The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Aesthetics
No full textThe interview is a form well-known to the New American Studies Journal: A Forum. In this essay, Lucy Cheseldine explores the ways in which the literary interview can be considered a modern — and modern American — form. There is a particular focus on the aesthetic dimensions of the form, as embodied most prominently in the famous Paris Review interviews
Aesthetics
No full textThis essay develops a framework for exploring interpersonal ethics in Edith Wharton’s writing. Using political philosopher Judith Shklar’s analysis of “ordinary vices”—the commonplace harms we inflict on one another—it identifies four central vices in Wharton’s moral imagination: hypocrisy, cruelty, intellectual incuriosity, and moral inattentiveness. After exploring the status of these vices in Wharton’s fiction and nonfiction, the essay proceeds to rank them, suggesting that moral inattentiveness—the thoughtless pain caused by self-absorption rather than malice—stands at the top of Wharton’s hierarchy of vices. Unlike Shklar’s “liberalism of fear,” which worries about the cruelty caused by social institutions and state violence, Wharton’s ranking of the vices flows from her “conservatism of fear”—a position organized around a concern with cultural disintegration. Her prioritizing of moral inattentiveness, the essay concludes by arguing, amounts to a privatization and depoliticization of morality, reflecting an ethic of personal responsibility rather than social change
Histories of Northern and Regional Australia
No full textThis article examines a selection of content from the Australian travel magazine ‘Holiday and Travel’ published between 1947 and 1951 with a focus on articles and advertising promoting North Queensland as a travel destination. The content surveyed reveals a variety of themes from wellness, relaxation, and recreation to calls for further development of regions, contrasting with articles highlighting the virtues of the natural beauty of the North. The articles highlighting the burgeoning development of tourism construct this new industry as a pathway to economic success with little commentary on potential environmental impact. This provides important historical context for the increasing tourism development which took place in the state in the second half of the 20th century and beyond. In some articles the spectre of the Second World War emerges as the benefactor of infrastructure which facilitates easier travel. This article argues that the magazine continued some of the trends in travel writing begun in the interwar period, while also operating in a new post-war context, wherein writers incorporated an active intent to offer readers a mental transition from the challenges of the war years to a potential future of leisure, relaxation and economic prosperity through travel
Aesthetics
No full textThis article contends that silence plays a central role in Frank Ocean’s musical aesthetic. Arguing that the increased use of silence across his body of work comes about in response to his becoming a celebrity musician in our media-soaked 21 st century, the piece uses his 2016 album Blonde as a case study to examine Ocean’s silences as key events in a “situated aesthetics” (Manzotti; see also Born, Lewis and Straw), heavily dependent on the musical material and the media contexts in which they occur. Drawing on P. David Marshall’s definition of the early 21 st century as the age of “public intimacy,” the article analyses Ocean’s music in the light of selected musical precursors and contemporaries (from John Cage to Beyoncé) in order to better understand his uses of silence: to protect his private life from the media, to control his public image in dealings with the music industry, and to draw his listeners in when creating music, both in the studio and during Ocean’s increasingly rare live performances
Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger and David Bratman, eds.: 'Tolkien Studies: Volume XIX'
No full textDeath and Rebirth in 'The Chronicles of Narnia'
No full textC.S. Lewis was deeply inspired by the Biblical metaphor of the dying seed. He mentions it in almost all his works, including The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956). He sees an ethical dimension in it, as he considers the necessity of agreeing to lose before gaining. He also associates it with the Christian concept of felix culpa, which implies that what comes after is better than what was before. Moreover, Lewis views this metaphor as a universal principle, a downward and upward movement present in nature, as well as in human systems of thought and in the Biblical narrative.C.S. Lewis war von der biblischen Metapher des sterbenden Korns zutiefst inspiriert. Er erwähnt sie in fast allen seinen Werken, auch in den Chroniken von Narnia (1950-1956). Er sieht darin eine ethische Dimension, da er die Notwendigkeit erkennt, erst zu verlieren und dann zu gewinnen. Er bringt diese Notwendigkeit auch mit dem christlichen Konzept der felix culpa in Verbindung, das besagt, dass das, was noch kommen wird, besser ist als das, was vorher war. Darüber hinaus betrachtet Lewis diese Metapher als ein universelles Prinzip, eine Abwärts- und Aufwärtsbewegung, die sowohl in der Natur als auch in menschlichen Denksystemen und in der biblischen Erzählung vorkommt
A Study of Past Tense Formation
No full textIt is well known that children produce non-adult-like forms during language acquisition. Among these are errors where in the fashion of multiple exponence the child overtly marks an underlying feature or category more than once. In addition, children also produce errors where features that are marked fusionally with one form in the target language are marked separately with more than one form by the child. This paper is concerned with such errors in the domain of English past tense. We present a comprehensive corpus study investigating the frequencies and distribution of different error types, combining both overregularization and overtensing errors, which have previously been studied separately. We then propose an analysis based on Generalized Head Movement (Arregi & Pietraszko, 2021 ) and Distributed Morphology arguing that errors can be derived from two occasionally occurring underlying mistakes: negligence of secondary features and omission of obliteration. We show how these two mistakes and their interaction can account for the overall differences in error rates and distributions between different error types as well as across different verbs.Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.HORIZON EUROPE European Research Councilhttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100019180Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1034
Parentheticals in Spoken Indian and Sri Lankan English
No full textWhile an increasing number of studies into the pragmatics of world Englishes indicate that sociobiographic factors—such as the speakers’ age or gender—influence pragmatic choices, most empirical investigations do not include sociobiographic information beyond said speaker characteristics. This study investigates parenthetical I assume / believe / feel / guess / suppose / think in the spoken parts of the Indian and Sri Lankan English components of the International Corpus of English to answer the question of to what extent parenthetical function, that is, expressing either the speaker's opinion or insufficient knowledge, is influenced by structural, contextual and sociobiographic factors. Based on 1265 parentheticals, the results of multifactorial statistical analyses indicate that the speakers’ educational background and additional languages spoken at home are important predictors for the choice of parenthetical function. Therefore, the study calls for the inclusion of wide‐ranging sociobiographic factors (and combinations thereof) in the description of pragmatic speaker choices in world Englishes
Testing Psycholinguistic and Neurocognitive Predictions
No full textSecond language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks—the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model—predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest–posttest syntactic adaptation study of English relative‐clause attachment preferences. First‐language German speakers listened to relative clauses disambiguated to the English low‐attachment preference ( secretaries of the professor who is/naps at home )—via either a copula (e.g., is ), which should be processed rapidly (copula group; n = 48), or a lexical verb (e.g., naps ), which should be processed more slowly (lexical group; n = 48). Only the copula group showed significant pretest‐to‐posttest learning. Moreover, the amount of learning was predicted by procedural learning abilities in the copula group, but by vocabulary size in the lexical group. The results, which are consistent with both frameworks, show that the L2 lexicon impacts L2 grammar learning, and reveal moderating psycholinguistic and neurocognitive variables.A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://www.oasis-database.org