The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Subversive Representations of Ideal Femininity in “Nie Xiaoqian” and “Luella Miller”
No full textAbstract
On the one hand, because of the double historical prejudices from literary criticism against ghost stories and women’s writing, little attention has been paid to investigate the ideals of femininity in women’s ghost stories in nineteenth-century America. This article examines “Luella Miller,” a short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, who indirectly but sharply criticized the ideal of femininity in her time by creating an exaggerated example of the cult of feminine fragility. On the other hand, although extensive research has been done on Chinese ghost stories, especially on the ghost heroines in Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, there are few studies comparing the Chinese and the American ones. By comparing “Luella Miller” and Pu’s “Nie Xiaoqian,” this article does not primarily aim to list the similarities and differences between the Chinese and the American ideals of femininity, but to provide fresh insights into how both Freeman and Pu capitalized on the literary possibilities of the supernatural, because only in ghost stories they could write about women in ways impossible in “high literature.
Print Exposure Across the Reading Life Span
No full textLeisure reading is a main contributor to print exposure, which is in turn related to individual differences in reading and language skills. The Author Recognition Test (ART) is a brief and objective measure of print exposure that has been used in reading research since the 1990s. Life span studies have reported contradicting results concerning age differences in print exposure, possibly due to the use of ART versions that differed regarding authors’ mean publication year. We investigated effects of participant age and authors’ mean publication year, literary level, and circulation frequency on author recognition probability between adolescence and old age (N = 339; age 13–77 years). An explanatory item response analysis showed that participant age and circulation frequency were positively related to recognition probability. Mean publication year was negatively related to recognition probability, indicating that recent authors who have been widely read for only a few years were less often recognized than classic authors who have been widely read for several decades. The relation between participant age and recognition probability was moderated by author variables. For classic authors, the recognition probability increased between adolescence and old age. By contrast, for recent authors, the recognition probability increased only between adolescence and middle age. Our results suggest that the mean publication year is a key author variable for the detection of print exposure differences between young, middle-aged and older adults. We discuss implications for author selection when updating the ART and for measuring print exposure in age-diverse samples.Stiftung Mercator
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/50110001332
Phonological and Phonetic Variation in Spoken Morphology
No full textIn recent years, more and more evidence is accumulating that there is a great deal of variation as a result of morphological complexity, both at the level of phonology and at the level of phonetics. Such findings challenge established linguistic models in which morphological information is lost in comprehension or production. The present Special Issue presents five studies that investigate the phenomenon in more detail, centered around the following questions: How do morphological relations affect articulatory and phonological properties of complex words? How do articulatory and phonological properties of complex words reflect their morphological relations? What do these two questions imply about theories that address morphological relatedness at the level of sounds?Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (1020
Modeling Role-Dependent Constituent Meanings in Compounds
No full textMany theories on the role of semantics in morphological representation and processing focus on the interplay between the lexicalized meaning of the complex word on the one hand, and the individual constituent meanings on the other hand. However, the constituent meaning representations at play do not necessarily correspond to the free-word meanings of the constituents: Role-dependent constituent meanings can be subject to sometimes substantial semantic shift from their corresponding free-word meanings (such as -bill in hornbill and razorbill, or step- in stepmother and stepson). While this phenomenon is extremely difficult to operationalize using the standard psycholinguistic toolkit, we demonstrate how these as-constituent meanings can be represented in a quantitative manner using a data-driven computational model. After a qualitative exploration, we validate the model against a large database of human ratings of the meaning retention of constituents in compounds. With this model at hand, we then proceed to investigate the internal semantic structure of compounds, focussing on differences in semantic shift and semantic transparency between the two constituents.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (1020
Posthumanism and the Role of Orality and Literacy in Language Ideologies in Belize
No full textThis article discusses language ideological data from interviews and group discussions conducted in a village in Belize. Speakers here perceive English as a formal prestige language and link this to the fact that it appears in written form and tangible materiality – that is, in the form of visual symbols in text, and in objects like grammar books or dictionaries. This contrasts with discourses on Belizean Kriol, which is mostly considered a code for oral, sound‐based uses. Kriol is understood as less prone to becoming standardized and more likely subject to continuous change and creative adaption, which some interviewees consider an essential, valued characteristic of the repertoire. This shows that repertoire uses as well as ideologies of stability and ‘purity’ are entangled with media technologies, which have an impact on processes of norm development. The posthumanist hypothesis that non‐human elements and technologies may be vital in human concepts is thus confirmed
Emerging Research in Australian Studies
No full textAustralian speculative fiction abounds with queer-identifying writers, queer protagonists, and queer minor characters, but so far, critical attention to this kind of literature has been small. This article highlights the inherent suitability of speculative fiction for telling queer narratives and provides a tentative overview of Australian queer speculative fiction published in the 21st century. The developments are traced through analytical spotlights on key texts published since the early 2000s, starting with the queerness of side characters in Australian fantasy novels in publications by Trudi Canavan and Lian Hearn. The article subsequently covers increasingly prevalent representations of gay and lesbian romance in speculative fiction, focusing especially on C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince series against the background of the author’s own identification as genderqueer. A more recent trend is noted, namely the discussion of non-normative gender identities and expressions in speculative fiction. Shelley Parker-Chan’s ‘She Who Became the Sun’ serves as a final example for a very recent case of genderqueer fantasy that has been commercially successful and award-winning. All in all, the article seeks to provide an extensive but not exhaustive overview of queer Australian speculative fiction, showcasing the vibrancy of the genre in the 21st century
Emerging Research in Australian Studies
No full textIn ‘The Yield’ (2021), Wiradjuri writer Tara June Winch challenges and problematises the necrologies, i. e. the histories of loss, of Aboriginal dispossession that are created in and
perpetuated by the colonial museum. Focusing simultaneously on the Wiradjuri family history of the Gondiwindis that has been violently extracted from their land, Prosperous, in the form of cultural materials kept in a museum’s archive as well as the threat of losing the land itself, the novel puts the restitution of museum objects and the reclaiming of land rights into dialogue. Drawing on Dan Hicks’ term ‘necrology’ to discuss how museums enact chronopolitical strategies to frame colonially oppressed peoples as non-coeval and ‘primitive’, in this article, I expand his notion of museums as colonial weapons of time by integrating Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorisation of the ‘white possessive’. In doing so, I situate the discourse in the settler colonial context of Australia, which allows me to read the museum as a site of knowledge production that is complicit in upholding the myth of ‘terra nullius’ and thus Aboriginal dispossession of country. I demonstrate that reclaiming the material and immaterial Gondiwindi family history in the forms of Ancestral Remains, cultural materials and a Wiradjuri dictionary signifies the rewriting of an othered history and hence a reclaiming of sovereignty over country
Images of Indigenous Australians in the Œuvre of German-Speaking Artists
No full textThe Berlin-born artist Alexander Schramm (1813-1864) emigrated to the British colony of South Australia in 1849, where over the next fifteen years he produced paintings, drawings and lithographs that focused on representations of the local indigenous people in encampments, travelling and interactions with settlers. While this body of work was not large, it constituted the major part of his Australian oeuvre and was made at a time when the Aboriginal population had been drastically diminished and largely dislodged from the centres of settlement.
Schramm appears to have had no intention of ethnographic documentation and his works are distinct from those of most contemporaries who employed the modes of portraiture of “representatives of the race” or figures included in the landscape for compositional or symbolic purposes. Rather they showed Aboriginal people per se, full-figured and individual, as they were currently seen around Adelaide. Schramm’s reasons for this focus and his own attitude to these people remain obscure but the works he made provide a unique record of an indigenous group over a decade of dislocation and suggest both the vitiation and the accommodations made by them in response to the expansion of colonial settlement
Designing Collaboration in Collaboration
No full textComplex societal and environmental challenges motivate scholars to assume new roles that transcend the boundaries of traditional academic expertise. The present article focuses on the specialised knowledge, skills, and practices mobilised in the context of science–policy interfaces by researchers who advise policymakers on collaborative governance processes intended to address these pressing issues. By working on the backstage of collaborative arrangements, researchers support policymakers in the co-design of tailor-made strategies for involving groups of institutional and non-institutional actors in collaboration on a specific issue. The present article examines the expertise underpinning this practice, which we term process expertise. While already quite widely practiced, process expertise has not yet been comprehensively theorised. The study employs a self-reflective case narrative to illuminate its constitutive elements and investigates the advisory work of the authors’ research team, called “Co-Creation and Contemporary Policy Advice”, located at the intersection of science, policymaking, and civil society. The findings show that process expertise, when exercised by researchers and supported by an assemblage of enabling conditions inherent to the research context, goes beyond the possession of a set of skills at the individual level. Instead, process expertise in the context of science–policy interfaces unfolds in interaction with other types of knowledge and fulfils its task by generating a weakly institutionalised “in-between space”, in which researchers and policymakers interact to find more inclusive ways of tackling complex challenges. In this realm, relational work contributes to establishing a collaborative modus operandi at the very outset of the advisory process, while working at the processual level supports knowledge co-production among multiple actors. The article argues that it is the ongoing work of process experts at the intersection of relational and processual levels that helps maintain momentum in these collaborative partnerships. By formulating and discussing five constitutive elements of process expertise, this paper untangles the complex work that is required in collaborative research settings and gives a language to the invisible work performed by researchers who offer policymakers—and other invited actors—advice on the process of designing collaboration in collaboration