Colloquium: New Philologies (E-Journal)
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Sprechaktreduktion bei delokutiver Derivation
Get PDFWhile the linguistic actions performed with speech acts are illocutions, delocutives describe speech acts. Through this change of part of speech, so to speak, a speech act reduction takes place. It is a special form of metonymy. Another speech act reduction with change of part of speech concerns the derivation of process and state designations. Common are event nominalizations with and without argument structure and result normalizations. The question that will be discussed is: under what conditions are delocutives included in the general vocabulary? Two factors are crucial: There must be a matching frame, and the delocutive must fit into a productive word formation type. The data comes from different language levels of German, but also from other languages, Greek and Old Indian. The investigation thus has a linguistic-historical and typological component
Good-Practice Beispiele für Wissenstransfer in den Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften
Get PDFNationalism as Regressive Identitarian Acting Out and Its Destitution Through Democratic Action
Get PDFIn the following text I would like to juxtapose two types of agency: on the one hand, the acting out of affects of hatred and envy against a projectively imagined other, which is mostly constitutive for nationalism; on the other hand, the deliberative acting on the basis of conflictuality which is constitutive of inclusive democracies, i.e. the ability within a society to resolve conflicts in a civilised way. In doing so, I will draw on the term of acting as enactment or acting out (Agieren), which Sigmund Freud coined for psychoanalysis, but which has since found its way into everyday language
“The Opposite of Hatred”: Undoing Nationalism in Joyce’s Ulysses
Get PDFThe epitome of chauvinist narrow-mindedness in Joyce’s Ulysses is the drunken brawler and anti-Semite depicted in the novel’s twelfth chapter, “Cyclops”. Using his mock-heroic approach as one of the essential stylistic devices in Ulysses , Joyce connects this character to the one-eyed giant Polyphemus of the original Homeric epic. As Randall Stevenson suggests in his study Modernist Fiction, Joyce uses the allusion to Cyclops to warn his readers of any “one-eyed”, narrow or single-minded view of reality (such as nationalism) and the dangerous patterns of behaviour that might ensue from it. However, Joyce’s intention is not just to repudiate or mock nationalism, but also to offer an alternative, a way of resisting the dangerous mindset embodied in Cyclops. Stevenson argues that Joyce accomplishes this by the very narrative method his novel employs: with its constantly shifting perspectives, its myriad styles and points of view, it successfully fights against any narrowing of vision – and so, by implication, against any tendency towards localism, division, ethnic or religious hatred. In her study Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum likewise focuses on the twelfth chapter of Ulysses in order to analyse the novel’s political stance and its repudiation of nationalist and religious bigotry. In Nussbaum’s opinion, however, Joyce’s strategy in dealing with these issues is inseparable from one of the major motifs in the novel, i.e., the author’s celebration of physical love. Using Stevenson’s and Nussbaum’s insights as a starting point, the paper will proceed to explore Joyce’s ethical and political preoccupations in Ulysses in order to outline the predominant narrative strategies which the author employs in undoing nationalism
The Role of Language in the Definition of National Character: A Case Study of Identity Discourse in Contemporary Japan
Get PDFAfter the defeat in WWII the Japanese experienced a twenty-year period of identity crisis in which they searched for a new ideology that could enable them to face the threat of “spiritual vacuum” (Befu 2001), economic instability and strong criticisms from the West. In such a chaotic environment the identity discourse known as Nihonjinron (Theories on the Japanese) flourished and became hegemonic. Nihonjinron successfully dominates the Japanese panorama even now, thanks to the influence of academic and popular literature, mass media, a powerful cultural industry, politics, and a national, genuine interest for the “Japaneseness”. The discussion on the alleged Japanese uniqueness, that is, the existence of unbridgeable racial and cultural differences between the ‘Japanese’ and the ‘Other’ – the West – is precisely the core of Nihonjinron. As Dale (1986), Befu, Sugimoto (1986) and Yoshino (1992) argue, the underlying assumptions of Nihonjinron could be summed up as follows: a racial and cultural homogeneity of Japanese people; a conceptual equation between Nation/Race/Ethnicity/Language/Cul-ture/Blood considered as monolithic, natural features, that is, a primordialist or essentialist perspective (Eriksen 2010, Geertz 1963); a “race thinking” or racialism; a belief in the validity of emic judgments only over etic analyses on Japaneseness and ethnocentrism. The historical roots of the Nihonjinron phenomenon can be traced back to the Meiji period (1868–1912), when the first theories on the origins of the Japanese nation emerged in reaction to the shocking encounter with the West and the introduction of Western science (Oguma 2002). Interestingly, the myth of a homogeneous, pure-blooded state-nation coexisted from its birth with another typology of nationalism, the so called ‘mixed nation theory’. This theory prevailed during the Taishō (1912–1926) and part of the Shōwa (1926–1989) periods until the 1945 defeat, serving as the basis of the multinational paradigm of the imperialistic and expansionistic ideology and as a justification of the aggressive expansionism into China. However, as a result of the surrender, the Japanese government could no longer advocate the logic of the past and the previous assimilationist discourse was abandoned. A vision of Japan as an isolated, remote and peaceful insular nation, homeland to no aliens but inhabited from time immemorial by a homogeneous and harmonious agricultural people, with no skill for war, was thus reactivated to serve in the new context. These images of Japanese identity based on a myth of homogeneity and on discourse of cultural exceptionalism culminated in the 1960s and 1970s, in correspondence with the economic growth and the gain of self-confidence in the international society. Moreover, despite the socioeconomical changes from the end of 1980s, Japan succeeded in adjusting her paradigm of cultural nationalism through the medium of cultural capitalism, as the spread of her soft power policies throughout the world shows. My contribution will focus on an outstanding example of Nihonjinron* and of its temporal continuity, namely the works of Watanabe Shōichi (1930–2017), a professor emeritus of English literature, a political and cultural critic and a historical revisionist. Despite its carrier background, from the half of the 1970s until well into the 2000s Watanabe was surprisingly prolific in the nihonjinron field, enthusiastically propagating the establishment’s ideology (Watanabe 1974a, 1977, 1980, 2000, 2007). In this respect, Watanabe’s essays provide a significant insight into two aspects of Japanese contemporary society which I will discuss: the role of language as the most effective expression of ethnic identity and the existence of a widespread set of peculiar Japanese expressions (un)consciously conveying the underlying ideology. Watanabe connects the uniqueness of Japanese culture to the particularism of the language, as revealed by a number of untranslatable aesthetical concepts and native words conveying a “Japanese spirit”, a vast range of lexical items and idiomatic expressions appealing directly to the emotionality of the Japanese. My purpose is to present and analyze a specific example of the ideological distinction that Watanabe intentionally develops, namely the lexical dichotomy between the stratum of the supposed “native lexicon” and that of “foreign loans”. Watanabe refers to the former by means of a variety of words and expressions related to the concepts of “authenticity”, “primitivity” and “naturalness”, associated with attributes such “indigenous”, “pure”, “irrational”, “emotional”, “soft/maternal”, “inward-looking”. The latter lexicon is instead related to negative notions such “foreignness”, “corruption” and “artifice”, and to attributes such “alien”, “contaminated”, “logical”, “detached”, “hard/masculine”, “outward-looking” (Watanabe 1974a). I will examine likewise the language of the feelings that each linguistic category is supposed to evoke: while native words should evoke a primordial ethnic memory of harmonious, peaceful, delicate and moving sensations, foreign loanwords provoke aggressive, euphoric states of mind, alien to the “true” Japanese spirit. My contribution will provide an insight into the close relationship between language and ideology. The role that language plays in the definition of Japanese national identity may help understand the importance of language in vehiculating and slyly imposing ideology, power, identity paradigms and distorted realities to the minds of social actors. This is all the more actual in the contemporary world, where the spread of nationalisms and ethnic conflicts is sustained by a scattered usage of rhetoric and ideological narratives
Conceptual Integration Theory of Social Issue Advertisements
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which conceptual integration theory can be applied to the analysis of social issue advertisements. Taking into consideration that we live in a visually-dominated culture, visual resources such as advertisements, cartoons, and memes have been used in crafting short, eye-catching messages, seeking the biggest impact with a limited amount of space and/or time. In recent years, there has been an enormous interest in the way conceptual integration theory can be used in explaining how the mentioned resources are formed, used, and what messages they can convey. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the applicability of the theory in the study of social issue advertisements
The Dos and Don’ts of Knowledge Transfer: Ein Leitfaden für die Umsetzung von Wissenstransferansätzen in Forschungsprojekten
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The Phenomenon of Propaganda as Reflected in Victor Pelevin’s novel S.N.U.F.F.
Get PDFIn this paper, we set out to analyse how modern cultural trends in Russia are reflected in Viktor Pelevin’s novel S.N.U.F.F. Propaganda as a phenomenon of public life is gaining increasing importance in Russian politics and Russian culture. We aim to investigate this phenomenon within the framework of propaganda mechanisms as defined by Jose Antonio Maravall, who has described the cultural mechanisms of the Baroque epoch. We will compare this interpretation with the image of modern Russian society as presented in Pelevin’s novel. Referring to Pelevin’s text, we attempt to demonstrate how concepts such as novelty, spectacle, theatricality, and secrecy are utilised to subjugate and control the will of the spectator. We will also consider how the text in itself is a reaction to this phenomenon