The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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The Role of the Keyboard for Writing and Script
No full textDer Beitrag diskutiert die Rolle von Tastaturen für Schreiben und Schrift und behandelt die Tasten und die Tastatur als übersehene Kulturtechnik. Während der Digitalisierung des Schreibens große Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet wurde, blieb das zentrale Mittel dieser Veränderung unbemerkt: die Tastatur. Sie ist das zentrale Bindeglied zwischen Gutenbergs Erfindung der beweglichen Type und den modernen mobilen Schreibgeräten wie Smartphones und Tablets. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie Schreibapparate und Tastaturen entstanden sind, wie sie sich in das Berufsleben und den Alltag ausgebreitet haben und wie sie zur Mechanisierung und Rationalisierung des Schreibens geführt haben. Durch den Auszug der Tastaturen aus den Büros und ihrer heutigen Allgegenwart auf mobilen Schreibgeräten sind Tastaturen ein fester Bestandteil alltäglichen Lebens geworden.Universität Bielefeld (3146
Ethnic Conflicts and the Power of Collective identity in Guy Gunaratne's 'In Our Mad and Furious City' (2018)
No full textAbstract
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2018 and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2019, Guy Gunaratne's debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), depicts a cultural conflict unfolding in contemporary London. Set off as the result of a killing of a white soldier by a black Muslim boy, violent riots force Yusuf, a son of immigrants from Pakistan, to recognise his migrant background and question his sense of self and belonging in the city. At the same time, for Nelson and Caroline, immigrants of a different time, the events evoke the memories of the past that haunts them and prove that the cultural divide they witnessed decades ago still prevails. By following the narratives of these characters and depicting violent ethnic clashes, the novel captures the driving forces of blind ethnic brutality on the one hand and the loss of a meaningful sense of self on the other. Drawing on Vamik Volkan's studies on large‐group psychology and collective trauma, this article analyses the power of the collective identity—be it a nation, an ethnicity, or a religious movement—in times of crisis and examines its influence on a personal sense of self. In Our Mad and Furious City illustrates the many ways in which the impact of the shared cultural identity not only generates cultural conflicts but can also lead to displacement and identity crises. This article explores the intricate ways in which Gunaratne's transcultural narrative depicts these age‐old yet contemporary issues
Evaluative Frameworks and the Making of Literary Authority
No full textAbstract
This essay uses Charles Taylor’s theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Taylor’s notion of strong value brings out literature’s often-overlooked similarities with religious-moral or civil-sacred domains, while his concept of weak value helps us to understand more mundane moods of purpose-rational reading. Combining the concept of evaluative frameworks with a socio-institutional account of literary authority, this essay sketches an alternative history of reading, with a focus on the shifting authority of “spatial reading” (defined as attention to formal and intertextual depth). Looking at developments from the 1780s to the present, I will show how the distinction between spatial and flat reading emerges in the eighteenth century, is transformed by the modernist institutionalization of high- and middlebrow notions of spatial form, and continues to provoke tensions between the civil sphere and the literary-artistic field (as the recent scandal around Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize attests)
The Logic of the Grail in Old French Arthurian Romance and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal
No full textThis article seeks to resituate critical discussions about logic in the Old French Grail romances and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal. Where previous scholarship has emphasised the mystical elements of the Old French Grail narratives to suggest alternate meanings for the Grail itself, this article reads the Grail miracles as structuring devices that reflect classical theories of dialectic and demonstrative argumentation. Through examining one example from Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, the Didot-Perceval, The Vulgate Cycle Queste del Saint Graal, and Thomas Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal, this article also highlights fundamental similarities between the logical systems underlying each Grail narrative that are not restricted by language or date of composition. Thus, the article depicts Malory not just as consciously drawing upon the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, but also as unconsciously inheriting elements from each of his Old French predecessors.Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (3102
An Unpublished Autograph Letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Carolus Clusius, 21 April 1576
No full textAbstractOnly a decade ago Roger Kuin's The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney (2012) offered scholars for the first time a complete edition of Sidney's correspondence. Kuin modestly allowed room for new discoveries, in the hope that additional letters might be identified. This article introduces a previously unpublished autograph letter by Sidney, written in French, addressed on 21 April 1576 to Carolus Clusius or Charles de l'Écluse, an associate of Hubert Languet and a noted botanist then active in Vienna at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. After briefly discussing the provenance of the manuscript I turn to its contents, situating the letter within the wider corpus of Sidney's extant correspondence, with reference to letters to and from Clusius and Languet in Kuin's edition, and analysing it within this context. The newly discovered letter, transcribed and translated in an appendix, is shown to offer important new evidence for Sidney's relationships with Clusius and Languet as well as his place in European intellectual culture more generally.Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/50110000234
The Acquisition of Every as a Case Study
No full textWe evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics (as opposed to the input in syntax or phonology) is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every.Universität Leipzig (1039
A Conversation with Allegra Hyde
No full textIn search of new literary voices that might present an answer to Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 lament on the failure of contemporary literary fiction to find forms that adequately express the multiple challenges of the Anthropocene, I came across a review of Allegra Hyde’s debut novel in the Los Angeles Times. The novel’s title, Eleutheria, was suggestive enough to pique my interest: etymologically, it evokes the concepts of liberty and freedom; geographically, it calls to mind the small island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas that was colonized in the late 1640s by a group of English Puritans known as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Add to this that Willa Marks, the novel’s narrator-protagonist, is a twenty-two-year-old member of Generation Z, the same generation as the students we teach these days, and Eleutheria (2022) becomes a worthy candidate for an American Studies syllabus. What kind of narrative tapestry was the author able to weave out of the materials of history, climate change, and a young generation’s growing frustration with the ecological and political state of the world? I was ready to discuss these and similar questions with a group of students in a seminar on Anglophone Literature in the Anthropocene during the summer semester 2023. Serendipitously, the son of an American colleague and long-time friend studied with Allegra Hyde at Oberlin College, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He suggested that she might be willing to discuss her novel with a group of German students. When I issued the invitation to join us digitally for one session, she accepted. I interviewed Hyde, who is also the author of two short story collections – Of This New World (2016) and The Last Catastrophe (2023)– a few days later. The following text is the transcript of that conversation. It has been edited for readability
Emerging Research in Australian Studies
No full textDeserters – maritime workers who left their ships before the end of their contracts – make up the biggest group of ‘coloured immigrants’ who were known to have entered Australia without authorisation during the era of the White Australia Policy. Archival records show that some deserters sought to stay in Australia, while others soon left again as workers on different ships. Both of these forms of labour mobility went against Australian and global structures, including immigration and employment law, that regulated the mobility of non-white maritime workers. Immigration restriction and racially-specific employment contracts were interconnected; they worked together to facilitate and restrict Asian workers’ movements along circumscribed channels. Despite this, the records of desertion show traces of people who were able to enact forms of autonomous mobility
Prosodic Variation of English in Dominica, Grenada, and Trinidad
No full textAbstract
Varieties of English in the Caribbean have been claimed to have characteristic pitch patterns. However, there is little empirical research on prosodic aspects of English in the region. This paper provides a comparative phonetic analysis of several pitch parameters (pitch level, range, dynamism, rate of change, variability in rate of change, and tone rate) in English language data from Dominica, Grenada, and Trinidad that comprises read and spontaneous speech from 243 speakers. The results show that a wide pitch range and a high degree of variability in pitch, as mentioned in previous works, are not necessarily characteristic of English in the Caribbean overall, but that there are considerable cross‐territorial prosodic differences, with English in Trinidad showing more variability than in Dominica and Grenada, particularly among female speakers. Socioprosodic variation, largely specific to Trinidad, was also identified
Exploring Peer Support among Young Learners during Regular EFL Classroom Lessons
No full textAbstractThis study explored peer support among grade 5 learners of English as a foreign language (N = 24) interacting during regular lessons. Grounded in sociocultural theory and applying mixed‐method research methodology, this study explored to what extent and how young learners support one another during classroom tasks targeting lexical phrases. Moreover, it investigated to what extent such support accounts for learning opportunities. Students relied mainly on linguistic support through suggesting or using resources while social–emotional support such as offering support, giving positive feedback, or inviting partners’ participation was limited. The analysis also revealed instances of lack of support in the form of reprimanding, impatience, expressing a lack of awareness of the partner's contribution, or disrespecting peer's linguistic resources which, however, differed widely across pairs.ZusammenfassungDiese Studie untersuchte den Peer Support von Lernenden der 5. Klasse im Englischunterricht (N = 24), die während des regulären Unterrichts interagierten. Auf der Grundlage der soziokulturellen Theorie und unter Anwendung der Mixed‐Methods‐Forschungsmethodik wurde untersucht, inwieweit und wie sich junge Lernende gegenseitig bei Lernaufgaben, die auf lexikalische Phrasen abzielen, unterstützen,. Darüber hinaus wurde untersucht, inwieweit diese Unterstützung Lernmöglichkeiten beeinflusst. Die Lernenden verließen sich primär auf sprachlichen Support durch das Vorschlagen oder Verwenden von sprachlichen Ressourcen, während sozial‐emotionale Unterstützung wie das Anbieten von Support, das Geben von positivem Feedback oder das Einladen des Partners zur Mitarbeit nur in begrenztem Umfang erfolgte. Die Analyse ergab auch Fälle von mangelnder Unterstützung in Form von Ermahnungen, Ungeduld, mangelnder Wahrnehmung für den Beitrag des Partners oder der Respektlosigkeit gegenüber den sprachlichen Ressourcen des Partners. Diese Fälle unterschieden sich jedoch von Paar zu Paar stark.</p