
supernatural drama in the Victorian society at the time of Jack the Ripper, crimes have just
taken place. We learn that we will see the events through the eyes of Vanessa Ives, a witch
woman who has just lost her best friend and will get involved in an extraordinary
gentlemens league, becoming (despite herself) the (side)show of a men governed
society. The main message emerging from the plot which focuses on vampires,
werewolves, and other Frankensteins monsters is the image of the woman completely
destroyed by society: women prostitutes murdered by a new Jack the Ripper; the bride
of Frankenstein created to be a good wife, the witch nurse called the Cut-Wife of
Ballantrie, a kidnapped Draculas Mina Harker, and the powerful and abusing Mrs Poole.
Reflecting Victorian serial murders of both Jack the Ripper and Amelia Dyer the Ogress of
Reading (Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1986) of who some people thought
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they were the same person , the series is about the murder of women and the image of
woman in the Victorian society which becomes the true murderer. Behind, we have
women victims: Jack the Ripper who killed female misery, Amelia Dyer who killed young
products of female misery, and witch nurses symbolized by the aesthetics of the
possession show who represent the decline of a society and the religious morality
(Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, 1973).
Through the eyes of Vanessa Ives we have an aesthetic focus on a mise en abyme of the
penny dreadful stories reflecting the morbid aspects of a decadent England by means of the
supernatural which highlights the question of the body. We thus also propose to analyse
the modes of representation of the female body and particularly the recurrent exhibiting
of those suffering, tortured female bodies, turned into an extremely violent spectacle.

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S43 Victorian and Neo-Victorian Screen Adaptations
Ela pek Gndz, The Piano: Neo-Victorian Sexuality
It is commonly known that the Victorian era marked a stark opposition between the two
genders: men were seemingly prudish and women were repressed. Although there was a
rigid gender role model which required that men be emotionless and strong while women
remain sexless and chaste, the neo-Victorian domain imagines and represents the opposite
case. One film in particular, Jane Campions The Piano, depicts this alternate reality via
representation of its heroines buried experience of sexuality. For Ada, the heroine, sex
symbolizes women's desirability and emotional satisfaction by men. In addition to
depicting this reversed gender model, the film also portrays the subalterns position by
projecting in its background the unheard voices of the Maori people. Thus, with Ada's
awakened sexuality, Campion both re-presents life in the colonies and reverses the
feminine prudence of Victorian sexuality. In displaying the impact of invisible Victorian
tropes on the present, Campions film is neo-Victorian.
The aim of this presentation is to analyse those ambiguous inclinations of the film
that are presented from a neo-Victorian outlook. For example, the famous scene of Ada and
her piano floating above the water signifies the resulting confusion regarding Adas
identity as a Victorian woman who buries her conventional gender role in the Victorian
past. By inducing for spectators unresolved questions pertaining the heroines ambiguous
gender identity, The Piano contributes a neo-Victorian dimension to traditional Victorian
gender perception.

Punking the Machine: Reengineering Victorian Literature in Steampunk Cinema
Dr. Robbie McAllister
Staffordshire University
In this paper I will evaluate a wave of twenty-first-century blockbusters that, whilst often
defined via different terminology, adapt previously existing texts into discernible
steampunk identities. The topic of discussion will not only be adaptations, but the acts of
adaptation and appropriation that allow millennial anxieties to be reimagined through the
industrial smog of nineteenth-century innovation. Shaped and defined through countless
re-imaginings, the popularised imagery of Frankensteins laboratory has become a staple
not only of the cinematic imagination, but also the thematic and aesthetic signifiers that
can be drawn through literary fiction into modern day steampunk. However, it may be
Frankensteins nameless monster itself that offers the most appropriate analogy to
steampunks construction within film. Reanimated via the allotransplantation of
alternative sources, the genre is made up of convoluted - yet unmistakable - patchwork
hybrids. In steampunks literary antecedent, the life with which inanimate flesh is
repurposed is met with revulsion; with steampunk itself, the reconstitution of revered
texts into new forms is met with similar scorn. I will begin by questioning the low cultural
and critically reviled position of the steampunk adaptation, and consider how it is not only
textual content that Hollywood steampunk has adapted, but troublingly for some,
subcultural identities too. Placing steampunk within the contexts of adaptation theory, I
will consider how these productions, like the steampunk gizmo itself, encourage renewed
archaeological agency, making the past re-present through industrialized acts of recycling,
borrowing and the (potential) robbery of historical artefacts that have come before. By
focusing on texts such as The Time Machine (2002), Around the World in 80 Days (2004),
Sherlock Holmes (2009) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), I shall argue
that cinemas contemporary identity is as deeply rooted in the industrial reengineering of
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literary works as it was in its own nineteenth-century formation. Transformed into high-
octane blockbuster texts, my conclusions will query how Neo-Victorianism has afforded a
mass-cultural means for society to mythologize a past century as an era of incredible
technological upheaval that acts as an analogue to our own fin de sicle hopes and fears.

My completed doctoral thesis and continued research focuses on a growing number of
steampunk films that have recast the nineteenth-century into a realm where past, present
and future collide. I am an active academic specialising in neo-Victorian film, and occupy
the post of Module Coordinator and Lead Lecturer for Film History and Film Theory at
Staffordshire University.

The Grand Guignol Approach to Adapting the Victorians: Penny Dreadful and the
Multiple Adaptations of Globalised Popular Neo-Victorianism
Dietmar Bhnke (University of Leipzig)

Before 15 minutes of the first episode of the Showtime TV series Penny Dreadful (2014ff.,
3rd series 2016) are over, we have been treated to a monstrous attack on a slum-dweller
in London (by a werewolf, we are led to believe), have witnessed a woman obviously
possessed by some supernatural force which is speaking through her, seen parts of a Wild
West show followed by an open-air sex scene between the main protagonist and one of the
female spectators, as well as a prolonged underground fight in which several vampire-like
creatures are killed. As this brief summary suggests, this is clearly not your average
heritage take on the Victorians, despite the 1891 London setting and the appearance of
characters like Mina Murray, Dorian Gray and Victor Frankenstein (who is effortlessly
transported to this period). Instead, it is what you might term the Grand Guignol
approach to Victorian literature and culture: a lot of blood and gore mixed with a little sex
and a veritable mash-up of various (Gothic) elements from nineteenth-century culture is
served up in the guise of a sensational mystery thriller (its pretty well done, actually, and
also great fun). It is certainly no coincidence that part of the first series including its final
scenes is set in a London theatre of the same name (i.e. Grand Guignol, modelled on the
famous Paris establishment), signaling a self-awareness by the makers of the programme
about contemporary popular cultures indebtedness to its Victorian forebears, which the
very title of the series already highlights. Incidentally, this also emphasizes the ineluctably
multinational or globalized character of a lot of recent neo-Victorian media products (the
US- produced series with its British-American cast was mainly shot in Ireland), as well as
their impure and multiply adapted character (mixing various genres and elements from
both Victorian and contemporary popular culture).
In this paper, I will analyse the first series of Penny Dreadful (aspects of the second
and third series may be included) from these interconnected perspectives: as a (meta-
)theatrical multinational adaptation of elements of (neo-)Victorian (Gothic) popular
culture. I will be particularly interested in how the series reflects on the process of
mediatisation and adaptation itself, e.g. with reference to theatre, photography, painting,
sances/possession etc., which will be related to the more general context of neo-Victorian
and adaptation studies. Time permitting, I may draw comparisons to other TV series such
as Ripper Street (2012ff.) or blockbusters such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
(2003) or Van Helsing (2004).

Picturing Dorian Gray: portrait of an adaptation
Shannon Wells-Lassagne Universit de Bretagne Sud
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Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray is tempting subject matter for filmmakers for
good reason: it is a gripping morality tale, filled with beauty, love, and action, while as a
prominent example of Victoriana with a slight Gothic bent, it ranks with Jekyll and Hyde as
the intersection of two domains that have inspired generations of filmmakers. However,
the novel poses unique challenges to filmmakers, one of which is present in its very title:
how can the extraordinary portrait of Dorian Gray be depicted onscreen, either in its
beauty or in its decadence? It is well-known that the novel, like all of Wildes work, thrives
on the tension between paradox and self-contradiction, where the reader spends much of
his or her time trying to discern the narrators perspective between the florid speeches of
Lord Henry and the strong morality implicit in Dorians downfall. But the adaptors
paradox resides in the fact that the very visual nature of the source text makes its transfer
to the screen difficult. The imagery in the novel is evocative rather than descriptive; the
portrait is not described until after Dorian Grays disappointment in Sybil Vane in Chapter
7, once it has already begun to change, though the change is more easily described than
viewed: In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds,
the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would
have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. (74) Whether painter or
filmmaker, one would be hard-pressed to recreate these lines of cruelty about the mouth
in a way that would be easily understood by the public and so reinterpretation of the
portrait in particular remains one of the major difficulties of adapting the story to the
screen.
If we are to believe that To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim, as Wilde
contends in his preface to the novel (17), it may be that the different adaptations of the
fiction ultimately fail in their aim (or that the adaptors aim is different from this artists).
Instead, these adaptors seem to agree with Basil Hallward, that "every portrait that is
painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the
accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter
who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself." (20) Each of these different adaptations
seems to view the portrait as a means of showcasing the possibilities of fiction in an
audiovisual context, and of their own individual aspirations for the works being made in
reaction to Wildes novel. As such, the adaptations seem to make of the portrait what
Hallward made of its subject: in some curious way [] his personality has suggested to
me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. (23)

Victorian Fiction on the Global Screen: The Case of Thomas Hardy
Margarida Esteves Pereira (Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

This paper aims to look at screen adaptations of two Victorian novels by Thomas Hardy,
namely, Tess of the DUrbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge. These two novels have
been adapted by English director Michael Winterbottom, the first under the title Trishna
(2011) and the second with the title The Claim (2000). Interestingly, the two adaptations
reconfigure the stories into completely different geographical, historical and cultural
contexts. Winterbottoms adaptations of Hardys stories seem to be apt examples of
narratives that, as Linda Hutcheon appropriate metaphor of biological adaptation
suggests, adapt to new environments by virtue of mutation (Hutcheon, 2006: 32). The
fact that these stories seem to fit well locations as different from Hardys Wessex as
Northern California in the nineteenth century, in one case, and twenty-first-century India,
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in another, draws our attention to their transnational and trans-historical quality. We aim
to look at these adaptations from this perspective, in order to assess the way Hardys late
Victorian narratives adapt to new historical and geographical contexts.

Gender, sexuality and social power in Thomas Vinterberg and David Nicholls 2015
adaptation of Thomas Hardys Far from the Madding Crowd
Elbieta Rokosz-Piejko, University of Rzeszw, Poland

In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his first Wessex novel, Thomas Hardy created a
female protagonist surprisingly unVictorian in her ambitions and temper. Similarly to
Hardys other major novels, that one, too, has been adapted for both the stage and the
screen. The most recent cinematic adaptation, which my presentation will be devoted to,
was directed by Danish former Dogme director, Thomas Vinterberg, with the screenplay
written by David Nicholls, and released in 2015. The shooting plans revealed two years
earlier suggested that the new adaptation was to be raw and revolutionary. It turned out
to be far from either, which does not mean that it is not worth critical attention. Since
Margaret Higonnet in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (1993) suggests that
the state of disequilibrium in Far from the Madding Crowd has much to do with gender,
sexuality and social power (52), I would like to examine the way in which the 2015 film
adaptation renders that. My paper will focus on the way in which the film handles the issue
of gender roles and sexuality, analysing the extent to which Hardys characters required
in the adaptors understanding modification to become appealing to the 2015 audience,
and defining the degree to which the new production fits into the neo-Victorian vogue.

Elbieta Rokosz-Piejko is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of English Studies of the
University of Rzeszw, Poland. Her main academic interests have been in ethnic American
autobiographical texts and in adaptations of literary texts into audio-visual media. She has
been teaching American literature survey courses, a course on literature and film, and
supervised numerous B.A. and M.A. diploma theses on American literature and culture. She
is a member of Polish Association for American Studies and Association of Adaptation
Studies. Her book publications so far include Hyphenated Identities: The Issue of Cultural
Identity in Selected Ethnic American Autobiographical Texts (2011), The Highlights of
American Literature (2012, co-authored with Barbara Niedziela) and published last year
Televised Classics. The British Classic Serial as a Distinctive Form of Literary Adaptation.

From a Neo-Victorian novel to a Victorian film? Gillian Armstrongs adaptation of
Peter Careys Oscar and Lucinda
Antonija Primorac, University of Split

In line with the most frequently used, and recently debated (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss,
2014; Kohlke 2014), definition of neo-Victorianism proposed by Heilmann and Llewellyn
in 2010, Peter Careys Oscar and Lucinda (1988) self-consciously throws light on little
known aspects of the Victorian past in Australia. It tells, among other things, the tale of an
unconventional mother and her daughter who wore bloomers garments favoured by
Victorian proponents of womens rights and dress reform and who shared a passion for
factories. In the final lines the novel, we learn that the daughter is known for more
important things than her passion for a nervous clergyman. She was famous, or famous at
least among students of the Australian labour movement. (515) However, Gillian
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Armstrongs 1997 film adaptation chooses to foreground exactly the characteristic of
Lucinda that Carey deems unimportant, as it highlights the romance and downplays the
feminism. This paper analyses the effects of this change by focusing on the role that clothes
play in the portrayal of Victorian gender roles and social rules in the novel and its
adaptation.

The Prestige, From Text to Screen (Christopher Priest, Christopher Nolan)
Gilles Menegaldo, University of Poitiers
The Prestige (1995), a novel by Christopher Priest, was adapted by Christopher Nolan, in
2006. The novel tells the story of a long-standing feud between two stage magicians in the
late 19th century and its tragic consequences for the protagonists and their descendants.
Priest uses a complex narrative structure, mostly based on the diaries of the two rivals,
with a consistent use of flashbacks and the interweaving of a contemporary frame
narrative. The novel deals with obsession, paranoa, spectacular magic tricks and secrecy
but it also foregrounds the role of science or pseudo science with the part played by the
famous and controversial Nikola Tesla.
Nolans adaptation dispenses with the frame narrative and changes many elements
of the plot while keeping the main thematic aspects of the novel and the same mood. The
film uses indeed a strategy of suspense and secrecy and disseminates significant signs,
both verbal and visual, which may help the spectator to unravel some enigmas, but these
signs are generally overlooked on first seeing the film. Nolan manages to convey the mood
of the period and the fascination exercised by these magic tricks on the attending
audiences, also pointing to the potential dangers involved, but he also offers a meta-textual
reflexion on the powers of the filmic medium which enables him to manipulate the filmic
spectator. We shall examine first the main transformations (suppression, addition,
displacement, amplification) carried out by Nolan on the literary source, then the narrative
and formal devices (especially lighting, sound, editing) by means of which Nolan manages
to convey some of the magic of the original work while extolling the cinematic art.

Benjamin Poore When the Sleeper Wakes: The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells and
Neo-Victorian Pulp Fictions
The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells, screened by Sky Arts in January and February 2016, is
an unusual adaptation of lesser-known late-Victorian fiction. Its four half-hour episodes
each offer stylistically distinct transmediations of H.G. Wells short stories first published in
1895 and 1896. But unlike the sprawling story worlds of Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky
Atlantic) and Dickensian (BBC) which are mashups of characters from different fictional
works Wellss tales remain distinct from one another, and indeed are framed as stories.
Episodes are opened, narrated, and concluded by Ray Winstone playing a seedy Wells in
late middle age. The format calls to mind a much older televisual tradition, as reviews have
been quick to point out: such anthology shows as Tales of the Unexpected, The Twilight
Zone, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
While its format puts The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells in frequent danger of lapsing into
clich (Tim Martin in the Telegraph called it a honking bit of period cheese), it might
usefully lead us to question the prevailing assumptions about seriality and genre in
television adaptation, including neo-Victorian drama (The Paradise, Penny Dreadful, Lark
Rise to Candleford, Dickensian, Sherlock). In this paper, I will revisit Whelehan and
Cartmells observations on pulp, genre and audiences in their introduction to Pulping
Fictions (Pluto, 1996) to examine the cultural status of NIghtmare Worlds. I argue that the
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series sits suspended between art and commerce, and between its Victorian forebears and
its televisual descendants.

Benjamin Poore is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television,
University of York, UK. His books include Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre:
Staging the Victorians (Palgrave, 2012) and Theatre & Empire (Palgrave, 2016). Ben has
published widely on the afterlives of Victorian novels and characters on stage, screen and
in popular culture. His current projects include preparing a monograph on the post-
millennial Sherlock Holmes, and editing the collection Neo-Victorian Villains.

Victorian and Neo-Victorian Screen Adaptations Between Darcy and Victoria:
Screening North & South
Ana Daniela Coelho, University of Lisbon, FCT

This paper will take into consideration BBCs 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskells novel
North and South (1954-5). Although categorised as a classical Victorian adaptation,
respectful of period detail and historical accuracy, this serial strives to offer a vision
appealing to a contemporary audience. In doing so, it reflects the blurred boundaries
between Victorian and Neo-Victorian objects as well as our own expectations of that past
era. My aim is to explore specific sequences representative of the 21st century portrayal of
the 19th century industrial England, so as to assert the balance between the social and the
romantic dimensions of the novel and its television adaptation, with a special interest in
markers of contemporaneity. This analysis will also try to contribute to the discussion of
new trends in 21st century period drama, more attentive to aesthetical concerns and
cinematic influences. It will also take into consideration the dialogical relation with
previous adaptations, namely the 1975 BBC miniseries adaptation of the same novel. Given
the known literary influences of Gaskell and also the fact that this adaptation has been
promoted as Pride and Prejudice with a social conscience, other pivotal examples, such as
the BBCs 1995 adaptation of Austens best-known novel, will also be taken into account.

Ana Daniela Coelho is a PhD candidate with a FCT (national agency for science and
technology) funded project on Austen adaptations in the new millennium, under the
supervision of Professors Deborah Cartmell (DeMonfort University, Leicester) and Alcinda
Pinheiro de Sousa (University of Lisbon). She is a researcher at the University of Lisbon
Centre for English Studies (ULICES), holds a degree in Modern Literatures and Languages,
and concluded her MA in 2013, with a dissertation on initial sequences of film and
television adaptations of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice. She is also a member of the
research group Messengers from the Stars, devoted to the study of Fantasy and Sci-Fi.

Andrea Kirchknopf Mary Morstan: a Cure to the Antifeminist Bias of the BBC
Sherlock (2010-)?
Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have received persistent criticism for their portrayals of
female characters in their British television adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock
Holmes stories. And justly so, since most figures are flat realisations of conventional
female stereotypes: Mrs. Hudson is typical mother-like figure, embodying Victorian
domesticity; Watsons girlfriends and Sherlocks admirer, Molly Hooper represent
neglected (would-be) partners to the male protagonists; and Irene Adler runs a strongly
humiliating course from a dominatrix to a damsel in distress. The introduction of Mary
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Morstan in the third series as Watsons wife into this truly male chauvinistic lineup, and
her retainment in the latest 2016 teaser episode, is a reason for hope. On top of showing
more complexity of character than the above-described female characters, she also seems
to function as an empty signifier, offering ample room for the interpretation of power
structures and gender roles in the series. I explore some of these possibilities in my paper:
Is Mary Sherlocks female double reinscribing the detective and the doctors homoerotic
relationship? Does she portray an updated Irene Adler working for Mycroft (and/or
Moriarty) but this time without losing her independence and integrity as a woman? Or is
she the disguised Moriarty himself gender bending?

Andrea Kirchknopf is a lecturer at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her
research interests are neo-Victorian fiction, postcolonial and postimperial literature in
English, literary and filmic adaptation of the long nineteenth century, postmodernism and
cultural memory. Her most important publications include the article (Re)workings of
Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts. Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1
(2008): 53-80, http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/ and the monograph Rewriting the
Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the Nineteenth Century, Jefferson (NC):
McFarland & Co Inc, 2013. Andrea's book won the European Society for the Study of
English (ESSE) book award for first books in the area "Literatures in the English language"
in 2014.

Juan-Jose Martin-Gonzalez. Universidad de Mlaga (Spain) Adapting Victorian
Gypsies for the Screen: Ethnicity, Otherness and (In)visibility in Neo-Victorian
Popular Film

This paper aims at analysing the presence of gypsy characters in two neo-Victorian
popular films, namely Joe Johnstons The Wolfman (2010) and Guy Ritchies Sherlock
Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011). The cultural construction of nineteenth-century gypsies,
those Others within Europe (Boyarin 433) whose presence in Victorian fiction was
peripheral, spectral and at times invisible (Nord 3-4), is simultaneously exploited and
contested by these two neo-Victorian screen narratives to raise issues of otherness and
invisibility on the screen. Setting off from the premise that screen texts, just like print
texts, can also be participant in the neo-Victorian project of reimagining the underside of
Victorian culture for contemporary audiences (Whelehan 273), this paper traces how the
adaptation of Victorian gypsies for the screen, true to the palimpsestuous potential
inherent to the process of adaptation (Hutcheon 6) and sharing the double drive between
past and present which characterises the neo-Victorian genre (Arias and Pulham xiii;
Shiller 539), hybridises our cultural memory of the Victorian Age on the screen while
concurrently raises concerns over the persistent liminal status of gypsies in contemporary
European culture. In particular, this paper illustrates how the tropes prototypically
associated to gypsies (namely their nomadic lifestyle, mysticism, alienated existence or
their perceived association to criminality) which can be traced back to Victorian culture
are deployed on the neo-Victorian popular screen (with varyingly succesful outcomes) to
comment on their (in)visibility in the European popular imagination.

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S44. Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of Modernism
Convened by Adrian Paterson and Christine Reynier

Anna Budziak, University of Wroclaw, Poland
A Deferred Polish Echo of T. S. Eliots Classicist Modernism

For T. S. Eliot, the significance of Modernism was predominantly theological. When he
asked Brian Coffey about the meaning of the term, Coffey answered, that which is
obviously the product of its age. Eliot described Modernism, dismissively, as sloppy or
muddy reasoning. He proposed to correct this type of sensibility and thought with his
classicism, hardened in the impassioned debate with John Middleton Murry. The reflection
of his classicism in Poland was deferred for 40 years. In the 1960s, poets clashed over its
meaning and tenets. While in Eliots classicism an earthly Arcadia was non-existent, to the
poets of the nation that suddenly migrated westwards, a literary Arcadia offered an
imaginary homeland. While Eliot struggled to sustain a sense of the miraculous in the
daily, his Polish followers emphasized the ordinary. Eliots classicism, in the 20s and 30s,
was a warning against moral degradation, whereas in the post-WWII period, poetry was
not meant to be a warning but, as for Miosz, a consolation. A question arises, then,
whether this Polish classicism, though ostensibly Eliotean, was not closer to the much
sunnier classicism of J. M. Murry; whether it actually did not confirm Coffeys apparently
facetious definition; and whether, to Eliot, it would not appear a modernist muddle.

T.S. Eliot as the reconciler of the Past, Present and Future
Zekiye Antakyalioglu, Gaziantep University, Turkey
T.S. Eliot as literary critic wrote many essays of generalizations and appreciations of individual
authors. In these essays we can find his hypotheses about what art is and what ideal poetry must
be like. Although Eliot was a prominent poet-critic of the modernist period, his theories of
tradition, time, memory, individual/society and history have still a penetrating influence on
contemporary thinking. Although his personal views on religion, morality and politics are
contestable and even obsolete in todays thinking, we should admit that Eliot had an
oxymoronic relation with them by virtue of being a classicist modernist, a royalist
American and a catholic Buddhist. This very intriguing position can be taken as a prototype
of poststructuralist way of handling the binaries as identical and deconstruction in general. Eliot,
for those who study postmodern/poststructuralist theories can be taken as an echo from the past.
By being the poet-critic of the present perfect tense, his analyses of history can be aligned with
the contemporary approaches to history as anachronistic. His concepts of objective correlative
and impersonal voice can be the echoes of the Deleuzean concept of art as the producer of
affects and percepts rather than the individual perceptions and sensations. His pessimism
about the dissolution of sensibilities can be taken as a critique echoing Jamesons views of
late capitalism whose result is the waning of affects. His cyclical view of time can be related
to the end of dialectical thinking in the contemporary studies. Finally, his negative attitude to
lyrical poetry and romanticism and his defense of epic distancing and collective voice in poetry
may allude a lot to the concepts like the death of the author and textuality. This paper will be a
revisiting of T.S. Eliots non-fictional prose and theory of art to analyze their validity and
relevance for us today.
Paolo Bugliani, University of Pisa, Italy
Facing the Monolith: Virginia Woolfs Alternative to Impersonality
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Modernism is far from being a monolithically conceivable theoretical entity, as its various
popularisations and canonizations may lead us to think. As a matter of fact,
having been constructed and negotiated by the most heterogeneous literary personalities
of world culture, it is highly predictable that many of its canonical features might
substantially vary according to the author analysed. A category in particular, that of
impersonality, might appear as the most universally applicable: T. S. Eliot envisioned a
continuous extinction of personality; Ezra Pound had his personae and absolute
rhythm; Joyce himself purported that The artist [] remains within or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, [] indifferent, paring his fingernails. And many other examples
might be added to this nuclear catalogue. Yet, when the magnifying glass is pointed at
Virginia Woolf, and in particular at her non-fiction (the literary space in which she is
allowed to reflect more freely on literature), we immediately recognize that, in her
opinion, an artist is never entirely allowed to step out of his/her creation. Even if in A
Room of Ones Own she affirms that: One must strain off what was personal and accidental
in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth, many other
pronouncements maintain a diametrically opposed position, for instance, the concept
of presence she sketches while speaking of the essay as a genre. With a comparative point
of view, my contribution aims at retracing and commenting some of these non-fictional
remarks to reassess the impact of authorial idiosyncrasy in the wider scope of Woolfs
aesthetics, in relation with the more general Modernist Manifesto of impersonality.

Annalisa Federici, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
This loose, drifting material of life: Virginia Woolfs Private Epitexts

Virginia Woolfs vast literary output is characterised by remarkable homogeneity and
coherence between aesthetic principles on the one hand and formal aspects on the other,
some qualities which her readers and critics have long recognised also thanks to the
paratextual genres (diaries, letters, memoirs) that she mastered along with criticism and
fiction. A thorough analysis of these texts, which Genette labels private epitext, shows
that they can be considered as a creative current parallel to, and no less important than,
her mainstream genre; furthermore, they also reveal the image of an author for whom life
and art were so inextricably interwoven that the creative process enacted in fiction is the
object of constant reflection amid the recording of memories, states of mind and daily
incidents. The public appearance of such private epitexts has aroused great interest for the
insights they afford into Woolfs life and works, but has also determined a reductive
interpretation of them as a mere adjunct to her fiction and essays. In fact, Woolfs private
epitexts illustrate the dichotomous vision informing her fiction and aesthetics; as works
embodying the Modernist tension between subjectivity and objectivity, between the
private and the public, they should be considered as originative documents, a workshop
space where her aesthetic principles were originally ideated, elaborated and sometimes
shared with acquaintances.

Jason Finch, bo Akademi University, Finland
Inside His Idiom: Forster and Eliot Reappraised

This paper offers a reassessment of Eliot and Forsters interconnectedness in the current
climate of research into modernism. When Forster looks at Eliot and speaks of the
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generation of 1929 as inside his idiom, there is no ism. For Forster, it is just another
generation, like his own with George Meredith in 1900 (inside whose idiom, Forster
claims, he and his university contemporaries were).
The contention here is that modernism needs to be reconceptualized bearing this sort of
generational thinking in mind. The paper proceeds by examining the history of Forster and
Eliots relations. Forsters 1937 essay E.M. Forster Looks at London, republished in Two
Cheers for Democracy (1951) as London Is a Muddle, draws its choice of sites to visit and
examine as representative of London quite specifically from Eliots The Waste Land, as has
not so far been recognized. The essay thus moves from the environs of London Bridge
around the church of St Magnus the Martyr to a canalside setting off the Caledonian Road
in a then-plebeian portion of North London in a way that seems specifically derived from
Eliot.
Read this way Forsters relations with Eliot look different from in P. N. Furbanks
officially-sanctioned biography, which sees them as prickly and generally unimportant to
the writing career of either man. Forster included an essay on Eliot in both of the
collections of essays he published, one before and one after the Second World War,
suggesting that for him Eliot was at the centre of contemporary culture. And, while
Forsters London relies on Eliots, so The Waste Land perhaps draws its portrait of London
to a greater extent than has so far been appreciated on the one found in Forsters Howards
End, published twelve years before it.

Leila Haghshenas, University Paul-Valry Montpellier, France
The Everyday in Leonard Woolfs The Pageant of History

The modernist period is no doubt marked by a tendency towards the ordinary and the
everyday. Recent studies reveal the influence of the everyday in the fiction of such
modernist writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, William Carlos
Williams, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (Randall 2007). It should however be
noted that despite the recent interest taken in modernist fiction and its relation to the
everyday, the link between the nonfictional works of modernist writers and the everyday
remains unexplored. This paper aims to explore the influence of the everyday and the
ordinary in one of Leonard Woolfs essays entitled The Pageant of History.
Though not considered as a modernist writer, Leonard Woolf seems to have shared
the modernists interest in the everyday and the ordinary. A prolific writer, Leonard Woolf
is the author of a great mass of literary and political journalism, several essays, two novels,
a volume of short stories, five volumes of autobiography, a play and poetry. In The
pageant of History, Leonard Woolf points to the extraordinary power of the everyday in
revealing the history of civilisation and thus illuminates the role of the everyday in modern
times.

Adrian Paterson, National University of Ireland, Galway
Fixing the pitch: Yeatss Letters Constructing Modernisms
R.F. Fosters biography of W.B. Yeats vows to concentrate not on what he wrote, but
principally on what he did. Yeatss letters however stand precisely at the intersection of
these two impulses. They are writings, potentially, that stand alone, that serve to
illuminate his own writing practices, and that elucidate his position as a newly
professionalized principal actor in several coterminous literary marketplaces. Possessing
an extraordinary sense of the way things would look to people later on, as his wife
claimed, Yeats left Autobiographies and published diary fragments that would influence
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the close of Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But whether written, typed, or
dictated, always considered, tested, never at white heat, Yeatss letters lay the foundations
of such constructions. Nowhere, perhaps, is an ongoing self-conscious construction of
modernism more evident but nowhere, equally, is this process more contradictory, more
compelling in its competing narratives. Nominally non-fictional, these letters try out many
fictions. This paper concentrates on two strands. First the exchange of books and letters
with the lawyer John Quinn which take us from a defining event in the west of Ireland to
London to New York, and which, beginning in excited correspondence about Friedrich
Nietzsche, came to define the terms of modernisms cultural and capital exchanges, with
Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and others. The second, correspondence with literary agents (such as
A.P. Watt), musical agents, and musicians concerning the copyrights and musical settings
of poems and plays pitched, presented, represented, reframed at different audiences,
culminating in the adaptation of nineties sensibilities to new broadcasting technologies. In
multiple narratives and retellings these correspondences construct new writing and acting
selves; they put on and take off different masks; they practice, rehearse those makings and
remakings of the self on which Yeatss idiosyncratic versions of modernism depend. Yet at
the same time they face outwards to a new milieu of cultural production and reception,
causing us to question critical approaches that stop at the finished, printed, unheard (even
genetic) text, and consider the dated, correspondent, unpunctuated, unfinished, oral and
aural dimensions of modernist constructions.

Constructing Modernism as Intermedial: Virginia Woolfs Essays in Good
Housekeeping Magazine.
Christine Reynier, University Paul-Valry Montpellier 3 EMMA, France

In 1931-1932, at the height of her career, Virginia Woolf wrote six essays on London for
Good Housekeeping magazine, a magazine she is rarely associated with. The essays,
apparently written for financial reasons, were dismissed by Woolf as pure brilliant
description (Letters IV, 22 March 1931). However, such a dismissive attitude was also
adopted by Woolf when she was writing her short stories, now regarded as literary
masterpieces. This situation should encourage us to read the Good Housekeeping essays,
known as The London Scene, for their own sake.
Apart from providing an original guided tour of London and conveying the
throbbing modernity of the metropolis, I will argue that these lively essays further offer
reflections on several art forms while they are themselves informed by them. Their
intermedial nature will be explored briefly, within the space allotted by the seminar. On
the whole, the six essays will appear to shed an original light on Woolfs own (essay-
)writing and help to construct her own brand of modernism differently, as connecting
various media and spheres.

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S45 Technology and Modernist Fiction
Co-convenors: Dr Eoghan Smith (Carlow College, Ireland) and Dr Armela Panajoti
(University of Vlora, Albania).

Tamara Radak, University of Vienna, Austria
SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS (Joyce, Ulysses 7.1022): Modernism and Machines

In The Senses of Modernism (2003), Sara Danius speaks of the myth of the
antitechnological bias in modernism, rightly calling for a re-evaluation of the long-held
idea that technology can be seen as the other of modernist art at the beginning of the 20th
century (except for the specific case of Futurism and its politically-charged cult of speed).

This paper will explore the significance of specific technical devices and machines (the
printing press, the tram, and the automobile) in two texts from the high modernist and late
modernist period. Leopold Blooms ambivalent relationship towards new technologies in
Joyces Ulysses (he is at the same time fascinated with the possibilities of technological
inventions like the gramophone or the printing press andsomewhat pragmatically
annoyed when a tram blocks his view of a womans stocking) will be juxtaposed with a
more positive attitude towards technology that the characters in Virginia Woolfs The
Years (1937) display. In this later text, the incessant buzz and rush of London traffic, as a
metaphor for fast-paced metropolitan life rooted in the present acts as a counterbalance to
the Pargiters oppressive perpetuation of tradition and as a temporary alleviation of the
burden of the past.

On a larger scale, this paper demonstrates that technology not only plays an important role
as a plot device in these texts, but also contributes to the dispersal, interruption and
fragmentation (Peach, ed. The Years xiv) of their narrative.

Dr. Artur Jaupaj, Canadian Institute of Technology, Albania
Technology and Modernist Fiction: Defying Totalitarianism

Modernism is central to any discussion of twentieth century art and literature. It has often
been labeled the tradition of the new or an attempt to reject old habits of thought, mainly
the positivist attitude of the nineteenth century, by depicting the contemporary situation
as chaotic and amidst fluid change due, in part, to technologically driven reality. As such,
modernist writers explore fresh ways of exploring human experience and reworking
traditional ways of expression towards radically new and innovative models of writing
oriented towards the future. Whether their style is elaborate or spare, wordy or elliptical,
abstract or concrete, they display a highly self-conscious use of language and aim at
transforming the way we see the world. Along these lines, Kafkas The Metamorphosis,
Huxleys Brave New World and Orwells Nineteen Eighty Four, to name a few, question the
excessive faith in the power of science and rational inquiry by highlighting the dangers of
such fallible attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to present the above-mentioned novels
as exemplary models of defying technological advances of the first half of the twentieth
century with regard to rise of totalitarianism, the elimination of high culture, nature of
labour, sexuality and deprivation of human freedoms, to name a few.
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Dr. Daniel Vogel, PWSZ Raciborz (College of Professional Studies in Raciborz), Poland
Modernism and the Beginnings of Science Fiction: Herbert George Wells
and his Visions of Future Societies

Despite the fact that most of the contemporary readers associate Herbert George Wells
with the beginnings of science fiction, in fact his literary ouput proves that he was one of
the most varied writers of the early 20th century. Easily crossing genres, he produced
works whose themes stretch from science fiction to political treaties, from Edwardian
satires to Utopian novels, from socialist idealism to gender issues and sexual freedom.
More a literary prophet than political activist, Herbert George Wells seemed to
foresee at least some of the radical changes in society that were to take place after the
outbreak of the First World War. However, his naive utopianism and belief in the war to
end wars is revised in his more mature fiction, such as The Bulpington Bulp, even if in a
typically satirical, Wellsian way. Such a change was the result of atrocities committed
during the war, difficult to conceal, but also by the earlier, rather pessimistic predictions
concerning possible war in Europe advocated by such writers as Joseph Conrad (i.e. in
Autocracy and War).
This paper traces the beginnings of H.G.Wellss literary career, with particular
emphasis put on the best known works that are classified as science fiction (The Time
Machine, War of the Worlds), but also on other futuristic writings of this great, yet
controversial artist. In addition to that, am going to examine the influence other artists of
that period had on Herbert George Wells, even though he often parodied or criticized them
(such as Ford Madox Ford or the aforementioned Joseph Conrad). Wellss scientific writing
left a legacy that reverberates to the present day, yet how his initial ideas developed and
changed in the course of time bear analysis, as does how at the end of his life he himself
assessed the books he wrote at the turn of the century.

Dr. Emine entrk, Atlm University, Turkey
Auto-Updated Human Beings in Mike Lancasters 0.4 and 1.4

In his short story The Machine Stops (1909), E. M. Forsters main character Kuno
criticises the Machine by stating, We created the Machine to do our will, but we cannot
make it do our will now (15). A century has now passed since Forster's story and the
Machine has been re-formed by Mike Lancaster in his novels 0.4 and 1.4. The front cover of
0.4 states Its a brave new world. Having woken up from a state of hypnosis, Kyle and the
other three volunteers realise that life has changed. There is no internet or phone
connection, and furthermore all the people living in the village appear to be mesmerised:
they are "updated". In the sequel 1.4, Lancaster exaggerates the concept of wireless
connection, as people are connected to each other via The Link (which is in their heads).
The critical portrayal of technology in Lancasters series will be the main concern of
this paper. What are the limits of integrating technology to our lives? Is technological
singularity the inevitable destination of todays journey? This paper aims to find an answer
to these questions, and also the alternatives of asking What if...?

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S46. REPORTAGE AND CIVIL WARS THROUGH THE AGES

Convenors
John S. Bak, Universit de Lorraine, France
Alberto Lzaro, University of Alcal, Spain

The American Civil War and the Irish Press
Pawe Hamera
Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland

The American Civil War was one of the most defining moments in American history.
Moreover, due to the fact that thousands of Irishmen fought on both sides of the conflict,
the Civil War played a pivotal role in the shaping of Irish-American identity. Historians, by
and large, have focused on the military aspects of the involvement of the Irish in the war
and there are many publications on the Irish brigades which fought on the battlefields of
this bloody struggle. Not much, however, has been written on how the conflict was
perceived in Ireland. In addition, not enough attention has been paid to how the Civil War
was depicted in the Irish press. Analyzing the contents of Irish journals can provide us
with some new and interesting insight into this complex confrontation, especially because
of the position of Ireland within the British Empire and the presence of the Irish diaspora
in the United States. The aim of this paper is to attempt to show how the American Civil
War was depicted in the Irish press and contrast the coverage and opinions provided by
the Irish newspapers with the way the conflict was portrayed by the British press.

The Real War That Never Gets in the Books: Civil Wars in Whitman and Yeats
Bojana Aamovi
University of Belgrade, Serbia

Works of poetry contain some of the most powerful accounts of wars, often exposing what
the newspapers and history books neglect. For the poets who consider themselves
national bards, particularly trying are civil wars, sparked off by internal divisions these
poets attempt to surpass. Walt Whitman, who proclaimed himself the American bard just a
few years before the Civil War, witnessed the horrors of this national catastrophe as a
nurse, taking care of the wounded and the dying. This experience furnished Whitman with
the material for the new collections of poems (Drum-Taps & Sequel to Drum-Taps) and of
prose pieces (Memoranda During the War). Whitmans war poetry is not the poetry
celebrating victories and brave generals, but rather the poetry of ordinary soldiers and of
despair. Some decades later, William Butler Yeats, another national bard, found himself in
a similar situation, with the outbreak of the Irish civil war. Although perhaps not as prolific
on this subject as Whitman, Yeats incorporated the national conflict in his next works (for
instance in Meditations in Time of Civil War). This paper examines and compares the
works of the two poets in aspects related to the civil war years, focusing on overt or covert
changes in poetics prompted by the changed circumstances.

Spanish Civil War Books in Estado Novo Portugal and Socialist Hungary between
1945 and 1974
Zsfia Gombr
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES), Portugal
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Antnio de Oliveira Salazars sympathies with General Francisco Franco were an open
secret right from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, since Salazar was perfectly aware
that the survival of his recently created Estado Novo greatly depended on the Nationalist
victory in Spain. Besides direct and indirect military help, the Estado Novo also backed the
rebels by manipulation of mass public opinion at home as well as in Spain through pro-
Nationalist propaganda and information control. Accordingly, all reportage books on the
Spanish Civil War that were assumed to have a pro-Republican bias or described the
horrors committed by the Nationalist army were strictly banned such as Searchlight on
Spain by the Red Duchess of Atholl. The official Hungarian viewpoint on the Spanish Civil
War is of course divergently different, especially, in view of the fact that several leading
Communist politicians including Ern Ger, Lszl Rajk, and Ferenc Mnnich fought as
volunteers in the International Brigades during the Civil War. The paper thus aims to
compare the translation productions of the two countries with reference to the Spanish
Civil War. Besides historiographies in translation, Civil War fictions and personal
narratives will be investigated in order to shed light on the conspicuous popularity (e.g.:
Hemingways For Whom the Bells Toll in Hungary) or absence of certain novels (Koestlers
Spanish Testament and Orwells Homage to Catalonia in both countries). The study draws
heavily on the new findings of the Hungarian research project English-Language Literature
and Censorship, 19451989 along with the book censorship reports stored at the
National Archives of Lisbon.

Spain 1937: Auden, Orwell and Spender in a Moment of (Civil) War
Miquel Berga
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Orwell, Auden and Spender spent time in Spain in the spring of 1937 when the
antagonisms between the political forces within the Republican side emerged brutally.
After May 1937, the die was cast and the outcome of the Spanish Civil War could be fatally
anticipated. Taking Audens famous long poem Spain and its significant reverberations in
In Memory of WB Yeats as a case study, the paper explores how the diverse experiences of
the three writers in the Spain of the civil war produced relevant fissures between their
public and private voices and how the very awareness of this disharmony was to shape the
personal relationship between them and, what is more important, was to resonate in their
ulterior literary output. Their individual responses to the strains of experiencing the
Spanish war and its politics gave a new and clear sense to their views on the function of
literature and became pivotal in the defining and refining of their political stand.

From Reporting to Reportage: Nationalist and Republican Oral Recollections of the
Spanish Civil War, A Case Study of Murcia
Margarita Navarro Prez
Universidad Catlica San Antonio de Murcia, Spain

The Spanish Civil War, as we Spanish see it, was a war between brothers, between
individuals who knew each other, neighbours and relatives who suddenly were involved in
a conflict many wished they could avoid. Today, almost 80 years after, (re)-constructing
our collective memory/ies of such an event is no easy task, history books, film and media,
together with peoples testimonies offer a way of trying to understand how it is perceived
and understood today. This presentation proposes an alternative way of looking into the
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Spanish Civil War, exploring the collective memories of those who lived to tell their stories
and were willing to do so. In this talk, I will present the preliminary sketch of what will
become a more extensive study of different perceptions and representations of the war in
Spain. I will, therefore, consider both eyewitness accounts and those passed on to later
generations by both Republicans and Nationalists, looking into how these recollections
combine with contemporary representations to form a collective memory of this historical
moment. Based on personal interviews with several surviving eyewitnesses and their
recollections of what they read in the press per what they actually experienced, this talk
argues that reportage, in particular during times of war, can also be created by those who
are not actively involved in the act of reporting. Juxtaposing personal accounts of the war
that have not yet been recorded against those accounts that were documented help to
demonstrate how a countrys understanding and view on such a nation changing event as
the Civil War was in Spain, changes and evolves as time goes by, proving that reportage is
much more than the recording of events it is also a lived experience shared between
people and generations and thus recoverable only through oral documentation. Moreover,
these testimonies combine with media representations (films and documentaries) to fuel
the constructions of collective memory/ies of contemporary Spain.

Two Conflicting Irish Views of the Spanish Civil War
Alberto Lzaro
University of Alcal, Spain

The Spanish Civil War sparked a heated debate in the recently created Irish Free State, as
the Republic of Ireland was then called. A country that had also gone through an eleven-
month civil war over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was again divided between those who
supported the left-wing democratic Spanish Republican government and those who
favoured Francos crusade against atheists and Marxists. In fact, some Irish volunteers
joined the International Brigades to confront Fascism together with the Spanish
Republican forces, while other more conservative Irish Catholics were mobilised to fight
with Francos army against those Reds that the media claim to be responsible for killing
priests and burning churches. Both sections were often moved by the news, accounts and
interpretations of the Spanish war that emerged at that time. This paper aims to discuss
the war reportage of two Irish writers who describe the war from the two opposite sides:
Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1986), a prominent Irish socialist activist and novelist who wrote
Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937), and Eoin ODuffy (1892-1944), a soldier, anti-
communist activist and police commissioner who raised the Irish Brigade to fight with
Francos army and wrote The Crusade in Spain (1938). Both contributed to the
dissemination of information and ideas about the Spanish conflict with their eyewitness
accounts, and both raise obvious questions about the relations between fact, fiction and
the truth, using similar narrative strategies and rhetorical devices to portray different
versions of the same war.

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S47: The paradoxical quest of the wounded hero in contemporary narrative fiction.

Convenors: Jean-Michel Ganteau (U. of Montpellier 3) and Susana Onega (U. of Zaragoza)

Susana Onega
Learning to love: The paradoxical Quest of the Male Protagonists in Jeanette
Wintersons The Gap of Time

Jeanette Wintersons rewriting of Shakespeare The Winters Tale is a good example of
creative misreading in Harold Bloom sense of the term. In Wintersons cover version the
Shakespearian topos of philia as a necessary stage in the maturation process of the male
characters before matrimony and reproduction is given an overtly sexual component that
complicates this progress and brings to the fore the matrophobic and even matricidal
elements underlying the patriarchal configuration of the nuclear family. Leo and Xeno,
themselves the victims of inadequate nuclear families, enjoy a complex male friendship
that is disrupted by Leos incapacity to share Mimis love with Xeno. This triggers what
Wilson Knight famously called the Shakespearean hate-theme (The Wheel of Fire, passim)
whose obvious target is the heavily pregnant MiMi and whose tragic consequences are the
death of Leo and MiMis son Milo and the disappearance of their newly born daughter,
Perdita. While MiMi and Perdita are clear examples of the vulnerability of women in
patriarchy, it is the two men, Leo and Xeno, who must learn from their mistakes, if they are
to mature and heal their self-inflicted wounds. The paper argues that the happy ending
of the novel is achieved when, abandoning their narcissistic positions, Leo and Xeno
understand the importance of the family and of responsible fatherhood through the
example of Perditas foster-father Shep and the influence of Leos secretary, Pauline, a
middle-aged Jewish woman embodying the ethics of love attributed by Emmanuel Levinas
to biblical Rebecca.

Eileen Williams-Wanquet
Title: Anita Brookners wounded heroine

Anita Brookners 24 novels (1981-2009) have as central consciousness a single
protagonist, who is usually female, and the successive heroines can be considered as
multiples of one another. This highly egocentric yet deeply wounded heroine is self-
defined by invisibility, which belies her calm and rational appearance and is expressed
through obsessive themes and images of sadness, loneliness, exclusion and anguish. The
unhappiness that defines her, far from being the result of a willed and Romantic form of
rebellious self-definition, stems from a failure to control her life and fulfil her quest for
love and inclusion, which encompasses the relation to and responsibility for the other. Her
quest for happiness is a traditional one founded upon a humanist ethics based on the
centrality of the subject and on Christian rationality, but she ironically obtains the
opposite of what she expects. The victim of familial and historical forces that she does not
control, and especially of the deceitful moral codes transmitted by the classic realist texts
that have fashioned her, incapable of controlling her life, Brookners heroine finally resigns
herself to a form of death-in-life. Her wounds are not willingly self-inflicted, but passively
undergone and finally embraced as a defining characteristic. She explains her vulnerability
by her misguided belief in humanist ethics, the very failure of which seems to point
towards an ethics of alterity.

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Chiara Battisti
Am I Still Alice?: the quest for a sense of the self and Alzheimer's disease in the
novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova

She was Alice Howland, brave and remarkable hero; she was Alice Howland,
Alzheimers victim. These quotations, taken from the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova
(2007), highlight and describe the main character, Alice, as an emblematic wounded hero.
Alice, a 50-year-old woman, is a cognitive psychology Professor at the University of
Harvard and a prominent expert in psycholinguistics. She is married to an equally
successful husband, and they have three grown-up children. Her life suddenly changes
when she is diagnosed early-onset Alzheimer's disease. My paper aims, therefore, at
offering a reflection on Alices quest and struggle with the loss of herself, including her
career, individuality, cognition, and connection to the world around her. I will analyse the
way in which Alzheimer's literary representation, as offered by Lisa Genova, negotiates
contemporary biomedical and disability studies discourses. Alices growing vulnerability
allows us to consider the ethical issue of representing vulnerable subjects. According to
Thomas Couser, the main ethical principles of biomedicine should be applied to forms of
life writing dealing with vulnerable subjects so that their subjects "have the opportunity to
exercise some degree of control [at least till it is possible for them] over what happens to
their stories."(T. Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, 19). In the specific
case of Alzheimers, the responsibility of speaking for the vulnerable person at a certain
moment shifts to other people. The caregivers (family network and friend) are credited
with the power/responsibility to [ reinterpret] the language of Alzheimer's [giving]
new meanings to the actions and inaction of the victims of Alzheimer's" (C. Gilleard and P.
Higgs, Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature, 186.)The idea of selfhood
which emerges from these considerations allow us to use the concept of second
Personhood to describe Alices quest. This concept, as outlined by Mieke Bal, indicates, in
fact, the derivative status of personhood in which the self is described in relation to other
persons. In the essay, I will also focus my critical attention on the role of the caregivers,
defined by Richard Glatzer- who co-directed the cinematic transposition of this novel-the
real unsung heroes. I think that the novel stresses the impact of Alzheimers on those
around Alice, in particular on her husband and on her three grown-up children, and thus
evokes the issues of the ethics of care and empathy on which I will extensively reflect.

Laura Colombino
Bodies and Landscapes in Pain: Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go
Entrapped in the dominant discourse of their models, the clones of Never Let Me Go
embrace a biopolitics of suffering. In the novel, the concept of a universal human nature,
presented through the perspective of a marginal wounded other, intersects with both
postmodern concerns for the simulacral and a neo-modernist interest in the depths of
consciousness a combination quite common in recent British fiction. The fictitious
quality of imagined essences (Hailsham which stands for the country house; actors in an
advert who stand for happy and fulfilled real people; the map of England for the country
itself) combines with the sense that they are the loci of unspeakable traumas and
ontological crises, in order to foreground an ethical seriousness beyond postmodern irony.
Similarly, the clones corporeality (their only recognised essence) remains itself the
traumatic real at the margin of their consciousness: their insides are linguistically
repressed and understated, hidden just below the surface of good manners. The paper
analyses the interplay between neo-humanist empathy, postmodern simulacra and the
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traumatic real through the relationship between the corporeality of the clones and the
physical environments they inhabit. It shows how, through its imaginative association
with the suffering body, a simulacral country is turned into a landscape of pain.

Roberto del Valle Alcal
Wounds of Precariousness, Paradoxes of Capital: Subjectivity and Servile Life in
Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go

My aim in this paper is to read Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go (2005) through a
theoretical reassessment of neoliberal forms of subjectivity and labour. I will suggest that
this novels examination of the notion of bare life (Agamben 1998) through a dystopian
re-imagination of recent biopolitical history has to be understood in relation to operative
disjunctions and discontinuities at the heart of neoliberalisms project of subject
formation. Beyond the figures of human capital and entrepreneurship of the self stressed
by Foucaults well-known analyses (2008), neoliberalism remains a project of
decomposition and recomposition at the level of dividuals, a process of functional and
affective enlistment, or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, of machinic enslavement (2011),
through which the body of the workforce (living labour or human capital, indeed, but
reconsidered in less essentialising ways) assumes many of the specific traits of fixed
capital. Following Marxs definition of the latter as the depository of accumulated
knowledge or general intellect (1973), I will argue that the tasks of memory and
narration in this novel become detached from humanistic determinations of the subjective
and are rediscovered in machinic assemblages or arrangements that subvert the ethical
and epistemological hierarchies of labour and agency in contemporary capitalism. With its
recreation of the constitutively wounded and precarious existence of a group of clones
who willingly partake in their own slow destruction, Ishiguros novel emerges as a
fictional gloss on the post-humanist aspects of contemporary capitalist life, shedding new
light on the paradoxical complicity rehearsed by neoliberal subjects in their own
exploitation and suffering. This paper will attempt to explicate and ultimately overcome
this fundamental paradox in contemporary biopolitics by moving beyond the notion of
bare life through which the novel has been read (De Boever 2013) and proposing instead
the concept of servile life.

Jean-Michel Ganteau
Espousing the Wound: Dispossession as Practice in Jon McGregors So Many Ways to
Begin

Jon McGregors So Many Ways to Begin (2006) evokes, in contemporary Bildungsroman
fashion, the life of David Carter, a museum curator with a special interest in hoarding
mundane, ordinary treasures. Each chapter begins with the description of an exhibit, taken
from the protagonists or a citizens past, making the narrative veer towards the exhibition
catalogue. Contemporary history looms large in Davids life, as we follow him from his
childhood years in war-time London to the present. As is the case with McGregors three
novels, So Many Ways to Begin is a trauma story, making individual and collective traumas
meet. Openness to ones own wound is what characterises this story in which vulnerability
looms large, i.e. not only the protagonists vulnerability but his exposure to the others
pain, as made clear through the story of his couple and his consistent support of his
depressed, equally traumatised wife. Espousing the wound is one of the main themes of
the novel, and certainly the central mode of individuation for the protagonist who
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becomes the picture of attention to his own and the others historical, anthropological and
more personal frailty. Heteronomy to the wound appears as the main mode of self-
definition, and provides the ground for a praxis that makes exposure to the other not only
a theoretical option but also a practice of care. In So Many Ways to Begin, dependence on
(ones or the others) wounds may thus be seen in terms of dispossession, in Athanasiou
and Butlers dual meaning of the term. By espousing the values and dynamics of
vulnerability, the novel promotes an ethical model that goes beyond the Levinasian
template and favours a Ricoeurian version, very much predicated on a practice of
openness to the other.

Pascale Tollance
Barely Alive: Rewriting Sacrificial Passion in Coetzees Life and Times of Michael K
(1983)

Coetzees Michael K can be seen in many respects as the ultimate vulnerable man:
coloured (in the context of apartheid South-Africa), hare-lipped and simple, he is a
wandering monad (Leblanc) who manages to survive on barely nothing and refuses to
take the food he is given (a reminder of Kafkas hunger artist). As Nadine Gordimers
famous review of the novel makes clear, it is not so much the fact that Michal K should
remain on the margins of the countrys political strife which has caused some to voice
reservations; more provoking is the sense that the character becomes, in the most
paradoxical way, a hero of some kind (hence Gordimers stark judgement: Coetzees
heroes are those who ignore history, not make it). Michael Ks power lies in a form of
recalcitrance (Leblanc) that could be likened to the resistance of non-resistance, as
analysed by Derrida in Rsistances which leads the medical officer who is haunted by
Michael to comment on the originality of the resistance [he] offer[s]: You were not even
a hero and did not pretend to be, not even a hero of fasting. In fact you did not resist at all.
Rather than someone living outside his times, Michael K can be considered to belong to a
heterotopic space or a counter-space anchored in the pitiless topia of the body
(Foucault). The description of his stay in the camp as an allegory [] of how scandalously,
how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term
in it also carries strong echoes of Agambens inclusive exclusion and of the power of
bare life. Whilst being on the verge of extinction (Leblanc), a figure of being rather
than of becoming (Coetzee), Michael K stands out for his drive and determination to go
back to the land, first with his sick mother, then with his mothers ashes, and finally with
the seeds he has collected. When all heroic schemes have been undermined, when the
paternal function of insemination has been replaced by that of dissemination (Atwell), one
can still look at Michael Ks life and its multiple journeys and ordeals as a passion of sorts
a passion without transcendence or redemption.

Maria Grazia Nicolosi
... the excellent pain that was wanting and needing, that was love Willed Wounds:
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Masochism in A. L. Kennedys Fiction

Inspired by that line of the French intellectual tradition wherein perverse configurations
in the interplay of self and other sustain politically, ethically and aesthetically radical
registers, recent critical-theoretical work and literary-visual representations have turned
to masochism as an imaginative mode articulating resistant accounts of subjectivity well
beyond the sexual-psychical dimension. Masochism has been described as a paradoxical
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ascesis through which the self works to dismantle its own protection by practising forms
of self-divesture not grounded in a teleology (or a theology) of the suppression of the ego
(Bersani, 2008: 55). The masochist aspires however pathologically to remedy the
perceived insignificance of the self in the world and to overcome alienation by renouncing
his/her own alienated freedom for a rebellious kind of pleasure experienced through
subjection to somebody/something wilfully aggrandised (Butler, 35-53). It is this
metaphysical aspiration to binding the void via the assumed proximity of power and
powerlessness, violence and desire, trust and vulnerability that allows the non-
coincidence of the self with itself to be envisaged as the constituted excess by which (sado-
)masochistic cruelty consumes its ontological borders and opens onto subversive
possibilities. As a form of pedagogy resisting to and evacuating the paternal law (Deleuze,
1991: 93-112), masochism is re-positioned as conducive to personal conversion and
large-scale transformation. These claims will assist my reading of select fiction by A. L.
Kennedy. Her obsessive journeying through places of brokenness and pain, her fascination
with perverse economies of desire, her imaginative concern for the socially invisible
confined to psychic and material conditions of lessness would corroborate the idea of
masochism as a wound to both the body and the self-contained subject. But if the
violation of the body [] breaks through our discontinuity from the other (Benjamin,
1988: 63), then, Kennedys fiction appears to promote new modes of relationality that, in
embracing risk-taking encounters with alterity, cut across secure aesthetic ground via
formal experimentation and establish the ethical and emotional configuration of her work
to be a derelict version of the Grail quest myth (Summers-Bremner, 2004: 134).

Merve Sarikaya-Sen
Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life: The Wounded Heros Anti-Quest in a Chaos
Narrative

Hanya Yanagiharas Booker-shortlisted A Little Life (2015) is a wound narrative which
documents the limits of pain and suffering one can endure and embrace. The novel begins
as a Bildungsroman which chronicles the lives of four friends, Malcolm, Willem, JB, and
Jude, moving to New York after graduation. The focus gradually shifts to lame Jude who
wallows in his traumatic past because of his ghastly childhood and adulthood experiences
including sexual and physical abuse. Far from the conventions of a Bildungsroman which
usually revolves around a quest for personal development, A Little Life pursues a
relentless quest for embracing suffering as a form of self-definition by delving into Judes
harrowing life crystallized in his physical and psychical wounds. Judes traumatic past
drags him from disgrace towards self-hatred as evidenced in his masochistic relationships,
addiction to self-harm, and eventually suicide. Rather than trying to heal his wounds, Jude
chooses to live with them. In doing so, the novel tends towards chaos narratives in which
suffering is overwhelming and wounds never heal (Arthur W. Frank). Evidently, the novel
gainsays the romantic struggle to overcome ones sufferings and instead privileges the
agency of extreme sufferings and vulnerability which act as self-definition mechanisms
(Martha Nussbaum).

Aristi Trendell
The Portrait of the Artist as a Wounded Hero in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys
In his 1995 novel, Wonder Boys, which associates elements of the Kunstler Roman and the
Campus novel, signature genres of what Mark McGurl calls the Prograrm Era (the period
marked by the postwar rise of creative writing programs in American Universities) in his
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eponymous study, Michael Chabon, focuses on the dislocation, disorientation and self-
destructiveness that characterise the modern hero in search for self-definition. Chabon's
wounded hero, Graddy Tripp, in perpetual trouble of his own making, is put into
perspective through a mirror of mentorships that highlight the midnight disease, the
artist's compulsive confrontation with the black hole of existence, which eats his life away.
Is the institutionalisation of the creative writer in the Program Era a blight or a blessing for
the wounded hero, traditionally represented by the figure of the artist? Chabon seems to
have his cake and eat it too. Indeed, while he preserves the romantic aura of the wounded
hero at the mercy of his midnight disease, he puts up for consideration an additional role a
creative writer can take on, that of the institutionalized Master, which could enhance the
artist's social function and balance the woes and setbacks of the writer.

Angelo Monaco
Self-definition through Melancholia in William Trevors The Story of Lucy Gault

Against the backdrop of the debate on the ethic turn in contemporary Anglophone
narrative, my paper intends to reflect on the exilic identity of the eponymous protagonist
in William Trevors The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), the third and last volume of his Big
House trilogy.
Trevors tale, which hinges on secrets and silences, articulates a melancholia of
resistance and consolation that illuminates vulnerability as a way of self-definition. Lucys
self-imposed exile from the world is marked by guilt and abnegation: the lonely child of a
Protestant family in danger, she refuses to leave Lahardane. In search of an identity of her
own, Lucy becomes increasingly concerned with the preservation of the cultural and
historical memory of Lahardane, which grows into a healing and contemplative place
tangential to the 1921 Irish Troubles and World War II.
Trevor, therefore, views loss as a source of strength rather than weakness and his
heroines vulnerability engenders consolation rather destruction. Like a modern Saint
Cecilia, Lucy endures her wounds behind Lahardanes walls. The journey towards her self-
definition, in conclusion, takes place along a road of vulnerability marked by a Levinasian-
inspired ethical care which opens up to the suffering of the other, even when the other
is the very source of loss.

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S48. Spaces of erasure, spaces of silence: Re-voicing the silenced stories of Indian
Partition

The present seminar tries to focus on the voices and narratives generally overlooked by
historical mainstream discourses, in the attempt to nuance and deepen the traumatic
experience of Indian Partition as depicted in the Indian English novel. Starting from the
idea of spatial disruption and its devastating consequences on national and individual
identity triggered by Partition, the seminar welcomes proposals on the reconfigurations of
domestic spaces, on womens and childrens untold stories and their alternative narrative
spaces, on spaces of gendered violence, on various strategies of recuperation, re-voicing
and re-membering the Partition.

Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata, ITALY
Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, ROMANIA

WOMEN AUTHORS ON INDIAN PARTITION: THE MOTIF OF HOME WITHIN
PARTITION NARRATIVES
Arunima Dey, Ph.D Student, University of Salamanca, Spain

It is common knowledge that the partition of the Indian subcontinent witnessed one of the
largest migrations in recent history. For the first few decades, the gory details of the
partition were brushed aside and attention was diverted towards the euphoria of
independence from the British Raj after two hundred years. However, various historians,
socio-feminists and cultural theorists started to investigate the partition through various
lenses and several alternate histories of partition began to emerge. The focus was moved
from political parties and leaders to the consequences of the partition on the masses.
Literature, too, began to make its contribution to the now ever-growing archive of
partition.
My focus here is on partition literature by women and their focus on the private space of
home as suppose to the public space. The gendered division of the public and the private
has ascribed home as the feminine space, which is bereft of history. My paper will argue
how this idea is contested by women authors who demonstrate the significance of private
spaces and personal narratives that chronicle the trauma of partition on lives of women.
The novels I will primary focus on will be Attia Hosains Sunlight on a Broken Column
(1961) and Anita Desais Clear Light of Day (1980). I will argue that Desai and Hosain
deliberately do not engage directly with partition violence and politics of the state, but
rather focus on the domestic space and the ruptures within its family members that
symbolise the breaking of the nation. In a nutshell, the paper will focus on the varied
methods through which Desai and Hosain, through their novels, paint silenced and hidden
stories on the partition.

ELOQUENT SILENCES: A GENDERED RETELLING OF PARTITION NARRATIVES
Sarvani Ravula, Ph.D. Scholar, Osmania University, Hyderabad. India
The partition of the Indian subcontinent is not a closed chapter of history and it cannot
be put away inside the covers of history books (Butalia 5) as the painful memories and
the traumatic experiences continue to influence how the peoples and states of
postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future (Jalal 3). Seen as symbols
of the honour (Butalia 143), women bore the brunt of the savage violence of the
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partition. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many disfigured or
dismembered (Dalrymple).
There is a need, therefore, to re-view the partition and its legacy from the
perspectives of sexuality and gender, the two critical axes [that] provide an
understanding that does not simply supplement the orthodox historiography but
interrogates, and rewrites its narratives (Kaul 10). This paper, thus, makes an attempt at
a gendered retelling of the partition through a study of short stories such as Roots by
Ismat Chutgai, A Leaf in the Storm by Lalithambika Antharjanam, Family Ties by
Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Exile by Jamila Hashmi which will help us to listen to the
hidden nuance, the half-said thing, the silences which are sometimes more eloquent than
speech (Butalia 11).

STATE-MAKING, VIOLENCE AND THE OTHER IN TABISH KHAIR'S FILMING
Om Prakash Dwivedi, Assistant Professor in English, Shri Ramswaroop Memorial
University, India

Tabish Khair's Filming contains the covert theme of the cleaving of united Hindustan into
two segregated parts- India and Pakistan, and the ensuing tragedies that enveloped people
on both sides of the barbed wires. In the present paper, I will be exploring how self-
centred or community-centred political aspirations can propagate a cycle of violence and
concomitantly (un)settle a large number of people and incite genocide. Such a result
always underpins forced demarcations of barbed wires, and quite rightly, Khair questions
the partition history of India which has surprisingly gone unregistered at official levels.
The present paper will also engage with the notion of Otherness or difference as
witnessed in Filming. It will show how it has become increasingly important in the present
world, poised on the axis of deep-hatred to treat the Other in an inhuman and beastly
manner. The aim of examining this communal violence in the novel is to project the
suffering and chaos that it brings to human society, and to offer a viable alternative, by
investigating some other theorists, in order to overcome this suffering.

RELIVING PARTITION IN EASTERN INDIA: MEMORIES OF AND MEMOIRS BY WOMEN
ACROSS THE BORDERS
Dr. Sharmistha Chatterjee Sriwastav, Aliah University, Kolkata, India

Genocide in Bangladesh: 1971 (2015), edited by A.K.M Nasimul Kamal is a well-
documented, organised and factual record of newspaper clippings from all over the world. A
collective effort, it is an objective, yet horrific account of the brutal atrocities of West
Pakistanis on the Bengalis in East Pakistan, carefully interspersed with the international
politics behind it.
Compared to this unparalleled book and many others like this, memoirs by individual
women recording the carnage during the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle are pale, unreliable
and flickering comments on the events and the real politick behind the bloodbath. Yet as the
paper argues, these memoirs and interviews by various women, from all walks of life, do
create an alternative history- a history characterised and problematized by doubts, gaps,
lapses, silences, turbulences and half realized truths.
Autobiographical accounts by Begum Mushtari Shafi ( translated,2006),and Farida Huq
(2008), former a social activist and latter an educationist coupled with interviews given by
several ordinary, poor women across the borders ( recorded in 2009) demand closer
attention to themselves by recreating the gruesome days. Falling back on their personal
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repertoire which oscillates between the home and the world, these largely anecdotal
narratives fill in the void of homogeneous official records. These memoirs do retrieve how
women acted or were acted upon in the devastation which changed their lives permanently.

WHEN SILENCE BREAKS INTO COLOURS: SPACES OF REMEMBRANCE IN SORAYYA
KHANS NOOR
Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania

This paper focuses upon the various strategies Sorayya Khan uses in her 2006 novel Noor
in order to evoke the tragic events that led to the creation of Bangladesh. Considered to be
the first Pakistani novel to deal with the events in the East Pakistan and thus break the
silence that generally envelops the subject, Noor (2006) gradually recreates the horrors
and absurdity of the war, metaphorically bringing together, by virtue of the immense
suffering they brought, the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 conflict between East and West
Pakistan. While analysing the dialectical workings of silence and remembering, Khan
builds her novel as a metaphorical site where forgetfulness and remembrance create their
own spaces that vie for supremacy. The past, and all its cathartic memories, is slowly
brought to life out of this conflict that opposes spaces, generations, individuals and
communities. The element that provides the connection between a past safely insulated in
the willed amnesia of a cosy household and a future that does no longer accept the secrets
and silences of unhealed wounds, is the ekphrastic introduction of a collection of paintings
achieved by Noor that preserves intertextual echoes of many Bangladeshi artistic
representations of the 1971 war.

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S49. THE POSTCOLONIAL SLUM: INDIA IN THE GLOBAL LITERARY IMAGINARY

In the global literary imaginary, the slum life in India is most often stereotypically pictured
as a source of fear, abjection, poverty, hunger, overpopulation, dirt and disorder. These
fictional representations of marginal spaces maintain, proliferate, and legitimize cultural
polarizations, projecting a discrediting light upon the entire Indian space and the South
Asian city in general. Starting from diverse depictions of the slum in Indian English novels
the present panel seeks to analyze the recent reconfigurations in the biopolitics of slums in
the context of capitalist based globalization, and the way they encapsulate Indian reality in
the global literary imaginary, questioning its postcoloniality.

Dr. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow-Deva Road,
INDIA.
Dr. Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, ROMANIA

Wednesday 8.30 10.30

1. Syed Haider, Living with Ambivalence: Slums and Modernisation in 8.30
India
8.50

2. Cristina M. Gmez-Fernndez, A Safe Journey in Mumbais Slums: the 8.50-
Journalistic Literary Genre in Sonia Faleiro and Katherine Boo
9.10

3. Chun Fu, In the Name of Progress: A Critique of Capitalist 9.10-
Development in The Last Man in Tower
9.30

4. Jagdish Batra, India: A Postmodern Melange
9.30-9.50

5. Discussions
9.50-

10.30

LIVING WITH AMBIVALENCE: SLUMS AND MODERNISATION IN INDIA
Dr. Syed Haider, Director of Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS),
London, UK

In a three part documentary produced by the BBC and aired in 2012, the viewer is taken
on a journey through the slums of India from Mumbai to Kolkata encountering the
poverty that was depicted in iconic fashion by Danny Boyles Slumdog Millionaire (2008),
as well as the ingenuity and tenacity of those living in the slums. These two frames, the
filth and danger of the slums, with its gangs, substance abuse and exploitation, and the
remarkable resourcefulness of its inhabitants, exist simultaneously in the popular
imagination and depictions of slums inside and outside India. What this paper seeks to
explore is the reasons why the slum as space and metaphor captures the cultural and
literary imagination, as well as interpreting the contested iconicity that slums like Dharvi
in particular have acquired. Surveying a wide range of texts, from fictional works like
Arvind Adigas The White Tiger to films and documentaries that portray slum-life, Living
with ambivalence argues that the discordance such cultural texts express about the slum
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is in fact an ambivalence that surrounds Indias rapid modernisation and integration into a
capitalist world order.

A SAFE JOURNEY IN MUMBAIS SLUMS: THE JOURNALISTIC LITERARY GENRE IN
SONIA FALEIRO AND KATHERINE BOO
Dr. Cristina M. Gmez-Fernndez, Cordoba University, Spain

This paper seeks to analyze slum journalistic depictions and character literary
explorations in Sonia Faleiros Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombays Dance
Bars (2011) in contrast with Katherine Boos Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death,
and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012). Exceptional converging characteristics between
both productions deserve critical attention. First, none of the books is described as fiction,
but as literary journalism. Their authors have documented their narratives out of
journalistic research. Second, both publications are based on Mumbais darkest
underworld of dance bars and Annawadis garbage pickers respectively. Third, their titles
offer to disclose the beauty hidden in unexpected loci and attempt to provide a deeper
reading of Bombayite reality. However, half way between journalism and literary fiction,
this phenomenon features a narrative mode recently fostered by global literary markets
which secures true stories for Western readers curiosity amalgamated with literary style.
These journalistic literary portraits will be explored particularly through notions looked
into by sociologist and historian Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, 2006) and Mrinalini
Chakravorti (In Stereotype, 2014). Both develop complementing perspectives from urban
theory and power and from literary investigation in stereotypes which generates fresh
responses to the issues affecting globalization.

IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS: A CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT IN THE
LAST MAN IN TOWER
Dr. Chun Fu, National IIan University, Taiwan

Arundhati Roy notes that Indian poverty has become a consumable and marketable
spectacle that increasingly boosts up slum tourism, further widens the gap between the
haves and the have-nots, and downgrades humanity, since equality never figures in the
market economy. By extension, the world is never as flat as it was. Behind the beautiful
forevers, a la Katherine Boo, the price the land and its people paid for this shining
accomplishment is not disclosed at all. Aravind Adigas Last Man in Tower gives us a drama
between the ruthless developer Shah and the unrelenting Masterji, challenges humanity
how to face the seduction of money and withhold moral integrity at a time globalization
breaks down all borders and barriers in the name of progress. Karl Marx is indeed
prophetic in Communist Manifesto that capitalism has conjured up such gigantic means of
production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells (17). In this vein,
capitalist development in India is like a train running at full speed, heading toward the
unknown under the command of a neoliberalist driver, at the expense of the good for the
millions.

INDIA: A POSTMODERN MELANGE
Dr. Jagdish Batra, Jt. Director, English Language Centre, O.P. Jindal Global University

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It is not a happy scenario when just as ordinary and uninformed people belonging to the
western hemisphere view India as a backward and slum-like state, most literary writers
too think of India in similar vein something unexpected of enlightened people with wide
access to valid knowledge databases. Unfortunately, Indian authors depict sordid scenes
in their fiction, more to drum up their socialist/humanist credentials for domestic
consumption than to seriously scrutinize the politics behind the establishment of these
settlements in our times when economic graph is going up. And then catering to the
western audiences craving for exotic narratives an instance of Re-Orientalism ensures
huge sales of their books. My paper examines the works of some such authors like
Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Nagarkar, Aravind Adiga, Indra Sinha, et al to underline the
imbalance in their representation of socio-political problems and the way this imbalance is
capitalized on in global literature. I argue that with all its inequities and infirmities, India is
a postmodern melange rather than a postcolonial slum.

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S50: Globalisation and Violence
Conveners: Pilar Cuder-Domnguez (University of Huelva, Spain) and Cinta Ramblado-
Minero (University of Limerick, Ireland)

Wang, Ginger (National Taipei University, Taiwan): A Network of Deceptions: Re-
membering Violence in Garden of Evening Mists
This paper reads Tan Twan Engs Garden of Evening Mists (2012) to examine the
psychosocial impact of war memories and the network of deceptions Teoh Yun Ling, the
narrator and also a Girton-educated retired judge in independent Malaysia, builds up
when remembering the unspeakable hardships as a Guest of the Emperor in a secret
Japanese prison camp. In the confinement, her sister is repeatedly raped as a comfort
woman while she is assigned as the camps interpreter and becomes the sole survivor of
war atrocities. Yun Ling and her sister distance themselves from the wartime ordeal as
slaves by dreaming to plant a classical Japanese garden with mesmerizing allure. To make
a Japanese garden, therefore, opens up a crack for judge Teoh to reconcile with a violent
past when she suffers from a degenerative neurological condition that will inevitably lead
to aphasic dementia. To imagine as well as remember the allurements of a garden of
evening mists becomes their last resort to dissociate from catastrophic adversities. Yet,
every aspect of gardening is a form of deception, says Aritomo, the self-exiled former
gardener to the Emperor of Japan and master of shakkei (borrowed scenery). He teaches
Yun Ling the tactics to play with light and shadow, namely, the skills of deceptive trompe
loeil vistas. To re-member, succinctly put, to start afresh the mobilization of the
traumatized people and to conjure up the war ferocities before she forgets, Yun Ling
borrows from South African, Chinese, Japanese and Malaysian characters and cultures to
weave a network of deceptions to reveal her traumatic memory of violence incurred by the
Japanese imperialists. When she comes to realize that a garden is not a garden but trauma
in disguise, it will not take her long to see beyond deceptions.

BIO: Ginger Wang is Associate Professor at the Dept. of Foreign Languages and Applied
Linguistics, National Taipei University (Taiwan). Her research interests are contemporary
English novels, postcolonial studies and literary theories. She is the author of Homeless
Strangers in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro: Floating Characters in a Floating World
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) and guest editor of the special issue: Fear and
Chaos in Contemporary British Literature for Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture
(2012). She has also published articles on Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Mitchell.

Ruthven, Andrea (U of Vigo, Spain): Killing is easy when you can feel nothing:
Posthuman Transnational Violence in Sense8
In her work on the posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti has affirmed the need to move past
the model of Humanism to question both the anthropocentric bias and to introduce a new
brand of materialism, of the embodied and embedded kind (22). In this respect, she sees
within the concept of posthumanity an attempt to devise renewed claims to community
and belonging by singular subjects who have taken critical distance from humanist
individualism (39).
The Wachowskiss 2015 Netflix series Sense8 imagines posthuman connectivities that
enable those with a certain genetic mutation to be mentally linked to seven other bodies
and to experience an increased connection to others with the same mutation. Including a
cast and setting that spans eight countries and a variety of racial, sexual and gender
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orientations, at first glance the series appears to offer an innovative and inclusive
configuration of what posthumanity can look like. Those in each cluster, that is each
group of eight, have access to each others emotions, experiences, language and thoughts.
By sharing the skills and feelings of seven other people, spread across the globe, the
potential for imagining affective communities that cross national, economic, sexual and
racial boundaries, and privilege the sensorial and corporeal affects is raised. Troublingly,
however, the twelve episodes comprising the first (and to date only) season of the series
are predicated on the violence that results when an us-versus-them divide between the
humans and the posthumans is defended.
If the contemporary affective turn theorises the way in which supposedly good and bad
affects circulate between bodies, the Wachowskiss series appears to suggest that ability to
engage in physical violence is a necessary attribute for the posthuman experience. This
paper will explore the way in which violence is used as more than just a plot device within
the television drama, questioning the way in which it becomes the defining trait of the
sense8 in this case the posthuman experience. Though one of the characters points out
that for humans to kill each other is easy, given that they can feel nothing of the other
persons pain, it is the posthumans who more often than not share their potential and
capacity for violence between themselves, thereby raising questions about the intrinsic
nature of violence in both human and posthuman experiences.

BIO: Andrea Ruthven is a researcher with the Bodies in Transit/Cuerpos en Trnsito
research project at the University of Vigo. Her doctoral thesis at the University of
Barcelona (2015) interrogated the ways in which violent women, especially action
heroines, are represented in contemporary literatures. She has published the essays La
Violencia Sexuada en los Cmics: Quin Salvar el Mundo? and The Woman Warrior:
Rejecting Utopia, among others.

Molares Pascual, Selene (University of Vigo): In a violent world: institutional
violence against women in Tamora Pierces The Song of the Lioness.
While its presence in the book market is as significant as ever, Young Adult (YA) fiction has
been accused of being increasingly dark and aggressive, especially after the publication of
novels that depict the cruellest parts of the lives of many adolescents around the world.
These depictions of real life (which may be conveyed either through realistic fiction or
through other genres such as fantasy or science fiction) contain explicit acts of violence
performed by and against teenagers. However, violence can take many forms, and while
the complaints have only been issued over signs of physical harm, YA literature has also
shown and denounced types of institutional violence in which social and cultural
organisations threaten the freedom and well-being of individuals. These signs of violence
have been overseen both in many analysis of YA literature and in real life.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the forms of physical and psychological violence
inflicted by social and political institutions against women as presented in Tamora Pierces
quartet The Song of the Lioness. This YA series, which has been translated into several
languages and sold copies all over the world, was first published in the decade of the
eighties (1983-1988), but its values and critiques towards society and its conventions are
still up to date. From the banning of women from certain spaces and professions to the
witch-hunt and the displacement of refugees, the topics of the quartet can be read not only
as a recapitulation of historical acts of violence towards women, but also as a
representation of current situations of injustice in our globalised civilisation.
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Bio: Selene Molares Pascual holds a BA in English Philology by the University of Vigo with
a specialisation in English Literature and a MA in Documentation Management, Libraries
and Archives by the Complutense University of Madrid with a specialisation in
Bibliographic Heritage. At the moment she is working on her PhD dissertation about cross-
dressing girls as heroines in Young Adult fantasy and science fiction novels in English
under the supervision of Dr. Beln Martn Lucas (University of Vigo). Apart from her
academic work, she is also the co-author of several Young Adult fantasy novels in Spanish.

Mendis, Ranjini Kwantlen University, British Columbia A Global Gaze: Sri Lankas
Civil and Ethnic Strife in Two Recent Diasporic Novels
During the 1980s - the decade preceding the Tamil-Sinhalese ethnic war - there were two
violent uprisings in the majority Sinhalese areas led by radical factions in Sri Lankas
southern province, spurred by economic and class differences. Sri Lankan-born British
writer Minoli Salgado reveals such underlying discontents in the social and political fabric
of postcolonial Sri Lanka in her novel A Little Dust on The Eyes (2012). The more widely-
known Tamil-Sinhalese ethnic war is the context of Island of a Thousand Mirrors by
Nayomi Munaweera (2014), also a Sri Lankan diasporic writer, resident in the U.S. It
records atrocities committed by both factions, as well as suicide bombings that were the
hallmark of the terror group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
These novels highlight how globalization may have influenced the uprisings among
educated Sinhalese youth through a neo-liberal ideology that challenged deeply
entrenched social hierarchies and political status quo, and how global influences played
significantly in the ethnic war through funding for the LTTE by the Tamil diaspora and
intervention by countries with their own political interests. This presentation will focus on
how the two novels not only bear witness to Sri Lankas violent history but push beyond
simplistic binaries in which such conflicts are most often conveyed in media and political
reports.

BIO: Ranjini Mendis is the co-founder with John Willinsky of the born-digital open access
journal Postcolonial Text, of which she was Managing Editor/Associate Editor from 2003-
2013. She served as Chair of both the Canadian and international Associations for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS and ACLALS), and is one of the
editors of Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century
(Rodopi, 2012). Ranjini is originally from Sri Lanka, resident in British Columbia, Canada.

Kiczkowski, Adriana (UNED Madrid, Spain): Fiction, Global Markets, and
Terrorism
In opposition to the official discourse about 9/11 and the War on Terror, centred almost
exclusively on the confrontation of civilizations S. Huntington's "clash of civilizations"
criticized, among others, by the current trend in Critical Studies of Terrorism (Jackson
2009), in recent times political proposals and narratives have appeared that emphasize
the multiple causes that could be connected to the presence on U.S. soil of global terrorism
and its consequences, aimed at the nerve centre of the economy and global finances.
Novels as Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne (2010), Netherland by Joseph ONeill (2008) or The
Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid, considers the relationship between a
capitalist dynamic based on financial speculation, and the links to global terrorism
proposing a new look at the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that is firmly set in the heart of
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capitalist society, which has one of its principal expansive driving forces in global financial
speculation. But at the same time, and as an unavoidable reference, appear the local
processes where the immediate effects of terrorism are produced. The society that
experiences the processes of globalization is also a society linked to local processes that
can reach global repercussions because our acts don't only have an effect on our
immediate environment, but also have effects far beyond what we could have imagined.

BIO: Adriana Kiczkowski is Professor-Tutor of American Literature at Universidad
Nacional de Educacin a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain. She received her PhD in 2014
with the thesis The novels of glocalization in the post-9/11 literature. Some recent
papers are El tejido narrativo del terrorismo global en Falling Man, Epos (2012); New
York, Madrid, Londres: Reprsentations littraires du terrorisme global Potisation de
lHistoire (2013); and Global Terrorism shatters New York and Madrid: Don DeLillos
Falling Man and Adolfo Garca Ortegas El mapa de la vida (2014).

Lpez Ropero, Lourdes (U of Alicante, Spain): Economies of Violence: Portrayals of
Human Trafficking in a Selection of Contemporary Fiction
Human trafficking is considered to be the worlds fastest growing criminal enterprise, one
which has global proportions and is fueled by the global economy. This form of modern
slavery follows the market logic of supply and demand, turning trafficked people into
commodities made available for exploitation in different destinations, and for a wide array
of economic activities such as prostitution or other forms of illegal and precarious labour.
The relationship established between the victims of human trafficking and their
perpetrators is characteristically marked by violence, understood as physical harm, which
is used as an instrument of coercion, control and exploitation. At the same time, because
human trafficking is embedded in a complex socio-economic dynamics, scholar Jennifer
Suchland (2015) draws our attention to the existence of a less visible and more systemic
kind of violence, which she refers to as the economics of violence that sustain the trade.
A similar distinction, although in a different context, is made by Slavoj Zizek (2008), who
distinguishes between subjective and objective violence, the latter being systemic, a
driving force in the ordinary world, and complicit with privilege. Drawing on the insights
of these scholars, I will address the interplay among globalization, violence and human
trafficking through an exploration of a selection of contemporary novels, namely Monica
Alis In the Kitchen (2009) and Chris Abanis Becoming Abigail (2006). These texts
showcase experiences of immigrant traffic, sexual traffic, or outsourcing in twenty-first
century London allegedly one of the capitals of globalizationwhich often involve
different forms of violence against women and other individuals.

BIO: Lourdes Lpez-Ropero is currently Associate Professor at the English Department of
the University of Alicante, where she teaches Contemporary Literature in English. Before
joining the University of Alicante to occupy a tenure-track position in 2001, she obtained
her Master Degree in English from the University of Kansas, and her PhD from the
University of Santiago de Compostela. Her primary research focus has been in the field of
Postcolonial Studies and she has been engaged in issues of genre, gender, intertextuality
and space, her articles appearing in journals such as Commonwealth, Journal of
Postcolonial Writing, or Childrens Literature in Education. She has participated in several
research projects, including Gender and Citizenship in Europe, part of the Athena 3
Advanced Thematic Network in European Womens Studies; and Mujer y Espacio Urbano,
led by Professor Teresa Gomez Reus. As a result of these projects, she has contributed,
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respectively, to a special issue of the journal Social Identities, and to the volume Inside Out:
Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space (Rodopi).

Coates, Donna (University of Calgary, Canada): The New Anzacs: Wench Warriors
Down Under
The fiction that emerged from both women and men writers in Australia during the First
World War was essentially a form of writing back to the Empire, where the myth of the
Anzac legend decreed that Australian soldiers had, despite their inauspicious beginnings,
acquired cultural and physical superiority. The Anzacs fighting prowess and fighting
capacity for combat (especially at Gallipoli) was said to have achieved nationhood history
for a new nation and international acclaim. Writers of Second World War literature were
under intense pressure to prove that the Anzac legend had not been a mere fluke of
history, or that the Sons of Anzacs were neither second-rate nor second best, but as
worthy of hero worship as their forefathers. Women writers once again unequivocally
supported the legend, which continued to assign women a subordinate place in Australian
society. Recently, two contemporary writers, Mandy Sayer and Sara Knox, have
imaginatively reconstructed events of World War Two from a temporal distance. In Love in
the Years of Lunacy (2013) and The Orphan Gunner (2007) respectively, they examine the
phenomenon of women dressing as men to impersonate soldiers. In their texts, their
central characters long for male privilege and to escape domestic confinement and
powerlessness. These women warriors, who journey away from the feminine ideals of
Australian society to the battlefields of New Guinea and bomber command in England,
become exemplary soldiers/gunners/pilots who earn the respect and admiration of their
fellow (male) soldiers, thereby proving that if women can perform masculinity without
being detected, then both masculinity and femininity are social constructs, not
biographical fact. Both novels shatter the notion of the brave invincible Australian soldier
fighting (and dying) gallantly for the imperial ideal, as both women dress as their brothers
who are timid and terrified n battle. In these texts, women are the new Anzacs who step
readily and easily into their military roles as defenders of the nation, but when their
gender identities are exposed, their superior officers recognize that the truth must never
become public knowledge, as the reputation of the military depends upon the stability of
its codes, rules, and skill of its men. But in the act of assuming mens identities, these
characters signal their discontent with the restrictive norms of both femininity and
masculinity.
BIO: Donna Coates teaches war fiction and drama in the English Department at the
University of Calgary. She has published dozens of book chapters and articles on
Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand womens fictional responses to the First and
Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and contemporary warfare in fiction and drama.
With Sherrill Grace, she has edited two volumes of Canadian war drama (2008. 2010);
with George Melnyk, she has edited a collection of essays on Alberta writing (2009); a
second volume of essays co-edited with Melnyk on Alberta writing will appear in 2016. In
2015, a collection of essays titled Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre, was
published. She is currently editing a series of eight volumes on women and war for
Routledges History of Feminism series and intends to complete a manuscript on
Australian womens twentieth-century war fiction in 2016.

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S51. Perpetrator Trauma in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

From Victim to Perpetrator: Jews in Irena Klepfiszs Poetry
Michaela Weiss, Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic
The paper analyzes the shift from the victim to the perpetrator in the poetry and essays of
contemporary American Jewish poet and essayist Irena Klepfisz. As a Holocaust survivor
and a lesbian, she often felt as an outsider, the one who does not belong either to the
Jewish or feminist community. Struggling to reconcile her social, ethnic and gender
identities, she became an active advocator of Jewish feminism especially in connection
with Yiddish culture. Her viewpoint was radically altered after her visit to Palestine where
she had to face the effects of Israeli occupation. In her poems she started to create
analogies between the Holocaust and the suffering of the Palestinians, especially in East
Jerusalem, 1987, where she gives voice to the Palestinian women who depict the loss and
destruction inflicted by the Jews. For Klepfiszs poetry, such comparisons and translations,
as she often calls them, became an integral part of her activism. She often interlinks past
and present and social and personal histories to document the effects of atrocities. Her
poetry discusses the changes in the Jewish history and thinking especially in connection to
their loss of innocence and rise in power, which she considers illusionary and dangerous.
She challenges the role of memory and forgetting, and questions the false sense of security
created both in Israel and America via oppression and dislocation of minorities, with
whose experience many Jews, including Kepfisz, can identify.

Ordinary Stories in Extraordinary Times: Marcie Hershmans Tales of the Master Race
Stanislav Kol, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
In many books and films about the Holocaust, perpetrators are portrayed as ardent,
bloodthirsty killers and their image only widens the gulf between them and common
people (read us). Historian Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve
Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, however, records perpetrators from
a different perspective. Browning focuses on the social and psychological mechanisms of
the transformation of average people into murderers who do evil under the pressure of
obedience and conformity. Banality of evil, to use Hannah Arendts phrase, comes to the
fore of Marcie Hershmans short-story cycle (or a novel-in-stories) Tales of the Master
Race (1991), which exposes the everyday ordinary lives of perpetrators and bystanders
(and occasionally victims) in an imaginary German small town called Kreiswald during the
period of the Third Reich. Its citizens, be it desk murderers or just ordinary bystanders,
indoctrinated by Nazi ideology and instilled by historical anti-Semitism, follow orders;
however, for some of them, as the author in her interlocked stories shows, the routine
tasks have stressful effects. Is it trauma or just the feeling of guilt that afflicts Hirshmans
perpetrators and bystanders? This is one of the questions that this paper attempts to
resolve.

Writing History from the "Other Side": Holocaust Perpetrator Faction
Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth, UK
Almost 70 years on from the end of the Second World War the Holocaust still holds
considerable cultural capital. Even though the numbers of actual survivors of the atrocities
are now inexorably diminishing, new publications on the Holocaust appear almost every
month. In lieu of survivor accounts, the ethically troublesome genre of Holocaust Fiction is
gaining ever more ground. Occupying the grey zone between memoir and fiction,
Holocaust faction is also getting increasingly popular. As such we have seen the
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appearance of works of fiction enhanced by factual research on the one hand, and works of
factual research more problematically manipulated by fiction on the other as writers try to
engage with the Holocaust from ever changing and challenging perspectives. One of these
perspectives is that of the perpetrator a topic long shunned but now increasingly coming
to the fore. Apart from the biographical accounts of children and grandchildren of the real
perpetrators, there is now fiction about imagined perpetrators (Jonathan Littells vastly
influential though no less troublingThe Kindly Ones, for example) as well as imagined
narratives about real perpetrators. This paper will offer a critical discussion of the
narrative strategies employed by Laurent Binets HHhH of 2013. In this highly original
account, Binet focuses on the Czechoslovakian assassins of Reinhard Heydrich whose
story, however, is constantly overshadowed by that of their victim, Heydrich himself. A
story about resistance heroes is thus turned, problematically, into a story foregrounding
the perpetrator. Through his postmodern historical and fictional detective work of piecing
together fact and fiction, Binet problematises the very act of writing historical narratives,
the reliability of history as well as turning traditional notions of victimhood on their
head.

Resisting (Neo-)Colonialism with Ngugi wa Thiongo
Radek Glabaza, Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic
The work of the leading Kenyan novelist, playwright and critic Ngugi wa Thiongo is
arguably best described in terms of his life-long commitment to anti-colonial struggle a
struggle that goes well beyond Kenyas independence and into the present times. The
paper is going to address ways in which the resistant tone of Ngugis early work,
represented here by his novels Weep Not, Child and The River Between, was distilled into
the political vitriol of his more recent texts, such as Petals of Blood and Matigari. While the
former pair of novels fictionally capture the displacements and dilemmas of characters
living in colonial Kenya and Kenya during the Emergency, the latter pair emphasize the
disillusionment faced by characters trapped in what Ngugi clearly sees as a crudely
capitalist, neo-colonial set-up of post-independence Kenya. This being the case, the paper
is going to examine the trajectory of Ngugis conceptual, ideological and stylistic strategies
deployed in the name of ultimate liberation from both forms

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S52.Leadership politics in the United Kingdoms local government

Stphanie BORY, Universit de Lyon 3
Nicholas PARSONS, University of Cardiff
Timothy WHITTON, Universit de Clermont-Ferrand II

2016 will be an important election year for Wales, Ireland, Scotland and London. In the
first three cases, elections were postponed because of the General Elections in Britain
whereas in London, the current mayor, will have finished his second four year mandate.
This seminar will focus particularly on the importance of leaders and their particular
brand of politics in these elections. To what extent have leaders attitudes changed
recently in the realm of local and devolved politics to enable them to keep abreast with the
challenges of modern leadership? How has mediated leadership[1] trickled down from
national to local and devolved politics? What role have the social networks such as
Facebook and Twitter played in shaping new leadership politics?
We seek papers that deal specifically with the personalisation of politics within local and
devolved government in the UK. Nevertheless, contributions on leadership issues that
highlight the complex relationship between local/devolved and national politics will also
be welcomed.
[1] Ana LANGER, The Personalisation of Politics in the UK. Mediated Leadership from
Attlee to Cameron, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012.

Gilles LEYDIER, University of Sud Toulon Var/The leadership of Scottish First
Ministers
This contribution will focus on the personalisation of Scottish politics by studying the
leadership of the successive First Ministers since the implementation of the devolution
settlement. Although a great deal of research has been devoted to the functioning and
achievements of the Scottish Parliament, very few political comments have focused upon
the executive power. More strikingly, the coverage and analysis of the power and role of
the Scottish First Ministers since 1999 has been extremely limited.
This paper intends to provide a reflexion on the way the successive Scottish First
Ministers have struggled to put their stamp on Scottish politics within the framework of
the devolved institutions. Outlining their backgrounds, profiles and legitimacy, exploring
their political environment, institutional limits and constraints upon them, assessing their
political initiatives, record and legacy in office, the paper will analyse the way the
successive incumbents have embraced their function to establish a political and personal
leadership upon the Scottish stage.
The paper will particularly explore the recent period in order to discuss whether
the arrival of SNP First Ministers has had any impact on the style of leadership and
personalisation of the Scottish stage. It will analyse the charismatic leadership
demonstrated by Alex Salmond during his Premiership in the context of the national
conversation and Indy ref debate, and discuss to what extent it has been continued by the
current First Minister Nicola Sturgeon since the referendum on independence and during
the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections campaign.

Fiona SIMPKINS, University of Lyon 2/Triangle, The SNP and the independence
movement in Scotland: new challenges, new leadership
In his resignation speech as leader of the SNP following the results of the September 2014
Scottish independence referendum, Alex Salmond accepted that a majority of Scots had
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voted for Scotland to remain part of the UK yet stressed the profound impact of the
referendum campaign on Scottish politics. Not only was the referendum "a triumph for
democracy" with a record 84.6% turnout, but the campaign had empowered hundreds of
thousands of Scots who had previously felt excluded from mainstream politics. He called
for this renewed political debate and mobilisation in Scotland "to be cherished, preserved
and built upon", concluding that "the campaign continues and the dream shall never die".
The 2015 general election results in Scotland would appear to confirm that his calls
were heard. The SNP snatched 56 out of the 59 contested seats in Scotland and sent a wave
of new SNP MPs to Westminster. Far from having subsided after the September 2014
independence referendum, the broad pro-independence social movement which emerged
during the campaign continued to grow and mobilise Scottish public opinion around a new
Scottish political project at odds with traditional Westminster politics. If former SNP
leader Alex Salmond had managed to turn the SNP into a party of government through
strong leadership and centralized decision-making, the Yes campaign encouraged
grassroots initiatives and attempted to build momentum behind the independence project
by adopting a loose organization, inclusive of other political parties and autonomous
organisations like National Collective, Women for Independence or Radical Independence.
The multiplicity of voices through which the independence message was conveyed thanks
to the use of social networks, original initiatives led by local groups as well as its own
crowd-funded media of bloggers and news websites, was able to reach voters directly
rather than through (generally unsympathetic) traditional media channels and engage the
public in a vibrant political debate.
Indeed, the referendum campaign has spurred a momentous change in the
independence movement, which no longer focuses solely on the strong leadership of the
SNP leader but also rests on a powerful new social movement. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon
enjoys an unprecedented Scottish majority in Westminster as well as an SNP majority in
Holyrood, soaring popularity rates and the confidence that the pro-independence
movement is growing in Scotland today. The convergence of interests brought by this new
independence movement combined to the strong leadership of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon
appears more than likely to bring another SNP majority at the May 2016 Scottish
Parliament elections. Yet, if another sweeping nationalist victory will inevitably bring
more uncertainties on Scotlands constitutional future, it will also question the break-
down of the traditional top-down approach used by political parties in Scotland and in the
rest of the UK. To what extent have leadership and personalization of power within UK
political parties overstretched the limits of the political message they wish to bring?

Susan FINDING, University of Poitiers/MIMMOC, Bristol Fashion? Local politics in
England and the power of democratically-elected mayors: an epiphenomenon or a
national trend?
In 2012 Bristol, one of the top dozen major English cities, elected its first democratically-
elected mayor following the 2011 Localism Act. To lead its council, Bristol elected not a
member of one of the traditional political parties, but George Ferguson, local businessman
and political novice, leader & sole member of Bristol 1st, the localist party he founded. This
paper will examine how local politics in Bristol have been influenced by the introduction
of direct democracy in mayoral elections in England and whether the Bristol case is a
blueprint demonstrating how local politics are independent from the national level and
new leadership styles and issues or whether Bristol merely reflects the general trend in
the eighteen directly-elected city mayoralties (the five elected combined authority mayors
excluded).
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Timothy WHITTON, University of Clermont-Ferrand II/EHIC, Its just not Boris
versus Ken
London politics have been dominated for the last sixteen years by two main figures, Boris
Johnson and Ken Livingstone. After crossing swords with both Thatcher and Blair, the
latter set the trend for electing maverick leaders to head the capital city rather than run-
of-the-mill politicians. It took the Conservatives another mandate to come to terms with
the fact that the leadership of London was a question of people rather than policies. For
2008, they plucked Boris Johnson out of their top hats, away from Have I Got News for You
and surrounded him with a well heeled team of advisors while hiring the Australian
political strategist Lynton Crosby to optimise his chances of beating Livingstone on his
own turf. They succeeded and the duel was repeated in 2012 even though Livingstone very
nearly pipped Johnson to the post this time round having run a very slick campaign with
intense use of the internet and the social networks.
For 2016 both Johnson and Livingstone decided not to run again. This has left the
field wide open and all the major parties organised primaries from which Zac Goldsmith
emerged victorious for the Conservatives and Sadiq Khan for the Labour Party, the only
two candidates who stand a real chance of being elected.
Turnout for the 2008 election had reached an unprecedented high with Londoners having
the choice between celebrity Boris and municipal Ken. Turnout in 2012 was slightly lower
but still very respectable for a local election. Odds on that in 2016 Londoners will not flock
to the polling stations because despite the healthy rivalry between the two very different
main candidates, Zac versus Sadiq is likely to be a very pale version of what the capital
has become used to. This is due to the very particular brand of leadership politics that
London has somewhat unwittingly fostered and what this paper will attempt to identify.

Stphanie BORY, University of Lyon 3/IETT, From Rhodri Morgan to Carwyn Jones,
two different styles of leadership
In 1998, the British Parliament voted the Government of Wales Act, thereby granting
executive devolution to Wales with the creation of the National Assembly for Wales. The
devolution of powers to Wales allowed some local politicians to make careers on the
political stage in Cardiff, thus to become prominent leaders whereas they were often
regarded as second-rank ones in London. This paper proposes to particularly study the
premiership of the two main First Ministers Wales has had so far, Rhodri Morgan and
Carwyn Jones, both of them members of the Labour Party, considering the different
political contexts they had to face.
When Rhodri Morgan became the First Minister in February 2000, he clearly
insisted on setting up a specific political model for Wales, as in the speech he delivered
during the annual conference of the Institute of Welsh Politics: Although Westminster is
the mother of parliaments, it doesnt mean that its the last word on parliaments. It doesnt
mean that the perfections of the unwritten British Constitution are so hugely admired that
we must fall into the Westminster model. We need to develop our own political culture
and processes17. He thus started by devising a different strategy from the Labour Party in
London and adopting a new leadership style, what came to be called Clear Red Water,
following a speech he made in November 2002 at the National Centre for Public Policy at
17 Rhodri Morgan, Check Against Delivery, speech delivered during the Institute of Welsh Politics annual
conference and published in 2001, Aberystwyth, Institute of Welsh Politics, 2001, p. 7.
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Swansea University. Morgan distinguished between the Welsh Labour Party in Cardiff and
New Labour in London.
Rhodri Morgan stepped down in December 2009 and was replaced by Carwyn
Jones, who immediately published his leadership manifesto entitled Time to Lead, and, as
underlined by David Williamson, a Welsh political journalist: The Carwyn era has begun,
and a new chapter in Welsh devolution is underway18. After only a few months in office,
he became the most senior elected Labour representative and government minister in the
UK. It will finally also be interesting to analyse the leadership strategy displayed by
Carwyn Jones in the campaign for the May 2016 elections in Wales.

18 David
Williamson, The man who will lead Wales, 02-12-2009, www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-

news/man-who-will-lead-wales, accessed in February 2016.
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S53. The Politics of Language in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Drama

Co-convenors :
Ian Brown, University of Kingston, UK
Daniele Berton-Charrire, Universit Blaise Pascal, France

In 1980, Brian Friel's Translations had its first production, its themes highlighting the
importance of language politics in an imperialist setting. In both Scottish and Irish
contemporary drama since then, language forms and usage have been a prime issue, either
in forms of theatrical dialogue as in Enda Walshs Disco Pigs (1996) or in the varieties of
language used in recent Scottish theatre. Papers are invited which explore aspects of the
politics of language in contemporary Irish or Scottish drama.

Monday 22 August 1630-1830
Sub-theme : The Politics of Language

Fighting the One Land, One Nation, One Language Policy in Irish and Scottish
Drama
Danile Berton-Charrire, Universit Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand II

To Brazilian Professor Kanavillil Rajagopalan Linguistic identity is largely a political
matter and languages are flags of allegiance. History has given evidence of language
plannings, including the One nation, one people, one [exoglossic or endoglossic] language
policy, as liberticide, culturally impoverishing and destructive. Orwells 1984 shows that
when a language is prohibited and its meaningful communication bereft of any
development (cf. Paul Garvin), its signifiers, signified and referents fade away, then die out,
along with the customs and ideologies they conveyed. Brian Friels Translations points out
what is lost in translation in exoglossic processes. A contrario, polyglossy preserves hybrid
nations traditions, roots and future. Its (often post-colonial) growth and progress enrich
their expression and identity. Scottish and Irish playwrights often combine standard and
non-standard languages used as local linguistic decors and idiosyncrasies, as well as
political statements, artistic and political commitments. They complete and/or compete
with one another. Semiotic devices join in as the latest ceilidh-plays expose through their
meta-dramatic and meta-theatrical dimensions. These notions will be tackled with a few
illustrative examples, and questions related to standard languages and to the dialogical
links born of dramatic polyglossy raised.

Symphonies of Loss and Isolation: The Politics of Language and the Representation
of Space in Tom Murphys A Whistle in the Dark
Anik Bach, University of Pcs

In an interview with Colm Tibn Tom Murphy stated that for him speech patterns of
individual characters have a way of conveying character on stage and his aim is to make a
symphony out of language. However, the symphonies Tom Murphy orchestrates in some of
his plays are not always the result of harmonious interplay of speech patterns between his
characters, but often question the possibility of dialogue on the stage in contemporary
society. Murphy frequently portrays his characters as outsiders, trapped both in space and
time. The protagonists of A Whistle in the Dark (1961) are no exception. The imprisoning
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social and cultural milieu the Carney family finds expression in linguistic and spatial terms.
The play is set in the rather liminal space of the domestic world, namely Michaels living
room. In this in-between space the characters try to express feelings of loss and longing
while language constantly fails them. My papers aim is to offer a reading of Murphys play
drawing on Edward W. Sojas notion of Thirdspace to explore issues of race, class and
gender that are apparent in the power relations, the constant speech makings, the
stammering and the silences of Carney family members.

The Language of Resistance and the Power of the Female Voice in Sue Glovers
Bondagers (1991)
Gioia Angeletti, University of Parma

This paper intends to show how Sue Glovers 1991 play Bondagers engages with the issues
of social change and cultural nostalgia in a country like Scotland, whose national and
political identity is still so strictly linked with the very nature of its landscape, traditions
and language(s). The expedients Glover deploys in order to foreground the intricate
relationship between the enduring force of tradition and the inevitability of change are
essentially two. Firstly, she has her main characters speak a rural Lallans language
(Horvat 2005) evoking an oral culture and mythical dimension with implied socio-political
connotations. With its many references to folk music and dance, the play is almost a
dramatic translation of the Scottish bothy ballad tradition, as it is also haunted by echoes
of Robert Burns, Allan Ramsay and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Secondly, by staging mainly
female outcast figures, Glover gives centrality to a communal female voice, subaltern yet
also authoritative. The final melancholy tone and the ambivalent meaning of bondage
suggest the effort of preserving Scottish values in a world seemingly developing along
different lines. Does Bondagers stage a backward look at the roots of Scottish culture while
ignoring the routes it has trodden or it may tread?

Ideological language and community identity in recent Scots-language drama
Ian Brown, Kingston University, London

This paper contends, following A J Greimas, that theatrical mythological and ideological
languages often invisibly serve to cement and to unify social blocs. For twentieth-
century writers in Scots, language use has been important in addressing the history and
ideology of Scottish experience and the nature of Scotland and Scottish history.
Recognising that language is a profoundly cultural artefact and its definition profoundly
political and that the playtexts language embodies, visibly or invisibly, its ideology, the
paper argues that playwriting in the languages of Scotland very often visibly that is to
say, explicitly or by clear implication expresses through language choice ideological
attitudes to community identity or identities. Part of the fascination of late twentieth-
century Scottish playwrights use of Scots for their characters lies in the tension between
use of Scots to mark the tradition-bound, in a sense the backward-looking, and the
prospective, its use as a flexible forward-looking modern language. That language is a key
means by which community may, in Benedict Andersons term, be imagined, assigns it a
key role in identifying communities. Playwright language choice is often fundamental to
her/his imagination and to the versions of Scotlands, the nature or form of the Scottish
nation imagined.

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Tuesday 23 August 1100-1300
Sub-theme: Translation, politics and 'classic' texts,

The Politics of Translating the Classics into Contemporary Ireland
Aidan OMalley, University of Rijeka, Croatia

Murmurs of discontent were audible in 1981 about Brian Friels Irish-ing of Chekhovs
Three Sisters. Last year, however, almost every single obituary dubbed Friel the Irish
Chekhov. Focusing on the period demarcated by these two points and, in particular, on
Friels diverse versions of Russian texts and Seamus Heaneys renderings of Sophocles, The
Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), this paper explores the evolving
politics of translating classic dramas into Ireland and Hiberno-English. Considering that
translating the classics has long been a method of elevating the status of ones language,
the paper examines the modes of translation employed by Friel and Heaney, and probes
the ways these speak to the different political contexts in which the plays were produced.
Following from this, it argues that the production and reception of these dramas reflect
not just the globalisation of Irish theatre, but also the changing relationship of Irish
literature and Hiberno-English to the Anglosphere, the hegemonic force in world
literature.

Translating Silence: Lorcas The House of Bernarda Alba and Scotland in Motion
Andrs Beck, School of Diplomacy Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Madrid

This paper intends to contrast two translations of Federico Garca Lorcas The House of
Bernarda Alba into English, both specifically commissioned for Scottish audiences. The
1989 version, staged in late Thatcherite Edinburgh, is a faithful rewriting of Lorcas classic
by playwright Jo Clifford, whose prolific engagement with Iberian literatures would mark
her oeuvre spanning over decades. Thirty years later, under the countrys first government
with independence on its political agenda, Rona Munros version for the National Theatre
of Scotland reimagines the plot in contemporary Glasgow and restructures both form and
content in an attempt to achieve the same dramatic effects in the updated, recognisable
context she proposes. An analysis of the politics of language in Cliffords and Munros
translations reveal how Lorcas universal themes of passion, oppression and revolution,
together with his play with silence, receive a radically different interpretation in the
historical periods that saw these two Scottish versions staged.

The Hermeneutics of Beyond the Grave Casualties of Language in Brian Friels
Theatre
Virginie Roche-Tiengo, University of Paris XIII

In On The Way to Language, Martin Heidegger states that the Greek words for interpreting
and interpretation hermeneuein, hermeneia can be traced to the god Hermes. Hermes,
son of Zeus and the Nymph Maia, is the god of language, a cunning and subversive
trickster, messenger of Olympic Gods, and a guide across boundaries including those
between the underworld and mortals, between life and death. From The Freedom of the
City (1973), Volunteers (1975), Living Quarters (1977), Faith Healer (1980), Translations
(1980), to Performances (2003), voices from beyond the grave people Brian Friels theatre.
The term hermeneutics suggests an interpretation, disclosing something hidden from
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ordinary understanding and mysterious. The voice from beyond the grave in Friels
theatre is to some extent Hermes, the message-bearer, because it has first and foremost
opened itself to a process of un-concealment. Friel dug into what is beyond language, the
inexpressible. Hence, we will first explore how language itself is inescapably political with
the Frielian beyond the grave casualties of language in The Freedom of the City, Volunteers
and Translations. Then we will focus on the notion of language as a perception of identity
and differences in Faith Healer and Living Quarters.

Respondent
Professor Jean Berton, Professor of Scottish Studies at Universit Jean Jaures, Toulouse,
President of the French Society for Scottish Studies

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S54 The Inner Seas connecting and dividing Scotland and Ireland
Philippe Laplace "Death of an island: madness and death on St Kilda in Karin
Altenberg's Island of Wings"
Cline Savatier Lahondes, The Inner Seas in John Millington Synges Deirdre of the
Sorrows
Emilie Berthillot , Smuggling Weapons, Republicans and Spies across the North
Channel (1880-1923): Gaelic friends or foes?
Jean Berton, Rescuing Lewis and Harris after the sinking of the Iolaire

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S55 I hear it in the deep hearts core: political emotions in Irish and Scottish
poetry

Co-conveners: Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK and Carla Sassi, Universit di
Verona, Italy

Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK
The Politics of Bewilderment: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney
Among the resounding rhetorical questions with which W. B. Yeats closes Easter 1916,
there is one that has a peculiar relevance for studies of political emotion and how it
operates in poetry. Yeats asks of the rebels, And what if excess of love / Bewildered them
till they died?. The etymological origins of bewilderment are uncertain, but the word
probably derives from wilder (to lead or go astray), and its modern usage carries
connotations of confusion, mystification, and bafflement. As a term that neatly conflates
political and aesthetic experience, bewilderment belongs to Edmund Burkes philosophical
category of the sublime, and it serves to reinforce the perception of a terrible beauty in
Easter 1916. The word appears much later in Seamus Heaneys elegy, The Strand at
Lough Beg, a more intimate poem of mourning that nevertheless carries echoes of Easter
1916. This paper will explore the politics of bewilderment, looking at examples of modern
poetry in which confusion and mystification are part of a complex imaginative response to
violence.

Scott Lyall, Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Fiery Speech: Vision and Violence in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse
This paper examines the work of two of the main protagonists behind the cultural and
political revival of Ireland in the early twentieth century, W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse,
looking particularly at some of the religious and spiritual ideas and emotions forming the
foundation to their poetry. While Yeats memorialises Pearse, and other 1916 martyrs, in
Easter, 1916, a poem that is in many ways a reply to Pearses The Fool, their respective
visions of what the new Ireland should look like Pearses traditional peasant
Catholicism and Yeatss heterodox elite Protestantism were very different. Yet in many of
their poems Yeats and Pearse inhabit the persona of prophet or visionary, with what
Pearse in The Rebel calls the gift of fiery speech. Their poems, especially those on
Ireland, often display a violent anger and outrage that, even so, shares the ultimate aim of
resacralising Ireland.

Hitomi Nakamura, International Pacific University (Okayama), Japan
Nearly a mile from home yet foreign country: Patrick Kavanagh and Ulster Politics
Although the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) is usually known for its treatment
of life and nature in rural Ireland, Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) once remarked that,
Without being in the slightest way political in his intentions, Kavanaghs poetry did have
political effect. While not as politically active as William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), who
became a Senator, Kavanagh worked for much of his life as a journalist and critic, and
named his own short-lived periodical Kavanagh's Weekly: A Journal of Literature and
Politics (1952, emphasis mine). As this paper shows, Kavanaghs background as the son of
a Monaghan farmer is a significant aspect of his life and work, to which insufficient critical
attention has been paid. One of the most consequential moments in his early life was the
partition of Ireland in 1920, which made him a borderer. As I argue, Kavanagh nurtured a
political awareness, and this is reflected in poems involving local territorial disputes.
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Drawing mostly upon primary sources including poems and other writings, this paper
explores the political inflections of Kavanaghs poetry, and shows how his writings could
be unintentionally political.

Katrin Berndt, University of Bremen, Germany
How Refrain from Love?: The Inclusive Idea of Scottish Citizenship in Twentieth-
Century Scottish Poetry
My paper argues that twentieth-century Scottish poetry imagined a model of Scottish
citizenship that is independent of national sovereignty, and connects political emotions
such as love for and loyalty to the land with civic values like liberty and social justice.
The concept of citizenship is often tied to the nation state, but in the absence of full
national sovereignty, it also defines who belongs to a community, and on what grounds.
My paper demonstrates that Scottish poetry has contributed to developing an inclusive
Scottish citizenship that combines emotional attachment to place with commitment to the
well-being of the nation. Discussing poems by Naomi Mitchison, Edwin Morgan, and Jackie
Kay, it explores how they identify cultural diversity, the critical re-evaluation of Scottish
history, and loyalty to ones community as core features of Scottish citizens who cannot
refrain from [their] love for the difficult land (Edwin Muir). The paper argues that the
inclusive idea of Scottish citizenship, which conjoins democratic principles with emotional
commitment to the land, understands the nation as a commonly and passionately
imagined site of belonging distinguished by shared values such as liberty, equality, and
social responsibility.

Glenda Norquay, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
The negative as political trope in Scottish womens poetry
This paper examines the trope of the negative saying no, never, not or neither - as a
means of articulating and situating national and gendered identities in Scottish womens
poetry since 1979. Focusing on poems in English and Scots, by Liz Lochhead, Alison Flett,
Ellie McDonald, Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie and Claire Askew, it explores the negative as a
literary manoeuvre which can encompass complicated relationships with past, with
country, with language and self. Negatives may be deployed as positive assertions of
identity but through the emotions of distance, disappointment, defeat can also speak to
contradictory dynamics with national pasts, national literatures and national voices. This
paper opens up questions of what it means to assert yes through saying no, asks why it is
such a dominant mode in Scottish womens poetry and explores how we might understand
these articulations in the current political climate. It invites discussion of similar
deployments of the negative in a wider range of Irish and Scottish poetry. What are the
emotional implications of the negative and how might it carry political reverberations?

Corey Gibson, University of Groningen, Netherlands
Extremism in Defence of Liberty: Hugh MacDiarmid, Malcolm X, Barry Goldwater,
and William Shakespeare at the Oxford Union 1964
In early December, 1964, the communist and Scottish nationalist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid
(1892-1978), and the human rights activist and former black nationalist, Malcolm X (1925-
1965), took part in a raucous Oxford Union Debate. They spoke in favour of the motion,
provided by the firebrand conservative and libertarian demagogue, Barry Goldwater
(1909-1998): extremism in the defence of Liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of
Justice is no virtue. This paper will examine how these exchanges, after the back-and-forth
of historical events and current affairs, and witty aphorisms, fell back on poetry to reveal
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the debates central tenets. Poetry allows these speakers to assume an absolutist stance
whilst embracing nuance that is otherwise elided in public discourse. With reference to
Malcolm Xs idiosyncratic reading of Hamlets famous soliloquy, and to MacDiarmids
lengthy citation from his own To the Young Poets of the World Today, I posit that poetry
allows these figures to present a more equivocal, less dogmatic, case for extremism than
that their opponents were able to for moderation. The reason, I suggest, is precisely the
sort of poetic political emotion that gives shape to the impulse for revolutionary action
and to knowledge of the suffering that follows.

Ronald Schleifer, University of Oklahoma, US
Late Symboliste Poetry: Violence Beyond Politics in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats
Representations of violence, especially as he grew older, proliferates in the poetry of W.B.
Yeats, but that violence while often apocalyptic is rarely associated with political
action. (In this, he is far different from the notable representations of violence even
intellectual violence in his precursor, William Blake.) Most often in Yeatss late poetry
the representation of violence is either graphic, to the point of breaking up his lines and
garbling syntax or, more strikingly, a reversion to the symboliste poetic strategies of his
early poetry. Nineteenth-century symboliste poetry, however, as Yeats described his early
poetry, pursued the subtlety, obscurity, and intricate utterance . . . . of our moods and
feelings [which] are too fine, too subjective, too impalpable to find any clear expression in
action or in speech tending towards action. This is clearly an apolitical project, and in the
late poetry e.g., Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen and Meditations in Time of Civil War
Yeats takes it up in order to circumscribe, not impalpable moods and feelings, but gross
and all too palpable political violence as seemingly simply apocalyptic violence.

Irina Popova, Moscow State University, Russia
Historical Feeling Political Feeling in Seamus Heaney and Michael Hartnett.
The poetry of world-wide known Seamus Heaney and that of less known outside Ireland
Michael Hartnett have some common central features. One of them is the way they voice
their political emotions. Unlike many Northern Irish poets, Heaney and Hartnett refrain
from direct response to politics but express their attitudes obliquely or by means of other
subjects and voices. Alongside the subject of Language and linguistic commentaries they
employ History as both important material and a conspicuous theme running throughout
their works. The major aim of this paper is to trace and comment upon the two poets
treatment of history as a mode of making a certain political stand. It will certainly touch
upon the questions of nation and identity. The research is going to involve 1) short poems
dealing with historic(al) events (like Heaneys Requiem for the Croppies et al.); 2) longer
poems which may be called parables (like, e.g., Station Island by Heaney and Sibelius in
Silence by Hartnett); 3) translations of three 17th-18th century Gaelic poets by Hartnett, the
work and material obviously bearing on the explored subject.

Carla Sassi, Universit di Verona, Italy
And in a new dimension [we] turned and spoke: the renewal of communal bonds
in Nan Shepherds poetry
The purport of my paper is to investigate, in M. Nussbaums words, the ways in which
emotions can support the basic principles of the political culture of an aspiring yet
imperfect society, with reference to early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance poetry. I will
contend this is a poetry that does not engage with issues of national (cultural)
independence in any simplistic way, but rather foregrounds a wider rethinking of
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communal politics and individual agency. My investigation will mainly focus on Nan
Shepherds collection In the Cairngorms (1934), as a particularly original and interesting
example of this. Shepherds largely forgotten collection foregrounds the poets relation of
love with the mountains a love that is both mystical/sacred and sensuous/erotic. Her
complex relationship with the mountain, however, also opens the way to a wider sense of
community and to a desire for a renewal of communal bonds, grounded on the same
feeling of love as well as on a family of interrelated emotions. I will then investigate how
Nussbaums idea that the core emotions that sustain a decent society have their roots in,
or are forms of, love, that is in forms of intense attachments to things outside the control
of our will, reverberates in Shepherds vision.

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S57: "Celtic Fictions-Scottish and Irish Speculative Fiction"
Convenors:
- Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza (Spain).
- Colin Clark. Charles University Prague (Czech Republic).

Description: The thesis of much modern Speculative Fiction in Ireland and Scotland is the
generation of a creative space in which, imaginatively, solutions are sought and simulated
for real political, social and metaphysical problems. Often the result of impasses and failed
channels for expression in society, speculative writing may be ludic, genre-hopping and
heteroglossic offering refreshing and innovative discursive space .This panel seeks to
expose and explore deliberately transgressive texts and engage with authors concerned
with negotiating topoi neglected by conventional, institutionalized institutions and to
bring together practitioners from various literatures and genres to discuss the
potentialities of the speculative mode.

Valentina Adami, University of Verona, Italy
And the New Worlds not a myth: The Survival Struggle of Environmental Migrants
in Exodus by Julie Bertagna
The environmental crisis is one of the most pressing societal concerns today. Speculative
fiction frequently questions current political, legal and cultural attitudes by portraying
future scenarios in which some ecological disaster has changed the world order. In recent
years, women writers have been particularly active in this sense: let us think, for instance,
of Margaret Atwoods MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2009-2013), Jeanette Wintersons The
Stone Gods (2007), or Starhawks 2015 City of Refuge (which is also the completion of a
trilogy started in 1993 with The Fifth Sacred Thing). Scottish childrens author Julie
Bertagna has given her contribution to these speculations on the consequences of letting
current trends in environmental behaviour continue unchallenged with her young-adult
novel Exodus (2002), also part of a trilogy continued in 2007 with Zenith and completed in
2011 with Aurora. This paper will examine Bertagnas survival narrative as a questioning
of environmental justice and human rights, in the light of contemporary theories on myth,
trauma

Ken MacLeods Descent or a Way for Passive Revolution
Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen
Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza (Spain)
Many works of speculative fiction seek to create a space in which possible solutions are
sought and simulated for real political, social and metaphysical problems. This is clearly
the case of Scottish writer Ken MacLeod, popular for his science fiction novels, which
creatively combine cutting-edge scientific speculation and a deep humanistic
preoccupation. In these novels, the author develops his social vision about the future,
analysing left-wing models such as utopian socialism, Trotskyism, or anarchism, in a
context where it has become obvious that we are not alone in the universe and where
aliens seem to have started to interact with human beings. For analysing this, I will focus
on MacLeods Descent (2014), a novel set in Scotland in the mid of the 21st century, as well
as on the novella The Human Front (2013), set in Scotland in the second half of the 20th
century. As we shall see, the concept of passive revolution coined by Antonio Gramsci
to refer the transformation of the political and social structures without disruptive social
processes of struggle underlays MacLeods narrations on UFOs abductions, local secrecy
and global military conspiracy in rural and urban Scotland. It is my intention to analyse
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these aspects in MacLeods works and try to answer the final question: is it possible for
these Scottish citizens to be happy and to have some real agency in the construction of a
free and equal society?

Jack Fennell, Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, but with Precedent: Absurdity in
Transition in Ireland, 1890-1923.
In this paper, I propose to compare and contrast three texts presented by their authors as
reprises of earlier works. Each text takes the grotesque and the absurd for its subject
matter, and openly invites comparison with an earlier work from which its author drew
inspiration. I wish to investigate why these three Irish authors revisited these older
stories, how they adapted or pastiched these texts for nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Irish audiences.
First, there is Edward Joseph Martyns Morgante the Lesser (1890), which depicts
the exploits of a monstrous character who is named after the protagonist of Luigi Pulcis
Morgante Maggiore [the Greater Morgante] (1483), but also references Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564). Martyns Morgante, a self-absorbed materialist
with an insatiable appetite, is sneezed out of his mothers nose and subsequently grows
into a violent, stupid (but curiously erudite) giant.
Second, there is History of a World of Immortals Without a God (1891), by Antares
Skorpios (Jane Barlow), in which the misanthropic main character repeatedly describes
the human race as Yahoos, states that Gullivers Travels is his favourite work of fiction,
and shares Lemuel Gullivers desire to become something other than a human being. His
convictions about the meaninglessness of life and the intolerable inanity of human
existence cause untold damage when he arrives (via magical means) in a utopian world of
immortals who have been awaiting a messenger from the Unseen God who created them.
Thirdly, I want to look at Mchel Mac Craiths Cuairt ar an nGealaigh [a visit to
the Moon] and Eachtra Fuirne [the adventures of a group of people], both published in
1923, both of which revisit Lucians True History.

Sidia Fiorato University of Verona
The private eye turns inward: Paul Johnstons speculative crime fiction
Dystopias are speculative fictions with a close connection with the present condition and
focus on the transformative potential of human agency. Paul Johnstons futuristic crime
fiction Body Politic (1997) presents a dystopian government set in 2020 Edinburgh, where
the murder investigation soon transforms itself into the investigation of the whole society.
The space of the city opens up to reveal a dysfunctional landscape of dissimulation and
becomes the creative space both for the author and the detective character to engage with
multifarious aspects. Johnstons narrative addresses geopolitical issues, bioethical issues
related to medicine advancement, societys institutions and power relations. The private
eye turns inward and presents an introspective analysis both of the individual and of
society; if the purpose of dystopia and speculative fiction is a defamiliarization of the
present in order to critically engage with it, Johnston brings the genre a step further as he
establishes an uncanny experience of the present itself which leads to a critical engament
of the individual with the deeper aspects of his personality.

Colin Clark, The Interesting Times Gang: Politics and Potential in Modern Scottish
Speculative Fiction
In a recent article in The Scotsman(10th March 2016), novelist Kirsty Gunn complains
about Scottification representing a grave threat to Scottish literature .She claims that it
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constitutes part of an unofficial politicizing of literature ,the supposition being that by
championing Scottishness ,we risk producing a parochial literature subservient to the
agenda of Creative Scotland and, by extension, the SNP dominated Scottish Government.
Gunns complaint seems churlish at first glance (how is the production of a strategy
rooted in, and of, Scotlands people and places a negative thing one may legitimately
wonder) but her complaint addresses a valid issue: should Scotlands National Literature
aspire to be apolitical? Is this possible or even desirable? Is her complaint actually
validated by a slew of works demonstrating neo-Tartanism? Murray Pittock famously
claimed in The Road to Independence (2008, 114) that Scotland was in the process of:
achieving a form of cultural autonomy in the absence of its political equivalent:
that Scottish identity was materially if not constitutionally becoming ever more
manifest
Of particular interest in the negotiation of identity in modern Scotland are those
formulations of cultural autonomy, presently perhaps contingent but coalescing in
tandem with the development of the nation -specifically texts of speculative fiction by
authors who are not simply imagining other dispensations for Scotland, but who
participate in the profoundly ludic processes of reterritorialization( already advanced and
kept vigorous by a clash of antagonistic propaganda blocks ) and in prefiguring possible
future Scotlands. To this end I will consider works by Iain M Banks and a raft of authors
(many members of GSFWC) with a stake in Scottish identity such as Gary Gibson, Neil
Williamson, Michael Cobley, Michel Faber et al.
My aim is then to determine whether Scotlands literature is genuinely at peril
from a faux cultural aesthetic, revanchism or whether this is simply a natural recursive of
Scotland as an autopoietic social system and the role speculative fiction plays in this.

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S58 The Symbolic Power of Humour: Gender Issues and Derision

The Male Body and the Role of the Camera in The Office (UK)
Lynn Blin, Univ. Paul-Valry Montpellier
The British sitcom, The Office (BBC, 2001-2003) was created by Ricky Gervais and
Stephen Merchant. Starring Gervais as David Brent, the homophobic, sexist, racist,
misogynist regional director of the fictional Wernham Hogg Paper Company, the series
turned the sitcom genre on its head. Abandoning devices such as the laugh track, and
three-camera shooting, which have traditionally given the genre its comic impetus, the
series was shot as a documentary. Intended as a spoof on the docu-soap trend of the late
90s, The Office is also a biting satire on the colossal tedium of a working environment
with an incompetent boss who erroneously considers himself to be a leader first, a friend
second, and, an entertainer third.

The Office was not only ground breaking in its format. Though the humour
devices used are consistent with those explained in the three main linguistic theories of
humour, it is in its use of humiliation humour that The Office is truly innovative. By
filming the series in documentary form, Gervais and Merchant introduce a supplementary
character into the show, and that is the camera itself. Each sexist or misogynist comment is
an opportunity for the camera to linger on the facial expressions and body language of the
characters. And where the female body has traditionally been the target of sitcoms based
on sexist humour, in The Office, it is the male body that is put on display. Though sexist
jokes, comments, and pranks abound, it is the authors of the jokes themselves that become
the butt, giving a new turn to the complex relationship of the maker of the joke, the butt,
and the audience.

By first examining recent developments in humour theory and then taking a closer
look at the male body on display, I want to examine how the specificity of the devices used
make The Office a study in humour as well a worthy subject of interest to gender
theorists.

The Symbolic Power of Humour: Gender Issues and Derision Mary Kingsley
Shirley C. Doulire, University of Bordeaux

This presentation intends to explore the apparent paradox of a woman, Mary Kingsley, and
her use of self-deprecation, sometimes bordering on misogynist humour.
Mary Kingsley was a Victorian explorer who paddled her way through Congo and
Cameroon. She published two narratives of her expeditions: Travels in West Africa and two
years later West African Studies. Both were instant best sellers and were followed by
numerous tours in which she would, invariably, be the butt of her own jokes, whether
about her appearance or her many failures as a woman; failures explained because she is a
woman and because she fails to be what was expected of a woman.
She was a fervent opponent to the female suffrage, wrote letters to the head of the
Royal Geographical Society to warn him against the actions of dangerous women
wanting to be accepted to the RGS. She claimed that the women who applied into learned
societies were shrieking females and androgyns. However she later applied to join at least
three learned societies. Her jokes can be seen as a way to ease the anxiety and
ambivalence she felt as a woman of independent means and character, but with no desire
to be a trailblazer. This misogynist humour allowed her to align herself with the ruling
patriarchy with whom she identified more than with her ascribed gender and fight the
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troubling fact that she was the unwilling element that helped create a new norm for
women.

Feminist Humor: Characteristics, Differences and Norms
Sandra Dufour, Universit de Bourgogne

This paper examines the characteristics of feminist humor and the issues at stake, and the
way it has been considered and analyzed throughout the years in the United States by
writers, politicians, sociologists and also by contemporary feminist humorists.
Writer Kate Clinton has come up with a compact word for feminist humorists
fumerists because it captures the idea of being funny and wanting to burn the house
down all at once. Feminist humor, according to Clinton, is about making light in this land
of reversals, where we are told as we are laughing, tears streaming down our faces, that
we have no sense of humor. She goes on to say that Men have used humor against
women for so long we know implicitly whose butt is the butt of their jokes that we do
not trust humor. Masculine humor is deective. It allows denial of responsibility, the oh-I-
was-just-kidding disclaimer. It is escapist, something to gloss over and get through the
hard times, without ever having to do any of the hard work of change. Masculine humor is
essentially not about change.
When one deals with the question of feminist humor, the question of the differences
between mens humor and womens humor come up. For some the difference is between
revolt and revolution. Womens humor calls into question the largest issues, questions the
way the world is put together.
The underlying question is moreover that of womens power: Womens humor has
a particular interest in challenging the most formidable structures because they keep
women from positions of power. Womens humor is about women speaking up. Poet
Marianne Moore, born in 1887, wrote that Humor saves a few steps, it saves years, and
ction writer Katherine Manseld, born in 1888, suggested in her journal that to be
wildly enthusiastic, or deadly serious both are wrong. Both pass. One must keep ever
present a sense of humor.

One may also wonder why the feminine tradition of humor has remained
essentially hidden from the mainstream. One of the possible answers lies in a paradox:
When women joke, they are exploring a particularly feminine tradition of humor. The idea
that women have their own humor, that a feminine tradition of humor could exist apart
from the traditional masculine version, is not considered a viable possibility, and so
women who initiate humor are seen as acting like men. Studies by sociologists and
psychologists go far in proving that society may hold different expectations regarding
boys and girls humor. These social norms, argues psychologist Paul McGhee, dictate that
males should be the initiators of humor, while females should be responders.

Comic cloaks and serious subjects: humour in the work of Djuna Barnes
Margaret Gillespie, Universit de Franche-Comt
American modernist Djuna Barnes (1890-1982) has long been celebrated for displaying
two potentially antithetical qualities striking beauty and caustic wit. This seductive if
unusual dyad contributed largely to forming Barnes literary persona as one at once
complicit with, and rebelling against, contemporary expectations of demure, decorative
femininity. Photographer Berenice Abbott, an early Greenwich Village acquaintance, was
one of the first of many to remark on the combination of glamour and mordant repartee
that characterised Barnes romantic in dress, frequently in a cape, always immaculate,
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brilliant and extremely witty (Herring). Lost Generation chronicler Robert McAlmon
similarly described the writer as far too good looking [] not to command fondness and
admiration but with a wise-cracking tongue that I was far too discreet to try and rival
(Benstock).
It is all the more surprising then, that the humour, which I believe forms a key
strand in Barness textual poetics, should have received so little attention from scholars,
and that its link with the writers own highly elusive gender politics should not have been
more frequently explored. Indeed, if the difficulty and obscurity of Barness more clearly
modernist writing has seemed almost by definition to preclude the very possibility of
comedy (in writing she appears she must inject metaphysics, mysticism and her own
strange version of literary quality into her work bemoaned McAlmon), the writer also
self-consciously deployed humour as a label as a means to downplay her more explicitly
Sapphic output (slight satirical wigging Barnes).
This paper will argue for the centrality of humour in Barnes, in which the tension
between the authors collusion and resistance (Caselli) will be shown to echo a parallel
dynamic in her poetics, where a comic cloak may hide a [] serious subject and a barred
female voice attempting to break through (Benstock).

Humor and Gender in Contemporary British Fiction
Justine Gonneaud, Univ. Avignon
With Bergsons postulate that in laughter we always find an unavowed intention to
humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour as a starting point, the aim of this
paper will be to explore and confront various practices of humor, laughter and satire
regarding representations of gender in contemporary British literature. From Jeanette
Winterson to Angela Carter, passing by Brigid Brophy but also male authors such as Will
Self and Peter Ackroyd, many contemporary writers have explored and questioned the
performativity of gender through representations of androgynous or hermaphroditic
characters and their sex changes.
Based on selected works from the aforementioned corpus, I propose to study the
corrective function of humor in keeping with the bergsonian acceptation of laughter
through an analysis of the satirical representations of gender stereotypes and their
subversion enabled by the hermaphroditic motif. Secondly, by showing that the platonic
myth is simultaneously debunked and extolled in contemporary fiction, I would like to
address the structural ambiguity of laughter regarding gender politics, in keeping with a
postmodern definition of satire whose aim, according to Dustin Griffin, is rather
exploratory than explanatory. Finally, using Helene Cixouss figure of laughing Medusa as a
symbol advocating for the creation of a new impregnable language that will wreck
partitions, I would like to suggest that contemporary fiction also explores a
reconstructive aspect of laughter, thus redefining humor as an affirmative and potent tool,
producing a new poetics of gender.

Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar? The special sense of humor of three women
writers of the American South: Eudora Welty, Flannery OConnor and Carson
McCullers
Katalin G. Kllay, Kroli Gspr University of the Reformed Church in Hungary,
Budapest

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The title of my paper begins with a quotation from Eudora Weltys Petrified Man, a story
which takes place in a beauty parlour, lacking all beauty in a small town of the American
South. The story can be read as a caricature of the local vernacular speech, the narrow-
minded attitude of common women of the early 1940s. Still, whatever is funny about the
text becomes also peculiar: not only because of the freak show which is a constant point
of reference in the conversations but because of the lavender mirror in the center, through
which the reader can grasp the grotesqueness of the everyday situation while perhaps
catching a glimpse of him- or herself.
I wish to examine the nature and the power of a special type of humor
characteristic not only of Weltys but of Flannery OConnors and Carson McCullerss
fiction as well, making a distinction between derision (exclusive laughter, laughing at
something or someone) and self-irony (inclusive laughter, laughing with someone).
Keeping in mind the original meaning of the word humor, i.e. body fluid, liquid, I will
argue that the works I analyse present a unique blend of these two attitudes constituting
a shared sense of identity with which the reader, regardless of where he or she is from, has
a choice to identify. Beside Petrified Man, I wish to focus on Good Country People by
OConnor and The Ballad of the Sad Caf by McCullers. I hope to show how laughter in
these texts may turn into pain, and then again, how pain may turn into laughter.

Stephen Leacocks Abnormalized Romance Made Normal Humorously
Gerald Lynch, University of Ottawa

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) was the English-speaking worlds best known humorist
from 1910-1925. His numerous works include two books on humour, wherein he
frequently refers to Henri Bergsons Le Rire (1900), which was arguably the first study to
theorize humour as normalizing. In the longest section of Leacocks classic short story
cycle, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), he treats of the romance, marriage, and
new family of Peter Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh. Leacocks view of gender in these three
stories is essentialist: by implication he presents the perfect relationship as one that
balances a female talent for romance with a male investment in realism. When things go
wrong in the love story, it is because foolish Peter wholly accepts silly Zenas excessively
romantic view of heroism. Peter achieves heroic status by re-asserting his connection to
the real he displays great loyalty in protecting the towns, Mariposas, harvest money in a
bank robbery which leads to a normalizing of his and Zenas relationship and a happy
ending. Thus the eccentric is humorously pulled back to the centre in conservative
Leacocks vision of love and organic community in Mariposa.

Touched by Humour and Death: Characters in John McGaherns Fiction
Dana Radler, Bucharest University of Economic Studies

John McGaherns stories bring to life characters in both comic and tragic instances, and
their whole existence goes under the spotlight, reflecting mild, ironic or sarcastic touches.
In between automatisms and mobility often directed to dogmatism or mental stereotypes,
canons, workers, teachers, writers or family members display their ignorance, occasional
(lack of) manners, boredom or elevation, often imitating what seems to be decent in
terms of taste. Class, gender and false pretenses are ridiculed and exposed in both novels
and short stories, and laughter moves from a classical Kantian play instance to a Freudian-
supported analysis of condensation and ambiguity as vehicles employed by a realist
creator.
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Gender-Based Humour in Alan Bennets The History Boys
Alberto Rossi, University of Verona

Alan Bennetts play The History Boys premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London in
2004. Set in a boys grammar school where eight students are trying to perfect their
knowledge of history in order to enter Oxford or Cambridge, the play stages a subversion
of stereotypical gender roles.
The location permits Bennett to describe a quite unusual framework: in effect, the
male students of eighteen prove unwilling to participate in the teachers' humour about sex
and relationships. Contrary to what is expected, the students seem to be interested only in
learning, while sexuality is not part of their world. As they reply to jokes by explaining
them in a very logical way, humour is deprived of its strength (Norrick, Chiaro), but
actually this strength is yet involuntarily delivered by their narrating sexual intercourses
using historical metaphors to describe the female body and penetration.
Only in the second act, when two characters discover their homosexuality, they
start making jokes about their own manliness. So, self-irony starts functioning as an
instrument of defence, used to protect the boys belonging to human society and hence
their admission to prestigious colleges. I will therefore point out how gender-based
humour functions as a cathartic device (Joanne R. Gilbert) that in the end allows the boys
to self-define themselves.

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S59: Religion and Literatures in English
Co-convenors: Pilar Somacarrera (Autonomous University of Madrid), and Alison
Jack (University of Edinburgh)

Rewriting the Gospels in Contemporary British Fiction (Barbara Schaff, U. of
Gttingen)
Although the Bible has always inspired the literary imagination, a considerable number of
novels about novels about Jesus and his disciples were published only in very recent years.
This paper will explore the surge of post-millenial biblical fiction by looking at Naomi
Aldermans The Liars Gospel (2012), Richard Beards Lazarus is Dead (2012), Colm
Tibins The Testament of Mary (2012) and Niall Williamss John (2008). It will discuss the
novels take on historical vs. gospel truths and gospel stories, their narrative forms and the
ways in which the medium gospel and the genre of life writing is reflected. Lastly, it will
address the question in how far these novels can be contextualised in what has come to be
known as the postsecular age.

Shaggy God Stories: Subverting Teleology in Contemporary Fictions in English
(Valeria Mosca, U. of Genova)
Teleology and consequentiality are concepts we often employ to make sense of the world
and the self, and that we traditionally associate to narratives. Even though we expect
chains of consequential events to bring plots to coherent endings, however, fictional
products exist that do not conform to these narrative conventions products that
disappoint our human and readerly expectations for consequentiality. Good examples of
this would be the famous shaggy-dog-story nonsense jokes: misunderstood by most, these
puzzling and anticlimactic narrations often result in people laughing at their own feelings
of entitlement to traditional forms of teleological narrative progressions.
Teleology is obviously very much at stake in religious discourse, and especially so in
the monotheistic, Western traditions. However, examples exist of non-teleological, non-
consequential, and, perhaps, even anti-narrative fictions whose main intertexts are
explicitly Biblical: among those, J.M. Coetzees The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and Carlton
Mellick IIIs desecrating The Baby Jesus Butt Plug (2003). My aim is to explore the ways in
which the loss of teleology and coherent progression are worked into these shaggy God
stories, which nonetheless borrow extensively from religious intertexts, and situate
themselves in a tradition that is based on teleology and supported by a narrative
apparatus.

The Equalization of the Image: The Way Changing Ideologies Underwrite Religious
Imagery in Eliot and Bishop (Trevor Westmorland, Autonomous U. of Madrid)
The socio-historical circumstances of poets T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop resulted in their
respective associations with modernism and postmodernism. Eliots The Journey of the
Magi and Bishops Over 2000 Illustrations and a Concordance are both poems which
explore the implicit value of poetic imagery, specifically through the use of images based in
a biblical tradition. Taking into account both their differing literary movement and
religious backgrounds, this essay will attempt to expose the poems as a microcosm of the
fundamental way that faith in the power of the image has altered with the shift from a
modernist to a postmodernist sentimentality, which includes the loss of faith in meta-
narratives that is a requirement of traditional religious discourse. Specifically, though both
poets present a variety of images, a close reading will demonstrate that the Anglo-
Catholic Eliot believes in the extra-personal power of his images to define a worldview,
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whereas the unbelieving Bishops poem is a search for validation in the power of the
image which is never attained; in the end the images from her concordance Bible are equal
to those random moments of her own travels, and everything is only connected by and
and and.

Ann-Marie Macdonalds Fall on Your Knees, or the New Bible for Women (Helena
Snchez-Gayoso, Autonomous U. of Madrid)
Ann-Marie MacDonalds Fall on Your Knees (1997) challenges dominant modes of
discourse, prominently phallocentric discourses such as History, the English Canon, or the
Catholic Church by including the voice of the marginalised or silent other inside these
same metanarratives. By recalling Genettes theory, this paper will explore how
MacDonald appropriates passages from the Bible (hypotext) not only to construct this
novel, which is presented as a pastiche of different grand narratives, but also to enact an
alternative female religious experience within the Biblical tradition. In order to show this
project of depatriarchalising the Bible, close attention will be paid to different Biblical
references. By decontextualizing these Biblical passages from their textual origin,
MacDonald is able to populate them with feminist meaning and create hypertexts that
challenge restrictive biblical truths. Fall on Your Knees thus emerges as a new construction,
or using one of the novels key metaphors, as a rebirth or regeneration of other truths,
expressed not through the immobile truth of HIS-story but through the fluidity and
hybridity of OTHER-stories. It is in this light where Fall on Your Knees can be understood
as the new Bible for women.

Doctorows Biblical Politics in City of God (2000) (Mara Ferrndez-San Miguel ,
University of Zaragoza)
Asked in an interview after the publication of his last novel, E.L. Doctorow explained: I
think of my politics as biblical politics: you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't steal, that sort
of thing (Wolf). Published in 2000, City of God is E.L. Doctorows most ambitious, complex
and enigmatic work so far. It is a highly metafictional text that may be best seen as a
collection of skillfully interwoven plots and voices that create a kaleidoscopic universe of
complementary ontological levels. The main plot recounts the stealing of the crucifix from
the altar of the Episcopalian church of Saint Timothys, and Reverend Pembertons
attempts to recover it as he stands at the brink of apostasy, only to find it on the roof of a
synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. But this is merely one strand in the narrative world of
City of God. In spite of the novels mosaic nature, all the interspersed storylines reveal an
underlying common concern with ethics and justice. This paper argues that such
preoccupation is tightly connected to Doctorows leftist ideology. I will explore the way in
which Doctorows politics, his heightened ethical sense of justice and his own condition as
a secular Jew collude in City of God. In other words, the aim will be to assess the extent to
which Doctorows ideology in the novel derives from, or relates to, his upbringing in a
Jewish-humanist secular milieu.

The Garden of Eden in Margaret Oliphants Chronicles of Carlingford (Alison Jack, U.
of Ediburgh)
The work of the Scottish writer Margaret Oliphant is deeply infused with biblical images
and allusions, often to the point of quotation. The opening novella in her Chronicles of
Carlingford series, The Rector (1863), uses the image of paradise or the Garden of Eden as
a recurring and uneasy metaphor for a place of belonging. George Eliots Adam Bede
(1859) offers a less ambivalent use of the image, for example. In my paper I will argue that
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Oliphants upbringing in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition offers some explanation for
this, and illuminates her intertextual use of paradise imagery as well as other biblical
allusions.

The Typology of Apocalypse: Early Modern Revelations of the Whore of Babylon.
(Victoria Brownlee, NUI Galway)
This paper addresses the politically charged Whore of Babylon from the book of
Revelation. Acknowledging how this biblical book was popularly mapped onto the on-
going struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism in the early modern period, it
examines the exegetical practices that facilitated the translation of Revelations narratives
and figures from biblical page to political present. The paper contends that a specifically
typological reading of this biblical woman ensured that her body, as well as her seductive
and deceiving nature (as detailed in Revelation 17), became a potent signifier of
Catholicism and the threat it posed to the reformed faith. Considering how Protestantisms
ideologically inscribed Whore permeated the periods literary writings, this paper will
illuminate how this biblical women is reimagined in Edmund Spensers The Faerie Queene
(1590/1596) and Thomas Dekkers The Whore of Babylon (c.1607). In doing so, I argue for
a more capacious, and ideologically contested reading of the Whore, and the processes of
typological revelation generally, in this periods literature.

More Than To Eat? The Temptation Scene of Genesis 3 in Literary Context. (Marta
Zajc)
The paper examines the temptation scene of Gen 3, in particular, the eating of the
forbidden fruit. The very function of eating is to be given theological significance, in which
I will rely on the interdisciplinary study of Carol Meyers - Discovering Eve. Ancient Israelite
Women in Context. To contextualize the biblical scene in question is one of the tasks of my
reading; yet, the other will be to maintain the theological framework needed to speak
about Christian dilemmas in the way which respects the most vital parts of Christian creed.
Therefore, in my presentation I will include texts without direct religious references, still
with some focus on eating (Mad Tea-Party in Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland
and Dulce Domum in Grahames The Wind in the Willows) as well as those in which the
religious engagement of the authors leaves no doubt (The Unexpected Meeting in Lewiss
The Magicians Nephew and The Elfland in Chestertons Orthodoxy). Still, my ultimate aim
will be to present the eating of the forbidden fruit as both much more and much less than a
mere act of transgression.

The Raising of Lazarus Plot and the Metaphors of Resurrection in the Short Stories
of Ray Bradbury (Nina Moroz Lomonosov, Moscow State U.)
In one of his late interviews (2010) Ray Bradbury described himself as a "delicatessen
religionist" inspired by Eastern and Western religions. Nevertheless, in many cases
Bradbury turns out to be closer to Christian tradition than we could expect. Moreover,
Bradburys ethics is quite straightforward, sometimes verging on the Puritan didacticism
and the motif of the sinful brotherhood of mankind in Nuclear Apocalypse stories of
1950-60s. The existence of an inextricable link between a human soul and a body is one of
Bradbury's basic ideas, tracing from his early grotesques (The October Country, 1955) to
nearly Christian fables of Long After Midnight (1976) and late stories of the 2000s
(e.g. Dorian in Excelsis). My particular interest lies in Bradburys main Biblical metaphor of
carnal resurrection, the Raising of Lazarus. Bradbury returned to it many times in both sci-
fi and gothic stories (Some Live Like Lazarus; Lazarus Come Forth; G.B.S.-Mark V, etc.). The
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famous story I Sing the Body Electric! (1969) comprises both the robot imagery and the
motif of resurrection, reconsidering several New Testament images.

Oh, of course, one accepts the Gospels, naturally: Bible Intertextuality in Graham
Greenes Monsignor Quixote (Beatriz Valverde , Loyola U. Andaluca)
ABSTRACT: When Graham Greene wrote Monsignor Quixote (published in 1982), one of
his aims was to reflect critically on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spain of the late
1970s, as well as on the support this institution had offered to the former dictatorship of
Franco the so called National Catholicism. In this novel, the reader witnesses the
evolution of the protagonist, Father Quixote, from a religious living a complacent life in a
small village in La Mancha to a priest in rebellion against the conservative hierarchy of the
Catholic Church in Spain, represented mainly by his Bishop. In this paper, I will examine
Greenes intertextual use of different religious texts to fight a model of conservative
Catholic Church that he rejects. I will focus my analysis especially on the selection of
quotations from the Gospels that the Bishop of La Mancha and Father Quixote make in
their dialogic interactions, quotations that portray their different vision of the role that the
Church should have in society.

Female spirituality in Kate OBriens biography of Teresa of Avila. (Pilar
Somacarrera, Autonomous University of Madrid)
Kate OBrien had a controversial life which resembles in some ways that of Teresa of Avila.
Both the Irish writer and the Spanish one were censored and suffered the rejection of
society who often did not understand their works. As Eibhear Walshe points out, OBrien
is a deeply problematic figure because of her gender identity, the nature of her writing and
her cultural placing. Her personal portrait of the Spanish mystic (Teresa of Avila, 1951)
has been read by Aintxane Mentxaka as a lesbian text. Teresa of Avila, who has also been
considered a lesbian, was a highly controversial figure during her times and had problems
with the Spanish Inquisition. In this paper, I intend to establish parallelisms between the
lives and the dissident spirituality of these two women writers which is deeply informed
by their gender identity.

Mission Literature in South Africa: Herbert Dhlomo and Nongqawuse (Giuliana
Iannacaro, U. of Milan)
My paper focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South African mission
literature; in particular, it discusses a play published in 1935 and written by a South
African writer, Herbert I. E. Dhlomo (1903-1956). The play is entitled The Girl Who Killed
to Save (Nongqause the Liberator) (Johannesburg, Lovedale Press, 1935) and deals with
an episode in South African history known in Western historiography as The Xhosa
Cattle-Killing Movement. Dhlomo was educated at Lovedale, a mission station founded in
1824 by the Glasgow Missionary Society (Eastern Cape Province).

Working on Dhlomos play gives me the possibility to raise a number of questions
regarding the intersection between Christian teaching and the representation of South
African (in this case, Xhosa) traditional beliefs, myths and stories. The Girl Who Killed to
Save has a clear educational purpose and its message was meant to be plain and easily
transmissible; a close reading, though, highlights the ideological complexity of the text, due
to the reception and re-elaboration of Christianity by a young South African writer who
was not unaware of the growing socio-political tensions of his times. Those tensions are
clearly identifiable in the play and often prove irreconcilable.

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Proofs of the existence of God in the apologetic works of G.K Chesterton and C.S.
Lewis (Tomas Niedokos, John Paul II Catholic U. Of Lublin)
The title brings to mind five proofs of the existence of God formulated by St Thomas
Aquinas. The popular English Christian writers G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis were not
learned theologians, however, in their apologetic works they undertook a similar task, to
set forth the basic tenets of Christianity in an accessible way. Theirs was an exercise in
applied theology rather than theoretical speculation; God was to be sought and found in
the most mundane experiences of everyday life, not in the realm of abstract concepts or in
the depths of ones mind. This kind of apology employs a thoroughly English Baconian
inductive method of generalising stepwise on the basis of experience rather than axioms,
which can then trigger a chain of logical deduction. The five proofs of the existence of
God described by Chesterton and Lewis in an intellectually and literary pleasing form,
employing metaphors and images of war, sport, health, theatre etc., are: the existence of
repeatable laws of nature, a proof by contradiction falsifying a thoroughly materialistic
approach, a new approach to the argument from morality and an argument echoing in a
way Aquinas Proof From Degrees of Perfection, as well as a sense of the Numinous.

Suspensive Parables In The Poetics of Louise Glck (Marie Olivier, U. of Paris-East)
Throughout her work, and more particularly in the collections The Wild Iris (1992) and
Meadowlands (1996), contemporary American poet Louise Glck has continuously
explored the figure of the parable (along with that of the fable) in poems that investigate
the narrative and the allegorical aspects of such religious and literary genres while
suspending their didactic aim. In Meadowlands, the parables serve the mythological
context of an actualized and modern Odyssey voiced by Ulysses, Telemachus, Penelope,
Circe and their contemporary personae. In The Wild Iris, poems assume the shape of
prayers and a dialogic structure between the creatures (plants, flowers and the gardener)
and a divine instance. Vespers and matines are riddled with an ontological and a religious
doubt which is not unlike Dickinsons; Glcks skepticism is rather Puritan but also
influenced by the Jewish heritage of the poet.In this paper, I propose to study how Glcks
use of the parable does not aim at delivering a clear and straight message but rather at
suspending meaning and referentiality through a poetics which blurs the frontiers
between genders, literary and liturgical genres, and sacred writings.

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S60 Memory, Autobiography, History: Exploring the Boundaries
Co-convenors: Irena Grubica, University of Rijeka, Croatia,
Aoife Leahy, Independent Scholar, Ireland

Tihana Klepa, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb,
Croatia. Mary Helena Fortune: An Independent Fly in the Webs of Victorian
Society.
Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331909) was a pioneer Australian crime fiction writer. At a
time when marriage and domesticity still largely defined women's lives, and Answers and
Correspondence in the Australian Journal in almost every issue included advice on proper
behaviour for women whereby they were expected to give birth, raise families and
provide a moral, civilising influence, Fortune freely admitted in her autobiographical
journalism to being self-supporting, and not having a spouse. She claimed that her tea
tasted better when she remembered that she has earned every penny of the money that
bought it. The story of Fortunes life, her writing, her husbands, sons and lovers is
extraordinary, and was potentially dangerous for her, given the hypocritical Victorian
morals. Thus, being fully aware of the webs the Victorian society set for independent flies,
Fortune wrote under a pseudonym Waif Wander which shielded her, and protected her
income from the audiences whose values she did not share. Her memoirs, partly
fictionalised, a common Victorian genre, reveal an extraordinary woman and
extraordinary times in Australian history.

Nicoleta Stanca, Faculty of Letters, Dept of Modern Languages and Literatures and
Communication Sciences, Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania. This Great
Magic Mountain Called Romania: Memory, Autobiography, History: Exploring Irish-
Romanian Boundaries in Peter Hurleys The Way of the Crosses.
This paper will look at the manner in which Romania is perceived by an Irishman, Peter
Hurley, living In Romania for twenty years, travelling on foot from Spna to Bucharest
(26 days, 650 kilometres) and recounting it all in a book, The Way of the Crosses (2013).
The title of Hurleys book may have been inspired by a hybrid Irish-Romanian experience,
signalled to the author by another Irishman, Shaun Davey, who, in 2009, composed music
on the lyrics of the epitaphs on the crosses in the Merry Cemetery of Spna, Romania.
Travelling, being inspired by Romanian landscape and culture, with the background of the
Irish writers sense of place, Hurleys account is meant to reach audiences beyond the
Romanian border and enable further interaction. The project of walking the way of the
crosses and the writing about it, drawing maps and showing pictures fit in the Irish
authors preoccupation with bringing to the fore authentic traditional Romania. His travel
writing becomes a means through which Romanian-Irish personal and collective memory
is transmitted beyond boundaries, avoiding ideological perspectives, using elements such
as Dacian potttery, Romanian ceramic production today and the story of the last family of
potters in Maramures.

Rocco De Leo, University of Calabria DSU, Italy The Space(s) of the Outsider:
History and Memory in Edward Said's Out of Place.
Memory can be considered the main feature characterizing the highly problematic
narrative technique of life-writing: from Saint Augustine to Franklin and Rousseau, it has
commonly been the most important basis upon which people (for different reasons) have
built the story of their Selves. Out of Place, Edward Saids personal account of his life from
1935 to the mid-1960s, when he was a university student in the United States, offers rare
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insights into the early life of one of our finest thinkers. Convinced by a fatal medical
diagnosis in 1991 to leave a record of where he was born and lived for years, in his
memoir Said rediscovers his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, in order to let
the reader understand how his identity as a man and as a critic emerged from that
background. This paper seeks to explore Saids inner feelings and deep thoughts of being
an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, an outsider; and how historical,
geographical and political events combine together in order to build up an integrated but
confused identity, shaped by the ambiguous self-images of a young mans coming of age

Aude Haffen, University Paul Valry-Montpellier III, France. Christopher
Isherwoods Kathleen and Frank: memories and pre-history of a queer
autobiographer.
In 1971, at the age of 67, Christopher Isherwood published as a full-fledged 360-page book
what is usually confined in the first chapters of an autobiography: Kathleen and Frank is
the biography of his parents, and it also includes their genealogy, ie the lives of the
Machell- Smiths (his mothers parents) and the Bradshaw-Isherwoods (his fathers
ancestors), with historical analepses back to the time of the Civil War and direct and
indirect memories of a family manor literally haunted by ghosts from the past. Its form
has immediate records of moods and events prevail over hindsight and re-constructed
narratives. Indeed the (auto)biographers third-person account, blending facts,
assumptions and Christopher s personal memories, gives way to a juxtaposition of his
fathers letters and his mothers diaries, sparsely commented on by the
son/(auto)biographer in seemingly random, impressionistic, often bracketed remarks,
exegeses and childhood reminiscences. For the pacifist and queer son of a Hero-Father
killed in action near Ypres in 1915, the Past and History had long been equated to a
repressive ideology conveyed by disembodied voices from pulpits, newspapers, books
(Kathleen and Frank 356) and meant to shape the proper British masculinity he
challenged and eschewed both in his life and in his autobiographical personae.

Stephen Joyce, Aarhus University, Denmark. All the Facts We Cannot Know: History
and Memory in Dictee.
Audre Lordes famous statement that the masters tools will never dismantle the masters
house implies a strong political alliance between marginalised groups seeking
emancipation and the postmodernist assault on dominant metanarratives and methods of
knowledge. Yet this seeming confluence of interests papers over a fundamental schism, for
the establishment of group consciousness depends on the kind of shared histories and
memories that postmodern theory discredits as artificially constructed. Perhaps no work
in American literature explores this problem better than Theresa Hak Kyung Chas avant-
garde autobiography Dictee. At once both a refugee from an impoverished post-war Korea
and a member of student protest movements and radical art circles in the USA in the
1960s and 70s, Cha drew on her extensive knowledge of literary and cultural theory, as
well as her personal background, to explore how the intellectual assault on the authority
of history, memory, and art simultaneously undercuts the efforts of marginalised groups to
have their histories and memories of oppression recognised. Dictee juxtaposes chapters
that present the postmodern case against history and memory with accounts of her
mothers life during the Japanese Occupation of Korea and memories of family members
killed during the post-war years of dictatorship and asks how we can hope to give voice to
these pasts when postmodernism has dismantled the tools necessary to unearth them.
From her unique dual perspective, Cha reveals that the problem is not dismantling the
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masters house but that the masters imperfect tools are still necessary to build the
subalterns house.

Tuba MEK, Artvin oruh Uni. - Fen-Edebiyat Fakltesi, Turkey. The Veiled
Stories of Conor McPherson in the play of The Veil.
Conor McPherson is a very remarkable contemporary Irish playwright. He is very well-
known for his storytelling/monologue technique like in The Weir (1997), The Dublin Carol
(2000), Shining City (2005), or The Seafarer (2006). In his plays, he mostly tries to release
and redeem his characters from their troubled minds and, psychological and physical
entrapments. He plays with this thin line between reality and imagination through
narratives of his characters. In this play called The Veil (2011) he again puts his characters
in such a position that their problems will be exposed through the use of narrative
technique of storytelling and through the employment of the supernatural, which may be
regarded as an indispensable part of McPhersons theatre. McPhersons The Veil explores
Ireland in the 19th century so its setting reflects the Ascendency Ireland which, in the light
of the currents economic and social circumstances, is about to decline. This play also
demonstrates a parallelism to the psyche of the fading Celtic Tiger in terms of being
haunted by poverty and deprivation. The storytelling technique enables to explore how
memory functions in McPhersons play in terms of individual and collective Irish psyche.
Besides, the supernatural is deployed as a catalyst to reveal these stories. This paper is to
deal with revelation of stories in the very context of decadence and decline of traditional
and established values in the Ascendancy Ireland of the 19th century by paralleling the
Celtic Tiger on the wane and to analyse them in terms of how memory and narrative affect
individual and collective consciousness, and both the past and the present in the
construction of identity.

Benjamin Keatinge, South East European University, Macedonia. Memory, History
and Autobiography in the Poetry and Prose of Richard Murphy.
Richard Murphys long poem The Battle of Aughrim (1968) has been praised for its work
of historical excavation in recreating the events of a pivotal battle in Irish history. Ted
Hughes has identified Murphys classical strengths in his recall of the actuality of events,
the facts and sufferings of history. Equally important, however, are the ways in which
Murphys poem explores historical memory and the place of Aughrim in collective
historical imagining. The battle, known in Irish as Aughrim of the slaughter, has been
claimed in different ways by differing factions in Ireland; indeed, Murphys poem
foregrounds a battle almost eclipsed by the triumphalism in Northern Ireland around the
Battle of the Boyne of 1690, despite Aughrims arguably greater historical consequence.
The poem shows an awareness of how History is happening today and is recreated by
each generation. The battle also has personal resonance for Murphy since his ancestors
fought on both sides. The poems actuality is thus also an autobiographical one by which
Murphy seeks to explain the divisions and devastations in his own self, as he writes in his
autobiography The Kick (2002). This paper proposes to re-examine Murphys poem as an
example of how memory and belief often diverge saying more about the prejudices of
victor or vanquished than about the facts of history. Issues of religion, nationhood and
language are mixed up with the (mis)rememberings which surround this chapter in Irish
history. Murphys poem allows us to explore these issues while also reflecting on the
poets own role as chronicler, historian and autobiographer.

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Elena Pinyaeva, University of Moscow, Russia. Towards Polyphony in Attaining the
Truth, or Self-representation as Self-invention in R. Nyes Fictional Autobiography
The Voyage of the Destiny.
R. Nyes The Voyage of the Destiny (1982) celebrates a hybrid mixture of sub-genres that
constitute a conventional life-writing discourse: the memoir, confession, travel writing and
Bildungsroman. It presents Sir Walter Raleighs fictional autobiography, which takes the
form of a diary written in the course of his voyage in search of El Dorados legendary gold.
Although the narrator attempts to memorialize his life experience and make others
recognize the truth about himself, his confession puts authenticity under question with
regard to the failure of the transcendent notion of the wholeness of the self. The novels
break with tradition is mainly achieved through using multifarious subject positions that
exchange their narrative functions being involved into homodiegetic experiments; the
latter in their turn lead to the narrators repetition and splitting, causing the subject to
create a patchwork of disjointed discursive fragments and think both the past and the
present differently. Since the unified self, as the novel proves, seems to be insecure, nor
can it form its own linear narrative, the autobiography concerned, therefore, might be seen
as a historical and ideological construct, which produces an effect of constantly changing
discourse.

Paola Baseotto, Insubria University, Italy. Memory and Salvation in Puritan
Autobiographical Writings.
I propose to discuss a paradigmatic example of individual and collective construction,
orientation and manipulation of memories in Puritan autobiographical writings of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following an analysis of over 200 spiritual
autobiographies and a large number of letters and diaries by Elizabethan and Stuart
puritans, I discuss how their authors often modelled their past experiences on
authoritative contemporary or scriptural patterns. The puritans viewed sanctification and
new birth as the outcome of a characteristic sequence of spiritual, psychological and
emotional changes which believers were urged to describe in autobiographical conversion
narratives. The writing of spiritual autobiographies was often motivated by a desire to
join the spiritual aristocracy of the regenerates by offering detailed accounts of successful
conversion experiences. Authors drew inspiration from and often appropriated elements
of the process of spiritual awakening of paragons of sanctification like St Paul and Luther.
It is worth noting how authors re-interpreted their lives in the light of the sanctifying
paradigm set by spiritual authorities and how they retrieved, re-invented or re-shaped
their memories (especially their childhood memories) to make them conform to a well-
established pattern.

Anna Izabela Cicho, Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocaw, Poland.
Collective, Cultural and Individual Memory: Twentieth Century History in Doris
Lessings Autobiographical Works.
In her memoires Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) and in her
alternative biography of her parents Alfred and Emily (2002), Doris Lessing scrutinizes
her and her familys life in a socio-political perspective. She ruminates over the influence
of the broad historical processes in the twentieth centurycolonialism, the two world-
wars and communismupon her personal experience and self-formation. In her
autobiographies, Lessing traces back her familys routes to explore her situatedness in
history, first as a daughter of the Great War survivors and middle class colonials in Persia
and in Southern Rhodesia, and then as an emerging author, who returns to the post-
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Second World War England. While re-creating her life, Lessing highlights the contextual
character of individual memory and examines the complex nature of
remembering/forgetting/reconstructing the past, which gives a meta-thematic dimension
to her narratives. In the paper, I focus on Lessings reflection on the connection between
collective, cultural and individual memories and on her search for individual agency,
which she finds in the process of writing only, in the creative acts of re-visiting and re-
writing the past.

Concetta Maria Sigona (presenting) and Mara Amor Barros del Ro, University of
Burgos, Spain. Reconstruction and memories in Caterina Edwards' Finding Rosa.
As a Canadian author with English and Italian origins, Caterina Edwards has been
constantly living among three different realities that have shaped her sense of belonging.
Far from looking for her identity, in Finding Rosa (2008) she searches for information
about her Italian heritage. More than being a personal quest, this novel represents a
historical and cultural exploration of Italian emigrated women's lives before and after
migration to the USA, the historical reconstruction of Istria exodus towards places all over
the world and the search for her mother's identity who was suffering from dementia. This
novel is about lost history and lost memory and a quest for a past and a home.

Respondent: Aoife Leahy

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S61 Contemporary Irish female writing at the intersection of history and memory
Convenors: Anne Fogarty (UCD) & Marisol Morales-Ladrn (U of Alcal)

Places saturated with memory: The Figure of the Traveller in the works of Marina
Carr, Claire Keegan and Evelyn Conlon
Melania Terrazas, University of La Rioja (Spain)

The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the last decade of the twenty-first century,
several Irish female writers have engaged in the exploration of a type of fiction that
attempts to place Irish women back in a history from which they were often written out.
Here, I analyse the figure of the tinker as depicted by Marina Car in her play By the Bog of
Cats (2002) and by Claire Keegan in her short-story The Forrester Daughter (Walk the
Blue Fields, 2007). I also investigate the figure of the orphan girl as depicted by Evelyn
Conlon in her latest novel Not the Same Sky (2013).
Carr, Keegan and Conlon tackle the issue of memory, both as an individual
psychological construct and as a collective recollection in their writings. On the one hand,
Carr constructs her main female character, Hester Swane, and her daughter Josie, as
tinkers or members of this traveller community in order to emphasize their
otherworldliness and separation from the settled cultural and societal norm in the Irish
Midlands. On the other hand, Keegan uses Martha and her daughter Victoria, also of tinker
blood, to reject the Mother Ireland image of compassion and suffering and represent the
reality of modern Irish women in rural Ireland. Both Hester and Martha find in the Bog of
Cats and the blue fields the solitude that will let their mind calm down and their
memory surface. Both Carr and Keegan assert the force of the mother-daughter link in
their writings. Their tinker female characters contribute to the emotional and tragic
impact of their stories because, using Lanters (2008: 149) words, they struggle with
questions of identity, fate and self-determination. However, their tinker heritage prevent
them from escaping from their mythical homes or makes them unwilling to do so.
Our third women writer, Conlon, narrates the moving story of over 4.000 Irish girls
orphaned by famine, who were shipped from Ireland to New Plymouth in England and on
to Sydney, Australia on 21 ships between 1848 and 1850. They were sent to work as
domestic servants, and the novel is a reflection on their lives. Conlon draws the narrative
back into the present, in Dublin, and returns to the character of Joy Kennedy, a sculptor
who receives a letter from Australia asking her to come and help to create a memorial to
the famine orphan girls in Sydney. Such an important move situates the orphans in history.
Conlon recreates how these orphan girls had to dig a hole and put their memories in it. In
Not the Same Sky, she honors their memory and unearths their lives.
This aim of this paper is to explore the process involved not only in what we
remember of these tinkers and orphan girls, the most vulnerable in the social order, but
in how and why we actually recall the past lived by these marginalized women in a given
way.

The Reimagining of Female Identity in Lia Mills Fallen
Nada Buzadi Nikolajevi, University of Belgrade

The paper aims at presenting the ways in which female identity and female experience of
the world are reimagined in Lia Mills novel Fallen. By skilfully exploring the multiple
points of both tensions and connections between female characters in the novel, Lia Mills
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makes her narrative feminocentric, at the same time managing not to make her female
protagonist a feminist spokesperson but rather a person coming of age in extraordinary
circumstances and creating her identity in the face of an overwhelming sense of
illegitimacy and disempowerment (Fogarty, 2002: 86). Applying the method of close
reading and looking into the narrative strategies employed in the novel, the author of the
paper attempts at exploring how historical material and the imagination of a creative
writer are intersected in this novel in order to bring history and memory to life, vividly
recreating the context of the lived experience of women in Ireland in the early twentieth
century in the backdrop of a world war and national rising. Much as this period is not
commonly renowned as a hotbed of feminism (Pierse, 2014), Katies coming of age at the
end of the novel clearly indicates that she finds the courage to reject the silence imposed
on womens issues.

History, Memory and Identity in Translation:Anne Enright in English and German
Katharina Walter, University of Innsbruck

This paper examines intersections of history and memory in recent writings by Anne
Enright to map out differences, however subtle, in the English original texts and their
German translations. The argument demonstrates that translations can destabilize notions
of history and of individual, national or religious identity not only in the cultures that
receive them, as Lawrence Venuti has recurrently argued, but also in the source cultures.
Apart from representations of history, memory and identity in Enrights literary oeuvre,
another important area of enquiry in this paper is the identity of literary originals
compared to their translated versions. Key questions this paper addresses include the
following: How can what is supposedly unique to Enrights literary style as well as to the
Irish cultural tradition be transferred into a German-speaking linguistic, historical and
cultural environment? What has to be captured and what can be surrendered for literary
translation to be faithful and/or ethical? And how can we determine the ownership of
literary texts and ideas, which is both compromised and enriched by translation? These
questions are important in- and outside the literary marketplace in a world in which
personal boundaries as well as boundaries of time and space are constantly re-negotiated.

That is How it was for Irish Girls in 1972: Coming of Age in ils N Dhuibhnes The
Dancers Dancing
Luca Morera, Universidad de Zaragoza

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Irish women distanced themselves
progressively from the traditional feminine roles of mother or wife, adopting instead a
more independent and active role in society. In spite of the Irish State's continuous
attempts at maintaining control over women, Irish society became more contemporary,
allowing women the opportunity to develop their identity in different directions. Writing
about the experience of being a woman using the coming-of-age novel as a framework, is
an example of that development. The Irish author ils N Dhuibhne dealt with this issue
in her novel The Dancers Dancing (1999): the idea of entering into womanhood in the
changing Ireland of the 1970s when female identity still remained unclear. The
protagonist, Orla, a middle-aged Irish woman, recalls memories of her own pre-adolescent
experience during the summer of 1972 through the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator.
While the Northern Irish Troubles were raging, she was studying Irish in Donegal. Her
experience in Gaeltacht liberates and distances her from her community ties and, as a
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consequence, Orla has to face her own prejudices and fears about her emerging
womanhood. Whilst embarking upon her journey to self-discovery, acquiring knowledge
and vital experience, she takes the engrossed reader along with her in every step of her
path towards maturity.

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S63. BIOGRAPHY

Conveners : Joanny MOULIN (The Biography Society, Aix-Marseille Universit, France) & J.
W. Hans RENDERS J.W.Renders@rug.nl (Biography Institute, University of Groningen, the
Netherlands)

Tuesday 23rd August 17.00-19.00 Historical Perspectives

RENDERS, Hans (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) Biographies as
Multipliers; The First World War as Turning Point in the Lives of Modernist Artists
It is readily assumed that just before the outbreak of the First World War, intellectuals
and artists were pacifists. Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, for instance, published many
articles which conveyed his pacifist convictions. However, comparative biographical
research has shown that Van Doesburgs views were not representative of those of his
peers. This chapter will show how a modernist artists seemingly representative view
turns out to be rather unique, thanks to biographical research. The concept of a turning
point as an argument for partial biography a moment or an event in a persons life that
influences that persons subsequent public deeds or actions serves here as an important
biographical-methodological aid. How have biographers of modern artists dealt with their
subjects reactions to the Great War? How did artists react and respond to the violence and
brutality of war, and to the vigorous nationalism of this period? These are not simple
questions to answer, particularly because the opinions of artists did not remain stable over
the wars four-year span. For biographers it is fruitful to investigate whether the First
World War was a turning point in their subjects lives and, if so, to explore whether such
a transformation was representative of the reactions of other artists towards the war. Yet,
regretfully, most biographers of modernist artists have not attempted to investigate the
representativeness or uniqueness of their subjects beliefs. To substantiate the proposition
that the turning point is a fruitful theoretical focus for a biography, this chapter
investigates how the opinions of a select group of modernist artists evolved during the
war, and how their biographers wrote about these changes and put them in perspective.
We will compare the lives and views of the Dutch art theorist, architect, painter, and poet
Theo van Doesburg; the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara; the German playwright and co-
founder of the Dadaist movement Hugo Ball; the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich; the
Italian founder of Futurism Filippo Marinetti; and other modernist artists. At the centre of
this chapter lies a research question concerning artists reflections on the war and what
their biographers have said about this. Do their interpretations confirm what has been
said in the literature about the relation between modernist art and the First World War, or
do they put this relation into a different perspective?

RICHARDS Page (University of Hong Kong, China) Biography, the Historical Lyric,
and Rita Dove The contemporary lyrics rich possibilities for biographical telling have
remained largely unexplored. There is one major trigger, therefore, for this research: Rita
Doves Pulitzer-Prize winning Thomas and Beulah, a book of lyric and biography founded
in the lives of the poets maternal grandparents. There has been no other major and
radically successful impulse in English, previous to this publication, for the irruption of
lyric in the genre of biography, a major milestone on a new landscape of what I am calling
the historical lyric. I will argue, however, that there are relevant and underlying back-
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stories for this irruption of importing two unnatural elements into modern and
contemporary lyric poetry: namely, the history of biography and third-person voicing,
united and forged first to this degree by Dove in the groundbreaking lyrics of Thomas and
Beulah. My paper will serve, therefore, as an overview to the pioneering work in lyric and
biography, initiated in the poems of Rita Dove. It also aims, more widely, to assess the
impact of this work: creatively, on modernist and contemporary lyric form itself; and
historically, on what newly constitutes telling a life or micro-history when represented
in the relatively few but emerging examples of historical and biographical lyric. Poetry is,
of course, full of poems that fall between the cracks of genre, but rarely does a new pattern
within a genre begin to appear with the historical force that we see in the lyric updates on
biography in Rita Dove. While research on links between autobiography and lyric already
has created a sub-volume of its own in critical studies, there is work to be done on the
phenomenon of lyric and biographical voicing: a characteristic of poetry both new and
urgent to contemporary understandings of biography, history and poetics. Brief Bio: Page
Richards is an Associate Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong.
Educated at Harvard University for the Ph.D. in English and American Literature and
Language and holding a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Boston University, she
has also studied at the Playwrights' Theatre in Boston and has contributed to theatre and
film production in Hollywood. Richards received a national Mellon Fellowship in the
Humanities in the U.S., Outstanding Teaching Award from the Faculty of Arts at HKU, a
Vermont Studio Writers Fellowship for Poetry and Translation, among many other
awards. She publishes on poetry, American literature, drama, and performance. Her work
has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, the Harvard Review, Wascana Review, the Journal of
Modern Languages, and 'After thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman, among others;
she is the author of Distancing English: A Chapter in the History of the Inexpressible and
Lightly Separate. She has studied and taught at Harvard University and Boston University,
offering courses in poetry, drama, and creative writing. She currently directs the MFA in
Creative Writing, the HKU Black Box Theatre, Moving Poetry, the HKU International Poetry
Prize, the Writers Series, and production of Yuan Yang: A Journal of Hong Kong and
International Writing.

BROCK Malin Lidstrm (Lule University of Technology, Sweden) Mad, bad or (just)
sad? Recent biofiction of Zelda Fitzgerald The publication of Nancy Milfords
biography of Zelda Fitzgerald in 1970 is considered a watershed moment in feminist
biography. In contrast to then existing biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Milfords
portrayal of Zelda was largely sympathetic towards her literary efforts, quoting long
passages from Zeldas short stories and unfinished novel. Equally significant was Milfords
insistence on Scotts literary debt to Zelda. In Milfords biography, Scott considers Zeldas
life and letters his intellectual property and is threatened by Zeldas insistence on using
the same material in her own writing. Attempting to set the record straight, Milford took
great pains to distinguish the (bio)fictional female characters in Scotts writing from Zelda,
the person. In the 2000s, several biofictional works of Zelda have appeared. In this paper I
read these works in relation to Milfords biographical saving of Zelda, paying special
attention to how Zeldas supposed schizophrenia and literary efforts have been depicted.
In the process, I also hope to generate a discussion of biographys truth claims in light of
the emerging field of biofictional studies.

WILSON COSTA Karyn (Aix-Marseille Universit, France) - Auguste Angellier's Life of
Robert Burns: an Indulgent Biography It is always the biographers fantasy to have
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forged, in the crucible of life-writing, the only true likeness (Robert McCrum, the
Observer, 31/5/15). Auguste Angelliers cradle-to-the-grave life of Scotlands national poet
Robert Burns (1759-96) is an aesthetic response to the theoretical, scientific approach to
literary criticism and life writing adopted by Hippolyte Taine. Based on the formula race-
milieu-moment the inherited disposition, the environment that modifies the inherited
racial disposition and the momentum of past and present cultural traditions
(Encyclopaedia Britannica) Taines sociological approach investigates the causal
dependence of literature on its milieu within a framework of hard-and-fast rules.
Angelliers Life of Burns modified this approach to the critical study of an author and his
work, causing something of a sensation on its publication in the 1890s. The Frenchman
seeks to define and explain the personality of Robert Burns as he sees it, the essence of his
genius, by emphasizing aesthetic criteria in what he defines as a realistic novel, based on
facts, letters, Burnss own admissions. Burns, he writes, lived in a continual state of poetry;
his Life of Burns is an exhaustive dramatization of everyday moments in that Life by a
fellow-poet with an avowed affinity with his biographical subject. Angelliers true likeness,
one that previous biographers had, in his view, distorted and perverted, is that of the Poet
of Love. The forging of this likeness, its inspiration and its after-life, will be the subject of
this paper.

POLLAND Imke (Justus-Liebig-Universitt Gieen, Germany) Imaginary Biography?
Portraying the public and private persona in the royal biopic The Queen. Although
it may not be the only award-winning film centring on a British sovereign in recent years,
Stephen Frearss film The Queen (2006) forms an exception: It is the first biopic of a living
monarch. This fact confronts the director with several difficulties: On the one hand, he has
to portray the official, symbolical, public persona of Queen Elizabeth II, while at the same
time trying to grasp the private person behind the body politic (to speak in
Kantorowiczs terms). Thus this film constantly oscillates between imaginatively tearing
down the palace walls in order to picture Elizabeth as mother or grandmother (body
natural) and re-enacting situations of official engagements showing her as Queen (body
politic). The paper will explore how this biopic negotiates between factual and fictional
accounts and in what ways it combines documentary material, re-enactments of actual
(well-known) news footage, and imagined/staged behind the scenes shots. The main
argument is that the genre conventions as well as the medium, the format and the
intended audiences of the biopic pose new challenges for the approach and practice of
biography in general, as it highlights dramatizing and entertaining aspects and thus asks
for a re-positioning between the factual/fictional dichotomy. In addition to that, it will be
proposed to conceptualize the royal biopic as a subgenre in its own right, allowing for its
special requirements and difficulties. The main questions to be addressed are the
following: - Which strategies/aesthetics of authentication are employed? - How can the
spaces opened up for innovations/changes by the biopic be conceptualised for the genre of
biography? - What ethics/principles are required pertaining to the person portrayed? -
What are the main features of royal biopics? In how far can they according to these
characteristics be conceptualised as a subgenre?

th
Wednesday 24 August 14-16 Biographers
MOULIN Joanny (Aix-Marseille Universit, France) Andr Maurois, or the Aesthetic
Advantage of Biography Over the Novel Andr Maurois (1885-1967) is today a partly
forgotten French writer, and rather unjustly so, or rather for a reason that pertains more
of French literary history than of is the intrinsic literary value of his oeuvre. For historical
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reasons, biography as a literary genre has been less flourishing in French than in other
national literary traditions. In 1918, in his preface to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
wrote: The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it
is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical
tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable loges,
compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men. For a Frenchman
today, this reads a surprising paradox, for we are rather under the impression that, unlike
the English, the French have never had a great biographical tradition: we have never had a
Walton and an Aubrey, a Johnson and a Boswell, a Carlyle and a Lytton Strachey. But we
have had a Maurois: a contemporary of Lytton Strachey and the New Biography movement
in Britain, his 1928 Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge gave the seminal
reflexions on modern biography, Aspects of Biography, in the wake of E. M. Forsters
Aspects of the Novel, at a time when the theory of the novel was still inchoative. On the
whole, Mauroiss oeuvre comprises no less than 18 biographies of French and English
writers, political and historical figures, as well as of the scientist Sir Alexander Fleming.
Toward the end of his life, Maurois devoted most of his energy to writing biographies, as if
both he and the public had finally recognized that this was the genre in which he was
making his most significant contribution to literature. Because he was a member of the
French Academy, and something of an official public figure, Maurois is often thought to
have been an academic writer, a capital sin in the days of the nouveau roman, while the
French theory period that ruled the roast for two decades after his death had little time
and admiration for biography. However, that has occulted the fact that his biographies,
unlike his novels, are far from academic, but on the contrary they have brought new life to
the genre, by approaching biography as a form of art, thus setting the trend for what is
sometimes called biographie la franaise, as distinct from the more sedate and longer
forms of historiography favoured in Britain and America. This article would offer to do
justice to Maurois achievement as an innovative biographer, re-reading his major
biographies in the light of his theoretical reflections in Aspects de la biographie, but also
Destins exemplaires, Mmoires, etc. so as to cast a new light on the literary value of these
underestimated works, that make such pleasurable reads up to this day.

DE HAAN Binne (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) Richard Holmes: A
biographer-historian par excellence The British biographer Richard Holmes (1945)
is well known as a master of literary biography. He gained prominence in the 1970s and
1980s as biographer of British literary giants like Shelley, Coleridge, Samuel Johnson,
Richard Savage and Wollstonecraft. His hybdrid book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic
Biographer (1985), in which Holmes combined the genres of biography, travelogue and
autobiography even became a classic in literary circles. Holmes became one of the
ambassadors of the genre of biography, and eventually even became Professor in
Biography and taught courses in biography at the University of East-Anglia, Norwich.
Holmes wrote several theoretical pieces on biography as a methodology. One of his central
observations in these considerations is the distinction he makes in biographical research
between archival field work and the interpretative dreamwork a biographer performs.
This article argues that, despite the mainly literary acclaim Holmes has received, his
biographical research reveals an outstanding historical commitment, that brought the field
of biography to a higher level. Holmes is a biographer-historian par excellence: by
scrupulously retrieving and examing historical documents and texts, and critically
interpreting them in a masterful way, he combines skills that historians ideally should
pursue to combine too. Holmes has used the metaphor of biograpy as a handshake with
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the past. Holmes indeed tries to do justice to the past by giving as much care as possible to
the traces and documents left by the past examining them detective like, as a
microhistorian, but also by presenting them in a careful way to let speak the past itself
properly, and by interpreting them ingeniously and tactfully as a biographer from the
present. Holmes therefore possesses a fruitful fascination for the past via a personalized
perspective that leads to a a very relevant and better understanding of cultural and
societal developments in this past, by which we can better understand the present. The
importance Holmes attaches to biographical research as an act of historical understanding,
even also leads to books that are not directly cradle to grave biographies or biographies in
the proper use of the word, dedicated to one individual. It brought Holmes to write
masterly group biographies that changed our view of history and also of the protagonists
Holmes has studies and interpreted intensively in an innovative manner in these projects:
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of
Science (2008) and Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2013), his latest two major
books, are proofs of that mechanism. In fact, we can observe in hindsight that this
mechanism provided the fundament too for his previous biographical works, in which
often several protagonists filled the stage.

THIRRIARD Maryam (Aix-Marseille Universit, France) Harold Nicolson, the New
Biographer In 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote what was to become her revolutionising
manifesto for life-writing: The New Biography19. She had in mind recent works such as
Lytton Stracheys Eminent Victorians (1918) or Queen Victoria (1921); however, her essay
was principally intended as a book review of Harold Nicolsons Some People, published
that same year20. It transpired that Some People had much more to it than simply being a
portrait gallery: it had a sense of beginning and ending, the time line being set by Harold
Nicolsons own life span. Woolf gave much praise to Nicolsons innovative life-writing
techniques and the way he had managed to set himself free from the rituals and
constraints of Victorian biography. Most of all, she relished his having brought the granite
and the rainbow so close together. Nicolsons successive careers as diplomat, journalist,
politician and radio broadcaster established him as a fine political and historical analyst of
home politics and international affairs; his talents as a diarist and portraitist are still
valued to this day for the historical information his first-hand accounts offer. At a specific
stage in his life Paris, 1919 - Nicolson also engaged in a literary career, as he set about
writing the life of the French decadent poet, Paul Verlaine. All in all, Nicolson wrote eleven
full length biographies, including his semi-autobiographical piece Some People. He also
provided a complete study of biography, entitled The Development of English Biography
and published in 1929 as part of The Hogarth Lectures on Literature series. Writing
Literary Biography in 1957, Leon Edel described Harold Nicolson and Andr Maurois as
having offered us during the 1920s the liveliest discussion of biography we have had in
our half century21; in this regard, they joined Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. It is
from this perspective that I wish to present Nicolsons biographical work: by assessing his
particular contribution to the evolution of biography at this pivotal moment in the history
of biography as a literary practice while highlighting the reasons for which he should
definitely be considered as part of the canon. Focusing mainly on Nicolsons earlier
biographies, the following questions shall to be addressed: what led Nicolson to engage in
a literary career of writing biographies and in which way have his earliest productions set
19 Woolf, Virginia. The New Biography. Granite and Rainbow Essays. Forgotten Books, 2015. Print.
20 Nicolson, Harold. Some People. London: Faber Finds, 2010. Print.
21 Edel, Leon. Literary biography. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1959. Print, 6.
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the tone for his biographical style? How did Nicolsons theory and practice help develop
new forms and techniques for modernist biography? How has Nicolsons praxis for
instance, his resorting to the devices of fictional writing contributed to defining
biography as a literary genre? What is it exactly that makes him a New Biographer, in the
Woolfean sense?

TREMBLAY Alexandre (Aix-Marseille Universit, France)Giles Lytton Strachey and
Biography: The Oddity of True Interpretation Giles Lytton Strachey succumbs to a
stomach cancer in 1932 at 51 years of age. He has to wait for the release of Eminent
Victorians, 14 years before his well-known quote: If this is dying, I dont think much of it .
(HOLROYD, 1968) in 1918 before the rest of his work acquires the type of assent he holds
today. Amongst the most distinguished oeuvres: Queen Victoria (1921) grants him the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize a year later in 1922, Book and Characters (1922),
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928) and Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays
(1931) contribute to assert his position as biographer. Nonetheless, his significant input,
namely to The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement, validates his career as a critic
as well. In 1912, before becoming a notorious public figure, Strachey releases Landmark in
French Literature. This publication is a concise and opinionated depiction of the evolution
of French Literature from the Middles Ages spanning to the end of the 19th century. From
1907 to 1909, his critics which seem to be theatrical in nature are published in The
Spectator. Although, Lytton Strachey reveals himself quite late, it seems fair to believe he
contributed to the rise of a style as well as a post-Victorian frame of mind. This article is
meant to highlight various modalities of biographical writing which wreak havoc Victorian
traditions at the beginning of the 20th century. It is what Michael Holroyd calls The New
biography in his biographical work Lytton Strachey: The New Biography. Through the
oeuvre that enables the writer to become a circumvented biographer: Eminent Victorians,
we will expose how the author undergoes a process of Renaissance in the writing of
historical works leading him to the biography genre. The difference between an historian
and a biographer not being quite clear at the time, as it is still today it seems, we will
attempt to bring additional meaning to the status of biographer in a historiographical
context. Moreover, the scientific methodology input as well as the artistic type of input
appears to yearn for a modernized equilibrium within these innovative parameters which
enables biographers to free themselves from this Victorian ponderosity. Finally, we will
attempt to find a pattern concerning the rapport Strachey holds with the personalities he
wishes to undertake this biographical endeavor. For the sake succinctness, we will refer to
them as biographees. As it appears Lytton Stracheys dose of interpretation sets out new
grounds striving to enhance the comprehension of readers.

SABLAYROLLES Franois (Universit Paris 2 Panthon-Assas, France) The
Silhouetted Figure of the Biographer Arguably one of the most prominent
intellectuals of his time, OFaolain was in his youth swept along by the wave of
revolutionary idealism that led him to join the ranks of the Anti- Treaty resistance
movement. His hopes were dashed by the emergence in the 1920s and 1930s of a morally
repressive, as well as ideologically and politically conservative, Ireland. OFaolains choice
to return to Ireland to confront the power of the Censorship Board which had banned his
first collection of short stories, Midsummer Night Madness (1932), testifies to his
conception of writing, whether it be fiction, biography, or essay, as an act of resistance.
While OFaolains realist aesthetic in fiction questioned idealised representations of
Ireland, his interest in historical biographies he wrote highly popular biographies of
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Constance Markievicz, Daniel OConnell, Hugh ONeill and Eamon de Valera aimed to
challenge the dominant nationalist historiography, thereby joining in the academic
revisionist movement that was emerging at the time under the influence of T. W. Moody
and R. D. Edwards. If OFaolains versions of Irish history had a significant impact in
Ireland and were praised by historians of his time, some intellectuals noted a certain
literary stamp that bore witness to his style as a writer of fiction but which sits uneasily
with history writing. The historian F. S. L. Lyons, for example remarked upon the
overwhelming presence of the biographic voice in OFaolains biographies. While
OFaolain often commented on the self-referential sometimes even autobiographic
dimension of his fiction, this paper will explore the limit between biography,
autobiography and memory. It will examine how the biographers presence materialises in
his work and questions the value of these biographies as history writing. After having
established the coexistence of the stylistic presence of the biographer, and of his
presence as a witness of historical events, I will study to what extent OFaolains
technique and voice tend to sculpt the biographic figures in his own image, leading to the
emergence of a form of veiled, shadowy self-portrait. This will lead me to study the
specificity of the relationship the biographer entertains with his characters, showing
how much it owes to the New English Biography. While the presence of memory and of the
biographic voice may be seen as encroaching on the scientific rigour and objectivity
required of history writing, they nonetheless contribute to renewing and revising the
tradition of historical biographies in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Bio: A
French post doctoral researcher in Irish literature, Franois Sablayrolles completed a PhD
on the influence of Sean O'Faolains historical biographies on his realist fiction in
December 2013 under the supervision of Carle Bonfous-Murat at Paris 3 Sorbonne
Nouvelle entitled: La biographie historique et son influence sur la fiction raliste
irlandaise de lentre-deux-guerres: lexemple de Sean OFaolain. He also completed an
MPhil in Angl-Irish Literature at Trinity College.

Thursday 25th August 11.00-13.00 Interdisciplinary perspectives

DI MASCIO Patrick (Aix-Marseille Universit) Biographying Freud There have been
many attempts at biographying Freud: testimonies if that counts as biography -,
authorized and unauthorized, revisionist and loyalist, popular and scholarly, in print and
on the screen The whole frantic biographical activity has had a commanding background
that biographers could not possibly ignore: the notion promulgated by the Master himself,
that biographers were condemned to lie and conceal the truth about their heroes - or
heroines for that matter Besides, Freud himself in his Selbstdarstellung was quite intent
on indicating that the works and the Cause were what matters Das Beste, was du wissen
kannst, darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen! Freud loved that quotation from Faust Of
course, Freuds whole business is precisely about ignoring whatever form of taboo or tact,
witness his exposition of Leonardos homosexual phantasy The work of the biographers
of the Master has been caught between two opposite trends: disclosing or keeping secrets.
The moral dilemma of the biographer - when the biographer is lucky enough to come upon
sources worthy of a dilemma - has been anticipated by the biographers provider and
providence: the Freud Archives. The tempo of the biographical-publishing business
around Freud has been orchestrated by the Archives, who have been intent on
preserving the privacy of the characters of the Freudian saga, and the stature of the
Master. If we recapitulate the history of the biographies of Freud, we realize that the
overall trend has been from hagiography to debunking, and then from debunking to
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objectivity Ernest Jones, Paul Roazen, Jeff Masson, Peter Swales, Peter Gay are the main
biographers who illustrate the vicissitudes of the biographying of Freud. The fluctuations
between hagiography, debunking and objectivity, the underlying motives of the
biographying impulse some sort of sublimation of the Sehtrieb Freud analyzed in
children, a curiosity for the primal scene of theory - have to do with our conception of
science and more specifically of the human sciences psychoanalysis being paradigmatic
of the human sciences. They have to do with the unconscious of our conception of truth
and objectivity. They have to do with a phantasy, neither Immaculate Conception nor
revelation, but a phantasy of purity and of goodness, of radical Otherness. It is this
phantasy as a motive for biography that I will try to illustrate in this paper.

FAUSEL, Heidi (Aix-Marseille Universit, France) A study in time travel: writing the
life of William Caxton Delving into the life of another human being is always a
mystery, be it that of someone close to us or someone more distanced. As even lives close
by in time and place can be woefully misunderstood. So the question arises not only how
to interpret and understand anothers life but, moreover, how to render a life that was
lived more than five hundred years ago and make it comprehensible and connect it to a
modern understanding of our times and those of the past. The task at hand must also
distinguish fact from fiction, and when one examines the life of William Caxton of the 15th
century there seem to be few facts to build upon which leads to much speculation by his
reputable scholars such as W.Blades, N.F.Blakes, Lotte Hellinger or F.E. Penninger. The
first genuine date of his life according to William Blades is 1438 when Caxtons
apprenticeship to Robert Large was documented in the Wardens Account of the
Mercers Company, and so it is known when exactly he embarked upon a life of a mercer
merchant, that took him to printing. His date of birth is an object of pure speculation: as to
how old he might have been at the beginning of his apprenticeship and the duration
thereof. Different writers of different eras give different approximations setting his date of
birth anywhere from 1412 to 1424 depending on when they were writing. But is the
question of when exactly a life started as important as how it developed and what it
achieved? Another challenge and paradox to understanding the facts of W. Caxtons life is
that he wrote about himself and the books he printed. It would seem to be the biographers
dream, the task boiling down to primarily reformulating his famous prologues and
epilogues in modern English and simply backing them up with some archival records.
Except not all his dates are reliable, not all his facts seem kosher, and sometimes rather
misleading. In one of the epilogues to the first book ever printed in the English vernacular
The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, Caxton maintains that it was begun in one day and
also finished in one day and also mentions the year 1471. So one might gather that it was
printed on one day in the German city of Cologne. Except the math does not add up, as it
could not have been printed in one day and even the city is questionable. Which shows
that our English printer is an unreliable narrator and makes one wonder why. Yet these
discrepancies give the study of his life texture and mystery, invite investigations into the
possibilities of his intentions, how his life fit into his times, the end of the 15th century,
how it pertains to our own at the start of the twenty-first, lead to a two-fold investigation
aiming to reveal that which is unique and that which is universal, a continuous quest to
make sense in a sometimes senseless world.

RENSEN Marleen (University of Amsterdam the Netherlands) Biography, Cultural
Mediation and Transnational Studies This paper will address the practice of
biography as a form of cultural mediation. This practice is particularly prominent in the
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context of Franco-German relations in the twentieth century, when numerous writers
published biographies of artists from the other side of the Rhine in order to advance
mutual understanding. For instance, in 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War, the
Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote a biography of Romain Rolland. He intended to
inform German readers about French culture by presenting them the life story of this
prominent French pacifist. Zweigs biography highlights the European scope of Rollands
life and works by constantly bringing out resemblances with artists from outside of
France, mostly from Germany. In a similar vein, Klaus Mann published a biographical study
of Andr Gide shortly after the Second World War. Comparable to Zweigs biography of
Rolland, he frames Gides life story from the perspective of Franco-German relations and
points out his affiliation with Goethe and Nietzsche, thus displaying a shared European
cultural heritage. Both Zweig and Mann seek to take their subjects out of national
frameworks by focusing on shared and connected cultural elements, as well as cultural
exchange and crossings. They overtly portray their subjects as Europeans whose lives
exceed national boundaries and articulate a certain idea of Europe. Even if their
monographs are rather admiring portraits than critical, full-fledged biographies, they refer
to them as biographies. Thus seen, they are interesting sources for what they reveal about
the ways people have thought about the biographical genre and how they have employed
it in the past. In this paper I want to further explore the practice of writing European lives
as a means to mediate between cultures and promote a common European identity. I will
focus on Manns biography of Gide as a case study and reflect more generally upon
methodological issues concerning cultural mediation and the transnational approach to
the writing of lives.

HARMSMA Jonne (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) From Model to Vision: A
Biographical Turn in Political Economy? In 1988 Robert Skidelsky, famed biographer
of John Maynard Keynes, was one of the contributors of the edited volume The Troubled
Face of Biography, which sketched a bleak outlook for biography albeit with regard to its
future as a genre in academia. Relatively optimistic in this choir of gloom, Skidelsky
praised some recent biographies for the soundness of its research, concluding, however,
that they were works of scholarship rather than imagination.22 Almost three decades
later the tide has turned. Biography has risen to new heights, in quality, ingenuity and
esteem.23 Elaborating on this biographical turn, investigating the contribution of
biographical research to the field of economics, the history of economic thinking and
political economy, Skidelskys conclusion of biographys lack of imagination is put to the
test. Besides examining Skidelskys work as a biographer, other publications and research
projects are highlight to signal the increased use of the biographical perspective within
economic history. By doing so, this paper will address the question of the added value of
turning to biography in this field. The quality of historical research Skidelskys
scholarship is widely acknowledged, but what about the imaginative part? Taking a
22 Robert Skidelsky, Only Connect: Biography and Truth, in Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds), The
Troubled Face of Biography, New York: St. Martins, 1988, p. 8.
23 Simone Lssig, Introduction: Biography in Modern History Modern Historiography in Biography, in
Volker Berghahn and Simone Lssig (eds), Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives
in International Historiography , New York/London: Berghahn, 2008, pp. 1-26; Hans Renders and Binne de
Haan (eds), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing ,
Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014; Joseph C. Miller, A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn, in Lisa A.
Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (eds), Biography and the Black Atlantic , Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014, pp. 19-47 and Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma (eds), The
Biographical Turn: Lives in History , Routlegde: London forthcoming.
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biographical perspective forces the historian to take into perspective more than only one
context, complicating, so to speak, the formality of theory, economic models and schools of
thinking, focusing instead on the real world many-sidedness of economics history.24
Intrinsically, the biographical perspective, through its agency perspective, highlights this
many-sided entanglement of the abstraction of (economic) reasoning on the one hand, and
an eclectic mash of personality, normativity, politics, ideology, religion, culture and
historical context on the other. As Skidelsky conclusion eloquently conveys the purport of
biographical research for the understanding of economic history: There was no single
Keynes, no identity in solitude.25 Investigating this heterogeneity of contexts and the
complex interplay of dimensions, biography forcefully ties scholarship to imagination. By
taking a biographical turn in economic history model superseded by vision, and the
abstraction of theory is problematized and expanded on.

POULOMI Mitra (Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India) Cinematic
(Mis)representation of Femininity: Virginia Woolf in The Hours The biopic has
emerged as a popular mode of film making in contemporary culture. As such it deserves
greater critical attention than it has so far received. Like its literary counterpartthe
biography, the biopic too is a fascinating but complex and hybrid genre interlacing the
real and the reel. The paper shall attempt to bring forth the significance of biopic in the
contemporary age by looking at the cultural implications of adapting a woman author
Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours. Woolf is certainly one of the most influential of
woman authors of the modern age who drew our attention time and again to the obsession
of men to define women in their texts and the struggle of women writers. The paper shall
attempt to deconstruct the cinematic representation of Woolf by using theories of
feminism and the very observations made by Woolf herself about male constructions of
femininity. In the same breath the study will attempt to extend the scope of Dennis
Binghams analysis of female biopics by studying how far the observations made by
Bingham apply to the particular screening of the female creative writer.

24 Joshua S. Hanan and Catherine Chaput, 'A Rhetoric of Economics beyond Civic Humanism: Exploring the
Political Economy of Rhetoric in the Context of Late Neoliberalism', in: Journal of Cultural Economy
8(2015)1, pp. 16-24 and Jonne Harmsma, Honest politics: A Biographical Perspective on Economic
Expertise as a Political Style, in: Renders, de Haan and Harmsma, The Biographical Turn .
25 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol. 2. The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937, New
York: Penguin Books, 1995, p. xxxiii.
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S64: Life-Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections
Convenors: Sandra Mayer, Julia Lajta-Novak

Charlotte Boyce (University of Portsmouth, UK): Who in the world am I? Lewis
Carroll in Contemporary Biofiction
Long before he achieved fame as the author of Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865),
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his literary pseudonym, Lewis Carroll)
exhibited a fascination with Victorian celebrity, lionising the best-known authors, artists
and actors of his day. Yet he was also fiercely protective of his own privacy and generally
refused to indulge fan requests for autographs or photographs; as he explained to one
enquirer, my constant aim is to remain, personally, unknown. Given this reticence, it is
perhaps unsurprising to find that Carrolls biography is peppered with lacunae, the result
of missing or destroyed documents. These gaps in the historical record have served only to
heighten post-Victorian interest in Carroll as a literary celebrity and, in particular, to
increase speculation regarding the truth of his relationship to his child-muse, Alice
Liddell. This paper examines the ways in which two contemporary biofictions Katie
Roiphes Still She Haunts Me (2001) and Gaynor Arnolds After Such Kindness (2012)
respond to recent biographic constructions of the Carroll-Alice relationship as
scandalously paedophilic. I argue that, although the novels confessional narrative
structures and use of fictionalised diary entries and first-person monologues create a
quasi-autobiographic impression of intimacy and authenticity, the texts ultimately subvert
the readers wish for epistemological certainty. In doing so, they work ironically to bolster
Carrolls celebrity status in the twenty-first century, adding to the enigmatic aura that has
historically surrounded his persona.

Ftima Chinita (Lisbon Polytechnic Institute, Portugal): Film Directors as Unsung
Artistic (Anti) Heroes
The starting point of this paper is a question: why are biopics of film directors so scarce?
The claim can be made that directors are not stars, have no inherent glamour and
therefore do not make for good box office. This eminently commercial rationale is
countered by the existence of devoted film fans and academic cinephiles to whom, in fact, a
director is the maestro of cinematic creation. Moreover, about a dozen biopics of film
directors did get made. The subjects are Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Sergei M. Eisenstein,
Federico Fellini, Robert Flaherty, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, James Whale, and Ed Wood.
Overall, there seems to be a lack of industry interest in the production of biopics of
film directors, exacerbated by the attitude of most directors themselves, who may feel
more comfortable dealing with their own artistic issues in cinematic allegories or in films
where they can represent themselves in a true self-reflexive style. However, my aim here
is to look at the exceptions, trying to find the common denominators in the filmic
depictions made and rationalizing the choices made in those biopics. In doing so I hope to
address the following questions: What prompted directors to depict specific directorial
figures? What was their approach and why? How do these films appeal to the general
audience and to a cinephile public in particular? Have they paid a service or a disservice to
the Hollywood myth?
I focus specifically on Sergei M. Eisenstein (Eisenstein in Guanajuato, directed by
Peter Greenaway, 2015) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Pasolini, Abel Ferrara, 2014), two of the
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most influential film directors of all time and both of them authors of crucial theories on
cinema. How did these two charismatic and notorious figures (aka enfants trribles of the
intelligentsia), who took part in the writing of cinematic history, get themselves treated by
cinematic history in the authorial frescoes of Greenaway and Ferrara?

Timo Frhwirth (University of Vienna, Austria):An Austrian Auden: A Media-
Construction Story
W. H. Auden (1907-1973) is one of the most acclaimed writers in the twentieth century.
But the final fifteen years of his life which Auden divided between New York City and
Kirchstetten in Austria re-main biographically undetermined. If his life and art add up
to the distinctive fame of the Anglo-American Pulitzer-Prize winner, Austrian media
project an image which blanks much of such writing and lifestyle, in accordance with
Daniel J. Boorstins definition of the celebrity as a person who is known for his well-
knownness and human pseudo-event made meaningful through mass-media
representation (1961,57).
Such representations involve selective strategies which, for Raymond Williams, are
constitutive of the construction of culture (1961,68); similarly, for Stuart Hall, it is through
selection that identity is storied into a single, coherent, narrative (1999,5). If Austrian
media re-construct Auden by an unlikely analogy to Josef Weinheber, poet laureate of
Nazi-Germany, this analogy structures a narrative that is co-authored by W. H. Auden
himself. And from competing media stories, a distinctive poetics and politics of such
mediatisation processes emerges.
If that precludes common notions of the transparent medium, media representation
yet creates a reductive transparency. Against an opacity that for douard Glissant is
subsistence within an irreducible singularity (1997,190), for Bill Brown, we look
through the other to see what they disclose about everything else but themselves
(2001,4). In the light of the media projection of an Austrian Auden, the celebrity becomes
understandable in terms of the narrative strategies that render readable the other: what
shines through is a familiar plotline.

Eva Gordon (Broward College, Florida, US):Las Meninas, Performing Dwarfs, and
Michael Jackson Fan Day: The Uneasy Gaze of the Living Icon
What are the ramifications of human beings transmogrified, by the stigma of disability or
celebrity, into objects of cultural fascination, and how can we begin to define the
consequences of this process for both the human object and the culture doing the
objectifying? This paper seeks to compare the experience of performing dwarfs as objects
to be stared at, played with, and further miniaturized in the eyes of the public, with the
contemporary treatment of Hollywood celebrities as abstract, dehumanized figures. I will
examine the memoirs of Joseph Burowlaski; tales of the Lilliput Troupe from The Seven
Dwarfs of Auschwitz; and essays on Velazquezs iconic painting Las Meninas. These
writings illuminate the mechanisms by which celebrities are miniaturized, objectified,
virtually turned into life-size dolls for popular consumption. Texts used to examine
contemporary celebrity include Moonwalk, the 1988 memoir by Michael Jackson (edited
by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), and essays on celebrity studies by Graeme Turner and
Oliver Lovesey.
Disability Studies provides a bridge between analysis of the historical role of
performing dwarfs and todays media-driven cultural obsession with celebrity. The
preoccupation with the body by disability scholars helps ground our conceptualizations of
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both the famous dwarf and the contemporary celebrity. In both cases, the object is made
irregular, made smaller on a human scale, through a distorted sense of his or her size.
Presenter Bio: Eva Gordon holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Spalding
University and an MA in English from Saint Louis University, Madrid. She currently teaches
writing and literature at Broward College and is co-author of The Everything Guide to
Writing Childrens Books, 2nd Edition.

Philip Jacobi (University of Passau, Germany): Soup and Salmon and Ducklings: The
Politics of the Cookbook as Life-Writing
In Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs. Ramsay, when asked about the Boef en
Daube she is preparing, reveals: What passes for cookery in England is an abomination
[]. It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. This fragment
of a recipe reveals much of Woolfs attitude towards society and culture as indeed
writing about food generally does.
In my paper I want to explore the cookbook as an often neglected type of life-
writing: it is both pivotal historical source of (female) life-writing and multi-layered
expression of contemporary celebrity, where the line between autobiography and
instruction is sometimes as wobbly as jelly. As a type of text, the cookbook occupies a
curious position of disparate and often conflicting ambitions. The common enumeration of
ingredients and instructional provision of cooking techniques reflect the economic and
social circumstance of its creation. The meal produced from these ingredients is site of
both private desire and public ideal. Moreover, other types of text contained within reveal
the ideological stances and attitudinal values of their authors, while the authors voices
(Barbara Ketchum Wheaton) project commodified personas in order to catalyse their
media images. British cookbook writers, like Isabella Beeton, Elizabeth David, Fanny
Cradock, Delia Smith, and Nigella Lawson, deal in a special brand of celebrity: some have
through temporal distance become blueprints for feminine ideals of certain periods, some
have shaped their social nonconformity into stories of culinary insurgency, while others
slyly employ conspiratory candour in their writing to further their brands by squarely
aiming at both our hearts and taste buds.

Rosemary Kay (University of Manchester, UK): The Dickens Phenomenon: The
Making of a 21st Century Brand
Charles Dickens, celebrity in his own lifetime, has been mythologised, manipulated,
subverted and reinvented ever since his death in 1870; so how do versions of Dickens
disturb and inform contemporary Biography Theory?
Dickens became a household name, a character who mythologised his own image, even
before he died. The reach and influence of his celebrity status, not only in literature, but
also within global culture, has if anything increased since then. Lyn Pykett in Dickens
describes it as the complex historical phenomenon of the Dickens Industry.26 One aspect
of this industry is the change in biographical methodology used to represent Dickens.
Investigating that change can illuminate the interests and preoccupations of the age in
which each new version of Dickens is spawned. This paper considers three such versions:
one by his biographer friend, John Forster, (1872-1874), relying heavily on Dickens own
autobiographical material, and subject to his own myth-making; Flanagans fictional
Dickens in Wanting (2008), a post-colonial novel using postmodern literary devices to
explore authorial identity and the process of self-fashioning; and my metafictional novel,
26 Lyn Pykett, Dickens (London: Macmillan, 2012), p.2.
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Anchorage, part of my Creative Writing PhD, which delivers a version of Dickens enduring
the pressures of celebrity whilst wrestling with personal disquiet: he is exploiting and
manipulating the image of a real person, the woman inspiring his creation Miss Havisham.
All these versions are products of their time, reflecting changes in the expectation, delivery
and manipulation of biographical material. As Taylor and Woolf pointed out: Successive
generations have used the Victorian past in order to locate themselves in the present.27

Holly-Gale Millette (University of Southampton, UK): The Observed of All Observers:
Lydia Thompson Looks Back
Looking backward from now, I do not believe anybody saw the little mite
bounding across the stage, but I thought differently then, and imagined myself
to be the centre of attraction, the observed of all observers.28
So begins Lydia Thompson when recalling her lifetime on the popular stage. Womens
relationship to theatre and culture at this time was substantial but their narratives have
too often been short sighted and their life writing especially, that of popular performers
is limited. Similar to the time-trapped/travelling novel of the same name (Edward
Bellamys Looking Backward, 1887), Thompsons text is both a time capsule and an
artefact recovered. Its short 139 pages confronts gossip, discusses stalkers and fans,
defends claims of impropriety, and details her dress and fashion choices on and off the
stage.
Lydia Thompson, the nineteenth-century British dancer and comedienne, had an
active following in America and achieved immense success there more so than in her
own country, in terms of fandom and remuneration. This paper offers a unique perspective
on an artefact of personal testimony that witnesses the human impact of being a
transatlantic celebrity on the late 19th century popular stage, and it evidences how fame
offered her a certain protection and freedom from her working-class childhood
something Roof (2009) observes as fames aura acting as a self-corrective (122) by
validating Thompson despite her working class beginnings.

Anne-Marie Millim (University of Luxembourg): Fan Pages: The Fear of Lionism in the
Diaries of Lewis Carroll and William Allingham
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, an intense suspiciousness of the
invasive lionism of the unknown and unknowable masses of readers pervaded Victorian
culture, as is demonstrated by Hallam Tennysons Memoir (1897) of his father. This paper
focuses on the diaries of the writer, photographer and academic Lewis Carroll (Charles
Dodgson), who only met Alfred Lord Tennyson briefly, and the Irish poet William
Allingham, who was a very close acquaintance of the poet and was, at times, his confidant.
It shows that, despite their varying degrees of closeness to Tennyson, both diarists display
a constant fear of potential accusations of lionism. Their acute awareness of potentially
inappropriate fandom means that the diary is no longer a strictly private record of
personal experience, but that it becomes a semi- or pre-public text that allows the diarists
to fashion themselves as part of Tennysons privileged entourage, as opposed to the
voracious and voyeuristic masses. In their very possessive attitude towards the poet they
try to craft the personas of legitimate fans. Consciously reacting to societal prejudice
27 Ed. Miles Taylor and Michael Woolf, The Victorians since 1901, Histories, Representations and Revisions
(Manchester University Press, 2004) p.i.
28 Lydia Thompson. My Early Life: Recollections and Anecdotes of My Theatrical Career. Unpublished
Typescript Proof Copy, dated 1893, p. 90. RA VIC/Add Mss.U.82 in The Royal Archives, Windsor, UK.
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against fandom, Dodgson and Allingham keep justifying the propriety of their admiration
of Tennyson within their diaries, even after they had successfully acquainted the poet.
This paper stands in corrective of critical accounts that dismiss mass-produced
memorabilia, such as cartes-de-visite, as meaningless commodities. It reveals the ways in
which Tennysons poetry, image and person were ingrained within these diarists
subjective and creative consciousness and the impact of celebrity culture on their attitude
towards, and behavior around, the laureate.

Marcus ODair (Middlesex University, UK): Authorised Biography and the Creating,
Reinforcing and Challenging of Myths: A Popular Music Case Study
The dust-jacket promise to expose the man behind the myth a provocative model
represented, for instance, by Goldmans biographies of Elvis Presley (1981) and John
Lennon (1998) has become a biographical clich. Yet Strachan (2003), writing
specifically on popular music, states that biographies create and reinforce, as well as
challenge, the dominant representations of popular musicians.
Edel (1959) suggests that the most competent biographers seek a narrative
technique suitable to the subject matter. The subject of my own recent biography, the
musician Robert Wyatt, is a Marxist, and Marxist theory has tended to eschew bourgeois
individualism. As a complement to that, my book attempts to move beyond a Romantic
model of individual genius through collecting multiple accounts, drawing on principles of
oral history. To an extent, this sits in tension with the books authorised status. Yet
though we might expect an authorised account to be whitewashed, even hagiographic,
Wyatt has stated there are passages with which he is not comfortable. In terms of the cult
celebrity that Wyatt enjoys, then, my approach is, at the very least, ambiguous
This paper will discuss the issues involved in writing an authorised life story,
touching on associated challenges (censorship, including self-censorship) and
opportunities (access). The discussion will be framed by reference to the warts and all
approach of the new biography introduced by Strachey and Woolf. I will examine the
politics of writing celebrity lives, the influence of myth on the writing and reading of such
lives and the extent to which, in an authorised biography, the celebrity can him/herself be
considered a life writer, occupying what Foucault (1969) calls the author function.

Annette Rubery (independent researcher, UK): The Dying Actress: Peg Woffingtons
Sick-Bed Portrait
Peg Woffington (1717?-1760) was one of the most popular actresses of the 18th century,
but is now almost completely forgotten. She initially made her name in breeches and
travesty roles, but would eventually gain celebrity status as a versatile comedienne.
Brilliant and beautiful, she was discovered in 1730s Ireland, then blazed a trail through the
London theatre scene until 1757 when she suffered a stroke while performing in As You
Like It. Woffington never returned to the stage but lingered, bed-ridden, until her death in
1760 aged around 43. During her lifetime Woffington never married but conducted a
series of high-profile affairs with prominent men, such as the actor-manager David
Garrick, with whom she lived openly. The main challenges for her biographer are the
absence of almost anything written by the actress herself, coupled with the spectre of her
scandalous private life. The latter resulted in the publication, after her death, of a
titillating memoir that depicted her as a prostitute; several 19th-century male writers
attempted to undo the damage, but in the process obscured her with an avalanche of
Victorian sentimentality. I would suggest that a reappraisal of Woffingtons portraits can
offer us a better understanding of her identity. I would like to focus on the curious portrait
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by an unknown artist of Woffington on her sick-bed. Why would a wealthy actress, famed
for her beauty, want to be portrayed like this and what does it say about her attitudes to
fame and to her own mortality?

Berkem Grenci Salam (ankaya University, Turkey):Becoming Jane: A
Romanticized Biopic
The overwhelming popularity of Jane Austens fiction in the last three decades owes much
to the popularity of the author herself. Following the impact of the 1990s BBC and
Hollywood adaptations of her works, Austen-mania, Jane-mania, and Jane-ism have
become common phrases of popular culture. The phenomenon has even spread to social
media sites like Pinterest and Instagram, as well as merchandise ranging from vintage-
style pens to Darcy knickers. On the more literary side of this scale are novels and films
that use the real Jane Austen as a fictional character, such as in Stephanie Borrans
detective series which began with Jane and the Unpleasantness of Scargrave Manor. This
paper will be concerned with a film that feeds into the iconography of this commercial
Austen franchise, Julian Jarrods Becoming Jane. Based on Jon Hunter Spences biography
Becoming Jane Austen, the film elaborates on a relationship between Jane Austen and Tom
Lefroy, a man mentioned twice in her letters to her sister, and around whom much
speculation exists. It suggests primarily that Jane Austen could not have become an author
without having had an affair. The main aim of this paper will be to reveal how this
biographical film can be read as an example of the romanticization of the heroine in line
with her iconic status in popular culture.

Amara Thornton (University College London, UK): The Archaeologist as Celebrity
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, generations of British archaeologists working
overseas in the exotic East promoted themselves in print. They established a relationship
with the press and with publishers to ensure their personal and professional identities had
market value, necessary for the continuation of their work. Drawing on research into
archaeologists and publishers archives, digitised periodicals and archaeological memoirs
and travelogues, this paper will discuss the ways in which archaeologists projected their
own identities to create a culture of celebrity within their lifetimes, with a view to
encouraging active investment in research from an engaged public, and cementing the
value of their emerging discipline and its related practices. It will present the myriad
means by which archaeologists communicated their lives and work to the public through
public lectures, annual events and exhibitions, books and, later film, television and radio, a
multi-strand approach that exposes archaeologists promotional nous. It will also evaluate
how later authors memorialised and exploited the adventuresome heroics of these bold
archaeologists to bring archaeology to wider audiences through biographies and collective
histories.
In exploring these routes to celebrity, this paper will also investigate the message
archaeologists promoted and projected about themselves and their work, and in doing so
question why the archaeologist has come to be seen as an adventurer with foreign links,
a spy, a looter, and even a cursed professional.

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S65. Contemporary Writers on Writing: Performative Practices and Intermediality
In the contemporary convergence culture, marked by an explosion of performance
discourse, writers are growingly exploring other media to tackle issues concerning their
own writing and literature at large. They do so through performative and intermedial
practices that make the writer-text-reader relationship more dynamic and interactive, and
that sometimes turn authors into celebrities. The seminar will focus on these manifold
practices by which writers perform themselves, their idea of literature, or their authorial
role, not limiting themselves to the written page but making also use of audiovisual and
digital resources, such as documentaries, films, video-interviews, booktrailers, blogs,
forums, links to social networks.

Convenors
Amaya Fernandez Menicucci and Alessandra Ruggiero (Universit di Teramo, IT)

C. Maria Laudando (University of Naples LOrientale)
Authorial Dissemination and Metamorphoses in the Medial Network
A number of studies (among many others, Landow, Hayles, Ryan) have recently discussed
the new dynamic and inter-medial reconfigurations of narrative and textuality that have
emerged in the fluid post-age scenario of our present highlighting the prominence of
processual modularity, and flickering, interactive multi-modality that the new
technologies have enabled to instantiate. These ongoing transformations have also
brought to the fore the performative dimension of the relation, the very inter-ship,
between authors and readers/spectators. If the audience remains one of the most elusive
and relevant issues of the contemporary debate, the question of authorship is no less
fractious and cogent. Indeed, despite the repeated death notices (of the author, of the text,
of the self, and humanities as a whole) that have characterised the debate on the
postmodern condition, the new technologies have undoubtedly also enabled new affective
and promotional affordances for authorial dissemination through the rich medial network
of our convergence culture (Ulmer and Jenkins). Starting from the complex conceptual
elaboration of the author through the critical stages of Western modernity (Benjamin,
Barthes, Said, Foucault, among many others) and in the light of the performative inflection
of authors-as-performers, the paper examines a number of interactive and flexible digital
resources such as websites, documentaries, lectures and online interviews through which
authors as different as Tim Crouch, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and William
Kentridge seem to exploit to the full, each in their own distinctive voices and attitudes, the
risks and opportunities of their own authorial and inter-medial dissemination and
equivocation.

Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University)
The Show of Literature: Celebrity Writers on Screens
My paper aims to analyse a television genre of which the BBC is very fond, namely the
authored documentary. The authored documentary usually consists of a series of
episodes presenting the subjective view of its author, a personality of renown, on the
chosen topic. I would like to focus on the four episodes of Faulks on Fiction where the best
sellers writer Sebastian Faulks presents his own history of the British novel supporting his
opinions with a wealth of talking heads interviews to celebrated contemporary authors.
Following the economic logic of convergence, the television program also became a book,
A Story of the Novel in 28 Characters, first published in 2011 to accompany the television
series entitled Faulks on Fiction, first broadcast on BBC2 in 2011. I will compare the two
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products and try to show their intermedial meaning and the celebrity-making dynamics
that are triggered by them.

Lucia Esposito (University of Teramo)
Welcome to the Jasper Fforde Website: pop culture, crossmediality, interactivity
In the passage from literacy to the secondary orality of electronic culture both the way in
which stories are constructed and the role of the author in their construction have
dramatically changed, restoring the older idea of literature as a performative environment
and the former collaborative transaction between performer and audience. Serial, multi-
linear, and participative narrations simultaneously take place as social events or practices
on multiple platforms, originating new narrative ecosystems (Innocenti-Pescatore),
where the birth and proliferation of new creative audiences (Jenkins, Castells), such as
online communities and fanfiction writers, is fostered. The paper aims at exploring this
new environment to understand the way in which the new storytellers are negotiating
their role and their creativity with wreaders (Barthes) or prosumers (Toffler). Jasper
Fforde, the author of a number of serialized novels, will be the privileged focus of this
investigation. Exploiting the new cultural ground and values, he builds a crossmedial
microcosm whose grand central locus of interconnections is the fully-fledged website
www.jasperfforde.com. Ranging from links to other social networks to pages in which
readers contributions are welcome, the site is also a favourite place where the author
exchanges his own ideas on literature and on his books with the audience through both
verbal and audiovisual means.

Amaya Fernndez-Menicucci
Michael Bunker: From Virtual Persona to Fiction Writer
In the trans-mediatic era of You Tube and Blogspot.com, it is possible for a v/blogger to
become a cyber-celebrity and end up authoring books, thus reversing the more traditional
progression of the unknown writer who must first attain literary and commercial success,
before acquiring media fame. Michael Bunker, author of the Pennsylvania saga (2014) and
creator of the Amish Sci-Fi genre, had been gathering acolytes and fascinated fans around
his original blog on Biblical Agrarianism since the early 2000s, but he did not begin to
publish works of fiction until 2013. Not only has his performance as a controversial guru
guaranteed grass-root support for his ideas, but it has also provided his post-apocalyptic
fiction with almost immediate success. From the point of view of performance studies, it is
particularly interesting to note that Bunker had actually been playing the role of the
charismatic leader in a survivalist, pseudo-Amish community for years before he started
writing about life in such a community. As a case study of the mechanisms by which the
writers public performance of the self influences and shapes literary production, I would
like to provide a chronological analysis of the process through which Bunker has merged
his identity as the founder and patriarchal leader of a small Christian fundamentalist
community in Texas with his personae as writer of and character in Sci-Fi novels.

Serena Baiesi (University of Bologna)
New performances of the past: Jane Austen, a vampire in New York
Many contemporary writers have produced numerous editorial attempts at re-writing, re-
mediating, and re-creating Jane Austens novels. However, along with the many sequels,
prequels, mash-up, film adaptations, blogs, and games created about her world and
characters, we have also arrived at a new representation of Austen as performative artist
in a modern society. Indeed, Jane Austen has been re-invented as both fictional character
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and potential celebrity in our contemporary world through several media. Even though we
cannot experience her presence as a human being in the world, her existence and influence
as a writer has been articulated on screen and the page in several ways. In this talk, I aim
to explore how the contemporary writer Michael Thomas Ford represents Jane Austens
body through the pages of his novel, Jane Bites Back. Here, the English Georgian writer is
turned into a modern American girl, an aspiring novelist and owner of a bookshop in a
small village in the state of New York. Moreover, Jane Austen not only faces many
difficulties in fulfilling her ambitions as a writer, but is also a vampire. Another character
in the novel includes Lord Byron, who embodies auto-performativity and self-affirmation
in terms of his literary career and personal performance from the past. In Fords novel, the
interactive dynamic between writer and readers is re-mediated, culminating in a new
relationship between reader, modern writer and the cult of celebrity, creating new
practices which situate both character and writer in a modern and complex society
haunted by the desire of fulfilment as professional writer as well as vampire.

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S67: Word and Image in Childrens Literature
Convenors: Karen Brown (University of Saint-Andrews, Scotland); Camille Fort (Universit
de Picardie Jules Verne, France); Laurence Petit (Universit Paul Valry-Montpellier 3,
France)

Session A: Monday 16:30-18:30

1. Nature and Form of Picture Books

Vronique Alexandre, Taking a closer look at The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg,
(1986) conflating cultural legacies and book forms.
In The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg the viewer's imagination sets off in different
directions across aesthetic and historical territories, as the pages or plates -- bind
together Antiquity, 17th century Europe and the USA, painting, sculpture, and film. We
may think of Henry James and Daisy Miller here where Daisy is also Persephone. A similar
intercultural transatlantic admixture is at work in The Stranger, with a Christian
sensitivity that owes as much to Chris Van Allsburgs American heritage as to his study of
Rembrandt.
The Stranger raises questions about the nature and purpose of a childrens book.
Discussions arising from it cannot be confined to the identity of the eponymous character
but must embrace a range of questions related to creation and book design (the very thin
line between an artists book and a childrens book), visual literacy, the importance
granted to the narrative verbal continuum, and the intercultural obstacles faced by
publishers when translating childrens books for a foreign readership.

Magdalena Sikorska (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland)
Beyond the verbal and the visual: the sensual in picturebooks.
The meaning of childrens picturebooks depends on the verbal and the visual. Yet, very
often the primary meaning of the word and image gives way to more nuanced messages
addressing thesensual world. My paper will discuss the potential and diversity of the
sensual in childrens picturebooks achieved through complex juxtaposition of the word
and the image. I will explore such notions as synaesthesia, onomatopoeia, sound and
colour symbolism, re-creation and re-evaluation of spacethrough touch and acoustics
mediated by the verbal and the visual. To illustrate the above mentioned points I would
like to share fragments of the following picturebooks: Shaun Tans The Red Tree (2001)
and Rules of Summer (2013), Laura Vaccaro Seegers Green (2013), and John
Burninghams Would You Rather (1994).

2. On Editorial Choices and How They Affect Picture Books

Linda Pillere (Aix-Marseille Universit, France)
Convergence and Divergence of Verbal and Visual Modes of Representation in
Childrens Fiction
If we follow the principle that the body of the text is not exclusively linguistic (McGann
1991, 13), but a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes, what exactly is the
role played by these non-verbal features in childrens fiction, and how exactly should we
analyse them? Using recent approaches to multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen; Kong;
Nrgaard), this paper analyses the role of illustrations and other visual modes in childrens
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literature. In order to gain a clearer idea of what any specific visual element may
contribute to the meaning of a text, I will be comparing different editions of childrens
fiction published in the last fifteen years or so, and more precisely American English and
British English editions of the same book. The co-existence of two editions in so far as
they differ offers instantaneous examples of the role played by editorial choice in the
presentation of text. This comparison will lead us to consider other sociocultural elements,
since all modes have, like language, been shaped through their cultural, historical and
social uses to realize social functions as required by different communities (Jewitt 2013,
251).

Jiri Rambousek (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Translations Illustrated
The paper deals with the relations between illustrations and text in books for children
written in English and in their Czech translations and adaptations. Changes in the use of
illustrations occurring in different editions of a book reveal the views of the function of
pictures held by their editors/publishers, and these may be more pronounced when the
work is transferred to a different context. The original pictures may be taken over, left out,
or replaced with newly commissioned illustrations. A more detailed look shows more
refined categories; examples of specific instances will come, among others, from the works
by Harriet M. Bennett, Wilhelm Busch, and Lewis Carroll.
As a special case in point, instances where the text explicitly refers to a picture will be
discussed. While sometimes these references are duly noted and dealt with (e.g., the
description of a table in Alice in Wonderland is changed to fit the new picture), very often
they are neglected, with consequences for the consistency of the whole.
The paper will discuss possible reasons behind the publishers decisions; economy, shifts
in target group, and failure to understand the role of illustrations in a particular text may
all play their role.

Session B: Tuesday 08:30-10:30
3. To Divert and To Instruct: The Educational Dimension of Picture Books

Justine Breton (Universit de Picardie Jules Verne, France)
Representing political education in child-oriented media: the case of T. H. Whites
The Sword in the Stone
In The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White describes the childhood of the future King of
England, Arthur, dubbed the Wart. The author dedicates a major part of his text to the
young heros political education, established through Merlyns teaching and animal
metamorphoses. Nevertheless, the Warts rise to power, which dictates the diegetic
structure of the novel, is not maintained in Disneys adaptation for the screen (1963). The
animated movie reinvests the meaning of the sequences devoted to metamorphosis by
erasing the political lessons taught to Wart during his adventures in the guise of an animal.
The combined political and educational reading of Whites novel disappears, to be
replaced with a wider and more entertaining dimension. Since the Wart is never pictured
as a ruler in the movie, his political training is deleted in favour of more general
instruction, addressing not only the hero, but every child viewer. We intend to focus on
this discrepancy between the political and the educational readings of these two versions
of The Sword in the Stone, while taking into account the difference between the two media.

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Alyce Mahon (University of Cambridge, England)
Dorothea Tannings Chimerical World
Surrealism was born of a fervent belief in the power of word and image to re-enchant a
disenchanted world. Following Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland which showed
children a world which is just the other side of the mirror (Louis Aragon,1931) they
turned to childrens literature as a model for re-fashioning the world of grown-ups. My
papers focus will be on Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) who staged young girls, bizarre
creatures and uncanny spaces in such paintings as Childrens Games, 1942, Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik, 1943 and Palaestra, 1947 and in her fantastic novel Abyss (written in 1947,
published in 1977), with its seven year old heroine Destina Meridian. All too often the
figure of Alice and the dream state itself in Surrealism are read purely in gendered terms
as girl and fairy tale are seen to play to male fantasy or to enact a revenge on it. My paper
insists we need to go further in our socio-political analysis: Tannings turn to the child, the
bed time story, and what she called the chimerical world of perpetual astonishment is a
mode of instruction through fantasy, calling on the power of wonder in an age of terror.

Katarzyna Smyczyska (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland)
Contemporary tales of terror in words, images, and in between
Unlike children's books by Beatrix Potter and Janosch, which implicitly undermine the
semantic harmony between the illustrations and the text, and thus ironically challenge
widespread assumptions about the transparency of the narration, two picturebooks by Jon
Klassen and one by Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch exemplify a striking symbiosis
between the verbal and visual narrative modes. Klassen's I Want My Hat Back and This Is
Not My Hat, and Innocenti and Frisch's The Girl in Red convey a genuinely terrifying,
metaphorical vision of human relationships and offer a bitter, not to say latently
apocalyptic diagnosis of contemporary western culture. While each book relies on
different aesthetic modes and makes use of different tension-building narrative strategies
Frisch's text (perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the vividness of Innocenti's
illustrations) being worth examining in its own right they all immerse their readers in
the gradually intensifying experience of horror. A spectacle of inescapable violence,
disguised and unpunished, is constructed via visual and verbal allusions and ironic
understatements. Residing in the text and the illustrations, or in narrative gaps between
them, irony constructs the nihilistic overtones of the stories and a sense of powerlessness
in confrontation with the predatory cynicism of the powerful.

4. Moods and Ideas: The Political and Philosophical Dimension of Picturebooks

Shona Kallestrup (University of St Andrews, Scotland)
Life imitates art: word, image - and interior design - in the childrens tales of Queen
Marie of Romania
This paper examines the interface between word, image and persona creation in the
illustrated childrens tales of Queen Marie of Romania. As Mother of all the Romanians,
and subsequently Mother-in-law of the Balkans, her childrens tales functioned
metaphorically on a number of levels following World War I and served to shape public
perceptions of newly unified Greater Romania, both nationally and abroad. The tales
engagement with Romanian folk culture, together with their often thinly disguised
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autobiographical references, served didactic, propagandist and aesthetic aims. One could
argue that their visual interpretation by leading-edge illustrators such as Edmond Dulac,
Mabel Lucie Attwell, Sulamith Wlfing, Maud and Miska Petersham, Ignat Bednarik and
Nicolae Grant, was part of the Queens wider project to create a distinctive artistic self-
image, embodied most vividly in the series of unusual homes she designed for herself
across Greater Romania. Hence this paper will explore links between text, image and the
material environments of architecture and interior design in order to demonstrate how
the visual and narrative settings of the tales related to Maries nationally-driven processes
of public persona creation.

Isabelle Gras (Universit Bordeaux Montaigne, France)
Metaphorical display of moods and ideas in picturebooks by Neil Gaiman and Dave
McKean, by Shaun Tan and by Brian Selznick

Images have two basic modes of external reference, according to Doonan: denotation and
exemplification. Drawing on her conception of exemplification as a means to express
abstract notions, conditions or ideas, this presentation studies how images interact with
text in picturebooks to suggest and metaphorically display moods, ideas about art and
language or philosophical reflections.
Three picturebooks were selected for this purpose: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two
Goldfish, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean, The Invention of Hugo
Cabret, by Brian Selznick, and Rules of Summer, by Shaun Tan. In each one, images or
sequences will be analyzed, following a metafunctional systemic approach. This will show
that particular pictorial elements in McKeans images contribute to evoking the complex
mood of the main character, that the type of interaction between text and image chosen by
Selznick builds a cinematographic metaphor into his story, and that Tans images interact
with the text to suggest metaphorical interpretations of conflictual conceptions of the
world.

Jade Dillon (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland)
Deconstructing Minds: A Psychoanalytical Deconstruction of the Brain as a Fantasy
Island in Disney-Pixars Inside Out
Childrens literature and film is often fuelled by societal paradigms and embedded
ideologies within the fantasy elements of childrens fiction. Upon its release in June 2015,
Disney-Pixars Inside Out has become one of the most thought-provoking fictional
productions due to its majestic animation and realistically harrowing use of childhood
depression as thematic content. From a deconstructive perspective, it is evident that
Inside Out functions as a metaphysical and metaphorical analogy for child psychoanalysis
which transcends the label of mindless child entertainment. This paper will investigate a
central aspect of Inside Out which underpins the deconstruction of psychoanalytic theory
within the text; the brain will be deconstructed as an alternate fantasy universe which
parallels the reality of the child narrator, thus governing the memories it recalls to be
contextual through Freuds evaluation of repression. Similarly, the cinematic elements of
the brain and the Emotions will be deconstructed to unveil elements of psychological
content.

Session D: Tuesday 17:00-19:00

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5. Animals and Animality in Picturebooks

Claudia Alonso (University of Valencia, Spain)
The animal seen, the animal read: A few considerations on the complex nature
between nonhuman otherness and childrens literature.
Nonhuman others bear a long-standing presence in childrens literature in global cultures,
and have increasingly become the object of literary study in English-speaking
communities, particularly due to the influence of Victorian mentality in the development of
such animal characters. From nursery rhymes to childrens picture books, and from animal
autobiographies to young adult fiction, nonhuman others are often featured in such
genres, following the demands imposed by the childs own psychological and emotional
development. The object of this presentation is to question the boundaries of what it is
that critics generally consider representative childrens literature on the basis of the
expectations generated by the animal presence. I present an exegesis through the lens of
ethology and posthumanism whereupon attendees bring themselves to question the
biopolitics underlying the image and the voicedness of nonhuman others in a series of
texts aimed at young readers. Through a revision of canonical strategies employed in a
series of classics (from Mark Twains A Dogs Tale to contemporary publications such as
Dear Zoo), I aim to analyze how the transition from the emotional connection with the
animal to the eventual acceptance of institutionalized forms of animal exploitation is
articulated through the word and the image.

Elizabeth and James Wallace (Boston College, USA)
Animals and Animalism in the Illustrations of Garth Williams

As the biographers of Garth Williams (1912-1996), we claim that he profoundly impacted
the interpretation of animals in post-war American childrens literature. The illustrator of
more than 150 books, Williams worked with many notable childrens authorsMargaret
Wise, E.B. White, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, to name a few. His drawings uniformly
captured an original and distinct perspective of the animal world, making visible the
secrets of their creature life. His illustrations filled the conceptual gap between the
authors word and readers imagination of the animal in four distinct and powerful ways.
First, unlike Disney, whose Mickey Mouse stands in for everyman, Williams created fully
individuated animal personalities who nevertheless retain the elusive mystery of their
animal nature. Second, adding levels of meaning to characters like Stuart Little, Williams
demonstrated how the diminutive animal could be challenged by the scale of the human
world yet capable of ratiocinationin other words, big in his smallness.

Hlne Gaillard (Universit Nice Sophia Antipolis, France)
Representing & retelling the Three Little Pigs story : words and images in
postmodern variations

As one of the most famous folk tales, the story of the Three Little Pigs has been adapted
many times but the recent postmodern variations are particularly interesting for the
interaction between the textual and visual contents. The notions of perspective, viewpoint
and interpretation are central in all three picture books and contribute to the development
of a critical mind for young readers.
Eugene Trivizass version illustrated by Helen Oxenbury has a subtle intermedial approach
opposing a traditional narrative and visual style to a more modern subtext and unusual
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angles. David Wiesners book crosses not only the textual but also the iconic boundaries of
the original tale: the story shifts from traditional storyboard frames to a metafictional
world where the pigs become more realistically depicted and gain autonomy by escaping
the linear plot. Told by the unreliable wolf, Jon Scieszkas narrative becomes a new story
characterized by cropping and framing. As the wolf claims that he has been framed, the
visual input relies on multiple perspectives challenging the construction of meaning.
Based on transmediality and metafiction, these fractured versions are highly enjoyed by
young and older audiences and also aim at emphasizing distance with the original
narrative and highlighting discrepancies between words and images.

6. Variations on Lewis Carroll
Rose Weeber (American University of Paris, France)
Curiouser and Curiouser: Charles Robinsons Invasion of Wonderland

Celebrating its 150th birthday this year, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis
Carroll was first published in 1866 and illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. Charles Robinson
(1870-1937), as well as others, illustrated the tale after the end of the copyright in 1907.
Why is Charles interpretation of this everlasting tale a total change with the tradition?
First, he brought the Arts and Crafts Movement to the eyes of children by introducing
decorative illustrations throughout the book while detaching himself from his
contemporaries by addressing a juvenile public instead of collectors. He was also the first
to change Alices features from a blonde to a brunette, based on Alice Liddell, the real girl
behind the tale. Moreover as his Alice is much more adventurous, Charles centered his
visual expression on Wonderland and its mysteries, and brought this new world to life
through more than 155 illustrations -leaving little undecorated pages- bringing the
children in a continuous quest alongside little Alice. From nonsense to fear, the artist fully
grasps the potential of his own images, he leads the reader from dream to reality and from
reality to dream in a way that the reader only escapes by turning the last page of the book.

Laurence Le Guen (Universit Rennes 2, France)
Suzy Lees Alice in wonderland: rewriting by images
And what is the use of a book thought Alice without pictures or conversations ?

The book Alice in wonderland, published in 1865, starts with these words. Suzy Lee offers
a personal vision, without words. Images thus dominate. As a result, textuality resides in
pictures which initiate many different meanings and create a story.
Some analysts claim that photography must be banished from books for children. Since
photography reflects reality, they tend to lose their imagination. This analysis seeks to
prove precisely that this classic plot is disrupted. Using this medium, Suzy Lee brings us
into a fairy tale world from which the child does not stand back. On the contrary, the latter
gets deeply involved in the visual process.
This book of photographs becomes autonomous because Lewis Carrolls book lies in the
collective imagination. Indeed, it is not necessary to quote the author to build a more
visual universe. Despite this fact, the original source text is never far, with Lewis Carolls
words written on the last page as a key example of that principle Is all our life, then, but a
dream? .

Raluca Petrescu (ENS Paris, France)
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Nonsense as state of consciousness: The Mad Gardeners Song and its illustrations in
Lewis Carrolls Sylvie and Bruno

Lewis Carrolls Sylvie and Bruno (1867) presents a particular narrative scheme, consisting
of a regular spiral, as the narrator experiences two alternating states of consciousness; the
passing from one state to the other is accompanied by certain signs or guiding elements.
Amongst these, the most compelling is the Mad Gardeners song: the nonsense poem in
nine four-verse stanzas that punctuates the narration at certain moments is a threshold
ritual, a nonsense initiation mantra. Its splendid comic vigour cannot deter from its
Unheimlich-inducing functions: He thought he saw a Buffalo/Upon the chimney-
piece:/He looked again, and found it was/His Sister's Husband's Niece./'Unless you leave
this house,' he said,/"I'll send for the Police!' . Harry Furniss, the black and white man,
illustrates the song by depicting the other reality: not the niece, but the buffalo, albeit in a
dress. An intense relationship forms between the notions of comic revelation, imaginary
awakening, and extreme catachrese in the semiotic structure of these illustrated stanzas.
Can there be such a thing as a nonsense initiation, and what is the part theirein played by
hallucinatory visualisation, graphic embodiment?

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S69. Young Adult Fiction and Theory of Mind
Conveners: Lydia Kokkola and Alison Waller

Session One (Monday: 16.30-18.30): The Body and Mind Reading YA Fiction
1. Leah Phillips
I just send my mind somewhere else: Shape-Shifting and the Mind/Body Split in
Tamora Pierces Immortals Quartet
The liberal humanist model of self that is available in the West is one underscored by the
Cartesian dualism that separates mind from, and privileges it over, body. Daines shape-
shifting in Tamora Pierces Immortals quartet, an example of mythopoeic YA fantasy,
offers a narrative of self that complicates this paradigmatic opposition by offering
inflections of mind into body, inside into outside, self into other, and human into animal
(and, always, vice versa). Through the symbiotic joining of minds that precipitates it,
Daines full body shape-shifting posits the mind as that which is shared between embodied
selves, not that which divides them. As mythopoeic YA fantasy, this quartet features many
functions associated with mythic literatures, especially myths offering of frameworks for
living and being in this world, an offering that the YA aspect of this fantasy heightens. As
such, the embodied self offered by Daines shape-shifting serves as a framework for an
embodied subjectivity that does not exclude woman, animal, or the other from its
structure. This is especially provocative for adolescent girls who, because of being
adolescent (thus disrupting binary pairs) and female (thus othered by the male/female
binary), have the most to lose under dominant narratives.

2. Alison Waller
Coming to Consciousness: Waking up the body and mind in YA fiction
The waking up scene is surprisingly common in speculative and fantastic YA fiction. As a
literary trope it serves to defamiliarise consciousness, rendering the protagonists self-
experience of both body and mind strange and disjointed. Waking up after an accident,
operation, transformation or out-of-body journey, adolescent characters are forced to
question the relationship between thought, language, sensation and the material world
around them. In this paper I offer an analysis of the waking up scene in a range of YA texts
from the last 30 years, including Peter Dickinsons Eva (1988), Rhiannon Lassiters Hex
(1998), MT Andersens Feed (2002), and Francis Hardings Cuckoo Song (2014). I will
demonstrate how these authors explore certain theories of consciousness for example,
the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) and the problem of qualia (Chalmers,
1996) through case studies of disoriented adolescent characters. The doubling of before
and after identities also provides fertile ground for testing theory of mind, as awakening
protagonists have to ascribe conscious alterity to past and unfamiliar versions of
themselves. As such, waking scenes serve a purpose as both literary conventions to open
up plots of mystery and suspense, but also as moments of introspection which introduce
young readers to philosophical and cognitive concepts that they can apply to their own
lives.

3. Clare Walsh
An education in difference: a comparative study of the representation of mind-styles in
John Boynes The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) and Siobhan Dowds The London
Eye Mystery (2007).
The concept of a fictional mind style, first introduced by (Fowler 1977: 76), can usefully
be applied to an analysis of two works of contemporary young adult fiction which
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represent minds impaired, in one case, by a restricted worldview (Bruno in The Boy in the
Striped Pyjamas) and, in the other, by high-functioning autism (Ted in The London Eye
Mystery). Each author employs a different narrative technique in order to convey the
atypical mind-styles of their characters: Bruno is the central focaliser in Boy, whereas Ted
narrates his own story. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of each novel
in heightening literary affect for readers and in underlining the novels themes about
memory, friendship and belonging. Interestingly, both novels also incorporate a secondary
mediating consciousness in the person of the boys older female siblings, Gretel and Kat
respectively. I will argue that while readers are cued to recognise Gretel as a false guide,
one who wilfully misreads Bruno as stupid, they are cued to perceive Kat as a
sympathetic guide who provides insights into Teds logical, if skewed, mental functioning.
I will conclude that both novels, in their different ways, offer their readers an education in
difference which is potentially schema-refreshing.

4. Lydia Kokkola
Hands on Reading: The Body, the Brain and the Book
Since the New London group coined the term New Literacies to describe the activities
involved in making sense of on-line digital texts, there has been considerable debate about
the extent to which this form of reading differs from traditional book reading. A broad
array of studies demonstrate that reading print-on-paper texts are better for memory
recall after reading (Mangen, Walgermo & Brnnick, 2013), for digesting complex
information (Stoop, Kreutzer & Kircz, 2013a, 2013b), and for immersing oneself in a story
(Mangen 2013b; Mangen & Kuiken 2014). Digital texts, on the other hand, are only
superior for quick information gathering, communication and navigation (Stoop,
Kreutzer & Kircz, 2013a, 2013b). The reasons for these differences are not yet clear, but
the physical ways in which our bodies perform literate acts and how our brain processes
materials provides a means by which to examine this phenomenon.
This paper begins by summarising existing research on how the brain responds to
these different environments, and how the bodily movements that surround these acts of
literacy differ. It will conclude with a proposal that changing how children use their bodies
when they are reading might improve comprehension.

Discussant: Maria Nikolajeva
Round Table Discussion with the four presenters.

Session Two (Tuesday: 11.00-13.00): Empathy and YA Fiction
1. Anna Savoie
Seeing Similarities to Overcome Differences: Opportunities for Empathy in Native
American Adolescent Fiction
Research shows that reading literature can help develop readers empathy and theory of
mind both in the short and long term. Through the lens of cognitive poetics, this
theoretical study investigates the specific advantages young adult literature offers to
adolescent readers in terms of empathy development. Multicultural young adult literature
presents a certain challenge to readers who are of the majority race. Studies show that we
use more empathy with those we consider to be similar to us, or those we categorize as
in-group. Racial differences between the reader and the protagonist could cause an
unconscious out-group categorization, which lessens the readers ability to use, and
therefore develop, empathy. This study focuses on two Native American young adult
novels, Cynthia Leitich Smiths Rain Is Not My Indian Name and Eric Gansworths If I Ever
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Get Out of Here. It argues that by offering a commonality, the depictions of adolescence in
these two novels mitigate the possibility of an out-group categorization of the
protagonists. It then examines how these novels present opportunities to the reader for
empathy and mind-reading use and development. The study concludes that the depictions
of adolescence in these novels would cause majority culture adolescent readers to use and
develop more empathy with them than they would with adult Native American novels.
More broadly, the study analyses in a new light the particular advantages young adult
literature offers to adolescent readers, namely that the strong presence of adolescence
mitigates any out-group categorizations and increases the likelihood of empathy
development through reading. The impact of this new argument is potentially
groundbreaking for teachers, school curriculums, and educational policy-makers alike.

2. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Cognitive Lessons about Social Movements: Social Minds, Theory of Mind & Empathy in
Radical Fantasy Fiction for Young Readers
We live in times of emergent bottom-up participatory democracy based on social
movements whose participants, regardless of class, race, gender and age divisions, unite to
address specific social or political problems. If social movements can be seen as instances
of collective cognitive praxis (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), then what leads to their
formation and sustains them is their members capability for mind reading and empathy as
a basis for progressive thought and democracy based on caring for others and cooperation
(Lakoff 2009). Radical Fantasy fiction for young readersone of the currently available
modes of utopian thinking and representationpropagates the ideal of participatory
democracy through its focus on solidarity of the oppressed across social and economic
divides. I argue that the potential appeal of Radical Fantasy to contemporary young
readers rests on its metarepresentations of social minds, intermental thought, and
interactions (Palmer 2010), as enabled by Theory of Mind and empathy. If reading
literature indeed improves the competencies of ToM and empathy (Kidd and Castano
2013), it is not misguidedly optimistic to hope that texts like Radical Fantasyespecially
when used as a background for intergenerational dialog and inter-age connectedness
provide training in a safe mode for solidarity. As a result, Radical Fantasy may tune post-
millennial young readers to becoming political actors, thereby turning out to be an
important cultural contribution to the rise of participatory democracy, based, among
others, on intergenerational justice.

3. Mike Cadden and Karen Coats
Once More, With Feeling: Two Views on How Authors Make Readers Feel Things
Most commentaries that address realistic young adult fiction highlight its ability to engage
readers through the creation of relatable characters. Mike Cadden argues that such
identification is not as straightforward as it seems; instead, he identifies a range of
character types and rhetorical strategies that evoke what Lars Bernaerts calls a double
dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization (69) that draws readers along a continuum
from indifference to empathy while simultaneously allowing for critical distance and
evaluative response. His approach could thus be called stimulus-driven, in that it depends
on rhetorical choices made by authors to evoke the appropriate responses in readers.
Karen Coats, on the other hand, approaches reading from a mind-driven approach,
bringing insights from cognitive studies, affect theory and psychoanalysis to bear on the
way readers engage in the double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization, and
exploring how breaches of expressive thresholds (such as crying while reading) are
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theorized in those discourses. In this paper we will bring these two approaches into
conversation through a close reading of narrative voice and characterization in E.
Lockharts The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Daniel Handlers Why We
Broke Up. Through our discussion of these texts, we explore the connections, gaps, and
impasses that emerge between traditional rhetorical theory and its newer cognitive
variations when it comes to examining how readers engage with other minds.

Discussant: Maria Nikolajeva
Round Table Discussion with the four presenters.

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S71 Thinking about Theatre and Neoliberalism

Victor Merriman, (Edge Hill University, UK) The Austerity Fraud: Critical Performance
Perspectives
Neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity ...
subdues democratic desires and imperils democratic dreams. Wendy Brown, Undoing the
Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (MIT Press, 2015): 44
This paper considers the performative dynamics of the fraudulent politics of Austerity
(2008-ongoing) as an enabler, in the West, of what may be the penultimate phase of
neoliberalisation. Drawing on work done, since 2010, by members of the Performance and
Civic Futures group, including the author, it sets out a critique of Austerity Culture across
key public institutions, events and projects. The argument considers the potential of
performance theory to point to acts of social praxis, toward futures better than what elite
groups are currently prepared to concede.

Hlne Lecossois (Universit du Maine, Le Mans, France) The value of failure in
Irelands theatre of (post)modernity
The (re)calibration of bodies for efficiency, performance, labour has been one of the
hallmarks of the theatre of modernity. Yet this theatre has also harboured pockets of
possible resistance to this calibration. It is in these pockets of resistance, located in the
theatricality of the theatre, that this paper is interested. It looks at the ways in which
theatrical performance might open up possibilities of thinking disruptively about
neoliberalisms imperatives of success and efficiency. As Nicholas Rideout has pointed out,
it is precisely because theatre is so deeply nestled within the sphere of (late) capitalism
that it is such a good, if perverse, place, to look for potential political alternatives. (N.
Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (2013)) This paper will not
look at the elements which might go wrong during a performance (N. Rideout, Sara Janes
Bailes) but will focus instead on instances of failure inscribed in the (performance) script
of a play (in Synge or Beckett for instance) and will inquire into their creative possibilities
for thinking critically about neoliberalism.

Aoife Monks (Queen Mary University of London, UK) Unhomely Virtuosity
Virtuosity emerged as a category of performance in the 18th century, and became an
important metaphor for identity in modernity. This paper considers the relationship
between virtuosity and nostalgia, and argues that these categories converge particularly
intensely in the virtuosic performances of Irishness during the 1990s Celtic Tiger economy
in Ireland. Focussing in particular on the stage show Riverdance, and drawing on the Stage
Irish entrepreneurs of the mid-19th Century, this paper will ask what homes are lost and
recuperated through virtuosic performance.

Lionel Pilkington (NUI Galway, Ireland) Theatre paying its way: Theatre and Economics
in 1980s Ireland
An important political shift took place in Ireland in the early to mid 1980s when the
countrys model of governance swung sharply away from a social state to a neoliberal
enterprise schemathat now-familiar agenda of austerity that valorizes individual and
profit-oriented enterprise, is committed to a programme of privatization and an
unleashing of market forces, and entails what is presented as a necessary and inevitable
retraction of state responsibility towards all forms of social provision. This paper will
discuss the ways in which Irelands neoliberal turn can be related to the extraordinary
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burgeoning of institutional theatre initiatives in the early 1980s and, specifically, on how
(a) we might describe and conceptualize the relationship between theatre as a practice
and as a funded institution and (b) how we might discuss the relationship between
theatre, taxation and acting as paid labour. Special consideration will be given to the
Abbey Theatre, Druid Theatre Company, and Rough Magic Theatre Company as well as
some of the notable productions of this period.

Mark Phelan (Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland) Boom Town: the
Neoliberal Politics of Performance in Post-Conflict Belfast
One of the many paradoxes of the Troubles is that the North's repressive state apparatus,
which was responsible for provoking (and perpetuating) the conflict, also inadvertently
shielded society from neoliberal policies unleashed by Thatcher in 1980s' Britain. Viewed
from this perspective, the North's conflict exposes neo-liberal ideology that free markets
and a weak state can provide peace and prosperity to be utterly illusory, for the political
conditions and contexts that enabled the North's peace process to succeed were
pronouncedly statist. And so, in the aftermath of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, one of
the most unsettling aspects of this political settlement - alongside the institutionalisation
of sectarian politics - has been the increasing consensus, from otherwise polarised parties,
over the application of neo-liberal policies in the North, such as Sinn Fin and the DUP's
commitment to lowering corporation tax rates to the same levels as Republic of Ireland.
These and other neoliberal policies and practices in the North often appear deeply
counterproductive to peace, especially given the palpable lack of a "peace dividend" to
working-class communities from across the sectarian divide, who suffered most from the
Troubles and have benefited least, especially in 'boom town' Belfast. This paper will
explore these issues in the work of a number of contemporary artists and playwrights as
well as exploring the limitations of some of these critiques given that theatre is frequently
pressed into performing the neoliberal peace.

Isabel Karremann (Universitt Wrzburg, Germany) How to Survive the Economic
Crisis with Shakespeare
The paper will focus on figures from Shakespearean drama who not only survive
precarious situations of indebtedness, but rather turn them into an enabling, liberating
experience. The point is emphatically not to establish a genealogy that legitimizes a neo-
liberalist framework, but rather to argue against an angst-and-anxiety-driven crisis
rhetoric that is familiar from the Euro-crisis and to articulate a more empowering, less
victimized subject position endowed with agency instead. Just as importantly, it seeks to
argue against a very similar crisis rhetoric prevalent in New Historicism (which has
dominated early modern scholarship for the last twenty years) that reduces the theatre
and its cultural and social functions to an articulation of 'anxieties' indicative of 'identity
crises' at the individual and collective level. While this approach obviously has great
explanatory force and allows literature (along with the literary critic) an important anti-
ideological critical function, it also tends to disregard other possible responses to
precarious situations. The argument of the paper will be placed this within a framework of
historical theatre practice and theatre business concerns, as well as within the framework
of recent critical considerations on 'the art of failure' (Halberstam), 'reparative reading'
(Sedgwick) and 'cruel optimism' (Berlant).

Michael McKinnie (Queen Mary University of London, UK) Theatre Financing and Real
Estate
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This paper explores the relationship between the financing of contemporary theatre and
urban property markets. While theatre and performance studies has become increasingly
preoccupied with the spatiality of performance in recent years, it has arguably failed to
pay sufficient attention to many of the complex economic, and especially property,
relations underpinning the spatial practices with which it is concerned. These relations
impinge not only on where theatres are located or the types of work produced, they also
affect the ways that theatres are financed in distinctive ways. This paper focuses on recent
theatre-building in Toronto, Canada. For a number of years Toronto has experienced one
of the worlds largest commercial and residential construction booms. After a long period
where theatre infrastructure lagged behind a fast-growing performance industry (due in
large part to constraints on public spending on arts infrastructure) a number of new
theatres have been built. These, however, have been financed to a notable degree through
agreements between private developers and theatre companies that have been made
possible by fiscal mechanisms within municipal planning law. This paper considers the
cultural and urban politics of such developments, where theatre infrastructure is not only
affected by real estate markets, but where the financing of it comes to depend directly on
those markets (with all their attendant complexities).

John Freeman (University of Detroit Mercy, USA) Outsorcery: Synthespians as the
Acting Precariat Class
Technological advances in GGI (Computer Generated Imaging) and stand-alone holograms
no doubt presage the day when synthespian actors will be coming to a theater near you.
Thus, when director Kerry Conran put out a casting call for an actor to play the perfect
villain in his 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, no less a luminary than
Laurence Olivier stepped forth to answer the call. Dead for fifteen years? No problem.
Through the wonders of CGI and archival footage, he has resumed his career in what looks
to be a very long run indeed. Outsourcing here takes on the character of outsorcery, a
conjuring of the dead to do work once the sole province of the living. Post-Fordist modes
of production, abetted by this technology, threaten to transform the actor qua laborer into
fragmentsassembled under a new law, microfragments and recombinations of an
informatic and immaterializing mode of production beyond even Walter Benjamins
theorizing about film and auratic transference. I will explore the nature of this technology,
what it delivers and fails to deliver, and the ethical questions that arise when thespians are
replaced by synthespians.

Frdric Mesplde (Universit Bordeaux Montaigne, France) Theatre and
Neoliberalism or Fiction Against Fiction
This paper will address the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and theatre in Lucy
Prebbles play Enron (2009) and David Hares play The Power of Yes (2009). During the
1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher revitalised liberalism (in its strictly
economical meaning) and its core tenet of free market in a series of economic policies soon
to be labelled neoliberal. The plays under study address the notion of free market and its
most notorious manifestation that are financial markets. In Enron, Lucy Prebble
fictionalises the financial scandal of Enron which led to the bankruptcy of one of the
biggest energy trading companies in the USA in 2001. In The Power of Yes, as the full title of
the play suggests: A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis, David Hare stages
a dramatist (himself) who wants to write a play about the 2008 financial crisis. The
dramatist therefore interviews key figures in the financial sector to understand the
financial crisis. What these plays attempt to do is to challenge the hegemony of
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neoliberalism and free market by creating what Jacques Rancire calls a new common
aisthesis. (Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics.) By creating their own story of
neoliberalism, the playwrights challenge neoliberal thinkers and decision makers who try
to pass their ideology as the only way to perceive the world. An ideology being, in the end,
a story which interprets the world in a specific way (for a specific purpose). The
confrontation between theatre and neoliberalism can be rephrased as fiction against
fiction. To challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism, the plays debunk the fundamental
principles of (neo)liberalism, defined by Adam Smith, by staging their contradictions. This
challenge of the neoliberal ideology is also accompanied by a reflection on theatre and
performance. Breaking with the tradition of engaged theatre, Lucy Prebble and David
Hare opt for an emancipating dramaturgy, namely storytelling, which acknowledges that
spectators ought to be emancipated by the play, according to Jacques Rancires
definitions (The Emancipated Spectator). The end of theatre is not to be sought outside
theatre in a collective political action. Theatre is not a political tool, it is only the
playwrights privileged way to express him- or herself. A play is also the perfect space for
confronting words and ideologies with live tangible actions, which is impossible in
television, radio or cinema. David Hare and Lucy Prebble want to entertain and to inform
(not to educate) spectators thanks to their plays. To achieve this, the playwrights must
design their plays so that they can be understood by spectators who have little knowledge
in economics. Also, their plays must be appealing enough to attract spectators who live in a
society where economics is often described as austere and reserved to economists.

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S72 Dilemmmas of Identity in Postmulticultural American Fiction and Drama
Co-convenors: Enik Maior, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania,
Lenke Nmeth, University of Debrecen, Hungary

Lenke Nmeth, University of Debrecen, Hungary
Blackface,Yellowface, and Whiteface: Masking and Unmasking in Postmulticultural
American Drama

In the 1990s the multicultural era of American culture is replaced by the postmulticultural
pattern, which involves new ways of looking at race and ethnicity. Inescapably,
postmulticultural discourse moves beyond essentialist definitions of these concepts and
introduces new articulations of racial and ethnic meanings, thus offering re-definitions of
cultural identity and what constitutes Americanness.
Being a most appropriate form of expressiveness for showing and reflecting on the
changing dynamics of cultural identity, American drama in the postmulticultural era
produces challenging explorations of new kinds of post-racial and post-ethnic identity. By
discussing innovative ways of the dramatic rendering of cultural identity in selected plays
by Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, David Henry Hwang, and Suzan-Lori Parks I will
argue that these dramatists effectively reverse cliched racial and ethnic images of identity
through the revitalization of the ancient device of masking.

Teresa Botelho, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University of
Lisbon, Portugal
Choosing Identities and the Lies of the Body in David Henry Hwangs Yellow Face
and Danzy Sennas Caucasia

The critical collapse of the stable binaries that ground systems of knowledge about racial
ascription dependent on the discredited semiotics of the visible, has fostered in
contemporary American literature a reinvention of the passing narrative, now invested in
projects that re-imagine identity, examining its flexibility in ways that disrupt both the
rigid paradigms that underlie its construction and the linkage between embodied
signifiers and social meanings. This paper will discuss two such texts, the 1998 novel
Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, and the 2007 play Yellow Face, by David Henry Hwang which
investigate, from different perspectives, the identity puzzle open by the realization that
race as a concept has no essencialized groundings and is a societal, historicized construct;
by examining how the traditional protocols of passing in both texts are inverted by
constituting Blackness and Asianness as identities of desire, this paper discusses how they
open foundational questions, namely asking whether the racial liminality of a body
allows an individual to emotionally inhabit both Blackness and Whiteness, and whether an
etho-racial identification of choice, grounded on desire and performance, is ever available
to a post-racial passer.

Identity Formation in Gary Shteyngarts The Russian Debutantes Handbook
Eniko Maior

I propose to investigate the fictional work of Gary Shteyngart The Russian Debutantes
Handbook (2002) in order to demonstrate that Shteyngart, an American writer born in
Leningrad, USSR, in 1972 presents a fictional world that draws closely on places the
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author knows but transforms them for the purposes of presenting images of literary
alienation. He left Russia but did not forget either about his Russian roots or his Jewish
identity. The key question Who am I? has to be answered before offering a thorough
textual analysis. Vladimir Girshkin, the protagonist of The Russian Debutantes Handbook
would like to avoid walking like a Jew but on the other hand he would like to make his
parents proud of their Russian Jewish boy. Can he escape his ethnicity and find happiness?
Shteyngarts hero, Vladimir Girshkin does not belong to one world, he is the son of
immigrants who does not know how to define his own identity and to find happiness. The
writer with the help of satire actually shows the protagonists search for his identity in this
absurd and strange world. My task is to show if this is possible or is just a utopian dream.

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S73 Literary Prizes and Cultural Context
Co-convenors: Wolfgang Grtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, David Malcolm,
University of Gdank, Poland

(1) Tugba Sabanoglu, Freie Universitt Berlin, Germany
The Man Booker Prize and Britains Postcolonial Melancholia
This paper seeks to contribute to the exotic vs. home-grown novel debate that has been
revolving around the Man Booker Prize and prompting questions about British literary
cultures engagement with postcolonialism since its debut in 1969. It will look at the body
of winners (as well as contenders) as a culturally sanctioned catalogue to investigate the
post-imperial condition to be observed in British political and cultural life that Paul Gilroy
identifies as Postcolonial Melancholia. I contend that rather than enjoying an abundance
of political correctness, Booker-winning novels that deal with postcolonial experience
could be read as an attempt at confronting, or even better, properly mourning Britains
unsettling colonial history. However, as Gilroy further delineates in his argumentation, the
consolidation of contemporary British identity through acknowledging past horrors is
never far from being precarious. A careful look into the English or home-grown
winners of the prize will reveal that although by foregrounding works that represent the
extra-national the body of Booker winning novels goes beyond a post-imperial urge to
revert back to past glory; it still simultaneously accommodates a reservoir of Englishness
that endeavours to sustain itself as something intrinsically different than a sense of post-
imperial Britishness that needs constant communication and confrontation with an
unsavoury historical and cultural baggage.

(2) Aniela Korzeniowska, University of Warsaw, Poland
James Kelman and His 1994 Man Booker Prize

In this paper I would like to address the issue of the consequences of being awarded
prizes, receiving nominations for the same said prizes and the frequent controversies
surrounding both the nominees and the judges, with special attention devoted to Scottish
writer James Kelman.

Kelmans first experience with the Man Booker Prize (popularly referred to simply
as the Booker Prize) was when his novel A Disaffection was included on its shortlist in
1989. Then, a few years later, in 1994, and to the horror of many, he actually received the
prize for his stream of consciousness novel How late it was, how late. Although his
Translated Accounts. A Novel found itself on the longlist for the 2001 award and he was
also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in both 2009 and 2011, it was his
1994 novel that aroused an astounding amount of press attention both at home and
abroad. It is interesting to go a little more deeply into the reasons for this attention and
what the consequences of this award were for Kelman himself, his future writing, and for
other writers experimenting with form and language.

(3) Ulla Ratheiser, University of Innsbruck, Austria,
Indeed, a wicked idea that good writing and entertainment are incompatible (H.
Jacobson) Comic Literature and Literary Prizes

When Howard Jacobson was shortlisted for and eventually won the Man Booker Prize
2010 for his novel The Finkler Question reactions were divided. They ranged from a
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completely worthy winner of this great prize (Andrew Motion) to Jacobson should not
win. (Jonathan Beckmann)
What has been mostly sidelined, though, except for some cursory comments, is the
fact that The Finkler Question is one of the very few comic novels to have won this
prestigious prize (Mark Brown). The fraught relationship of comic writing and literary
prizes is the particular intersection this paper will aim to explore by referencing The
Finkler Question, and reading it also against the backdrop of Edward St Aubyns Booker
Prize satire Lost for Words (2014).

(4) Wojciech Drg, University of Wrocaw, Poland
Hopes Still High: The Goldsmiths Prize Three Years after Its Launch

The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 by the Goldsmiths College in reaction to the
frequently voiced concerns that the Man Booker had been failing to recognise genuinely
demanding fiction. The founders announced their dedication to celebrate the qualities of
creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould
or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The launch of the prize was met with much
hope and enthusiasm: the Times Literary Supplement called it fantastic news for
literature and for prize culture, whereas the New Statesman predicted that it would
encourage young writers to write boldly and provide a breakwater against the fear of
the reign of the Amazon culture. Three years on, it is still too early to say if the
Goldsmiths Prize has lived up to those expectations, but a tentative assessment of its
influence so far can be conducted and will be the aim of this paper. After outlining the
prizes objectives, its rules of entry and introducing the winning and shortlisted novels, I
will compare the overlap between the novels recognised by the Goldsmiths with those
appreciated by the Man Booker and the Costa. Finally, I shall examine the effect that the
prize has had on the commercial and critical success of the winning novels.

(5) Violetta Trofimova, St. Petersburg, Russia
Female Intrusion into Literary Prize Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century France

This paper seeks to analyze the phenomenon of women winners of academic literary
competitions in France in the last decades of the seventeenth century. While women were
largely excluded from academic life during that period, and their membership in the
academies was problematic, academic competitions were open to everyone irrespective of
sex and social status. Even French Academy (closed for women up to the twentieth
century) welcomed all participants for its contests, including the contest in eloquence
first conducted in 1671. It is important to note that the first winner of this contest was
Madeleine de Scudery, a leading French woman writer of her time. The reception of her
victory will be discussed in this paper. Scudery was an exception because she received a
prize for an essay, and not a piece of poetry, as other women winners did. The topics of the
contests will be discussed with a special focus on their relationship to politics and social
problems, for example, peacemaking and female education. Besides that, general
formation of literary prize culture will be analyzed, including the rules of the contests, the
advertisement, the jury, and the award ceremonies.

(6) David Malcolm, University of Gdask, Poland (co-convenor)
The Role of the Short-Story Prize in the Development of British Short Fiction
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It is widely believed that the short story has been an ignored and disparaged form in
twentieth- and twenty-first century British fiction. Contrasts are usually made with the
esteem in which the short story is held in Ireland and the USA. British publishers have
usually shown a reluctance to publish short fiction, certainly short fiction by less well-
known writers. The main literary prizes in Britain are given to novels. Yet, there have long
been major short-story prizes, both for mainstream fiction and for genre fiction, in the
United Kingdom. Recently, a number of high-profile short-story awards the BBC National
Short Story Award, the Costa Book Award, among others have sought to change the dire
status of the short story in Britain.
This paper will suggest that the effect exercised by these awards on the position of the
short story in UK publishing has been negligible. It will consider recent winners of the BBC
National Short Story Award, arguing that high-profile awards tend to be won by
established writers writing within the genre conventions of the social-psychological short
story. Experimental short fiction, historical short fiction, crime short fiction, and other
categories of short prose must seek either their own prize-awarding bodies or go
uncelebrated on a larger scale.

(7) Wolfgang Grtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria (co-convenor)
British and Irish Poetry Prizes A Critical Evaluation
Prizes have become a normal part of any moderately successful literary career. Writers
handbooks usually list more than 200 prizes for Great Britain and Ireland, the majority of
them being awarded for new novels. Just around ten per cent of the literary prizes are
awarded in the field of poetry. For a non-UK publisher (for example, Poetry Salzburg),
even considering the idea of submitting new collections for British poetry prizes, quickly
brings complete disillusion. The guidelines defining the rules and conditions of entry
usually contain the stereotype requirement first published in the UK or the Republic of
Ireland.

The majority of the Irish poetry awards contrasts pleasantly with their British
counterparts. The Patrick Kavanagh Award, one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in
Ireland, is confined to poets born in Ireland, or of Irish nationality, or long-term residents
of Ireland. But country of publication is irrelevant. Similarly, the Poetry Now Award is
presented for the best single volume of poetry by an Irish poet, irrespective of place of
publication.

This paper will evaluate the most important British and Irish poetry prizes and try
to find out whether the policy of British poetry-prize administrators is in compliance with
terms of EU agreements.

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S74 21st-Century Female Crime Fiction
Co-convenors: Wolfgang Grtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, Agnieszka
Sienkiewicz-Charlish, University of Gdansk, Poland,

(1) Jessica Homberg-Schramm, University of Cologne, Germany
Female Tartan Noir: Denise Minas 21st- Century Crime Fiction

Scottish womens writing has long been characterised by a double marginalisation of their
writers, both as Scottish and as women. The subsequent rise of female writers and their
increased visibility in the late 20th and 21st centuries has not been paralleled in the genre
of crime fiction that is still dominated by male authors in Scotland. After scrutinising the
genre label Tartan Noir, the paper provides a short overview of female Scottish crime
fiction. Published at the turn of the century, Denise Minas Garnethill trilogy (19982001)
will then be employed as an example of crime fiction that is dedicated to a female
perspective. The paper will demonstrate in which ways Mina exposes institutionalised
violence against women pervading all levels of Scottish society in her novels. A special
focus will be on Minas depiction of the city as a post-industrial space that reflects the
conditions of and facilitates the growth of violence. In a last step, the paper will critically
engage with Minas agenda that presents the mirroring of mens violent behaviour as the
only resort available to women.

(2) Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish, University of Gdansk, Poland (co-convenor)
Glasgow Noir: Denise Minas The Red Road
Denise Mina has published 12 novels as well as a number of short stories, plays and
graphic novels. Her writing has been identified with explicitly feminist politics
(Scotsman). She claims that she is a lifelong feminist (Mullin) and wants to use crime
fiction to present a narrative about very disempowered people becoming empowered
(Trouble and Strife). Consequently, Mina focuses on the personal and professional
struggles of individual and often vulnerable women such as a former psychiatric patient
and a sexual abuse survivor Maureen ODonnell (Garnethill Trilogy) and would-be
journalist Paddy Meehan (The Field of Blood, The Dead Hour, The Last Breath).
Minas novels are less concerned with personal guilt than with the social evils that create
criminals and the predators who nurture them. She explores such themes as family, social
injustice and institutional violence offering a window to contemporary reality. Minas
focus on the social issues puts her close to the fiction of William McIlvanney or Ian Rankin;
however, Mina has increased the psychological element and given voice to the characters
often unprivileged in crime fiction.

The paper is going to offer a closer reading of Minas The Red Road (2013),
featuring a female police officer, DI Alex Marrow. It will examine how Minas political
intentions are played out in the novel and how she escapes the limitations of the serial
format of the police procedural by subverting its conventions.

(3) Eduardo Garca Agustn, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid. Spain
Crime in Pandemic Times: Louise Welsh and Her Plague Times Trilogy.

In the two published novels of her still unfinished Plague Times Trilogy, Scottish writer
Louise Welsh presents a world being devastated by a highly infectious disease known as
The Sweats. After developing all its symptoms, some people become survivors in a world
where life and death have acquired a new signification. However, amongst the millions of
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victims, the main characters in each novel become unexpected detectives and find
themselves immersed in a contemporary, apocalyptic whodunit in which solving a crime
becomes the only remnant of the pre-sweats human logic. Some peoples lives become
thus grievable, borrowing Judith Butlers term from Frames of War (2009), as opposed to
millions of massive ungrievable lives: Dr Simon Sharkley for Stevie Flint in A Lovely Way to
Burn (2014) and the different member of the community Magnus McFall meets in Death is
a Welcome Guest (2015).

My presentation arises from Ascaris claim that, when reading, we grasp only those
aspects of texts that our cultural position and subjectivity enables us to recognise and to
relate to other data (2007). My approach highlights the darkened, almost Gothic,
elements that tinge the literary, televisual and cinematographic references in both novels
by Louise Welsh, as well as the readers true real life, where crimes, massive deaths and
several pandemics do actually take place. This leads to the questioning on characters and
readers alike of the true human condition, where the divide between good and bad, death
and life are far too subtle.

(4) Wolfgang Grtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria (co-convenor)
Im a lot smarter than most of those dozy detectives you see on the box. And Im a
lot less patient. Val McDermids The Skeleton Road (2014)
Val McDermids standalone novel The Skeleton Road (2014), a whodunit novel, is
introduced by an epigraph which forms its thematic leitmotif: the geography of the world
is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing
authorities over the power to organize, occupy and administer space. It prepares her
readers for a very political crime novel. Set in Edinburgh, Oxford, and Croatia during the
Balkan Wars of the 1990s, it involves as protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie,
Head of the Historic Cases Unit for Police Scotland. The main themes range from genocide
and ethnic tensions to individual human betrayal. This paper will offer an in-depth
analysis of the novel that is based on an interview with the author conducted in Salzburg
in November 2015.

(5) Stephen Butler, Ulster University, Great Britain
The Likeness of Male and Female Detectives in Tana Frenchs Fiction
Tana French is one of Irelands most successful crime writers, an impressive achievement
considering the almost completely masculine bias of the genres publishing record until
the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Unlike other female writers
in the genre though, it could be argued that gender politics plays little of a role in her work.
In her first novel In The Woods, the main character is the male detective Rob Ryan around
whom much of the plot focuses, with his partner Cassie Maddox in the role of female
sidekick. In Frenchs next novel, The Likeness, Cassie, however, is the main protagonist, and
the plot revolves around an old undercover case she used to work. Much was gleaned of
Cassies character second-hand in the first novel, whilst she assumes the main role in the
second, and the contrast between the two approaches to Cassies characterisation is a key
element of comparison between the two novels. In the third novel, Faithful Place, Frank
Mackie who is a former superior officer of Cassies and the principle secondary character
of the second novel takes the role of the main character, and as in the first novel there are
further insights into Cassies character, once more from a secondary source. This paper
will examine how these various narrative focalisations add infinite layers of complexity to
Cassies character, with insights offered as much from her male companions as from
herself, in a manner that seriously deconstructs any gender binaries in this form of crime
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writing. That Tana French herself is a novelist equally adroit at handling male and female
characters and narrative voices is a testimony to her unique talent in the contemporary
crime fiction context.

(6) Laura Ellen Joyce, Edinburgh Napier and UEA., Great Britain
21st-Century Marriage Thrillers: Gaslighting in Gone Girl (2012) and Her Story
(2015)

Gone Girl, a bestselling crime novel (and later a Hollywood blockbuster) and Her Story, a
critically acclaimed videogame, are both proof of the reach of female-centred crime fiction
in contemporary culture. In this paper I will argue that both stories are updated versions
of the marriage thriller, the most famous of which is Gregory Cukors 1944 film Gaslight.
This film was so famous that it coined a new term, gaslighting, which is used colloquially
to describe prolonged psychological abuse, usually intimate partner abuse. Both Gone Girl
and Her Story centre on murderous female narrators who have been victim in some way to
gaslighting, and I would argue that the marriage thriller is alive and well in contemporary
female-centred crime fiction.

Through careful narration, inventive storytelling, and experimental techniques,
both Her Story and Gone Girl update the marriage thriller to reveal that gaslighting and
intimate partner abuse are still very real threats in the 21st century.

(7) Maria Vara, Hellenic Air Force Academy, Athens, Greece
Metafictional Crime Novels by Women: The 21st-Century Greek Progeny

While women have been among the most prolific crime authors, the metafictional crime
novel (a term implying the appreciation of mysteries which remain hopelessly
unresolved), is still stereotypically considered to be a male-dominated territory. During
the past two decades, while crime fiction became regional and multi-ethnic, the Greek
progeny turned into a distinctive product that has begun to develop a tradition, albeit with
no visible metafictional input, let alone by women authors. The purpose of this paper is to
highlight and contextualise this input, by focusing on two contemporary crime novels
whereby metafictional artifice is constituted by the layering of multiple narrative levels:
Soti Triantafillous Kinezika Koutia. Tesseris Epoches tou Detective Malone [Chinese Boxes.
Four Seasons for Detective Malone], published in Greek in 2006, (translated in German in
2009 and in Italian in 2012), and Argiro Mantoglous Lefki Revans [White Revenge, which
connotes an invalid one], published in 2012, only in Greek so far. Both novels more or less
explicitly deploy and subvert traditional conventions of the genre, using the idea of
Chinese nested boxes in order to host queries about the formation of gender and
subjectivity in a contemporary urban context.

(8) Tiina Mntymki, University of Vaasa, Finland
Fearsome Encounters in Unni Lindells Rdhette
Norwegian crime writer Unni Lindells psychological thriller Rdhette (2004) revolves
around a fearsome encounter with a wolf and a female child in a forest which
dramatically leads to the birth of a female serial killer. The thriller draws both on the
various versions of a medieval folktale featuring a girl in a red hood, circulated mainly by
female storytellers, and the more recent written versions by male writers such as Perrault
and Brothers Grimm. Moreover, this crime novel joins the continuum of numerous
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contemporary rewritings of the story in which the woman stigmatized by the colour red
metamorphoses into a subversive force.
In this paper, my aim is to detect the ways in which the female murderer is constructed in
terms of affect, applying Sara Ahmeds ideas of strangeness as an epistemological category
and fear as an emotion which produces fearsome encounters. I discuss the protagonists
murdering career as a series of encounters with strangeness and fear. After her seminal
encounter with male violence as a child, the murderer-to-be constructs a fiction of the
wolf and produces this fiction as a phobic object, a strange body which later comes to
serve as a point of recognition whenever she feels threatened and a motivator for murder.

(9) Elena Avanzas lvarez, University of Oviedo, Spain
'The Doctor Is Here': Female and Feminist Forensic Doctors in Contemporary Crime
Fiction

Patricia Cornwell inaugurated a new era in crime fiction when she saw her first Kay
Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, published in 1990. However, Cornwell did much more than
simply creating the forensic thriller: she created an archetype that has changed female and
feminist characters in 21st century crime fiction.
It is not a coincidence that most forensic doctors in crime fiction a label under which I
will include both novels and television shows are women. They are what Sally Munt calls
"The New Woman": 'powerful detectives [who] resolve three unstable forms close to the
liberal feminist heart the individual, the family, and the state' (1994: 29). So, I will
analyse their political and gendered concerns in relation to the three fields Munt
highlights. First, how both women's agency plays a key role in constructing their own
identities. Secondly, how they balance their lives with traditional family roles associated
with women, and, finally, how they interact with the state and their work in a field
traditionally constructed as male. The aim of this paper is to analyse female forensic
doctors as the evolution of the traditional female sleuth paying special attention to their
bodies, the spaces they occupy, and their relationship with traditional constructions of
femininity, all from a feminist point of view.

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S75. MEDIA, CULTURE AND FOOD - MEANING OF NEW NARRATIVES

Co-convenors
Mara Jos Coperas-Aguilar, Universitat de Valncia, Spain
Slvka Tomakov, Univerzita Pavla Jozefa afrika v Koiciach, Slovakia

The immense growth of new media in the 21st century has caused substantial changes in
the old media, both in their forms and their contents. In the last two decades food as a
cultural phenomenon has become one of the most visible narrative categories in
discourses of old and new media. The space provided to various elements related to food
has been enormous and is still growing. Contributions to this seminar will focus on the
analysis of food elements which constitute new narratives in any kind of media, traditional
or digital. They will also examine the relations between culture, food and media
consumption addressing questions connected to the role food plays in the creation of
meaning in contemporary media narratives.

Taste and Consumption in Hannibal: Food and Corpses as Cultural Signifiers
Astrid Schwegler Castaer, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain
Food and its related processes such as taste are often used as metaphors for abstract
concepts since they are at once part of one of the most basic human need and a symbolic
system that defines personal and national differences. NBCs TV-Series Hannibal (2013-
15) entwines aesthetic taste with its literal meaning of gustatory perception to present a
critical view of US consumerist society through the aesthetics of violence and bodies,
which are consumed as cultural products. I will look at how aesthetic taste coupled with
the recurring conceptual metaphor of cannibalism/consumerism are linked to how
characters showcase and acquire their social status, moral values and ultimately power.
This, in connection to the shows highly stylized visual aesthetics and its distortion of
features of the serial killer fiction tradition, will show how the consumption of violence
and bodies in parallel to art and food blurs ethical boundaries of both the characters and
the audience, offering a criticism of the current consumerist society.

Advertising Italian Food Overseas through the Visual Media
Lucia Abbamonte, Seconda Universit di Napoli, Italy
Flavia Cavaliere, Universit degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy

By acting as a pervasive sixth sense, the media is responsible for cultivating viewers
conceptions of social reality and creating meanings. In the world of advertising, the visual
media often constructs portrayals, which are filtered through viewers race, socioeconomic
status, etc. Particularly in food advertising, a close relation between ethnic/national
cultures and food is foregrounded. We investigated the evolution of the typically Italian
Food-Family-Females association over the decades and we showed how in US TV
commercials of the 1980s to the 1990s of Italian (style) food, Italian American women
were depicted either as caring (grand) mothers and aproned good cooks, whereas in
2000-2010 US TV commercials, the foregrounding of more fashionable typecasts is
recognisable. In the pragmatic TV commercial dimension, the preparation and
consumption of (supposedly) fresh Mediterranean food, with its culture-laden elements, is
transferred outside its socio-cultural cradle and re-shaped in a persuasive meta-fictional
setting. By using MCDA tools, we accounted for how videos, images, language switching,
accents, music, costumes work synergically to create meanings. Through the pragmatically
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devised framing of products images, taglines, auditory settings, and that of characters
transitive gaze vectors, gestures, and proxemics, an ongoing multi-sensorial process of
configuration takes place, where an evolving Italianicity reaches beyond its Mediterranean
boundary.

Culture, Food and Subtitling: The Appetite for Narration in Audio-Visual Media
Eleonora Sasso, Universit degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara, Italy

This paper takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphors ideas are food and food
is thought as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) in order to advance a new reading of
subtitling, one which sees this medium as a new audio-visual narrative category. Such
films as Chocolat (1988), Waitress (2007), Julie & Julia (2009), Chef (2014), and The
Hundred-Foot Journey (2014) not only envision their own detailed blueprints of the culture
of food, but are also audio-visual narratives examining the relationship between culture,
food and media. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues -- the role
of food in the creation of ideas, subtitling strategies for rendering culture-bound terms
related to food, etc. -- which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re-read the
aforementioned corpus of subtitled films from a cognitive perspective. I will analyse food
conceptual metaphors pertaining to the films mentioned above in order to demonstrate
that the mind is conceptualized in bodily terms and that food for thought constitutes
appropriate ideas for mental eating in new filmic narratives. Through Vianne, Jessa, Julie,
Julia, Carl, Madame Mallory, and Hasan, I suggest, food consumption acquires a cultural
valence in the creation of meaning in contemporary audio-visual narratives.

Digitally Modified Food or How to Find Who We Are When We Read What We Eat:
The Case of Food Blogs
Otilia Pacea, Universitatea Ovidius din Constana, Romania

Food blogging is where old and new media collide, where traditional everyday food
practices and cooking discourse interact with emerging digital forms in the most
unpredictable ways. In food blogs, every recipe gets tested and food news shared, from
niche food stories of gluten free kosher or high-fiber Nicaraguan cooking, to food jokes or
restaurant reviews. Every kitchen story gets told across various media platforms, reaching
audiences, online and offline, national and global. In the context of such genre migration
and proliferation, conventional taxonomies are no longer valid. To classify blogs today
between thematic and personal blogs, as previously suggested, is to blissfully ignore the
legions of such successful content prosumers as the food bloggers. Computer-mediated
communication may be overpopulated with a myriad of mixed forms and blogs in general
might be dead or simply, difficult to reach with so much overlapping. Yet the increasing
popularity of the more recently emerged genre of the food blog proves the contrary. This
paper explores the socio-cultural construction of identity in the discourse of the most
widely read food blogs, testing a unifying framework for analysis that correlates
traditional linguistic indicators of self-expression with media features (image, theme,
website design, link, exchange analysis).

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S76 Gendered Bodies in Transit: from Alienation to Regeneration?

Recovering from a Traumatic Past. Restored Identity in Meg Kingstons Chrystal
Heart
Marta Alonso Jerez, Universidad de Mlaga

Chrystal seemed the typical nineteenth-century lady, passive and well-mannered;
however, an act of violence turns her into someone radically different, an active and
powerful being not fully human. She heals both physically and spiritually, becoming a
mature and strong woman, completely healed from that traumatic event and who will
never be a victim again. Meg Kingstons Chrystal Heart (2013) is a clear example of the
new identities arising in twenty-first-century steampunk movement and some of its
members main features, such as keeping Victorian manners, while showing some of the
characteristics of contemporary women. This work not only explores gender stereotypes
in Victorian England but also the features of the new steampunk woman of the twenty-first
century, who has achieved to recover from the trauma of past times and has learnt to use
the elements which were previously the source of discrimination in her advantage.
Throughout my paper, I will deal with Judith Butlers ideas on gender and identity as well
as Michel Foucaults notions of control. I will also make use of trauma studies to develop
my statements. Similarly, I will make reference to the relationship between fashion and
identity argued by Helene E. Roberts.

Deviant Women: Neo-Victorian Madwomen and Embodied Resistance
Ashley Orr, Australian National University

The Victorians are often characterised by their obsession with progress and yet their
attitudes toward deviant women were far from progressive. Recovering the experiences of
such marginalised women often absent from the historical record is a key concern of
neo-Victorian fiction and its criticism. However, scholarship has largely ignored fictional
representations of embodied modes of resistance to mechanisms of power and control. My
paper addresses this gap with reference to the figure of the madwoman in Wendy
Wallaces neo-Victorian novel The Painted Bridge (2012). Anna, the novels protagonist, is
wrongfully institutionalised by her controlling husband and subjected to a treatment
program akin to torture. Despite her trauma, she forms a community with her fellow
female patients and, together, they actively subvert the quasi-medical disciplinary regimes
designed to restore their subservience to male authority. My analysis takes an
interdisciplinary approach that brings together corporeal feminism, cultural memory
studies, and neo-Victorian literary criticism to argue that the Victorian madwoman in
Wallaces novel reflects the ongoing relevance of Victorian gender ideology in demarcating
normal and deviant female bodies in the present. Moreover, I examine the way in which
such bodies, through collective action, assert their independence by constructing
alternative ways of being in the world.

Emma Donoghues novel Room as an allegory of patriarchy and a post-patriarchal
fantasy
Eva Kowal, Jagiellonian University, Krakow

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In my presentation, I would like to discuss the child character from Emma Donoghues
2010 novel Room, five-year-old Jack, as a deviant body who is punished for being an
impure and androgynous Devils seed paradoxically only after his (self-)liberation
from the captivity of which he was never aware. I would like to reflect on the relativity
and problematic duality created by the walls of the shed/Room, which itself will be seen as
both the most hyperbolic symbol of patriarchy (in its actual, physical form: the shed) and a
model for a non- or post-patriarchal society (in its potentiality and its emotional and
imaginary form: Room).
Drawing upon the writings of Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), Mary Douglas (Purity and
Danger), and Christiane Olivier (Jocastas Children. The Imprint of the Mother) I would like
to analyse the co-existence in the novel of the realistic traumatic experience of Mas
imprisonment because of her forceful reduction to the female body and sexuality (which
corresponds with the phallogocentric perception of women) with what I read as a
fantasy/science-fiction vision of a future generation of sons not brought up in accordance
with the Law of the Father, who could give rise to an otherwise unimaginable non-/post-
patriarchal society.

Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (University of Mlaga), "The Hottentot Venus, and the
Neo-Victorian: The Problematization of South-Africa and the Sexual Identity of the
Black Other".
In her novel, Hottentot Venus, published in 2003, Barbara Chase-Riboud tries to bring to
light the story of a woman whose life represents the utmost vilification of the female black
body and sexuality but in a fictionalised way. In this context, she tries to question issues of
sexual exploitation and discrimination and to re-write the history of slave-women giving a
voice to the victims. The experience and the memory of slavery constitute a key element in
the reconstruction of the past and in the construction of a better future. Similarly, the
process of recovery and identity construction in a postcolonial era determined by the
traces of colonial trauma is an important element in the fictionalisation of Sarah
Baartmans life as an icon of the idealisation and problematisation of South-Africa. Also the
author resorts to spectrality to give her protagonist some agency in a post-positivist sense,
but also to symbolise the silenced voices of subaltern colonial people that haunt our
present postcolonial societies. These issues bring to the fore questions of race and
feminism, the idealization of the colonies and colonised people in contrast with white
imperial subjects, and the consideration of the contemporary neo-slave narrative as a Neo-
Victorian genre.

Scars, tattoos, hairstyles: redressing pain and healing in the poetry of Patience
Agbabi
Manuela Coppola, Universit della Calabria

The Black body has historically been the battleground for discourses of power and
subjection, trauma and representation. Reduced to non-human commodity during slavery,
considered as a primitive object to be examined and displayed under the scientific and/or
voyeuristic gaze of the white male, the Black female body in particular has been subject to
exploitation, as well as to scrutiny and discipline. Moving away from notions of afro-
pessimism, in this paper I will focus on the ways in which the contemporary British poet
of Nigerian origin Patience Agbabi has re-articulated the black female body as a complex
and ambiguous site of pain, suffering and healing. Far from being either represented as a
site of victimization or celebrated as a source of material and spiritual nurture, the black
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gendered body is reconceptualised in her poetry as a shifting signifier which is incessantly
re-written through its unstable markers of identity such as skin and hair, a performative
tool able to deal with past and present traumas. In particular, I contend that Agbabi
redresses the contemporary pained body in new and unpredictable ways, turning the
entangled performance of pain and pleasure into an empowering and liberating
instrument which challenges the expected trajectory from alienation to healing.

Bring up the Bodies: Hilary Mantels Vindication of the Rights of Women in
History
Simonetta Falchi, Universit di Sassari

Mantels trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light) questions the
possibility of narrating true facts: can the official history we learn from books and
documents really be said truer than a novel? To which degree are facts manipulated, and
by whom? Are women the victims of patriarchal violence, or its accomplices? Firstly, a
possible answer to these questions will be offered analysing the metaphor of Annes body
as a scapegoat on the altar of HIStory, as it emerges from the dualistic opposition between
the queens dismembered body and the undivided, augmented, body of Thomas Cromwell
significantly reverberating in the other Thomases of the novels. Secondly, Annes
traumatised body will be considered as a body of evidence mining the well-established
version of history by promoting through the power of proof a revision of the narratives
in terms of HERstory. In this view, the four women who protect Annes body represent the
blossoms of a nascent sorority, and their cry We do not want men to handle her the
manifesto of a possibility to open up a healing discourse of regeneration and
empowerment.

The Dying Body: Caste and Nationhood in Contemporary Indian Short Stories
Antonia Navarro Tejero, Universidad de Crdoba

This paper will address issues associated with end-of-life experiences as represented in
Githa Hariharans The Remains of the Feast, a short story taken from her 1992 collection
The Art of Dying, and Mahasweta Devis Breast-Giver, from her 1997 collection Breast
Stories. Both Indian women writers deploy female characters who die of cancer, and how
families treat the dying old women in the Indian society. Though both authors are Hindu
Brahmins, Hariharan deals with repression and escape as related to female selfhood in a
brahminical community, and Devi pays particular attention to low caste women. However,
both focus on the gender-violence these womens social existence leads to.
Following Judith Butlers theories of violence and mourning, Mary Douglass notions of
pollution and taboo, and Gayatri Spivaks subalternity, we will examine the metaphor of
the cancerous tumor, and the rejection of the hospital as a foreign institution. We will
conclude by asserting that the short stories discussed in this paper can be read as a harsh
indictment of an exploitative social system as well as a weapon of resistance.

The Others Other: Alterity and Resilience in Olive Seniors Arrival of the Snake-
Woman
Teresa Carbayo Lpez de Pablo, Universidad de Zaragoza
Most of Olive Seniors fiction revolves around the intersection between race, class and
gender in Jamaican rural communities. In Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989, 2009), the
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author explores the encounter with otherness in an African-Jamaican Creole context upon
the arrival of an Indian migrant, and the neo-colonial and communal structures of power
that aim to alienate and dehumanize her. Drawing on the theoretical framework of
abjection and narratives of community, as well as on Jamaican folklore and Caribbean
feminist discourses, this paper will focus on the mechanismslinguistic, mythical and
institutionaladopted by the inhabitants of Mount Rose, the community described by
Senior, to marginalize and demonize the Indo-Caribbean woman known as snake-
woman or Miss Coolie. In doing so, it will explore how myths and religion have fuelled
discrimination against (female) otherness within Afro-Jamaican communities.
It is my contention that such process of displacement and racial exclusion is contested by
Miss Coolies anansi-like survival strategies of accommodation and negotiation, which will
ultimately subvert racial and gender hierarchies, allowing her to perform the cultural
identity of her choice. Seniors choice of an Indo-Caribbean characterdespite her falling
into clichscomplicates and displaces the Caribbean Afro-European dichotomy that has
traditionally ignored the Indian presence, ultimately presenting Indian migration in
Jamaica as a regenerating force for the community.

Gendered Bodies in Transit in Nuala OFaolains memoir Are you somebody?
Mara Elena Jaime de Pablos, Universidad de Almeria

The aim of this paper is to examine the international bestseller Are you somebody?, which
was published in 1996 as an autobiographical work by the Irish writer Nuala OFaolain,
from a gender perspective. Cathy Caruths cultural trauma theory will be applied to
analyse OFaolains memoir which renders the disturbing effects of gendering bodies on
individuals who live in a patriarchal society like Irelands.
In Are you somebody? Nuala OFaolain constructs the narrative of her life through
selected memories which range from childhood, as a girl trying to survive in a poor
dysfunctional family in Eamon de Valeras Ireland, where she can witness how female
bodies are gendered through psychological and physical violence and constant pregnancy,
to adulthood as a cosmopolitan unmarried middle-aged woman who openly subverts the
patriarchal ideology in the Celtic Tiger years.
The strategies that OFaolain employs university education, extensive reading,
travelling, etc. to learn how to reject and deconstruct the personal, gender and national
identity, grounded on false essentialist patriarchal prejudices, that she was told to assume
at an early stage of her life, will receive focal attention. Similarly, Nualas mind and body
transformation to achieve a more liberating and satisfactory personal, sexual and
professional identity, founded on global influences, gender equality, integrity principles
and enriching human relationships, will also be thoroughly analysed.

The Magdalenes: Subjected bodies and peripheral sexualities in Conlons The
Magdalen (1999) and Mullans The Magdalen Sisters (2002)
Elena Cantueso Urbano, Universidad de Mlaga

In this paper I analyse the vulnerability of womens bodies in connection to a historical fact
that disestablished 20th century Ireland; I am referring to the so called Magdalen laundries
where thousands of deviant women were enclosed to embrace a pious life and develop
laundry work. Sexual repression and punishment has been one of the measures taken by
the Catholic Church to maintain social order. Given that, all those women who did not
conform to the morality standards approved by the Church were automatically considered
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fallen women and sent to Magdalen asylums where they were rehabilitated following the
religious doctrine. Following Adriana Cavareros work Horrorism I take the Magdalens
bodies as the target of modern forms of violence. Moreover, I study the Magdalenes as
peripheral sexualities (Foucault) condemned for a sinful life by the Irish Catholic Church.
Morality, sexuality, violence and identity are key concepts in this paper which
explores the hidden cruel reality about the Magdalenes. Given the social resonance of this
historical fact, several cultural products have resulted as a sign of peoples uneasiness.
Following postmodernism and gender studies, I analyse Marita Conlons novel and Peter
Mullans film exploring womens bodies and their identities in the Irish Catholic State.

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S77. Women on the Move: Diasporic Bodies, Diasporic Memories, Constructing
Femininity in the Transitional and Transnational Era in Contemporary Narratives in
English.
Co-convenors Julia Tofantuk, Tallinn University, Estonia
Silvia Pellicer Ortn, University of Zaragoza, Spain

Abram, Nicola (University of Reading, UK)
Diasporic Bodies, diasporic books: Yvonne Veras short stories
This paper will examine the relationship between women and space as represented in
works by Yvonne Vera, an award-winning author whose own biography is a tale of transit
and transition spanning Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and Canada.
Veras under-examined first book, the 1992 short story collection Why Dont You
Carve Other Animals, is the papers focus. The opening story, Crossing Boundaries, seeds
the themes identity, power, belonging that circulate throughout the collection (and,
indeed, in Veras subsequent novels). I propose Veras use of form as a feminist means of
making space. For example, her cinematic scenes slow the speed of time, forcing a
lingering look at the world she creates. I read Veras use of the short story form as
particularly significant; the typographical spaces between texts are suggestive of the lives
unlived and stories still untold.
To conclude this exploration of womens writing as a space to imagine new
identities, I will reflect on the material text as a body that is itself in circulation: made by
individuals hands and moving across national borders. I thus suggest the literary archive
as demanding our scholarly attention, as the site of texts and identities that are
unpublished, unremembered still in motion.

Vera, Yvonne, Why Dont You Carve Other Animals (Toronto: TSAR, 1992)
Vera, Yvonne, Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Womens Writing
(Oxford: Heinemann, 1999)

Bigot, Corinne (Paris Ouest Nanterre, France)
The thing around your neck: making sense of home and self in contemporary
diasporic short stories by women
In this paper I would like to look at how contemporary female writers (Nalo Hopkinson,
Edwige Dandicat, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Chimamanda NGozi Adichie) explore the
diasporic female experience foregrounding the female body and the senses. Home and
memory of home, experienced as the thing around your neck, even in a new life and new
home with a new husbandin an arranged marriage, sustained in the memory of odors and
tastes of traditional food, embodied by ghosts, or encapsulated in a batik hanging in an
American bedroom, remain a bond that seems to prevent the young woman from finding
out who she is in the new country and may eventually force her to flee once more or
forever. Foregrounding of the body and the senses (womens hands and tongues thickened
by pottery, touch, cooking, or a hybrid tongue, with Creole, Bengali or Igbo words that
resist assimilation) are the means to express the loss of identity in trying to make sense of
home and self. Yet, the emphasis on the body and the senses, as well as diasporic narratives
by women boiling in the narrators blood suggest hope of finding a space and voice of
their own.

Cobo Pinero, Maria Rocio (University of Cdiz, Spain)
Taiye Selasi and the Afropolitan Daughters of the Diaspora
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The aim of this paper is to analyze the main features of Taiye Selasis influential coinage,
Afropolitan (2005), and if her debut novel, Ghana Must Go (2013), embodies such
components. In order to do so, I first confront Selasis term with new theories of
cosmopolitanism (Braidotti, Click Schiller, Mignolo), while considering questions of
gender, race, power and transculturation. Although the Afropolitan consciousness outlined
in Selasis Bye-Bye, Babar (or: What is an Afropolitan?) complicates and destabilizes
fixed notions of identity, it refers to privileged experiences of migration from Africa to the
West. The general positive ideas associated to Afropolitanism and the international
experience, noticeably contrast with her more nuanced and multilayered portrait in Ghana
Must Go. The dreams of success in the United States are the main source of conflict and
frustration for the family of African descent that leads the choral story. The three parts of
the novel display an aesthetic of mobility and dislocation distinctive of the characters
diasporic subjectivities, in transit between Nigeria, Ghana, England and the United States.
A critical notion of Afropolitanism is further articulated: one that questions gender roles,
delves into the historical motives of the contemporary diaspora and privileges identities
on the move.

Courtois, Cedric (Paris I, Pantheon Sorbonne, France)
Need[ing] to fill the void with sound: Giving a Voice to Displaced African Women in
Chris Abanis Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwes On Black Sisters Street
(2009)
On Black Sisters Street deals with four African prostitutes in Antwerp, Belgium. Their pimp
offered them a [middle?] passage to Europe. Only through the death of one of them will
they voice their unspeakable stories with garrotted voices, silence(s), and shout[s],
conveying a cacophonous first impression.
Becoming Abigail narrates the life of a Nigerian teenager. After her father commits
suicide, Abigail falls into the hands of a relative who plans to prostitute her in London.
While Unigwes novel is interested in sounds but also silence(s), which become the
[imagined] community [readers] share with these women, Abanis novella is inward-
looking. In this paper, we analyse a whole linguistic spectrum ranging from muteness to
logorrhoea.
These works are diasporic female narratives of development. By using the
Bildungsroman associated with masculinist views Abani and Unigwe aim to debunk
patriarchy. This paper analyses both works under the light of feminist and diaspora
theory. The stories presented are individual stories which become a collective one: the
story of the silenced minority, as Caryl Phillips wrote.

Arizti, Brbara (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
See Now Then (2013): A Palimpsestuous Reading of Jamaica Kincaids Limit Case
Autobiography
In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2011), Gilmore asserts that life
writing has been transformed by the representation of traumatic experiences, giving way
to works tethering on the edge between the fictional and the factual. I intend to read
Kincaids latest novel as a limit case autobiography on the domestic trauma of a failed
marriage based on the authors experience.
Time features prominently in See Now Then. Mrs Sweet, the main character, often
ponders on how her Now quickly turns into a Then and on how the Then still painfully
impinges on the Now. In the novel, references to different kinds of time personal,
geological, historical, mythical, mystical, etc. dispose themselves like the layers of a
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palimpsest. My analysis does not, nevertheless, involve a traditional palimpsestic reading
of the text in an attempt to reach down to its deepest hidden meanings, but, as Dillon puts
it in her monograph on the palimpsest, I perform a palimpsestuous approach that explores
the interplay of themes in the Now, this complex variegated surface, where the trauma of
an estranged marriage intertwines with those of the mother-daughter relationship and the
legacy of the Empire the staples of Kincaids on-going serial autobiography.

Antxustegi-Etxarte Aranga, Maialen (University of Deusto Bilbao, Spain)
Travelling the U.S-Mexican border, challenging chicanidad
Crossing a national border might represent a simple routine or a revolutionary factor in
the development of border identity. The site of the border, with its political implications,
directly affects the border-crossing experience in cultural, economical, and legal terms.
The case of the U.S.-Mexican border is particularly dramatic, and it is the purpose of this
study to examine the feminization of this modern border struggle.
In the 1960s, Aztln, the Chicano homeland, embodied the ideological
conceptualization of El Movimiento and was pivotal in the design of Chicana/os political
activism. Nevertheless, little was said about the way in which tradition maintained
Chicanas triple oppression as working, colored women. In order to overcome this void
Tejana theorist Gloria Anzalda reinterpreted the concept of Aztln by locating her
alternative homeland in the U.S.-Mexico border. Her concept of the Borderland dismissed a
constraining understanding of traditional nationalisms, and, instead, she promoted a
mestiza conceptualization of the border.
The novel El Puente/The Bridge (2000) by Chicano author Ito Romo revolves
around the apparently uneventful everyday life of individuals living on both sides of the
U.S.-Mexican border. It is through day-to-day practices that the women in these
Borderlands challenge constraining notions of womanhood, nationalism and chicanidad.

Snchez Palencia, Carolina (University of Sevilla, Spain)
Under the Skin of British History: Bodies in Transit in Andrea Levys Small Island
(2004)
Andrea Levys Small Island (2004) shows how notions of race, nation and space were
redefined in the context of postwar Britain when the first generation of Caribbean
immigrants following the arrival of the Windrush in 1948 challenged the perverse logic of
ethnic absolutism (Gilroy 2004: 110), and called upon a necessary reassessment of what
it meant to be British. This paper interrogates Levys novel to examine how these social,
political and cultural dislocations are primarily registered in the body as the locus of an
identity that is no longer coherent and unified, but always divided and displaced. I draw
from Body Theory (Foucault; Grosz; Haraway) and Postcolonial Studies (Gilroy; Hall;
Brah) to analyze the complex ways in which multicultural environments have endorsed a
hierarchy of bodies as organizing principle while simultaneously negotiating non-
essentialist modes of cross-racial relationships. Most of the issues addressed by Levy
racial segregation, cultural prejudice, ghettoization, housing discrimination,
miscegenationinvolve a centrality of the body that has been overlooked in much of the
critical work about the Anglo-Caribbean author. In this light, it is interesting to note how
she suggests that postwar anxiety about racial impurity coexisted with the exoticization
and eroticization of the Other, a complex synergy presiding the libidinal economy of
colonial and postcolonial Britain.

Mirza, Maryam (University of Liege, Belgium)
343
The Intellectual Female Body in Indian Diasporic Fiction by Women Writers
Through the prism of two novels by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland
(2013), and Kirin Narayans campus novel Love, Stars, and All That (1994), this paper
grapples with literary depictions of first- and second-generation female immigrants of
Indian descent working as academics in North America. Some of the questions that my
paper will address are as follows: in what ways does a transnational academic career and
their choice of specialization inform the female characters class and gendered identity in
the host country? To what extent does the immigrants intellectual journey in these
novels echo her engagement with her cultural heritage (as appears to be the case with
Gita, the protagonist of Narayans novel, who becomes a scholar of Indian folklore)? Or
rather does it reflect a conflict-ridden relationship with the Indian diasporic community
and become a means of avoiding a confrontation with ones racialized identity (which, for
instance, Moushimi in The Namesake seems to do by specializing in French literature)? The
paper will also seek to evaluate the extent to which a transnational academic career
proves to be a liberating experience (emotionally, sexually or otherwise) for the female
characters.

Barros del Rio, Maria Amor (presenting) and Concetta Maria Sigona (University of
Burgos, Spain)
Looking back on the American Dream: Irish female migration and return in two
contemporary novels
In the last years there has been an increasing production of Irish narrative addressing
issues of exile and diaspora. That profusion of migrant fiction suggests a need to express
cultural identity negotiations, in particular those of women abroad.
Edna OBriens The Light of Evening (2006) and Colm Tibns Brooklyn (2009)
explore a troubling sense of place through the testimonies of emigrated and returned Irish
women. Both novels are set at present time but they recall female diasporic experiences in
the early decades of the 20th century. In these novels, physical and emotional
(dis)locations problematise the traditional representations of Irish womanhood and their
place within Irish society. Through the lens of translocational positionality (Anthias 2002,
2008), negotiations within the boundaries of time and space are revealed. An
intersectional approach will illuminate how these novels use migration to question female
identification with the unitary national subject. The analysis will finally unveil the real and
symbolic contradictions lived by Irish women experiencing displacement and it will
demonstrate how issues of identity are affected by geographical and cultural spatialities.

Gilbert, Ruth (University of Winchester, UK)
Dislocations: Exploring Diasporic Identifications in Contemporary British Jewish
Womens Writing
This paper looks at dislocation and disjunction as recurring motifs in contemporary British
Jewish womens writing. By focusing particularly on figurations of place and space, it
considers how contemporary British Jewish women writers explore themes of connection
and disconnection: not focusing entirely on fixed ideas of home and exile but rather
exploring the experience of Diaspora that can be, in Bryan Cheyettes words, a blessing or
a curse or, more commonly, an uneasy amalgam of the two states. Focussing on themes of
place and displacement, belonging and longing, sites of origin and destination, this study
will also reflect on more contemporary relocations within recent British Jewish writing.
For British Jews, the diaspora undoubtedly presents some past and current ambiguities,
namely being simultaneously a well-established, highly assimilated cultural group, yet
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demonstrating, especially in texts written by women, an ongoing preoccupation with
issues of hybridity and liminal identifications. Thus, dislocation will be arguably
understood, in Yellins words, as a source of generative tension and creative possibility,
whereas diaspora will be paradoxically looked at from the increasingly decentred
conditions of todays Britain, the place where these writers are supposed to belong.

Glebova, Olga (Jan Dugosz University of Czstochowa, Poland)
My sisters, my daughters, my clones, myself: female identity and female bonds in
the speculative fiction of Weldon and Atwood
The proposed paper aims to examine representations of femininity in two works of
contemporary womens speculative fiction: The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) by Fay
Weldon and The Handmaids Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. Both novels provide an
ecofeminist critique of modern science as a projection of mens values and explore
possible effects of futuristic technological developments on female bodies and female
identity. In Weldons novel, the experience of cloning is envisioned as an empowering one.
The bonds of sisterhood formed by the protagonist and her clones signify a utopian non-
hierarchical space of female solidarity, where the stratified social positions are reversed
and intermixed, identities are redefined and women are allowed choice, freedom and
success. By contrast, in Atwoods dark feminist dystopia the many-layered female
hierarchy, established by means of sexual and social engineering, is a travesty of the
feminist ideal of sisterhood since women, segregated according to their fertility and class
status, are devoid of self-determination and agency. Although the two novels offer
strikingly different scenarios of how male interference in nature may affect female identity
and femalefemale power relations, they both view female bonding as a formative force in
the development of female subjectivity.

Pellicer-Ortn, Silvia (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
Short Stories on the Move: Mapping Memory and Constructing the (Jewish)
Diasporic Female Self in Michelene Wandors False Relations (2004)
False Relations is a collection of short stories whose time span goes back to Biblical times,
passing through the Renaissance, and returning to the present, and whose settings move
across the globe. Among these miscellaneous dimensions, diverse literary genres are re-
written as well as multifarious voices enter a mutual dialogue that transcends time and
space boundaries and shapes the polyphonic collection of stories that British-Jewish
writer Michlene Wandor has pieced together with the aim of disclosing the complex
mechanisms that underlie the construction of Jewish female identities in the transnational
era.
The main aim of my study is to analyse the narrative elements that assemble these
stories to demonstrate that they respond to the need to foster transnational and
multidirectional links so that the women depicted may make sense of their disrupted
sense of history and identity, whereas they also struggle to keep their specificity against
hegemonic discourses. In order to do so, I will have recourse to the theoretical background
provided by Memory, Diaspora and Jewish Studies, together with some transnational
feminist ideas, as well as the narratological tools used to untangle the literary devices
mastered by this writer to call attention to the fact that Jewish women not only have
experienced the duality of living as women in a male-dominated culture, but also the
duality of being part of foreign environments.

Tofantuk, Julia (University of Tallinn, Estonia)
345
Family, Tradition, Rebellion, Woman: the Multiple Skins of Femininity in Charlotte
Mendelsons Almost English
In my paper, I wish to explore several issues pertinent in the writings of Charlotte
Mendelson, a British Jewish writer of a younger generation (b. 1972), known for her
award-winning Daughters of Jerusalem (2003) and Orange-shortlisted When We Were Bad
(2007). How do the diaspora experience and the specific female experience (mother-
daughter relations, generational differences and frozen herstory, sexuality, gendered
expectations, forbidden relationships) mutually complicate one another? Is there such a
thing as a specific Hungarian experience of Almost English or specific Jewish experience
that Mendelson addressed in her earlier novels or, rather, a universal diaspora
experience or the experience of hybridity? What is it like for a woman to be in-between,
a not anymore and not yet in multiple senses as an adolescent, a member of a closed
migrant community in London, part of a closed educational system vs. society at large
Last but not least, what are the narrative and artistic means to communicate this
complicated experience? How does the heroine literally feel culture on her skin? How
does the writer, known for her predilection for smells, tastes, food and texture, reproduce
the material world that both defines and problematizes her hybridity as well as her
uniqueness?

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S78 Travel and Disease across Literatures and Cultures
Co-convenors
Ryszard W. Wolny, Opole University, Poland
Sanja Runti, University of Osijek, Croatia

In this seminar we propose to investigate the ways in which literature, film and art have
dealt with the various aspects of disease and dying. We will be particularly interested in
the representations and images that combine traveling with disease. Henry James's The
Wings of the Dove, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man are just a
handful of examples of outstanding works combining traveling with death. We will be
interested in a more in-depth investigation of these phenomena in culture. We would like
to analyse and juxtapose various works of art that highlight diseased bodies traveling for
cure or dignified death. We want to establish how literature and film deal with the
problem of old age as well as mental health and balance. We would like investigate how
health (including mental health and balance) are imagined and represented symbolically.

List of presenters:
1) Ljubica Matek, University of Osijek, Croatia
What will survive of us is love: Dementia and Dignity in Lisa Genovas Still
Alice
Lisa Genova's novel Still Alice (2007) focuses on Alice Howland, a 50-year old linguistics
professor, and her struggle with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Narrated from Alice's
perspective but in third-person point of view, the story gives a convincing insight into a
rapid disintegration of personality caused by an incurable neurological disease. Rather
than focusing on a literal (spatial) journey, the novel represents a temporal journey of
Alices gradual disassociation from what she has known to be herself. In addition to
looking at the problem of Alices disappearing identity which is rooted in language (the
illness targets what she perceives to be her defining feature her ability to use and analyse
words), the paper will focus on the problem of preserving dignity in spite of Alices rapidly
diminishing cognitive abilities. The paper proposes that the only way for both the patient
and her carers to deal with the unstoppable corrosion of personality caused by the loss of
cognitive and linguistic abilities, and short-term memory is to reject the metaphor of an
empty shell to describe a patient with dementia, and accept the new post-language,
poststructuralist dimension that is still available to Alice and thanks to which she is still
Alice: one of emotions and affection, instead of labels and language.

2) Stankomir Nicieja, University of Opole, Poland
The Journeys End: Aging and Its Representation in Paolo Sorrentinos Recent
Films
Although still relatively young for the internationally accomplished filmmaker (born in
1970), the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino seems increasingly drawn in his recent films to
the themes of aging, disease and death. In my presentation I want to take a closer look at
how Sorrentino handles those topical issues, particularly in the cultural context of the
crisis of institutional religions (and generally Western crisis of spirituality) as well as the
market-induced cult of youth, unconstrained consumption and sexual prowess. For that
purpose I will analyse two of his most recent productions, The Great Beauty (La grande
bellezza, 2013) and Youth (La giovinezza, 2015), where Sorrentino explores the specific
dilemmas of the elite members of the outgoing generation born immediately after the
second World War, who entered into maturity taking full advantage of the liberal and
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creative atmosphere of the post-war economic boom in Western Europe, only to leave the
stage ravaged by endemic crisis, inequality, and various other excesses of neoliberal greed.

3) Sanja Runti, University of Osijek, Croatia
The Diseased and the Decolonized: Travel and Disease in Leslie Marmon
Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks
This paper examines the correspondence between travel and disease in Native American
novels Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko and Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich.
Juxtaposing the novels' protagonists, Tayo and Pauline, it focuses on the detrimental
effects of their dislocation from the tribal matrix and their contact with the dominant
world. Whereas Tayo's identity quest is centripetal and in itself represents a "homing-in"
journey, a ceremony of convalescence from the painful emotional ramifications of World
War II trauma and his alienation from the Pueblo tradition, Pauline's voyage to the all-
white community of Argus leads to a complete mental imbalance and disintegration. In her
attempt to assimilate, Pauline becomes obsessed with racial purity and Christianity, and
engages in malicious and dysfunctional behavior. Struggling to deny her Anishinaabe
background and purge herself from "its evils," she harms and kills other people, starts
practicing bizarre rituals of asceticism and bodily mortification, and ultimately descends
into madness. Observing the two characters' different understanding of indigenous
epistemologies, and interpreting their bodies as constructs "imprinted by history" and
"disciplinary discursive practices," the paper attempts to expose the correlation between
disease and colonization, i.e. healing and decolonization.

4) Ryszard W. Wolny, University of Opole, Poland
Travel and Disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice
Thomas Manns novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), presents a story of an
artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, suffering from the writers block who travels to Venice to
look for inspiration and where he eventually finds his death. In the meantime, he suffers
from depression strengthened by feats of febrile listlessness, pressure in the temples,
heaviness of the eyelids that make discontent befall him. The putrid smell of the lagoon
hastens his departure, but a strange coincidence makes him change his mind. He returns to
the hotel drawn by the enthrallment for the young lad, Tadzio, he had spotted there.
Wandering through the streets of Venice, he ignores the health notices in the city, only
later learning that there is a serious cholera epidemic in Venice. But he does not escape,
nor does he warn the boys family of the fatal danger. He dies in his beach chair, looking at
the boy on the beach.

The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore the relationship between travel and
disease as juxtaposed with a growing passion for a youth, unmistakably, a sign of life
affirmation in a sickly body and burnt-out mind.

5) Jadranka Zlomisli, University of Osijek
Eros and Thanatos Death and Desire on Campus
The paper examines the ways in which works belonging within the sub-genre of the
academic novel deal with the human preoccupation with illness and death. Don DeLillos
White Noise and Philip Roths Dying Animal have been selected as representative
portrayals whose thematic concern is not only closely related to the world of higher
education but also stretches across the American cultural landscape with its expressed
fear of aging and death. Philip Roth and Don DeLillo differ in their writing styles but in
their novels both depict the American male academic trapped by fear of dying and illness.
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The paper explores the transformation of the social and psychological landscape of
America which redefined the modern American culture with its perceptions of aging,
dying, death, and grieving. The aim of this paper is to show how these two novels reflect
the modern American cultural denial of death through characters engaged in a daily
struggle between Eros and Thanatos.

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S79 20th and 21st century British Literature and medical discourse

1. Gonul Bakay (Bahcesehir University,Turkey), "Madness in The Woman on the Edge
of Time"
This paper aims to examine the treatment of madness in Marge Piercys Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976) with reference to R.D. Laings theories. The story of the novel takes
place in two settings: the New York of 1976 and Massachusetts in 2137. On the one hand,
the book analyzes the casual events of 1976, and on the other hand, it deals with scientific
discoveries that affect the present and probably the future. Connie gets into a fight with
her nieces (Dollys) pimp Geraldo because he tries to convince Dolly to have an abortion.
Connie hurts Geraldo and he commits her into an asylum. Connie is then selected for a
scentific experiment. Doctors intend to put an implant in her brain which they believe will
control Connies nervous outbursts. Connie tries to resist this experiment and tries to
escape from the asylum but can not. Because she can not escape the asylum, she poisons
the doctors who intend to operate on her. The book does not offer a neat satisfying ending
- as in life there are very few satisfying endings to stories. Connie is poor, hispanic, and
lives on the periphery of society. Was Connie mad? Or were the people in her environment
insane? The novel does not end on a promising note.

2. Nicolas P. Boileau (University of Aix-Marseille, France), "The Production of
Symptoms by Psychiatric Discourse: Evidence in Literature from Woolf to Kane"
The emergence of a new science of the mind at the end of the long 19th century
psychoanalysis led to the re-consideration and re-construction of mental illness, and its
representation throughout the 20th century. The fact that the emergence of this theory
coincided with a global, artistic movement now called Modernism invites us to a reflection
about the way in which the history of medical treatment in the 20th century - ranging from
the consideration of the advent of cognitive psychology and its scientific apparatus, to an
understanding of the multiple fractures within the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis
helps understand new figures of madness in literature, and contributes to producing new
symptoms. This will be exemplified by a short history to be developed in future works
of the effect of Modernism on contemporary writing, especially in theatre (in-yer-face)
but also in contemporary hybrid forms that do not pertain to postmodernism per se
(McGregor, Diski and Cusk). I will thus touch upon the disappearance of the mad woman
in the attic and its avatars, in order to concentrate on new ways of representing the
irrational at a time of generalised, ordinary psychosis (Miller).

Laurence Petit (University of Montpellier 3, France), "Figuring and Dis-Figuring
Illness: Pathological Images and Therapeutic Words in Anita Brookner's Look at
Me."
Anita Brookners 1983 novel Look at Me recounts the story of Frances Hinton, a short-
story writer who is the reference librarian of a medical institute specializing in problems
of human behavior. Francess task consists in archiving reproductions of artwork depicting
doctors, patients, and diseases through the ages a veritable encyclopaedia of illness and
death, as she puts it. As Frances becomes involved with the Institutes research doctors,
the novel itself develops into a veritable narrative of illness and death, whereby the
pictorial images come to be metaphors for Francess mental and physical disintegration.
The metaphorical death that ensues creates the conditions for a therapeutic writing
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retreat as Frances embarks on her lifetime project writing an autobiographical novel
centered on the medical institute and its occupants, in other words writing the very novel
that we have been reading throughout. Drawing from Julia Kristeva, Marianne Hirsch, and
Frances Restuccia, this paper explores the relationship between the visual and verbal
representations of illness that in-form the novel, as images and words, by trying to figure
and contain the random, chaotic, and erratic nature of illness, come to be seen as
metaphorical frames against terror, from an ontological as well as a historicized
perspective.

4. Claire Poinsot (University of Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle, France), "Conflincting
Interpretations of the Epileptic experience in W. B. Yeats's play The Unicorn from the
Stars (1907).
W. B. Yeats representation of epilepsy in The Unicorn from the Stars combines realistic
symptoms and prejudiced popular perceptions. The protagonist delivers a first-person
narrative of his experience of the falling sickness, dwelling on the sensory hallucinations
and peace he felt when in an epilepsy-induced trance. Yet his observations are repeatedly
dismissed as irrelevant by the representatives of the Church, of hard work and
pragmatism. Martins trance and visions are actually either identified as a symptom of an
individual illness, a curse, or as a sign of divine election.
Yeats refuses to acknowledge medical expertise in the process of diagnosis and healing
significantly, the medical voice is never embodied on stage but displaced on a manual
promoting interchangeable remedies that never single out the idiosyncrasies of epilepsy.
As often, Yeats rejects the (medical) establishment in favour of the poetry of self-
expression be it induced or not by a pathological state. Yet, in spite of his patient-centred
approach, one should keep in mind Yeats own view of epilepsy as a hereditary defect that
should be kept under control a point he expressed in his 1939 eugenic essay On the
Boiler and that obsessed him to his death the very same year.

5. Angela Thurstance (University of Leicester), Bumpy episodemics, fragmentation
and infected narrative in Reina James This Time of Dying.
Jennifer Cooke argues that [e]ach author writes plague by allowing features of the disease
to infect their writing. 29 She draws attention to the presence of small, almost self-
contained narrative outbreaks or episodemics which erupt from the main narrative like
the characteristic buboes on plague victims so that the surface of the narrative is rumpled
by the bumpy observations. 30 These episodemics are collected by the narrator as
evidence of the spread of the disease, their brevity reinforcing the untimely interruption
of life.31
In this paper, I will consider Jamess narrative in relation to Cookes theories on plague
narrative. I will explore Jamess use of language to reflect the panic and fear created by the
pandemic and show how the spread of influenza is reflected in the urgent language used to
describe it. I will examine Jamess use of episodemics to mirror the spread of disease, offer
diverse glimpses of those affected, and break up the flow of the narrative to create
fragmentation to reflect the sense of panic and disorientation experienced during the
pandemic.

29 Jennifer Cooke, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p.
19.
30 Cooke, Writing Plague, p. 25.

31 Cooke, Writing Plague, p. 26.
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6. Antolin Trinidad (Yale University, USA), "Fragmentation, Resilience and the
Cancer Narrative: Arguments from the Cancer Memoir"
Medical practice now elevates the importance of the illness narrative as a major
determinant of treatment trajectory and prognosis. Whereas previous eras in medical care
favored medical authority, recent trends favor shared decision making which in turn
strengthens the emphasis given to first-person narratives. The cancer memoir is a form of
patient narrative that documents the negotiation within the (long term) relationship with
the physician. It also describes narrative strategies to palliate the perceived fragmentation
of the self. Cancer treatment often spans many years requiring a relationship with the
physician, a relationship tensely characterized by polarities of professional distance and
intimacy. Three recent cancer memoirs illustrate the roles of these narratives in the lives
of patients in treatment: Anatole Broyards Intoxicated by My Illness, Susan Gubars
Memoirs of a Debulked Woman and Christopher Hitchens Mortality. My argument is that
the cancer memoir not only attempts to represent the experiences during the treatment
but also represents and constructs the complex relational negotiation with the treating
physician, an issue that also abuts prognosis and survival. Illness narratives become not
only forms of representation but also strategies of resilience.

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S80. Writing Old Age in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Convenors: Sarah Falcus (University of Huddersfield) and Maricel Or-Piqueras
(University of Lleida)

An Introductory Approach to the Portrayal of Ageing in Carol Rumens and Lorna
Croziers Poetry by Nria Mina Riera (University of Lleida, Spain)
Both Carol Rumens (1944) and Lorna Crozier (1948) are well-established poets in the
British and the Canadian tradition, respectively. Nevertheless, Carol Rumens works
published from 2005 onwards, namely the poetry collections Blind Spots (2008) and De
Chiricos Threads (2010), remain largely unstudied. As two female artists from the same
generation, their poetry collections contain a number of reflections on the ageing process
recounted from different age perspectives. However, Rumens and Croziers depictions of
the experience of moving along the life course do not always concur with each other.
Taking as a starting point the view posited by Nria Casado-Gual when discussing the
representations of ageing in the works by Joanna McClelland Glass (2015) that complex
and even ambivalent portrayals of the ageing experience help portray a more realistic and
deeper understanding of the process of growing old, this paper will compare four different
stages of the life-course as portrayed by Rumens with the same stages as depicted by
Crozier in her poetry, namely: the climacterium, sexual appetite in late middle-age, and the
life-changing experiences of the death of a father and of a mother. Furthermore, the essay
will track the evolution of the representation of these stages along both writers literary
career, paying especial attention to Rumens two latest poetry collections. In this way, both
Rumens and Croziers depiction of ageing from the perspective of their young-old age will
also be taken into consideration, in order to observe whether they favour notions of
progress or decline, or both, in their poetry.

Nria Mina Riera holds a BA degree in English Philology and a Masters Degree on
Teaching English at Secondary School Level, both of them from the University of Lleida
(Spain). Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate of contemporary Canadian poetry and an
assistant lecturer at the same university. Her dissertation analyses the process of
formation of the late style in Lorna Croziers works from an interdisciplinary approach of
aging and ecocritical studies. As a lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics,
she teaches English language in the Teacher-Training programme for future English
teachers, and English poetry, 19th and 20th century history of the United Kingdom and
Canadian and Australian culture to English-Studies undergraduates.

Ancient Country, Old Attitudes, New Beginnings: Old Age in Twenty-First-Century
Welsh Fiction in English by Elinor Shepley (Cardiff University, U.K.)
Older characters have played significant roles in Welsh fiction written in English since its
emergence in the early years of the twentieth century. From inspirational grandmothers
and playful grandfathers to gossips, burdens, the invalided, the institutionalised and the
independent, writers have engaged with character types and stereotypes and have sought
to render older protagonists innermost thoughts on the experience of ageing. Where texts
are concerned with history, the Welsh language and traditional culture, elderly characters
have often acted as remembrancers of the past.
In novels and short fictions published in the twenty-first century, stereotypes are
rare and a number of Welsh writers offer fresh imaginings of what later life might involve.
Short stories by Glenda Beagan and Emyr Humphreys tell of widowed women who
develop personally and politically after the deaths of their husbands, for example, while
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Christopher Merediths The Book of Idiots (2012) engages with older mens anxieties about
and experiences of retirement. Meredith and writers including Trezza Azzopardi can also
be seen to critique the treatment of older people in contemporary society and their
representation in the dominant cultural discourse.
A later life well lived appears contingent on establishing or holding on to ones
home in contemporary Welsh fiction. Returns to places from childhood are common and
often promote a rediscovery of national identity. Echoing the elderly custodians of the past
that feature in Welsh literature from the last century, older characters become involved in
preserving the country and safeguarding its culture, history and landscape.
This paper will explore the above trends and issues through analysis of recent
novels and short stories by Trezza Azzopardi, Glenda Beagan, Emyr Humphreys and
Christopher Meredith.

Elinor Shepley is a doctoral research student at Cardiff University. Her research examines
the representation of old age in Anglophone Welsh fiction published after 1900. Elinor
wrote her Masters dissertation on old age in the fiction of Emyr Humphreys, a section of
which was published in Almanac: The Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English.

Mapping Old Age in Deborah Moggachs novels: when retirement becomes the new
beginning by Maricel Or-Piqueras (University of Lleida, Spain)
Despite the fact that Deborah Moggach does not define herself as a popular fiction writer,
some of her novels, especially the ones published in the last years, have become very
successful and have been widely read. Deborah Moggachs has tackled various topics and
has focused on diverse historical periods in her writing; however, there is a topic which is
recurrent in her last novels: retirement and all the cultural, social and family consequences
that follow retirement in contemporary Britain.
For many years, retirement has been considered a time of leisure in which one
would be contented with his or her achievement in life and would wait for death to arrive.
With an exponential ageing of the population, retirement represents the entering into a
phase in which one may start a complete new life: one may fall in love again, start a new
business or pursue a dream which has not yet become true. In novels such as Close
Relations (1997), These Foolish Things (2004) and Heartbreak Hotel (2013), Moggach
explores the concerns and expectations, the possibilities and obstacles of British
characters after retirement, making use of her specific humorous touch.

Maricel Or-Piqueras is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics,
Univerity of Lleida (Spain). She is also a member of research group Dedal-lit since it
started to work on the representation of fictional images of ageing and old age in 2002. In
2007, she defended her PhD thesis entitled Ageing Corporealities in Contemporary
English Fiction: Redefining Stereotypes, which was published in book format by Lap
Lambert in 2011. She is currently conducting research on British contemporary writers
such as Penelope Lively, Julian Barnes and Deborah Moggach, and on the portrayal of
ageing and old age in TV series. She has published her research in journals such as Journal
of Aging Studies and Odisea.

Love and Sexuality in Fay Weldons Rhode Island Blues by Ana Daz-Rodrguez
(University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Love and sexuality have always been universal themes in Literature. As a topic they have
motivated many relevant titles, both in fiction and criticism, becoming an imperishable
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source of inspiration for authors . However, it is commonly a field focused on young
people, being very uncommon to find any text dealing with love and sexuality in
senescence, mainly due to socio-cultural reasons, which negatively associate old age with a
period of life ruled by loneliness and lack of sexual desire.
Fortunately, thanks to the emergence of new fields in literary criticism as aging
studies, these sort of taboo topics are beginning to be resolved. Bearing this in mind, the
aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of Fay Weldon's Rhode Island Blues (2000) in which
the British author vindicates the right of enjoying private life in old age.
With a theoretical framework based on aging studies and feminist criticism, we pay
attention to relevant topics such as the omission of love and sexuality in senescence in
literature as well as the slow but firm advances that authors like Weldon are making in
order to break with this silence and give voice to this sector of population often ignored by
society.

Ana graduated in English Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de
Compostela in 2013. In 2014 she specialised in Advanced English Studies, presenting a
master's dissertation on aging studies, where she analysed the topic of female aging in
Doris Lessing's fiction. Currently, she is working on a PhD Thesis where, combining aging
studies with feminist criticism, she is studying the representation and function of the
female aging characters in contemporary literature in English.

Heres how it starts, the long process by which you become your childrens child:
Unease about aging in Ian McEwans later fiction by Tomasz Dobrogoszcz
(University of Lodz, Poland)
Early McEwans fiction, Kafkaesque-dark and often disconcertingly macabre, never focuses
on the elderly; his protagonists are mostly young adults, or even teenagers. But since his
1998 novel Amsterdam, an end-of-millennium elegy, pervaded with obsessional
ruminations on finality and death, the novelist systematically has taken up the issue of
aging. In later novels, his protagonists are usually affluent individuals representing several
professional fields, interpellated into positions of high social esteem. Although old age is
never McEwans most direct concern, his characters experience encounters with senility
and dementia, either age- or illness-induced, which affect themselves (Atonement), their
parents (Saturday) or friends (Amsterdam). They painfully realise that the long process of
aging may bring about various hues of humiliation: the collapse of the family (The Children
Act), the infirmity and ugliness of the body (Solar), the dire need to settle accounts with
the ghosts of the past (Atonement), the fear of dotage (Saturday) or the contemplation of
euthanasia (Amsterdam). But, as this presentation attempts to evidence, on many
occasions McEwan uses the process of aging as a metaphor for a more general condition of
the present-day Western civilisation. By means of different textual strategies, such as, e.g.,
intertextual allusions to Joyces short story The Dead, he emphasises the inertia and
melancholy suffusing the contemporary man. The deterioration of the human body may be
often read to symbolise the decline of humanity, the degradation of the environment or the
void at the core of human subjectivity.

Tomasz Dobrogoszcz teaches British literature and literary translation at the University of
Lodz, Poland. His main fields of research include contemporary British and postcolonial
literature, as well as poststructuralist and psychoanalytical literary theory. He has
published articles on such writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, John Banville or
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E.M. Forster. He is the editor of "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts
In Monty Python", published in 2014. He translated into Polish "The Location of Culture"
by Homi K. Bhabha, as well as many other critical and literary texts, e.g. by Hayden White
or Dipesh Chakrabarty. He is currently working on a monograph on Ian McEwan.

Entering the Dementia World in Emma Healeys Elizabeth is Missing (2014) by
Jennie Chapman (University of Hull, U.K.)
Until the twenty-first century, dementia was rarely depicted in fiction. Contrastingly, in the
last fifteen years enough novels have been published to allow us to speak of dementia
fiction as an emergent sub-genre.32 Dementia fiction reflects not only the increasing
prevalence of a disease that currently affects one in fourteen over-65s, but also represents
an attempt to render into narrative a condition which resists its own telling: the nature of
dementia makes it increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, for a person with the
condition to narrate his or her own subjective experience. As such, the role of dementia
fiction is partly compensatory: it imaginatively restores the words that the disease works
insidiously to revoke.
Emma Healeys Costa Prize-winning debut Elizabeth is Missing (2014) imagines the
experience of dementia from the first-person perspective of its protagonist-narrator Maud,
a woman in her eighties living with dementia. Where other dementia novels are conveyed
in the third person and thus reaffirm the person with dementias status as an (often
mysterious) object of the young and healthy gaze, Healeys novel invites the reader to
enter the dementia world that Maud inhabits. I argue that this interpellation of the reader
is undertaken to reveal how behaviour that appears inexplicable and even disturbing to
those without neurological impairment in fact conforms to the internal logic of the
dementia world, in which time, space, and language operate according to different
imperatives and exigencies. Placing the reader alongside Maud in this shared narrative
space allows the former to see latter not as a pitiful victim of cognitive decline, but as an
intelligent, perceptive and often subversive figure. Healeys novel thus offers a powerful
corrective to the diminishing and dehumanizing ways in which older people with
dementia have been popularly portrayed.

Dr Jennie Chapman is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Hull. She
completed her AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Manchester in 2010 and published
her first monograph, Plotting Apocalypse: Reading, Agency, and Identity in the Left Behind
Series with the University Press of Mississippi in 2013. She is now working on a second
monograph which explores representations of dementia in contemporary British and
American fiction.

Between Autonomy and Isolation: Old Age and Dementia in Fiona McFarlanes The
Night Guest by Sara Strauss (Paderborn University, Germany)
In consequence of the rapidly ageing populations in Western societies and with old age
being the leading risk factor for age-related mental disorders, the prevalence of dementia
and Alzheimers disease is on a steady rise. Against this background there is a growing
public interest in an insight into the consciousness of dementia patients. Numerous
literary texts and films show this increasing public awareness of dementia and Alzheimers
32 Examples include Amy Tans The Bonesetters Daughter (2001), Lisa Genovas Still Alice (2009) Paul
Hardings, Tinkers (2009), Samantha Harveys The Wilderness (2009), Walter Mosleys The Last Days of
Ptolemy Grey (2010), Lore Segals Half the Kingdom (2013) and Matthew Thomass We Are Not Ourselves
(2014).
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disease and move the subjective experience of dementia patients into the centre of
attention. These narratives address the challenges which old age and age-related diseases
entail not only for the individual but also for society as a whole. They focus on issues such
as the personal identity and autonomy of dementia patients as well as their social
marginalisation due to the disease.
At the same time, the symptoms of Alzheimers and dementia, which cause a severe
loss of the patients cognitive and linguistic faculties, pose fundamental challenges to
literary representation. Authors of narrative fiction meet the challenge of representing the
situation of mentally confused, disoriented characters who are unable to express their
experience through language with the help of different narrative modes and techniques
and with experimenting with traditional genre conventions. This paper analyses Fiona
McFarlanes novel The Night Guest (2014), a mystery novel told from the perspective of an
elderly protagonist who is severely affected by dementia. It focuses on the fictional
representation of symptoms of dementia, the social isolation of the elderly as well as on
discourses of autonomy and paternalism as discussed in McFarlanes novel.

Sara Strauss is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Paderborn, Germany.
Her research interests focus on 20th- and 21st-century narrative fiction, narrative theory,
medical ethics and ageing studies. She completed her PhD with a thesis on contemporary
British stream of consciousness fiction (This Bright Inward Cinema of Thought: Stream of
Consciousness in Contemporary English Fiction, Trier: WVT, 2013) and has published
articles on British, Irish and Canadian literature and culture, for example on the narrative
fiction of Alice Munro, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Ian McEwan. At the moment she is
working on a project on the narrative representation of dementia in English-language
literature and culture.

Dementia and Generational Time in Adele Parks Whatever It Takes (2012) and
Kirsty Warks The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle (2014) by Sarah Falcus (University of
Huddersfield, UK) and Katsura Sako (Keio University, Japan)
The cultural discourse of dementia is very much connected to the way we view the life
course. It is seen as a time of decline into loss of self and death, a time characterised by the
absence of linear progression, activity and meaning, a time associated with the fourth age.
In its association with old age, it also signifies pathological ageing in opposition to healthy
ageing.
Amongst the many recent literary texts that have explored the experience of dementia,
there are those that seem to interrogate this narrative of the time of dementia. Examining
Adele Parks Whatever It Takes (2012) and Kirsty Warks The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle
(2014), this paper explores the ways in which they challenge the problematic temporal
conception of dementia and of the ageing self in their emphasis upon generational and
familial time. These two popular novels focus upon family relationships across
generations, and both include the experiences of a woman in early midlife negotiating a
relationship with an older woman with dementia: in Whatever It Takes, this is Eloise and
her mother-in-law, and in The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle, this is Martha and her mother.
Though time in these novels is at one level linear, as generations succeed each other, it is
also both palimpsestic and transcendent, as one generation is in dialogue with those that
have come before and those that will come after. However, the mystery plots that drive
the novels, the revelations of family secrets and hidden parentage, reinstate an
individualistic narrative as they serve as a vehicle for the younger protagonists self-
reflection and change. This narrative of individual progress perhaps echoing a
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postfeminist emphasis upon choice and self-(re)invention in middle age is in tension
with the more expansive conception of familial and generational time that is otherwise
central to both texts. Extending the experience of dementia from the personal to the
familial and to the generational, these texts offer the possibility of telling stories of lives
that are lived outside of the linear. But they also risk reinforcing a narrative of progress
that is defined by personal growth, the very discourse that supports the loss-of-self model
of dementia.

Sarah Falcus is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield,
UK. She has published in the areas of contemporary womens writing, feminism and
literary gerontology. She is currently co-authoring a book on literary narratives of
dementia with Katsura Sako.
Katsura Sako is an Associate Professor of English at Keio University. Her current research
interests are in ageing and old age in contemporary writing, and she is currently working
with Sarah Falcus on a study of narratives of dementia.

Reinterpreting the Past in Later Life through Objects in the Novel by Sarah Salway
Getting the Picture (2010) by Roco Gonzlez Torres (University of Mlaga, Spain)
Old age in Contemporary British fiction has often been portrayed within the bounds of
social exclusion where the aging body seems to be subjected to being hidden in the home,
or in the case of physical frailty or illness in a retirement community. The attachment that
the elderly establish with the physical environment is forged during years of accumulative
experience and memory. This bond with the house is also reflected with the accumulation
of objects such as photographs, letters, clothes, and jewellery. Through materiality, the
ageing self finds a path to express and maintain an identity threatened by the passing of
the years. Unfortunately, these memorabilia are a reliable ally to memory loss and self-
doubt.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the novel written by Sarah Salway Getting the
Picture (2010) where the characters of Martin Morris and George Griffiths meet when they
move to a retirement community called Pilgrim House. Though Griffiths is unaware of the
relation that Martin had with his deceased wife, Martin plans to reveal the truth of his
affair with Georges wife by showing the material proof of their meetings.
Salway highlights the important role of letters and pictures as they destabilize the
self with a reality that can alter the memory of our past or the image we hold of our loved
ones. In fact, Getting the Picture (2010) gives an insightful portrayal of how life can be
changed by the revealing effect of objects. Through a retrospective look into our lives we
analyze and revive moments, people and feelings, but with Sarah Salways novel we also
explore the multiple ways in which memory can be deceived.

I am from Crdoba, Spain. I have a degree in English Studies from the University of
Crdoba, and I received my Masters degree in Multilingual and Intercultural
Communication at the University of Mlaga, where I am currently doing my PhD in
Material Memory in Contemporary Fiction about Ageing. My thesis deals with the personal
bonding that old people establish with their material possessions. Furthermore, my
research focuses on female British novelists in their attempt to give voice to women
coming of age within the setting of their material and personal mementos. I am also
interested in memories studies, environmental psychology and spatial studies.
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I have been working for the Fundacin General at Mlaga University for the last two years,
teaching Gender Issues in North America and the Hispanic World: Cross Cultural
Perspectives and Cross-Cultural Psychology.

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S81 Ekphrasis Today
Convenors: Renate Brosch, Universitt Stuttgart; Danuta Fjellestad, Uppsala Universitet;
Gabriele Rippl, University of Berne

Anne-Sophie Letessier: Figuration, disfiguration, figurability in Jane Urquharts The
Underpainter
Canadian novelist Jane Urquharts fourth novel, The Underpainter (1997), is a
Knstlerroman fraught with pictorial references, from Czanne to Robert Henry, in a
manner that is akin to name-dropping and which might be seen as requiring elite literacy
and education. However, in an age when the reader can access almost any image with a
mouse click, as well as a wealth of information on artists, Urquhart chooses to play upon
the plasticity of the ekphrastic genre. Indeed, she resorts to a blend of notional and
Homeric ekphrasis when describing her characters devising an aesthetic based on the
drastic technique of disfiguration which he refers to as the concept of formal ambiguity:
the alteration of a figurative underpainting through the superposition of layers of paint
and glazes. Drawing upon the conceptual opposition between figuration and figurability
introduced by French philosopher George Didi-Huberman, I would argue that Urquharts
ekphrastic strategies are evidence of her reflection on the efficiency of painting outside the
realm of knowledge and visual skills, because of their relation to discourse. The
Underpainter ponders on what paintings visually present without visibly representing, an
experience which entails a suspension of the ability to produce meaning and knowledge, to
which language bears witness.

Jolene Mathieson: The Written Body, Rival Voices and Failed Semiotics in New Media
Poetry
While seminal literature on the subject of new media poetry (Funkhouser, 2012) and its
potentially ekphrastic properties (Lindh, 2013) has been published in recent years, the
relationship between digital poetry and traditional art ekphrasis has yet to be adequately
explored. This paper thus proposes to examine, by example of Harry Giles Photo of Maud
Wagner (2013), new media poetry and the digital strategies it utilizes in the ekphrastic
remediation of the art image. Harry Giles multi-modal poem consists of a text written in a
combination of computer code and anagrams, the typographical arrangement of which
actually re-creates the concrete image of the famously tattooed and photographed Maud
Wagner. Additionally, a sound file accompanying the written poem comprises of two
voices: a digital female voice which performs the code, and a competing analogue male
voice which performs the anagrams. This layered, hybrid, verbal re-presentation of Maud
Wagners photo, I argue, is on one hand, a paragonal contemplation on the inability of
pictorial semiotics to capture, and therewith, successfully reproduce the living essence of
its human subject. But on the other, via its rival audio voices and competing semiotic
systems, it prompts us to ask: If an ekphrastic poem successfully reproduces a failed
image, doesnt it too fail its human subject?

Anja Meyer: The use of cinekphrasis in Joe Wrights cinematographic production
With the proliferation of visual-media from the end of the nineteenth century onward, the
notion of ekphrasis has assumed new meanings, going beyond the traditional assumption
that ekphrastic texts are essentially verbal. In our contemporary culture, intermedial
encounters have become so pervasive and significant that the ekphrastic object today
encompasses not only the traditional arts, but also photography, film, video and television
(Grnstad, 2012). Following Rajewskys classification of ekphrasis as a specific
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subcategory of intermediality, named intermedial reference (Rajewsky, 2005) and
Grnstads notion of cinekphrasis as an intertextual mobilization by which static, singular
images are conceptually re-animated as moving images (Grnstad 2012), the aim of my
paper is to analyse the cinematographic production of British director Joe Wright,
focusing, in particular, on the ekphrastic quality of representative key scenes in the movies
Pride and Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007) and Anna Karenina (2012).
In each cinematic adaptation, the process of ekphrasis is invoked in specific scenes
resembling or reinterpreting works of art or artistic styles (for example, the scene of the
evacuation of Dunkirk during WWII in Atonement looks like a Hieronymus Bosch war
postcard, while Pride and Prejudice presents a strong pictorial influence and classicist
references, like Canovas marble statues). Such process firmly contributes to disclose the
psychological sphere of some characters, but also a specific symbolical imagery, that could
not be conveyed in other ways.

Angeliki Tseti: Narrating Unaccommodable Fact: Photographic Ekphrasis and
Trauma in Graham Swifts Out of This World
With the advent of Trauma Studies, photography has often been distinguished as the
traumatic genre par excellence, owing, predominantly, to its frozen temporality that best
captures the trauma and loss, as per Marianne Hirsch (The Day Time Stopped 2), or to
the striking parallels between the workings of the camera and the structure of traumatic
memory (Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence 8). This paper discusses Graham Swifts Out of
this World as a photo-novel that places these parallels at the core of its narrative
development by employing photography with a view to depicting the protagonists
inherently traumatized subjecthood, and narrating the complex nexus of relationships
established between them following a terrorist attack.
What is more, I submit, by introducing ekphrastic renditions of photographs of
atrocity and war, the novel references the reader/viewers cultural knowledge and works
towards activating what Liliane Louvel terms the pictorial third, a virtual image
engineered by the text and reinvented by the reader (Photography as Critical Idiom 45),
while, nevertheless, shunning the compassion fatigue often instilled through the
dissemination of such photographs in the media. Hence, while the adoption of the photo-
textual mode designates the viewer/reader as an integral part of the meaning-making
process, the employment of photography in ekphrasis signals the possibility of addressing
trauma through affective engagement and attention.

Teresa Bru: Ekphrastic Self-Reflexion
The paper proposes to engage with questions concerning the emerging potential of the
principles of ekphrasis in an expanded field of digital production and consumption of
images. My analysis of autobiographical life narratives by acclaimed photographers (Sally
Mann, Annie Leibovitz, Sebastio Salgado and Irving Penn) will show that photography
continues to demand and rely on ekphrasis. Photographers themselves render
ekphrastically the radical change in medium from the analogue to digital photography to
illustrate technically-determined contexts for shifting subjectivity. In these narratives
ekphrasis functions both socially and historically. Relying on Mieke Bals definition of
ekphrasis as a deployment of visibility within a linguistic discourse, I will seek to examine
the constitutive role of ekphrasis in recent autobiographical narratives.

Nadezhda Prozorova: Terrors of Attraction: Ekphrasis and its Functions in John
Banville's Novels
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The paper focuses on the provocative character of ekphrasis in Banville's prose. Two of his
novels - Book of Evidence (1989) and Ghosts (1993) - are of special interest for this
purpose. These novels are concentrated on a mysterious and irresistable power of
painting, provoking Banville's characters to commit distgustful crimes. Thus ekphrasis
becomes the source of novels' plot structure with its elements of thriller and detective
story.The detailed description of imaginative Portrait of a Woman with Gloves in The Book
of Evidence demonstrates the hypnotic power of the painted woman, at the same time
attractive and terrific. Besides, Banville emphasizes the mystery of individual perception
that can't be expressed in the terms of reason. In Ghosts Banville focuses on the "ghostly"
nature of artistic imagination that inhabits the world with phantoms of its fantasy. The
depiction of a small island where the writer settles his ghost-like personages refers to a
subtle art of Antoine Watteau whose paintings stand behind the most powerful imagery of
the novel. Banville's skill to find appropriate verbal equivalent for visual images
demonstrates the main paradox of ekphrasis: creating illusion of visual art by means of
words ekphrasis reminds of the supreme power of logos. "In the beginning was the
Word..."

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S83: Literary and cinematographic prequels, sequels, and coquels

Co-convenors :
Ivan Callus, University of Malta
Armelle Parey, Universit de Caen, France
Isabelle Roblin, Universit du Littoral-Cte dOpale, France
Georges Letissier, Universit de Nantes, Franc

Ben Davies (University of Portsmouth, UK), The Prequel: Familiar Narratives,
Uncertain Times
Anne-Laure Fortin-Tourns (University of Maine, France), Wide Sargasso Sea as a
prequel to Jane Eyre : from visuality to iconicity
Franoise Krl (Universit de Caen, France) New filiations in The Lost Child by
Caryl Phillips
Georges Letissier (Universit de Nantes, Frances) Transcultural Imaginaries,
Wuthering Heights Prequel and Coquel: Lord Byrons The Dream and Alison
Croggons Black Spring
Armelle Parey (Universit de Caen, France), Servants with a voice in Jo Bakers
Longbourn, a coquel to Pride and Prejudice
Isabelle Roblin (Universit du Littoral-Cte d'Opale, France) P. D. Jamess Death
Comes to Pemberley (2011), a Sequel With Many Twists
Ivan Callus (University of Malta, Malta), Next -- Or, Sequels and the Serial Killer:
The Case of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Novels
Anne-Claire Le Reste (Universit Paris Ouest Nanterre, France) So much for
ghosts! or The (Fatal?) Turn of the Screw

Ben Davies - The Prequel: Familiar Narratives, Uncertain Times
Prequels offer a return to well-known narratives. More importantly, I shall argue, prequels
allow us to rethink time in significant ways. They therefore appeal to readers/viewers, as
they pose fundamental questions about time and offer new models of temporal direction
and causation.
Working across a number of contemporary examples, including Gertrude and
Claudius (2000) and Skagboys (2012), I shall explore how prequels employ narrative
techniques and structures to open up new conceptualisations of time. Firstly, prequels
provide a way to rethink causality, as the past narrative of the prequel is controlled and
to some extent caused by the future narrative of its related text. Secondly, prequels
challenge us to rethink absence, presence and order, as they must first of all be non-
present, non-existent; to come into existence, the prequel must first be suspended, as its
future presence is predicated on its initial absence. Thirdly, prequels disturb our
understanding of past, present and future, as they are always already proleptic; through
allusions and diegetic content, the prequel refers to the future of its narrative successor,
simultaneously anticipating and deferring this future. Moreover, past and future are not so
easily discernible in the relationship between the prequel and its related text, as the
future narrative is a type of past future, a future that has already been. Ultimately, then,
prequels can help to change how we interpret time and, crucially, how we construct
narratives and sequences within and beyond literature; therein lies their potential and,
possibly, their popularity.

Anne-Laure Fortin-Tourns - Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to Jane Eyre : from
visuality to iconicity
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My proposal for the prequel, sequel, coquel workshop at the Galway conference this
coming summer hinges around an analysis of Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel
to Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre where the phenomenon of iconisation linked with the
rewriting and the interpretation of the canonised literary work is facilitated by the poetic
as well as the political import of visuality in Rhyss novel. The notion of the gaze and in
particular the oppositional gaze which is central to Rhyss novel will be articulated with
an analysis of the notion of iconicity as defined by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School
so as to uncover the mechanisms whereby Wide Sargasso Sea has given its main
protagonist Antoinette Cosway alias Bertha Mason a near-iconic status and has become an
iconic text in the process.

Franoise Krl - New filiations in The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips
If sequels, prequels and coquels have flourished in 20th century literature and its dialogue
with the canon, and has taken a new turn with the postmodernist challenging of master
narratives, such textual experimentations have taken a slightly different meaning in the so-
called postcolonial literatures or anglophone literatures as I propose to refer to Caryl
Phillipss latest novel to date The Lost Child (2015). While previous prequels such as Jean
Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea purposefully shift the focus by inventing the subaltern subtext of
Bertha Masons untold narrative, as convincingly argued by Gayatri Spivak in her famous
analysis of Rhyss novel in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Caryl Phillipss Lost Child
strikes another cord in this more mature project which feeds on the authors lifetime
engagement with literature at large and English literature and the canon, not only as
something that needs to be challenged but also as part of his cultural, intellectual, affective
makeup from which his voice has learnt to pitch the right notes in the emotional grammar
of textual yarns. Caryl Phillipss latest novel revisits a landscape loaded with references to
Bronts Wuthering Heights, his lost child making his novel technically speaking a prequel
to Bronts Wuthering Heights. Focusing on Heathcliff as a child, situating his narrative
before chronologically speaking- Phillips symbolically reframes the filiation but also
casts a new light on Bronts work, inscribing new meaning into the master narrative.

Georges Letissier - Transcultural Imaginaries, Wuthering Heights Prequel and
Coquel: Lord Byrons The Dream and Alison Croggons Black Spring
How anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth
wonders Lockwood in Wuthering Heights coda. Precisely, generations of readers the
world over have taken up the challenge by refusing that the pair of lovers should be put to
rest once and for all. Wuthering Heights afterlife is closely related to the novels capacity to
call up haunting as a unique component of the experience of reading. Spectrality tropes the
process of rewriting, through the self-generative power of the narrative to lend a new
lease on life to its ghost: twenty years, Ive been a waif for twenty years! Neo-Victorian
studies have underscored the foundational role of haunting in revisionary (re-)writings by
insisting on the traumatic persistence of a past that will not pass (Heilmann and Llewellyn,
Arias and Pulham) whilst the Canadian writer Jane Urquhart showed the ghosts of
Charlotte and Emily Bront floating in the margins of her 1990 novel Changing Heaven.
This paper purports to investigate Wuthering Heights imaginary afterlife from a
slightly different angle, by starting from an oneiric prequel: Lord Byrons The Dream to
consider a coquel: Alison Croggons Black Spring, described as a Tolkienesque epic fantasy.
In a typically romantic vein, the poem calls up a dream vision which adumbrates Bronts
plot. As a reader of Blackwoods magazine and a writer of poetry, the Victorian novelist
knew Byron full well. His dark, tormented inspiration influenced her own fictitious
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universe. A contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy writer Alison Croggon
was drawn to Bronts skill in conjuring up imaginary realms from a profound engagement
with space, local legends and folklore. She nevertheless chose to leave out the realistic
anchorage underpinning Wuthering Heights to fashion a fantasy world prioritizing
suspense, adventures and escapism. Ultimately our aim is to highlight textual mutability
from high to low culture, from exotic orientalism to Nordic mythology.

Armelle Parey - Servants with a voice in Jo Bakers Longbourn
Companion novels to Jane Austens works of the type that often reorganizes a story from
the point of view of a secondary character play up the comfort of familiarity (see
Lynch Sequels 165). This appears to be a valid argument considering that the companion
novel eventually joins up with the original ending and consequently does not ruffle the
primary design. These coquels would therefore present no challenge to the hypotext in the
way that rewritings do or sequels might do. And yet, does not the fact that one reaches the
same ending via a different route modify the primary message? Dont the adventures of
new or secondary characters have an impact on the lives of the original ones? Or on the
way they are perceived by the reader?
In Longbourn (2013), Jo Baker revisits the plot of Austens Pride and Prejudice with
a focus on the servants so that the Bennets adventures are now the backdrop to their
servants lives. The reader thus follows what goes on in the kitchen while Austens
characters are having dinner upstairs, for instance, or a scene is witnessed from the corner
where the servant is standing. Contrary to other coquels, the heroines that now occupy the
centre stage in Longbourn are in fact not even secondary but extremely minor. In the same
way as Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea gave a voice to Bertha Mason, the object of only one
chapter in Jane Eyre, Baker gives a voice to these servants who are often not even named in
Pride and Prejudice, as they are mere accessories to the plot, part of the setting that gets
described so little in Austens novels and makes Bakers Sarah feel like a ghost. Unlike
most sequels, novels that also revisit the same diegetic space, Longbourn does not
glamorize the past. Rather, like others before her, Baker giv(es) voice to those characters
or subject-positions they perceive to have been oppressed or repressed in the original
(Sanders).
This paper will first examine how Baker carves her own narrative space within
Austens novel then how this choice of characters actually takes the reader out of her
comfort zone by throwing a new light on well-known plot and characters and/or shedding
light on what happens behind the scenes. Finally, as a companion novel, Longbourn must
not and does not (directly) upset the happy ending of Pride and Prejudice but the latter is
significantly displaced as both endings are not concomitant.

Isabelle Roblin - P. D. James Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a Sequel With Many
Twists
Published in 2011, P. D. James Death Comes to Pemberley is part of an already very long
and at times tiresome tidal wave of Jane Austen continuations. There is however from the
start a twist to the original story as it is both a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, as the title
clearly indicates, and a classic murder mystery by one of the most respected crime writers
of her generation (it is in fact the last novel she wrote). Indeed, the familiar characters
from Pride and Prejudice (the Darcys, the Bennets, the Bingleys, the Wickhams?) find
themselves in an unexpected situation, at the heart of a murder investigation. Death Comes
to Pemberley combines many elements from different genres, from the gothic to the
historical reconstruction of a Georgian inquest and trial. Moreover, passing and tantalizing
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references are also made to characters from other Austen novels (the Knightleys, for
example), turning it into a kind of playful mash-up. This paper will examine the ways in
which P. D. James not only pays homage to Jane Austen in this pastiche of Pride and
Prejudice but also skillfully manages to add a new dimension to the already hackneyed
Jane Austen fan fiction.

Ivan Callus NextOr, Sequels and the Serial Killer: The Case of Patricia
Highsmith's Ripley Novels
After a framing look at prequels, coquels and sequels within crime fiction, this paper
moves to consider the parallels and differences in Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. The
representation of a serial killer like Tom Ripley necessitates, by its very rationale, the
resources of the sequel. What makes Highsmith's cycle particularly intriguing is her
fashioning of what might be thought of as the phenomenology of seriality and, hence, of its
challenges to the study of mind and voice in narrative. Some of Highsmith's narrative
devices in this regard have since become familiar in contemporary crime fiction, but what
this paper attempts is a consideration of the innovativeness, even now, of her take on
seriality and on sequence in life and death: in other words, on the psychologies of
murder's nextness. One intriguing contradiction does, however, arise: in the adaptations of
the Ripley novels in TV, film, theatre and beyond, sequels do not appear to feature.
The paper concludes with some reflections on where one might look, in contemporary
crime narrative, for the genre's further and possibly more daring play with the dynamic
captured within this seemingly innocent word, 'next'.

Anne-Claire Le Reste - So much for ghosts! or The (Fatal?) Turn of the Screw
My paper will focus on the most recent rewritings of The Turn of the Screw, namely
Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly by Donald Thomas, and Florence and Giles by John
Harding, both published in 2010. Thomass novella is the first sequel to pick up the story in
the aftermath of Miless death, after the governess has been convicted of murder, merging
Arthur Conan Doyles and Henry Jamess worlds to solve the mystery of Quint and Jessels
apparitions. Hardings novel is more of an adaptation but it also includes one of the rare
prequels to the tale. While the previous spinoffs upheld the reality of the ghosts (Oates,
Straub, Bailey) and/or the madness of the governess (Bailey, Wilson), these two instances
discard the ghosts by turning them into flesh-and-blood murderers, but without opting for
the mad governess theory. If spinoffs tend to fill in the blanks, these do so gleefully,
methodically dispensing with all the ambiguities of Jamess tale, and with its whole critical
history in the process. This is all the more provocative as the essence of The Turn of the
Screw arguably lies in its very blanks and its concomitant refusal to carry on beyond Miles
enigmatic death, in a gesture which may be seen as deeply anti-sequel. Analyzing the
narrative strategies of these two spinoffs and their pre-text will allow me to argue for a
joyfully agonistic approach to the act of writing beyond the ending by examining the
violence of adaptation (to borrow from Jean-Jacques Lecercles theory of language) or
when the pleasure of rewriting may well reside in its murderous bent. Or

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S84 Cultural politics in Harry Potter: death, life and transition
Convenors: Dr. Rubn Jarazo-lvarez, University of the Balearic Islands, and Dr. Pilar
Alderete-Diez, National University of Ireland, Galway.

Blood, life and death in Harry Potter: Voldemorts transiting body and vampire
imagery
Dr. Rubn Jarazo lvarez
University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

Gupta argues that Malfoys prejudice against blood-lineage is one of several key elements
of the book (2009: 101). But definitely blood concomitances in HP are visibly more
complex than its association with fascism, mirroring also both references to Christianity
and pagan rituals. As for Voldemort, in Philosophers Stone he drinks unicorn blood to
sustain his life, and in Globet of Fire he draws Harrys blood to resurrect his body. In
addition, Harrys mother self-sacrifice (whose blood runs in his veins) resembles Christian
symbolism in opposition to the antagonist, who symbolises anti-Christ imagery (Guanio-
Uluru, 2015). Voldemort is thus, what Judith Halberstam described as the perfect figure
for negative identity (1995: 22), an entity who resembles a (magic) vampire, who cannot
be reduced to a unique cultural component.
From a psychoanalytical reading, just as vampires contain two opposing states
within one body (life and death) (Jones, 1931: 99), Voldemort remains a body of
contradictions and oppositions, encompassing the human condition. The relationship
between the living human and the undead has always established within a continuum;
Voldemorts posthuman body transits, in fact, from former human to a new entity, just as
vampire and victim oscillate between life and death in an endless cycle of creation and
destruction.
Death and life are definitely intertwined by blood in the saga and Voldemort is
substantial to understand these two issues. In this paper, Voldemort will be analysed
under the auspices of vampire (Christian and pagan) mythology in a saga where the lines
of racial, cultural, sexual and ideological divisions are being blurred. Our antagonist rises
to act as the dead body on which all these cultural uncertainties are mirrored in relation to
Capitalism, with special emphasis on Thatcherism and present day Britishness.

The Chosen One(s): The re-imagination of English ethnic election in J.K. Rowlings
Harry Potter series
Chellyce Birch, University of Western Australia.

Although we live in a posthuman, secular world, the concept of ethnic election or
chosenness is an essential component of contemporary English national identity. To be
chosen, according to Anthony D. Smith, is to be singled out for special purposes by a
divine body, to be saved and privileged through obedience to Gods will and pre-
determined path. As Liah Greenfeld explains, this element of English identity became
prominent during the Elizabethan era when, with Protestant nationalism on the rise, the
English began to feel not only that God [was] English. The perceived chosenness of the
English has since permeated heroic cultural and literary works, in which protagonists
undergo a metaphorical death of character, and are reborn as upstanding, divine leaders of
the society in which they live. Drawing on Shakespearean and Dickensean heroic
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archetypes, J.K. Rowling continues this tradition in the highly successful Harry Potter
series. The epynomous Harry is repeatedly chosen to face seemingly insurmountable
challenges, culminating with the sacrifice of his life in Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows. Harrys series-long transition from schoolboy to hero is completed by his death
and resurrection, and like his literary predecessors, that transition is considerably shaped
by the context in which the text is produced. With the collpase of the vast Empire it
controlled until the 20th century, coupled with the pressures of a global capitalist economy
and culture, the metaphorical death of this element of the English character could be
expected. However, as an analysis of the representation of Harry in Rowlings series
shows, these external pressures have lead to a reimagining of the idea of English ethnic
election. Harrys transition from boy to hero demonstrates that, although the language
used to describe the nation as chosen has become more secular, the sacred belief in
English chosenness remains intact.

A story about how humans are frightened of death: Harry Potter, death and the
cultural imagination
Dr Anna Mackenzie
University of Chester, UK
In a series where death and its relationship with mortality is continually explored,
exploded and discussed, the Harry Potter novels maintain a continuous interest in death,
life, and the fragile line between them.
This paper explores the representation of death in Harry Potter in two distinct
ways. Firstly, by exploring the deaths of Albus Dumbledore and Sirius Black and the use of
props (the Castle window and the Veil, respectively), performance and textual analysis of
these demises reveals how such props are used to question and challenge the tenuous
connection between life and death.
The second part of this paper relates these texts to wider cultural conversations
about death, considering William Shakespeare and John Donnes poetry and Biblical
allusions in Harry Potter. The inscription on the Potters gravestone in Godrics Hollow
reads: The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, adapted from Corinthians 15:26
(Rowling 2007, 267). Investigating the intertextual relationship between Shakespeare and
Donnes writings and Harry Potter reveals clear and fascinating connections traversing the
Renaissance realms to the twentieth century, and demonstrates how Harry Potter
contributes to this enduring story about how humans are frightened of death (332).

Children and The Next Great Adventure: Death and How to Deal With It in the Harry
Potter Series.
Dr. Pilar Alderete-Diez
Spanish and Children Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway

In spite of the lengthy discussions by Harry Potter fans about the possible death of certain
characters in the Deathly Hallows, while J.K. Rowling was in the process of writing it; there
has not been much analysis about this topic. It is obvious that death is one of the main
issues in the books and the way it is underlined throughout the series opens up the ground
for the discussion on one of the most taboo themes in Western culture amongst children,
although children stories have always embroidered death into their plots even as a
character-, showing the fascination that humans of all ages have with the unknown stage
of non-living.
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This presentation was triggered by the comment from a thirteen year old boy in my
family who reported that the last book helped him deal with the painful sudden death of
his own mother, only weeks after the publication of the book. It was not the first time our
dialogue about Harry Potter would direct my research, and since his previous comment
had led down the route of translation and humour with successful results, I decided to
embark in this new adventure and see where it would take me for this conference.
My task for this presentation will be to examine death in the books, its imagery, its
language and the types of death to which children are exposed and the different options
and role models offered for coping with the numerous, and many times brutal, deaths. I
will be searching for connections to other well-known children books and attempting to
map a portion of Deaths territory in the imagination of contemporary children.

Flirting with Posthumanist Technologies in Harry Potter: Overconsumption of a
Good Thing
Dr Maryann Nguyen
Houston Community College, Houston (TX), USA
One could equate the witches and wizards magic and its use in J.K. Rowlings world of the
Harry Potter series to technology in the way we Muggles use and rely upon technology
and science in our daily lives. Magic is both the Wizarding worlds technology and science,
thus one can think of the Hallows and Horcruxes as magical equivalents of technological
tools and scientific advancements to attain immortality.
If one considers the Hallows and Horcruxes as means to extend a normal lifespan
and reflects upon Elaine Ostrys assertion that one category of evolution from human to
posthuman is the prolongation of life [whereby humans attempt]to extend the lifespan
beyond current limits, even trying to achieve immortality through scientific advance (223-
4), one could then argue that both Hallows and Horcruxes are posthumanist technological
tools. When a person combines the Deathly Hallows one cheats Death; when Voldermort
creates his Horcruxes he, too, makes himself virtually immortal. Both the Hallows and
Horcruxes exist outside the limits of normal magic for a normal wizard, thereby further
situating these two technologies in the realm of posthumanism.

In the same way that Muggles consume technology, witches and wizards can
consume (or over-consume) these posthumanist magical technologies. Two major
consumers exist in HP: Albus Dumbledore, the conservative consumer, and Lord
Voldermort, the over-consumer. Dumbledore understand the limits of his direct or indirect
consumption of these tools. Voldemort, however, not only uses posthumanist technologies
but over-uses them to become a posthuman. Each horcrux he creates not only distorts his
physiognomy into the monstrous but produces a less human physiology and psychology.
Hes not only evil but becomes supernatural evil incarnate.
Furthermore, as excess consumer, he perverts the capitalist systems mantra. He,
the consumer, gains immortality and the producers of these horcruxes, pay the ultimate
sacrifice with their lives.

Classical antiquity in the Harry Potter saga
Andrea Ladrn de Guevara Quintela
University of Murcia, Spain

J.K. Rowlings magical universe is full of references to classical antiquity. Theses references
are present in the neologisms (most of the spells are written in Latin) or the magical
creatures (e.g. sphinx and Pegasus), but the main ones are found on the themes and the
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adventures that the hero and his friends have to overcome. In similar terms, our
protagonist must overcome a myriad of labours, as did Heracles, Theseus or Jason before
him. However, his own death in the seventh book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)
should be specially remarked.
Rowling completed a Degree in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. This
background allowed her to turn to classical themes, which are recurrent from the
introduction where she reproduces some verses of Aeschylus The Libation Bearers to
the prophecy that is going to determine the heros life. All in all, the classical influence on
Rowlings work is vast and it deserves to be analysed in detail so as to fully understand the
prophecy of the seventh book.

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S85 Fantasy Literature & Place

Erin Horokova, University of Glasgow: Enchanting the World
Horace Walpole sought via literary and material projects to bring the fantastic into the
mundane, and to dwell in that altered reality. The writer of The Castle of Otranto and the
builder of Strawberry Hill, Walpole was an originating figure in both gothic revival
architecture and gothic literature. But even as Walpole was collecting artifacts and
building a utopic, gloomthy retreat from modernity and the city (and, as a queer man,
crafting spaces for himself outside of heteronormative relations), he was the PMs son,
serving in Parliament, and, via his extensive correspondence, participating actively in
Society. Networking is as much the source of Walpoles legacy as any discrete
accomplishment; it was the means by which he founded genres. Id like to propose that
Walpoles activities are not strangely juxtaposed, but in fact fundamentally intertwined.
Using his letters, fiction, and art criticism, as well as Brooks The Gothic Revival, Pearces On
Collecting and Roses The Pleasure of Ruins (with a little Burke, Sontag and Benjamin), Ill
discuss the centrality of place and materiality to Walpoles conception of the fantastic.
Even as Walpoles seemingly disparate projects are actually interdependent, his aesthetic
of bright, cheerful, gloomy-warmth and literary camp positions charm at the core of the
gothic. We normally view the gothic sublime and charm as diametrically opposed
(threatening wilderness vs cosy domestic space), and the real-world spaces these
aesthetics relate to as similarly at odds. I aim to trouble that unstable binary and
illuminate the connections between the canny and the uncanny, the foundational kinship
between Walpoles dream-worlds and his real one.

Rebecca Long, Trinity College, Dublin: Physical and metaphysical landscapes in
Irish childrens literature
Patricia Lynchs The Turf Cutters Donkey (1939) engages with the physical and
metaphysical landscapes of Ireland through the central figures experiences of myth,
temporality, and identity. A particular pattern of re-imagination occurs in the landscape
Lynch depicts, where imaginative vision and experiences of emplacement produce
instances of mythic apprehension33. The depth of the narrative engagements across and
within this text reveals the extent to which representations of landscape in Irish fantasy
literature for children is dominated by images of cultural heritage. Within the text,
landscape is the medium through which experiences of childhood are articulated, and
through which images of cultural heritage are transmitted and re-imagined.
This paper investigates how the child figures at the centre of Patricia Lynchs The Turf
Cutters Donkey (1939), Seamus and Eileen, move extensively through the physical and
metaphysical landscapes of the West of Ireland, and the extent to which an awareness or
knowledge of mythological narratives supports or inhibits their ability to progress through
the environments they find themselves in. Ireland is explored as a constructed or storied
space, created through the dynamic process of narration, and perpetuated and re-created
through a recurring cycle of myths.
This paper investigates the extent to which narrative treatments of physical and
metaphysical landscapes in Irish childrens literature transmit images of cultural heritage,
and whether the landscapes depicted in a fantasy text such as The Turfcutters Donkey
33. Kraft E. Von Maltzahn, Nature a Landscape: Dwelling and Understanding (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 1994), 19.

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support imaginative engagement with narratives of Irelands pasts, presents, and futures. I
posit that through the act of re-imagination, and through imaginative reveries into the
landscapes of Ireland, the child figures in this text are presented with opportunities to
reconcile past and present realities, both personal and national, through recurring
narrative patterns.

Lindsay Meyers, NUI Galway: Impossible Dreams: The Subversive Nature of Fascist
Architecture in Bruno Paolo Arcangelis Venite con me nellimpossibile (1941)
Eversice the first Golden Age of Fantasy in the late nineteenth century the urban and rural
landscapes of childrens fantasy have served as powerful vehicles for reflecting on social
and political issues. Rural landscapes have tended to be associated with beauty, spiritual
growth, liberty and emancipation while urban landscapes have tended to symbolise
uglynes, industrialisation, exploitation and oppression. Fascist architecture with its stark
solidity and imposing solemnity has consistently been employed in works of fantasy and
science-fiction to symbolise evil, and both the recent Hunger Games trilogy and the new
Star Wars Movie rely heavily on this trope.
Bruno Paolo Arcangeli s employment of fascist architecture in Venite con me
nellimpossibile, a childrens fantasy which first appeated in Italy in 1941, does not,
however, display any of the by-now-established literary conventions. The fascist
landscapes in this work are rural not urban and the solemn and highly immaginative
fascist buildings that appear in the illustrations to the work are, in many ways, far more
original than their post-war counterparts. Why is this work so strikingly different, and
what exactly was its ideological message? By focussing in detail on the content and
illustrations of this little-known fantasy and by situating both elements in the context of
Italian fascism, this paper aims to shed new light on the relationship between the
architecture and ideologies of fascism in twentieth-century childrens literature.

Franziska Burstyn, Universitt Siegen: Second Star to the Right Hemisphere, and
Straight on to Enchantment; Charles Taylor and the Mapping of the Fantastic Realm
Within the genre of fantasy, the entrance into the fantastic realm often entails a re-
enchantment of the characters who set foot into secondary worlds. Accordingly, the
mapping of primary and secondary world follows a principle which can also be explained
with Charles Taylors hypothesis of enchantment as a pre-modern condition as opposed
to the modern state of disenchantment. Taylor draws on Max Webers ideas on the
disenchantment of the world as a byproduct of secularization within contemporary
Western societies, which necessitates a re-enchantment of the world as a basic human
need. On closer examination, the interconnection between disenchantment and (re-
)enchantment also bears resemblances to the neurological interrelation between the left
and right hemisphere of the human brain. In fact, popular science typically associates the
left hemisphere with analytical thought, essentially organizing, analyzing and rationalizing
information on a disenchanted level, while the right hemisphere focusses on the moment;
it is the creative and emotional force striving for a state of enchantment.
This paper will map the primordial need for fantasy on the basis of a sociological as well as
neurological explanatory model by interrelating the dichotomy of primary and secondary
world with Taylors theory on (re-)enchantment. While the exchange between the primary
and the secondary world in fantastic narratives also points to a state of re-enchantment,
the genre may also be argued to visualize both cognitive counterpoints. In order to show
the mechanisms of both sociological and neurological patterns, this paper will examine J.M.
Barries Peter and Wendy (1911).
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Eva Oppermann, Universitt Kassel : The Heterotopian Qualities of the Secondary
Worlds in Rowlings Harry Potter-Books and Cassandra Clares The Mortal
Instrument
Worlds of Fantasy often contain not only what can be called our world but at least one
more world which is closed to all but the members of a certain group of special humans,
such as Rowlings Witches and Wizards and Clares Shadowhunters. In my contribution, I
would like to explore in which respects either the whole secondary world or certain places
there correspond to Michel Foucaults concept of heterotopia. Aspects of this study will
include the protective as well as exclusive character of a heterotopian place; here, Witches,
Wizards, Shadowhunters, Werewolves and Vampires are safe from espionage by Muggles
or Mundanes, and sometimes only they can enter. Other places reveal their true character
only to insiders of the community. On theother hand, these places also separate the
community of the supernatural from ordinary society by hiding away the strange. Because
ofthis, contact zones will be of special interest. One further aspect will be the
geographical setting of many such places which only appear on magical or enruned
maps but not on ordinary ones. Furthermore, with regard to Clare, I will have a look at the
meaning of NewYork and Alicante in the first three volumes of The Mortal Instruments.

Sinead Moriarty, Roehampton University: A Hostile Wilderness? The Antarctic in
fantasy literature for children
The Antarctic was the ultimate unknown wilderness landscape. Hidden by a seemingly
impenetrable wall of ice the Antarctic landscape retained its mysterious nature late into
the nineteenth century. This allowed a rich body of fantasy literature to develop around
the Antarctic with writers from Coleridge to Poe creating imaginary accounts of
expeditions within the icy continent.
Many early fantasy representations of the Antarctic depicted the landscape as a deeply
uncanny environment, characterised by death, the return of the dead and malignant
supernatural forces. Even after explorers began to investigate and map the interior of the
continent, literature for both adults and children continued to imagine the Antarctic as a
malevolent and treacherous wilderness.
Despite revolutionary cultural changes in the perception of wilderness landscapes, and the
contemporary veneration of these spaces, the Antarctic has remained a largely uncanny
space within fantasy literature for children. Many Antarctic fantasy texts for child
audiences imagine the continent as a landscape characterised by death, filled with ghosts,
the return of the dead and mortal dangers for their child characters. However in
contemporary Antarctic fantasy literature for children this essentially uncanny landscape
sometimes offers vital opportunities for growth and development for the child characters.
In these texts the Antarctic is a space which threatens death but also supports growth. I
will focus on Geraldine McCaughreans The White Darkness (2005) and Margaret Mahys
The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom (2001), analysing their contrasting approaches to the
representation of the Antarctic as an uncanny landscape. I will specifically focus on the
journeys of their child protagonists through the Antarctic landscape and the ways these
child characters are able to progress and gain agency in this unique space.

Aishwarya Subramanian, Newcastle University: Landscape and Postimperial
Identity in British Children's Fantasy
This paper considers a series of fantasy novels written in the 1960s and 70s, in which
British identity is rooted in the particularities of a physical landscape and in local histories
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and myths/traditions, and places them within the context of a broader discourse around
national identity in the wake of empire and rapid decolonization. Drawing on aspects of
works by Alan Garner, Penelope Lively and Susan Cooper, I will discuss the process by
which the British landscape is re-enchanted during this period, the realignment of
Britishness from the empire to the domestic landscape, and the creation of a national
identity based in local space and history.
I'll be reading these books in the context of a tradition of localist discourse (drawing on Ian
Baucom's Out of Place; also on Lucy Pearson's recent work on the presence of such a
discourse within British children's literature since the 1930s) and examining reasons why
it might see such a resurgence at this historical moment. Drawing on Baucom's suggestion
that this localism is in part a response to a broader attempt to shift the location of national
identity "from place to race", I'll also be addressing the question of how these books deal
with the presence of outsiders to this shared national history.

Laura Tosi, Universit di Venezia - Ca' Foscari: Child bodies in dystopian spaces:
spectacles of metamorphosis and suffering
Metamorphosis, body displacement and grotesque distortion are the bedrock of fantasy.
Mutations and alterations of childrens bodies can especially be found in dystopian spaces
within fantasy locations. In the nineteenth century, examples range from Alice shrinking,
elongating and almost disappearing in Wonderland (a land with a distinctly dystopic
flavour), to Floras deformed and object-shaped guests at her birthday party (in the Land
of Nowhere in Rossettis Speaking Likenesses), to Pinocchio changing into a donkey in Il
Paese dei Balocchi. In contemporary dystopian fantasies such as Collinss Hunger Games
Trilogy or Dashners Maze Runner series, however, the metamorphic, distorted or
mutilated bodies of children, who must fight in a Darwinian struggle for survival, are
placed at the centre of a panoptical structure watched by adults: the arena and the maze.
My paper investigates the way 19th century nightmarish fantasy spaces frame and contain
the childs bodily transformations and contrasts them with the way teenage bodies
interact with their spaces of competition for existence in contemporary YA dystopian
novels. While body alterations in 19th century are rectified in the end, and reframed as
symbolic journeys that end with a return to normality, contemporary dystopian fantasies
are constructed as adult controlled spaces which produce traumatic experiences and
scarred, suffering bodies. In Hunger Games and Maze Runner, mutations, mutilations and
distortions of child and teenage bodies have become public spectacles to be witnessed as
they are displayed in sophisticated landscapes for horrific transformations that have been
built and devised by future adult societies.

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S86: Calculables and Incalculables in Teaching English Today

Co-convenors:
Dr Roy Sellars, University of St Gallen and University of Southern Denmark
Prof Graham Allen, University College Cork

The process of calculation has become ever more prominent in departments of English
across Europe. Accreditations, benchmarking, internationalisation, transparency, audits,
assessments, learning outcomes, key competences, deliverables: the list goes on. At the
same time, teaching practice remains, we propose, fundamentally and necessarily
incalculable. In this seminar we want to bring together teachers from different European
contexts in order to reflect on recent developments and to ask: how can resistance to
pedagogical calculation be conceptualised and organised without falling back into passive
critique or another discourse of calculables? If the history of theory and before it
philosophy entails, as we would assert, a history of pedagogics (teaching practices which
reflect not only on their practice but also on their very possibility), does
theory/philosophy have anything to say, today, in defence of the incalculable?

Dr Elizabeth Hoult, Birkbeck, University of London Contemplating Hope in the
Infinite in a Prison Reading Group
In this paper I will give an account of a recent research project which convened a science
fiction film group in a mens prison. Escaping the walls of the university, and teaching in
the context of a funded research project rather than the curriculum apparatus, has led me
to a pedagogical experience which has been characterised by people confined in space and
time, but where, paradoxically, the accountancy and accountability measures that saturate
more traditional university environments were largely absent. The process of thinking
about infinite space and time in these confined contexts has led to open and plural
readings of both the texts (e.g. Kubricks 2001) and the participants own futures in the
context of incalculable space and time. Ill offer some possible readings of this freedom.

Dr Michael OSullivan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Imperfect
Knowledge of the Knowledge Economy and the Teaching of Literature
The language of the knowledge economy is based on allegiance to what are often
described as rigorously calculated macroeconomic models of universities as markets.
University administration teams employ these models, they tell us, in place of older
models based on tradition and educational philosophy because they are less open to the
kinds of chance and uncertainty that could send us crashing in this same market. However,
this paper explores the imperfect knowledge of the Knowledge Economy. As Frydman and
Goldberg argue with their IKE (Imperfect Knowledge Economics, 2015), rational choice
macroeconomic theory has for too long ignored the radical uncertainty (Keynes, 1936)
and imperfect knowledge that behavioural economics must be based on. They argue that,
regardless of whether agents are fully rational or less than fully rational, fully
predetermined microfoundations are incompatible [...] with profit-seeking in real-world
markets, and that, in order to open macroeconomic models to minimally reasonable
decision-making [...], economists must jettison their core premise that non-routine change
is unimportant for understanding market outcomes. If any discipline can help our
students and universities imaginatively engage with the economic [...] and ethical
importance of radical uncertainty, imperfect knowledge, and non-routine change in
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planning for the future, it is literature, and specifically a theoretical approach to literature.
This paper will explore these ideas in relation to the teaching of such writers as Samuel
Beckett and David Foster Wallace.

Dr John W. P. Phillips, National University of Singapore, Leading and Misleading: A
Hundred Years of English Teaching
With an eye on two kinds of process, of calculation and of education, and therefore on two
kinds of practice, I want to inquire into a possibility of teaching in its connection with
1) truths that cannot be proven and that are, in fact, false;
2) an aesthetic education that aims to combine opposite conditions by cancellation
(Aufhebung); and
3) a tension between what is teachable and unteachable. In addition, I propose a reading of
short sections from Aristotle the Ethics and the Analytics and a passage from Sophocles
Antigone (with several translations). The framework of a history of English serves as a
guise or, as Rousseau would have had it, a subterfuge, and the motif of leading (in several
senses) operates as a guide through an otherwise complex tangle of materials.

Dr Sarah Wood, University of Kent, Dream Reckoning
Taking up the panel calls possibly psychoanalytic language of resistance and defence, Id
like to see what happens if we start to dream teaching, and start to read what Freud writes
about calculation (Rechnung) in dreams. According to On Dreams, dream-calculation
produces the wildest results. Can dreams teach us how to reckon with pedagogical
calculation?

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S87 Richard Hakluyt
Organisers: Daniel Carey (NUI Galway) and Claire Jowitt (UEA)

Colm MacCrossan (Sheffield Hallam) The Master Thief of the Unknown World: The
Ambivalence of Hakluyts Drake
In Richard Hakluyts enormous travel collection The Principal Navigations...of the English
Nation (1598-1600), no other voyager is named as often or in such a variety of contexts as
Sir Francis Drake. He appears as the first commander to complete a voyage around the
world (1577-80), and as a leader of the English defence against the Spanish Armada
(1588), and his influence in the text further extends from Virginia to Tierra del Fuego,
Constantinople, and Ormus. Yet, while Hakluyt explicitly expressed an ambition to provide
images of famous predecessors to inspire further English voyaging, his text does
surprisingly little to frame Drakes activities in a way which would make him a cohesive
exemplar to younger Englishmen. This paper examines the fragmentary representation of
Drake in The Principal Navigations, taking into account the sources Hakluyt had available
to him and the contexts in which it was produced, and asking what the treatment of Drake
reveals about the larger collection and how it can be read critically today.

Claire Jowitt (University of East Anglia) Hakluyt and the Heroic: Captaincy at Sea and
its Discontents

Everyone knows what the sea means to an Englishman; what is not sufficiently
known is the precise form of the connection between his relationship to the sea and
his famous individualism. The Englishman sees himself as a captain on board a ship
with a small group of people, the sea around and beneath him. He is almost alone;
as captain he is in many ways isolated from his crew.

So wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960) about the symbolic character of the
English nation. For Englishmen (sic) the fantasy figure of the sea captain was a
remarkably stable national self-identity, and Canetti describes how this isolated male
figure personified his ship, sought to impose his absolute and undisputed power of
command on a sea that is there to be ruled, and provided a powerful collective vision of
how to behave and interact with others that endured for generations. The model is clearly
apparent in nineteenth-century accounts of English colonial and imperial history where,
for instance, J.A. Froude famously described Hakluyts collection of English exploration,
trade, and travel, The Principal Navigations (1589; 2nd rev. edn 1598/9-1600) as the prose
epic of the modern English nation (Short Studies in Great Subjects, 1891). But Hakluyts
texts present a more complicated and nuanced picture than these homogenising accounts
of Englands nautical history allow. Though Froude is right to suggest that The Principal
Navigations makes claims for the central role of sea captains such as Francis Drake, Walter
Ralegh, and Thomas Cavendish in supporting English expansionist policies abroad and
defending the nation in times of war, and Canetti makes astute connections between
English national identity, individualism, and the figure of the sea captain, The Principal
Navigations frequently includes disputes between captains concerning the power of
command. This paper focuses on the ways struggles to establish and maintain command
by sea captains are recounted in The Principal Navigations to explore questions of how and
why Hakluyts collection repeatedly emphasized and re-cycled this particular motif.

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Anthony Payne (NUI Galway) Hakluyt and the Ancients

This paper will discuss Hakluyts treatment of supposed ancient knowledge of the
Americas, especially in the last volume of his Principal Navigations (1600).
Hakluyt was not excited by the concept of a New World. Indeed, using ancient
authors, he questions its novelty. This was not purely a classicists deference to
antiquity. It could be deployed against Iberian claims deriving from the originality of their
American discoveries. These, according to Hakluyt, had been preceded by ancient
voyagers and had been informed by the ancients knowledge of lands across the Atlantic.
Implicit in this thinking is that if the lands found by Spain and Portugal were no more than
rediscoveries, then the English, acting as true pioneers, were discovering a genuine new
world. Hakluyts discussion of ancient knowledge of the New World had ample precedent.
Ramusio, his model as a compiler of voyage accounts, had cited Platos Atlantis as evidence
of the inhabitability of the entire globe and quoted Senecas Medea as prophetic of the
discovery of the New World. But Ramusio was writing half a century before Hakluyt. Soon
after 1600, Hakluyts successor, Samuel Purchas, rejected the ancient discovery
tradition. Might Hakluyts intellectual world have seemed old fashioned even as his final
volume came off the press?

Jane Grogan (University College Dublin) Vaunting Knowledge and Vouching antiquities
in the Principall Navigations (1589)
Hakluyt ordered his materials regionally, imitating Ramusio, as D.B. Quinn noted. The
texts centre on travellers, not regions, vivid eye-witness accounts rather than geographical
pronouncements, but the structures of belief and endorsement that Hakluyt demanded,
particularly for the New World materials, were not a given. Just a year later, for example,
Edmund Spenser would enjoy some epistemological brinkmanship at Hakluyts expense,
casting doubt on the veracity of both travellers and editors work for the dubious purposes
of establishing Faeryland within the same appealing framework. Who euer heard of
thIndian Peru? / Or who in venturous vessell measured / The Amazons huge riuer now
found trew? / Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew? (The Faerie Queene, II Proem).
That New World interests Virginia, Peru were at the heart of Hakluyts project in the
Principal Navigations is a given; less clear are the significance of the Old World travel
narratives interspersed among them: trading missions, pilgrimages and embassies to
known parts of the world east and south. This paper confronts Hakluyts ordering of
materials in the first edition of the Principal Navigations, exploring the implications of his
mixture of accounts of the Old World and the New in its historical moment.

John Carrigy (NUI Galway) To proove by Reason: Historical precedent in the work
of John Dee and Richard Hakluyt

Elizabethan efforts to establish an English presence in the New World engendered a
literature of both justification and promotion. Convincing both the state and prospective
investors of the legality of colonial and exploratory ventures required rigorous, convincing
arguments. Key texts in this tradition were John Dees General and Rare Memorials
Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577) and Richard Hakluyts Discourse on
Western Planting (1582). The success of these persuasive texts is evident in the letters
patent and voyages during these years.
This paper will explore the uses of prior claims to sovereignty over the New World by
Hakluyt and Dee, demonstrating the inter-relatedness of the sources and substance of
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their arguments. It will foreground the significance of Roman law and historical precedent,
within a broader British antiquarian tradition, as the basis for sixteenth-century imperial
theory. It will focus in particular on the influence antiquarian methodologies had on the
tone and content of imperial literature at this juncture.

Ladan Niayesh (Paris-Diderot) Under Persian Eyes: Hakluyts Corrective to Safavid
Chronicles
To the historian looking for Persian accounts to match Hakluyts extensive Muscovy
Companys material on the beginnings of Anglo-Iranian trade in the second half of the
sixteenth century, surviving Safavid chronicles are a disappointment. Referring only in
passing to European embassies, Persian sources mostly conflate Western visitors under
the generic appellation of Farangi, which could be understood as a sign either of ignorance
or of indifference on their part.
Taking its cue from Rudi Matthee and Sholeh Quinns works on Safavid
historiographys aims and methods, this paper purports to provide a corrective to this
view, by examining in particular Hakluyts accounts of Muscovy Company agents court
audiences, which yield proof of a surprisingly deep awareness of European geopolitics on
the part of the Shah and his nobles. With this evidence in mind, I will argue, the
discrepancy between English and Persian sources can be accounted for through a process
of selection and adjustment whereby the chroniclers make their accounts fit the Safavids
Iran-centred, providentialist view of world history.

Daniel Carey (NUI Galway) Hakluyt and the Clothworkers: Long Distance Trade and
English Commercial Development

Richard Hakluyt has long been understood as organizing The Principal Navigations (1589;
1598-1600) around the interests of the Clothworkers Company, based on the fact that he
received support from the Company in pursuing his studies in Oxford; the benefit he
received in compiling the work from figures like Richard Staper, a prominent member of
the company; and the evidence of his commitment to extending the demand for English
finished cloth in distant markets (opposing the interests of the Merchant Adventurers).
This paper reexamines the case for this view and suggests a more nuanced reading.
Hakluyt certainly recognized the value of the trade in cloth to the English economy; but
whether that makes his position identifiable solely with the interests of the Clothworkers
Company is another matter. The cloth trade, yes, but Clothworkers exclusively? This seems
less plausible. Membership in multiple companies complicates the picture of whose
interests are being served. There are also other texts in the volumes that support the case
for cloth from figures without any recognized connection with the Company (e.g. Sir Geoge
Peckham); thus it was possible to advocate for cloth without being an agent of a single
interest. If we situate Hakluyts work in relation to that of his influential elder cousin, also
named Richard Hakluyt, is seems clear that his broader purpose is to stimulate economic
development, provide for employment, and to strengthen English competitiveness with
Spain in particular.

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RT1: Literary Journalism and Immigration: A Stranger in a Strange Land
Co-convenors: John S. Bak, Universit de Lorraine, France
David Abrahamson, Northwestern University, IL U.S.A

Literary journalism a genre of nonfiction prose that lies at the conceptual intersection of
literature and journalism can be the best vehicle to tell a certain kind of story that
reporting often neuters of its emotional appeal and literature inevitably elevates to
universal heights that efface its individualistic nature. It can be argued that the cause
clbre of the last few decades or so has been immigration, the ineluctable endgame of
colonialist agendas. The discourse is global, poignant and often marked by nativism,
racism and even violence. The proposed session will focus on ways in which a variety of
national traditions of literary journalism have dealt with the immigrant experience, in
particularly on how various perspectives (both by individual authors and in national
traditions) have explored what it means to be or, perhaps more importantly, to be view
by others as a stranger in a strange land.

Speakers
Alfred Archer, University of Bristol, UK
Michael Hendrik, University of Bamberg, Germany
Isabelle Meuret, Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Hania A.M. Nashef, American University of Sharjah United Arab Emirates,

RT2: Re-defining the Contemporary in Anglo-American Fiction
Convenor: Dr. Ana-Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
However cursory a glance at scholarship devoted to contemporary literature will identify
the inconsistency with which the contemporary is defined and periodised nowadays. As
it becomes increasingly evident that literature after 1945 no longer means
contemporary literature, new temporal landmarks are hard to agree upon and often
seem tenuous, problematic and fraught with conceptual and ideological difficulties
(Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, 60). Nonetheless, periodisations remain
pragmatically necessary and theoretically suggestive (Tew 17). Taking fiction as our
object, as the more referential and perhaps the most representative of contemporary
literary genres, our round table aims to investigate the ways in which recent fiction in
English has been narrativised in relation to various events, in search of a relational and
workable periodisation of the contemporary.

Speakers:
1. Prof. Peter Childs, Newman University, Birmingham, UK
2. Prof. Smi Ludwig, Universit de Haute-Alsace, France
3. Dr. Sebastian Goes, Roehampton University, London, UK
4. Dr. Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth, UK
5. Dr. Emily Horton, Independent Scholar, London, UK
6. Ms. Corina Selejan, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
7. Dr. Ana-Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania (convenor)

RT3: Narrative Strategies in the Reconstruction of History in the Work of
Contemporary British Women Novelists
Convenor: Ana Raquel Fernandes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
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The aim of the round table is to enquire into the ways certain contemporary British
women authors write into their fiction the processes by which they recreate and pay
testimony to history. We will also examine the reasons why they recreate the past,
whether they be political, social or artistic, and the strategies employed to establish a
comparison to the present.
Celia Wallhead will open the debate discussing Byatts collection of critical studies, On
Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, in which the author set out her thoughts on the
reasons behind what she called the sudden flowering of the historical novel in Britain.
Wallhead will look at Byatts thoughts in the context of the postwar novel and its heritage.
Furthermore, shell show how Byatt uses the strategies she identifies in her critical studies
in her own fiction in the course of her literary career.
Mara Jos de la Torre will focus on the latest fiction of Pat Baker and Sarah Waters
in order to explore the relevance of their historical settings. In particular, de la Torre will
address how their use of historical settings responds to some of the different modes of
writing that the flourishing of the historical novel in Britain has given rise to. The
Postmodern elements of fact/fiction hybridity will be approached, as well as the social
realist streaks that may be found in the novels, which will link with the notion of rewriting
history.
Furthermore, Alexandra Cheiras analysis of how visual elements (fact) and the
stories weaved around them (fiction) are intertwined in Tracy Chevaliers novels will
make for a striking historical approach. Cheira will discuss Chevaliers use of visual art to
create her novels. She will also argue that Chevaliers novels are neo-historical in the sense
that History is secondary to plot and characters.
Finally, Wintersons and Smiths novelistic production, their interrogation of
particular versions of history through the process of narrative, their depiction of
alternative identities and the rewriting of personal and national myths will prompt the
analysis by Ana Raquel Fernandes. Debate will be opened to the floor. At the end we expect
to have demonstrated/discussed parallels, shifts and transformations in the writing of
these authors and in the rewriting of history in contemporary British fiction by women
authors.

Speakers:
1. Celia Wallhead (University of Granada, Spain)
2. Mara Jos de la Torre (University of Granada, Spain)
3. Alexandra Cheira (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon/ ULICES (University of Lisbon
Centre for English Studies), Portugal
4. Ana Raquel Fernandes (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon/ ULICES (University of
Lisbon Centre for English Studies), Portugal.

RT4 Stories of Their Own: Gender and the Contemporary Short Story in English
(A collaboration of the European Network for Short Fiction Research [ENSFR] and the
research project Womens Tales, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and
Competitiveness [FEM2013-41977-P])
Co-convenors: Jorge Sacido-Romero, U Santiago de Compostela, Spain and Michelle Ryan-
Sautour, Universit dAngers, France

The aim of this round table is to explore the connection between the contemporary short
story in Britain and Ireland and womens experience by examining some theoretical issues
pertaining to the above-mentioned connection to then move on to analysing particular
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texts. Womens contribution, both qualitatively and quantitatively speaking, to the
development of the contemporary short story cannot be explained only in terms of
continuity with a rich female short story tradition, but also in terms of the genres inherent
potential as a vehicle for the expression of a feminine experience that is critical with
reality as it is symbolically structured.

Speakers are:
Jorge Sacido-Romero
Michelle Ryan-Sautour
Laura Lojo-Rodrguez
Paul March-Russell
Sylvia Mieszkowski

RT5: Competition out of the ordinary: Roundtable on top research in English
Studies
Co-convenors: Janne Korkka, University of Turku, Finland
Elina Valovirta, University of Turku, Finland
The rhetoric of competition in todays academia values top researchers (ERC) and top
universities (QS Rankings) above the rest. This type of register denotes that by all
accounts, competition in academia is fierce and intensifying. This roundtable questions
and debates how the qualitatively proportional terms of top, best or cutting-edge
research rely heavily on the prerequisite of ordinary as its foundation or its flipside. Based
on collaboration under the research project, Out of the Ordinary. Challenging
Commonplace Concepts in Anglophone Literature (Academy of Finland), this roundtable
challenges the hegemonic way in which the rhetoric of the top in discussions of academic
competition has become so commonplace and self-evident that it has in fact become
ordinary, not special or out of the ordinary. Panellists from various European universities
will engage with questions such as how to move beyond the axiomatic top-bottom
juxtaposition reproduced in the prevalent academic rhetoric of competition? What does
the increasing competition to produce top publications, projects, and researchers mean
for English Studies and its future?
1. Bndicte Ledent, University of Lige, Belgium
2. Antonia Navarro Tejero, University of Crdoba, Spain
3. Joel Kuortti, University of Turku, Finland
4. Alexis Thadi, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France

RT6 The Spatial Turn: What is Literary Geography Now?
Convenors: Eleonora Rao (Universit di Salerno) David Cooper (Manchester
Metropolitan University)

The prominence of literary geography within English Studies has been heightened by the
spatial turn across the arts and humanities and has been formalized by the launch of a
new open-access international, interdisciplinary journal. It is an appropriate moment,
therefore, to reflect on the current status of literary geography and to consider the
different ways it is being practised across Europe.

This roundtable discussion will invite scholars from several different countries to draw
upon their critical processes and procedures to address the key question: What is Literary
Geography Now?. Topics under consideration might include: the relationship between
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creative and critical practices, geocriticism, literary geography and ecocriticism,
interdisciplinary collaborations between literary critics and geographers, digital literary
geography.

Speakers:
Jane Suzanne Carroll
Kirsti Bohata
David Cooper
Bruna C. Mancini
Eleonora Rao
Rocco De Leo (respondent)
Jason Finch (respondent)

RT7 Romantic-Era Labouring-Class Poetry: New Critical Directions
Convenor: Franca Dellarosa (Universit degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy)
Co-Convenor (in absentia) and Panel Advisor: Professor John Goodridge
(Professor Emeritus, Nottingham Trent University, UK)

Recent criticism has focused intensely on labouring-class poetry, debating which writing
profiles it should accommodate as a critical category, and under which agenda. An
expanding corpus of British labouring-class poetry is now widely available, as the editors
of the special dedicated number of Criticism Donna Landry and William J. Christmas
remarked in 2005; this provides a solid, text-based foundation to stimulate appreciation of
what is now recognized as both a vibrant and sustained literary and cultural
phenomenon. Landry and Christmas make a strong case for critical exercise on labouring-
class writing to move and embrace questions of formal and aesthetic order, therefore
providing a necessary, healthy rebalancing of the categories of history and the literary, or
politics and aesthetics, and circumventing the risk of sociological reductionism.
Appraising the current debate for the recent Blackwell Companion to Romantic Poetry,
Michael Scrivener records the new turn to the aesthetic as a welcome shift of emphasis,
associating the somewhat controversial element of the biographical with the until
recently prevailing ideological approach in the present, the critics task, in Scriveners
words, is to read the aesthetic ideologically and read the ideological aesthetically, giving
full weight to the entire meaning of poetry. The round table, also developing on the
outcomes of the themed panel on labouringclass poetry Exploring and Expanding the
Archive of Labouring-Class Print Culture, convened by Bridget Keegan for the Conference
Romantic Imprints (Cardiff, BARS Conference, July 2015), is intended to discuss the state
of the art regarding labouring class poetry as a critical category, in the light of new
scholarship and editing work.

Speakers:
Franca Dellarosa
Jennifer Orr
Jack Windle

RT9: Using ideas from intercultural communication, literary texts and cultural
studies to expand EAP practice: breaking new ground
Convenor: Ann Gulden, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway,

383
This provocative round table seeks to address and challenge the worrying tendencies
towards conformity in EAP practice and its outcomes. EAP imposes a terministic screen
which can be limiting and lead to the risk of cloned discourses. There is an element of
instrumentality in much current EAP practice, which risks endorsing unreflecting
formulaic writing. The power of EAP hegemonies can interfere with the development of
academic identities in both L1 and L2 contexts. Using approaches from intercultural
communication, literary and cultural studies, we propose to explore ways in which learner
imagination and autonomy can be encouraged and such instrumentality challenged.
Speakers:
1.Karen Bennett , Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
2. Ann Torday Gulden, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway,
3. Tom Muir, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway,
4. Kart Rummel, Tallin University of Technology, Estonia
5. Kristin Solli, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway,

RT11: Creating a European Anglicists' Gender Studies Network

Co-convenors: Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany
Iil Ba, Boazii University of Istanbul, Turkey
Mara Socorro Surez Lafuente, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain

Womens and Gender Studies have established themselves as a vibrant, highly innovative
field of English Studies and contribute decisively to the crucial role the discipline plays
among the humanities in Europe. The plethora of achievements across the continent
makes it difficult to get an overall picture, particularly as the strong interdisciplinary
orientation of Womens and Gender Studies encourages co-operation in smaller local or
regional units. Much can therefore be gained from European exchange and synergies, as
ESSE has already demonstrated. These effects can be heightened further by a network.
Womens and Gender Studies cut across all sectors of English Studies and a network can
help to bring them together for focused work, greater international visibility and well-
deserved prestige.
On the basis of a wide-ranging research project, the first part of the panel will give the first
European overview of the current situation and highlight a number of landmark
achievements.
The second part will be devoted to organisational matters, including the fleshing out of
initiatives and activities (such as setting up a directory of researchers and research).

Speakers:
Florence Binard, Universit Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cit, France
Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany
Mara Socorro Surez Lafuente, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain

RT12: Shakespeare in the Second Language Classroom
Co-convenor: Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Norway
Mention Shakespeare to a group of primary or secondary students, and you will get an
equal measure of excitement and fear. Excitement over his iconic status and his universal
presence in popular culture, and fear over his difficult language. This is particularly true
for the second language classroom. However, across Scandinavia (and Europe),
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Shakespeare is regularly mentioned by name in national curriculums. The Norwegian
National Curriculum, for example, states: Engelsksprklig litteratur, fra barnerim til
Shakespeare, kan gi leseglede for livet og en dypere forstelse for andre og seg selv.
[English Literature, from nursery rhymes to Shakespeare, can offer a life-long joy of
reading and a deeper understanding of others and oneself].
This roundtable seeks to consider the innovative ways educators encourage students to
appreciate Shakespeare and his language, and to interrogate the ways Shakespeare
remains a resource for language learning across Scandinavia and Europe. The panel will
include both educators and critics to discuss methods, resources, experiences, challenges,
translations, adaptations, teaching through performance, and ways of encouraging a wider
use of Shakespeare at all education, skill and age levels.
Speakers:
1. Delilah Bermudez Brataas (Chair), Associate Professor of English, Norwegian University
of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway
2. Erica Hateley, Professor of English, NTNU, Norway
3. Christina Sandhaug, Assistant Professor of English, Hedmark University College, Norway
4. Kikki Lindell, Associate Professor of English, Lund University, Sweden
5. Svenn-Arve Myklebost
6. Ellen Marie Kvaale

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Posters
1. Casilda Garcia de la Maza, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain,
Integrating the general and the specific in a maritime English course
2. Jiina Popelkov and Lucie Gillov, Charles University in Prague, Sound Symbolic
Expressions from a Cross-linguistic Perspective
3. Michaela amalov, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, Cross-linguistic
Influence: The Potential of Pedagogical Translation in English Language Teaching
4. Sumie Akutsu, Toyo University, Japan, Translation in the Teaching of English: A Case
Study Using a Translation Corpus in an EFL Context
5. Mark Donnellan, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan, A Pilot Study in
Intercultural Communication Between EFL Learners in Japan and Denmark
6. Virginia Zorzi, University of Padua, Italy Multi-Dimensional Analysis and Public
Communication of Science and Technology: a Corpus-based Approach to the Media
Coverage of Scientific and Technological Controversies
7. Ene Kotkas (presenter), Tallinn Health Care College, Siret Piirsalu, Tallinn Health Care
College, Estonia, Kateriina Rannula, Tallinn Health Care College Estonia, Elle Srmus,
Tallinn Health Care College Estonia Multilingual Teaching in ESP Challenges and
Benefits
8. Rodrigo Prez Lorido, University of Oviedo, Spain, The role of (the avoidance of) centre
embedding in the change OV to VO in English
9. Davide Mazzi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, There is no doubt about
Irish sentiment: a corpus-based enquiry into de Valeras rhetoric
10. Ofelya Poghosyan and Varduhi Ghumashyan, Yerevan State University, Russia, English
Borrowings in Nagorno-Karabaghian Dialect of the Armenian Language
11. Sonja Koren, University Department of Health Studies, University of Split, Croatia,
Conceptual Metaphors in Discourse on Organ Donation
12. Savita Nair, Department of History and Department of Asian Studies, Furman
University, South Carolina, USA, India and Ireland: Old Connections, New Initiatives, and
Unique Opportunities
13. Ira Hansen, University of Turku, Finland, Otherness of the Self: Trauma as
Subjectivity-Building in Paul Austers Fiction
14. Emilia Di Martino, Universit degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli, Not So
Horrible Science: 'Its science with the squishy bits left in!' Popular science writing/shows
for children and young adults
15. Harri Salovaara, University of Vaasa, Resisting Hegemony through an Embodied
Ecological Protest Masculinity
16. Jimena Escudero Prez, Universidad de Oviedo, The female Ex Machina: new
proposals of identity
17. Nerea Riob-Prez, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Sleeping Beauty as a
Lethal Sexual Icon: Angela Carters Vampire Fairy Tale The Lady of the House of Love
18. Elena Markova, 'Higher School of Economics", Russia, Professional competence of a
Foreign Language teacher
19. Serkan en, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey, From English to Turkish:
Morphological Borrowing and Compounding
20. M. Dolores Perea-Barber University of Cdiz, Spain, "The teaching of Vocabulary
Learning Strategies to Maritime English university students"
21. Nevin Faden Grbz Sleyman Demirel University, Turkey, Postmodernism in Samuel
Becketts Plays
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22. Nuria Fernndez-Quesada, Pablo de Olavide University, Spain, More Torture Than
Literature (When Spanish Censors Read Beckett)"

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Sub-Plenary Lectures
Mara Jess Lorenzo Modia, Universidade da Corua
National Identities in Nineteenth-century Womens Writings: Mary Brunton and Lady
Morgan
CHAIR: Mara Socorro Surez Lafuente

Gatanelle Gilquin, FNRS UCL, Belgium
A corpus-based comparative and integrated approach to non-native Englishes
CHAIR: Lieven Buysse

Diego Saglia, Universit degli Studi di Parma, Italy
Continental Voices in Romantic Poetry: Appropriation, Ventriloquism, and Politics
CHAIR: Giovanni Iamartino

Hugo Keiper, University of Graz, Austria
Of Hooks, Earworms, and Other Fishing Tackle. Observations on the Structure, Impact,
and Reading of Pop/Rock Songs
CHAIR: Wolfgang Grtschacher

Michaela Mudure, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Gendering Blackness-es: The African American and the Roma Women
Chair: Muireann OCinneide.

Michel Van der Yeught, Aix-Marseille University, France,
Developing English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Europe: mainstream approaches and
complementary advances
CHAIR: Pierre Lurbe

Madeleine Danova, Sofia University, Bulgari
Genre-Bending: The Postmodern Biofiction and After
CHAIR: LUDMILLA KOSTOVA

Frederik Van Dam, KULeuven, FWO
Songs without Sunrise: Irish Literature and the Risorgimento in the Victorian Age
CHAIR: Lieven Buysse

Roberta Facchinetti, Universit di Verona, Italy
English in the Media: When news discourse sheds its bark
Chair: Carlo Bajetta

Adam Ndasdy, Etvs Lornd University, Budapest, Hungary
Phonetic Transcription: Curse or Blessing?
CHAIR: Attila Kiss

Susan Bruce, Keele University, UK
Articulating Public Goods: TV Drama, Public Institutions and the Value(s) of Humanities
critique
CHAIR: Alison Waller

388
Anna Walczuk, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
That Amazing Art of Words: the World, Time and Eternity in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and
Elizabeth Jennings
CHAIR: Adrian Paterson

Ondej Piln, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
The Grotesque: Soliciting Audience Engagement in Contemporary Drama in English
CHAIR: Jana Chamonikolasova

Marie-Louise Coolahan, NUI Galway, Ireland
Circles, Triangles and Networks: The Transmission and Impact of Womens Writing,
1550-1700
CHAIR: AOIFE LEAHY

Alessandra Marzola, University of Bergamo, Italy
The pity of war and its transformations in 20th century British Culture
Chair: Carlo Bajetta

Pivi Pahta, University of Tampere, Finland
Multilingual Practices in Written Discourse: A Diachronic View of Global and Local
Languages in Contact
Chair: Anne Karhio

Gza Kllay, Etvs Lrnd University, Budapest, Hungary
Is There a Metaphysical Turn in Shakespeare Studies?

Esse 2016 Abstracts

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ESSE

S16 The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing

S67 Word and Image in Childrens Literature. Co-convenors Laurence Petit,

RT1 Literary Journalism and Immigration: A Stranger in a Strange Land Co-

Marginal annotation identifying Charles Dickens as the author of

Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 196502002), 4:192.

conference and published in 2001, Aberystwyth, Institute of Welsh Politics, 2001, p. 7.

Williamson, The man who will lead Wales, 02-12-2009, www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-

(Manchester University Press, 2004) p.i.

30 Cooke, Writing Plague, p. 25.

University Press, 1994), 19.

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