The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Hermeneutik und Germanistik – Ansätze, Voten, Diagnosen
No full textDie Probleme hermeneutischer Arbeit in und an der Gegenwart liegen nicht begründet in der Idee des Verstehens selbst, sondern in der Unzulänglichkeit der kommunikationstheoretischen und literatursoziologischen Konzepte hermeneutischer Lektüre. Eine gegenwartsfähige Hermeneutik benötigt ein Update ihrer Kategorien. Hierarchisch gedachte Verhältnisse von Autor, Werk und Lesen sind zugunsten eines breiten, seitwärts verfahrenden Lektürebegriffs zu verabschieden.The problems of hermeneutic work in and on the present are not rooted in the idea of understanding itself, but in the inadequacy of the communication-theoretical and literary-sociological concepts of hermeneutic reading. A hermeneutics capable of dealing with the present needs an update of its categories. Hierarchically conceived relations of author, work, and reading must be abandoned in favor of a broad, laterally proceeding concept of reading.Universität Greifswald (1032
A Compositional Semantic Analysis
No full textAbstract
Indeterminate pronouns in Old English (expressions like hwa ‘who/what’ and hwelc ‘which’) permit several interpretations in addition to their use as interrogative pronouns, for example readings as universal or existential quantifiers. They combine with morphological prefixes (ge- ‘and, also’ and a- ‘always, ever’), which change the range of possible interpretations. Old English indeterminate pronouns are shown to contribute a crosslinguistically hitherto unattested pattern of available interpretations. In particular, bare indeterminate pronouns have a universal interpretation and ge-indeterminate pronouns can be both universal and existential. This paper offers an alternative semantic analysis in the spirit of Hamblin (Found Lang 10:41–53, 1973) and Shimoyama (Nat Lang Semant 14:139–173, 2006). A compositional semantics is given for the pronouns and the prefixes, which derives the available readings. The paper ends with a proposal for compositional semantic change relating Old English indeterminate pronouns to their modern descendants
Democratisation or Power Struggle?
No full textThis article examines the impact of reforms on the outcome of Labour party leadership contests since the premiership of Tony Blair. From a theoretical perspective, these reforms are characterised by a tension between a general trend towards increasing “democratisation” of political parties and the power interests of intra-party actors. While there have been significant changes to both the nomination stage and the final ballot, the impact of these changes has to be strongly qualified. Instead of a major “democratisation” through targeted and deliberate reform measures, simple shifts in the power structure between strategic actors are more prominent among reform effects. Meanwhile, the trend towards “democratisation” in relation to the final ballot stage was largely driven by the massive membership surge since 2015, as well as low-key reform measures unconnected to handing ordinary party members more influence over the election process.Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (1010
Social Identity as a Collective Resilience Factor in Areas Threatened by Sea Floods
No full textResearch on collective resilience processes still lacks a detailed understanding of psychological mechanisms at work when groups cope with adverse conditions, i.e., long-term processes, and how such mechanisms affect physical and mental well-being. As collective resilience will play a crucial part in facing looming climate change-related events such as floods, it is important to investigate these processes further. To this end, this study takes a novel holistic approach by combining resilience research, social psychology, and an archeological perspective to investigate the role of social identity as a collective resilience factor in the past and present. We hypothesize that social identification buffers against the negative effects of environmental threats in participants, which increases somatic symptoms related to stress, in a North Sea region historically prone to floods. A cross-sectional study (N = 182) was conducted to analyze the moderating effects of social identification on the relations between perceived threat of North Sea floods and both well-being and life satisfaction. The results support our hypothesis that social identification attenuates the relationship between threat perception and well-being, such that the relation is weaker for more strongly identified individuals. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find this buffering effect to be present for life satisfaction. Future resilience studies should further explore social identity as a resilience factor and how it operates in reducing environmental stress put on individuals and groups. Further, to help communities living in flood-prone areas better cope with future environmental stress, we recommend implementing interventions strengthening their social identities and hence collective resilience.Leibniz-Gemeinschaft
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001664Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (1022
An Analysis of Multiple Short Answer Corpora
No full textThe ’short answer’ question format is a widely used tool in educational assessment, in which students write one to three sentences in response to an open question. The answers are subsequently rated by expert graders. The agreement between these graders is crucial for reliable analysis, both in terms of educational strategies and in terms of developing automatic models for short answer grading (SAG), an active research topic in NLP. This makes it important to understand the properties that influence grader agreement (such as question difficulty, answer length, and answer correctness). However, the twin challenges towards such an understanding are the wide range of SAG corpora in use (which differ along a number of dimensions) and the hierarchical structure of potentially relevant properties (which can be located at the corpus, answer, or question levels). This article uses generalized mixed effects models to analyze the effect of various such properties on grader agreement in six major SAG corpora for two main assessment tasks (language and content assessment). Overall, we find broad agreement among corpora, with a number of properties behaving similarly across corpora (e.g., shorter answers and correct answers are easier to grade). Some properties show more corpus-specific behavior (e.g., the question difficulty level), and some corpora are more in line with general tendencies than others. In sum, we obtain a nuanced picture of how the major short answer grading corpora are similar and dissimilar from which we derive suggestions for corpus development and analysis.Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart (3377
Mary Todd Lincoln's Uneasy Union with Memory in LeAnne Howe's 'Savage Conversations' (2019)
No full textThis essay examines the politics of service vested in the First Lady role and her affective labors by turning to a contemporary fictional representation of Mary Todd Lincoln. In Savage Conversations (2019), LeAnne Howe considers issues involving US national memory, White womanhood, and settler colonial violence. The play imagines Lincoln’s insanity episode in the Bellevue asylum in the 1870s, where, as Lincoln told her doctor, an “Indian” visited her every night, scalping her and wiring her eyelids open. By outlining Mary’s performance of caring widow and her petitioning for compensation for her public service, Howe reveals Mary’s complicity in the Lincoln presidency’s settler violence. The play recalibrates the gendered renditions of (public) service inherent to the narratives of mourning, motherhood, and insanity tied to Mary’s persona and shows the flip side of the care narrative, connecting the long 19th century to the First Lady persona of the present
A Response to 'Contemplating Women's Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,' by Esther Wetzel
No full textA Woman’s Work is Never (Un-)Done: A Response to “Contemplating Women’s Imperial Service: Mabel Bent as Photographer, Travel Writer, and Collector,” by Esther Wetze
A Conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
No full textIn commemoration of the proclamation of the end of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865, writer, activist, and performer Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton read from and discussed her memoir Black Chameleon at the 2023 Juneteenth Dialogue hosted by the Chair of American Studies at the University of Münster. The Juneteenth Dialogues are designed to enter into a discussion about systemic racism in the United States and to explore literary responses to the vulnerabilities of Black lives and strategies of (literary) resistance. With Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, the focus of conversation was on the importance of mythology for Black women in the United States, the potentials of autobiographical writing, and the importance of literature today. Mythology, in Mouton’s work, builds on what Audre Lorde called "biomythography" to combine personal experience, popular culture, history, and received narratives that are part of ancient storytelling traditions. In Mouton’s hands, this becomes a technique for getting closer to some of the complex truths of a past grounded in enslavement. Mouton’s reading from Black Chameleon and the panel discussion that followed are the basis of this interview. It has been edited for clarity. We want to thank the audience of the 2023 Juneteenth Dialogues as well as Dr. Ortwin Lämke and Frederik Köpke from the Studiobühne for providing the space for this event
Cultural Diversity in Unequal Societies Sustained through Cross-Cultural Competence and Identity Valuation
No full textIn much contemporary political discourse, valued cultural characteristics are threatened by interaction with culturally distinct others, such as immigrants or a hegemonic majority. Such interaction often fosters cross-cultural competence (CCC), the ability to interact successfully across cultural boundaries. However, most theories of cultural dynamics ignore CCC, making cultural diversity incompatible with mutually beneficial inter-group interaction, and contributing to fears of cultural loss. Here, interview-based field methods at an Amazonian ethnic boundary demonstrate the prevalence of CCC. These data motivate a new theoretical mathematical model, incorporating competing developmental paths to CCC and group identity valuation, that illuminates how a common strategy of disempowered minorities can counter-intuitively sustain cultural diversity within a single generation: Given strong group identity, minorities in a structurally unequal, integrative society can maintain their distinctive cultural norms by learning those of the majority. Furthermore, rather than a rejection of, or threat to, majority culture, the valuation of a distinctive minority identity can characterize CCC individuals committed to extensive, mutually beneficial engagement with the majority as members of an integrative, multi-cultural society
Cole and the Queering of Asexuality in Dragon Age: Inquisition
No full textIn this article we consider the representation of the character Cole in Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition (Electronic Arts, San Mateo, 2014), focusing upon how his asexuality is treated by other characters and its significance within his narrative arc. As well as contributing to the discussion of the representation of sexualities and gender within games, we seek to add to the ‘representational archive of asexuality’ (Cerankowski and Milks, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, Routledge, Abingdon, p 40, 2014), including games as media depicting and defining asexuality through fictional characterisation. We argue that it is particularly through humour that Cole is marked as being ambiguously set apart from the other characters in the game, and is infantilized as a ‘boy’ rather than a young man. Within a party of diverse genders, sexualities and indeed species, Cole’s absent interest in sex is treated as though it were something strange and in need of being overcome for Cole to become fully ‘human’. Beyond the scope of this game, this raises further questions for the representation of asexuality within media culture, and broader cultural discourses concerning whether asexuality is conceived of as being within the bounds of both masculinity and human normality.Projekt DEA