251 research outputs found
The meaning of 'dark*' in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
No full textIn this article the author makes a contribution to the still ongoing debate concerning the relation among Joseph Conrad's representations of the African continent in Heart of Darkness and the phenomenon of Imperialism. She does so through an analysis of the lemma DARK* and its diverse word forms. This is a crucial aspect of Heart of Darkness, as it is precisely this stylistic feature that has been pointed out as having played a decisive role in the construction of the well-know modern myth of 'dark Africa'
L'apprendimento di una L2 nel testo letterario: il caso di Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language di Eva Hoffman
No full textPROFILI DI TUTELA CONSUMERISTICA DEL COMMITTENTE NEL CONTRATTO DI COSTRUZIONE DI NAVE
No full textL’autore si interroga a proposito dei margini di applicabilità delle norme previste dal Codice del Consumo ai contratti di costruzione di nave. Individuate le caratteristiche suscettibili di ricondurre tale fattispecie nell’alveo dei rapporti
consumeristici, lo scritto si sofferma, in particolare, sulle principali tutele offerte al
committente e sui profili di responsabilità del costruttore, evidenziando i principali
profili controversi.The Author examines the margins of application of the rules provided by the
Consumer Code to shipbuilding contracts. After having identified the main features
susceptible to make this matter fall within the scope of Consumer Law, the paper
focuses, particularly, on the principal guarantees offered to the consumer and on the
shipbuilder’s liability profiles, outlining the most controversial issues
L’azione ex art. 7 ter d. legis. n. 286/2005: profili sostanziali e funzionali di un’‘‘azione diretta’’
No full textWriting the Self: The Autobiographical Subject as Language Construct. The Case of Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
No full textThis paper focuses on Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a translingual memoir published in 1989 by Eva Hoffman (Ewa Wydra, at birth), a Polish writer who, aged thirteen, emigrated to Vancouver and then to the States, learnt English from scratch and finally became editor of the New York Review of Books as well as the most important contemporary Polish female writer in English. The translingual memoir is a fairly recent sub-genre in autobiographical writings which deals with immigrants’ recounting their progress from alienation towards integration into the host culture. This progress revolves around a process of language acquisition, or, as Hoffman’s memoir title signals, of translation by which the migrant gradually loses her mother tongue to acquire the language of her host country. Being a writer, and thus well aware of the fact that discourse is constitutive of, and determined by identity, Hoffman starts from the general assumption that “nothing fully exists until it is articulated” and moves on to explore the ways in which the close interrelation between “languaging” and the Self is re-defined and adapted to a post-modern bilingual context, in which individuals are more and more often divided between two cultures, languages and nations. Through a detailed functional linguistics analysis of the roles of the two “I”s in the memoir (the cognitive active “I” of the author, who knowingly presides over her writing, and the narrativized “I” as the passive object of the language she does not know but in which “[she has] been written”), this paper shows that acts of designation and translation construct a split subject and, at the same time, function as a bridge that connects the subject’s linguistic and social status. Thus, the analysis of Lost in Translation makes a significant contribution to the exploration of migrants’ identities through “translation” – intended, in one of its etymologies, as a tool to represent the identity of a split subject who has been “carried across” different countries, cultures and languages
Construing the ‘primitive’ primitively: grammatical parallelism as patterning and positioning strategy in D.H. Lawrence
No full textThat the style of D. H. Lawrence tends to either bore or enthuse his readers is certainly no secret. That it is its hypnotic rhythmic quality that elicits such contradictory reactions is equally well-known (Balbert 1974). In his unpublished Foreword to Women in Love, Lawrence himself describes his style and offers a justification of sorts for it, one which implicitly ties his ‘form’ to what might be seen as his artistic aim, in terms of ‘content’, or better, of representation:
In point of style, fault is often found with the continual, slightly modified repetition. The only answer is that it is natural to the author; and that every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding come from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination (1930: 276)
As Lawrence repeatedly makes clear in his copious production, for him the very act of writing is a means of enacting what he sees as a primeval and creative, if antagonistic, ‘flux’ between two extremes – call them mind-body, knowledge-feeling, light-dark, Lamb-Lion, Son-Father...his dyads are myriad – of the intrinsically dual nature of both the individual and creation itself. A basic assumption of this paper is that the chief linguistic resource through which Lawrence construes this fluid but strained relationship between the two ‘ways’ is grammatical parallelism (Jakobson 1960, 1966), still frequently seen as a survivor of a primitive, tongue-tied way of meaning (cf. Ong 1967, 1982). The paper posits that a detailed linguistic analysis engages with, and leads us to, an understanding of this characteristic of Lawrence’s art in a more fruitful way than other, albeit valid and insightful, critical approaches alone have, or can (Miller 1989, 2000). This does not imply that the Lawrencian socio-cultural context, and intertext(s), are neglected, for also assumed is that Literature [i]s Social Practice (Fowler 1981).
The study is carried out on a very small, though diachronically ‘representative’, corpus of Lawrence’s poems. Though the corpus is machine-readable and interrogate-able, analysis is primarily manual, and qualitative. Grammatical Parallelism is, firstly, explored as a means of consistent, significant and motivated meaning-patterning, or foregrounding, or ‘symbolic articulation’, of the poems’ deepest meanings, or Theme (Hasan 1985/1989), which, no matter what the subject matter of Lawrence’s text, can be said to center upon that flux. Secondly, but not unrelatedly, its likely function as resource for aligning speaker/hearer positioning is also investigated. Thus parallelism is looked at from the perspective of recent developments in Appraisal theory, and in particular, Engagement (White 2003a & b), in an attempt, as is unavoidable with Lawrence, to get at what is treated as being at stake. But the phenomenon is also, and ultimately, queried as a means of enacting Shklovosky’s (1977: 35) claim that “Art is a way of experiencing the making of a thing.” In short, in Lawrence, parallelism would seem to be construing experience as process, as a process of ‘flux’, as this ‘primitive’, ‘tongue-tied’ way of meaning might usefully be compared to the medium of ‘spoken-ness’. And as Halliday has convincingly argued, the ‘choreographic’ complexity of the spoken mode lends it
...the power to intuit, to make indefinitely many connections in different directions at once, to explore (by tolerating them) contradictions, to represent experience as fluid and indeterminate (1987: 148-149)
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