ESSE 2016 BOOK OF ABSTRACTS 1 Summary of Contents CONTENT Seminar Abstracts Roundtable Descriptions Posters Sub‐plenary lectures PAGE 9 379 385 387 2 This document was published on Friday 19 August. A Note on Presentation Seminar convenors made a variety choices about how to present their abstracts. Some chose to give a breakdown of the timing of individual seminars, others to give their seminar sessions specific names or subthemes, and so on. Some convenors included biographical information for speakers; others did not. Some listed papers in the order in which they will be presented; others did not, or were obliged to reorganise their seminars due to withdrawals. Rather than seeking to impose consistency – which would have required the removal of information from most seminar descriptions – the editors of this document have presented material largely as it was sent to the organisers. Some changes have been made to formatting for reasons of space; delegates’ email addresses have been removed; and we have sought to eliminate repetition of information that is available in the programme. It is also possible that some changes will inadvertently have been made in the transmission of an abstract from the speaker to the convenor to the conference organisers. The content is otherwise unaltered. 3 List of Seminars • S1 “Pragmatic strategies in non‐native Englishes.” Co‐convenors Lieven Buysse, KU Leuven University of Leuven, Belgium and Jesús Romero‐Trillo, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain • S2 “Negation and negatives: a cross‐linguistic and cross‐cultural perspective.” Co‐ convenors Irena Zovko Dinković, University of Zagreb, Croatia and Gašper Ilc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia • S3 “Cross‐linguistic and Cross‐cultural Approaches to Phraseology.” Zoia Adamia, Ekvtime Takaishvili Teaching University, Rustavi, Georgia and Tatiana Fedulenkova, Vladimir State University, Russia • S4 “New advances in the study of the information structure of discourse.” Co‐ convenors Libuše Dušková, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic and Jana Chamonikolasová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic and Renáta Gregová, P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia • S5 “The influence of English on word‐formation structures in the languages of Europe and beyond.” Co‐convenors Alexandra Bagasheva, University of Sofia, Bulgaria and Jesús Fernández‐Domínguez, University of Granada, Spain and Vincent Renner, University of Lyon, France • S6 “Multimodal Perspectives on English Language Teaching.” Co‐convenors Belinda Crawford, Camiciottoli, Università di Pisa, Italy and Mari Carmen Campoy‐Cubillo, Universitat Jaume I, Spain, • S8 “Change from above in the history of English.” Co‐convenors Nikolaos Lavidas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Jim Walker, Université Lumière Lyon 2, France • S9 “Social identities in public texts.” Co‐convenors Minna Nevala, University of Helsinki, Finland and Matylda Włodarczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland • S10 “Comparative and Typological Studies of English Idioms.” Co‐convenors Anahit Hovhannisyan, Gyumri State Pedagogical Institute, Gyumri, Armenia and Natalia Potselueva, Pavlodar State University, Republic of Kazakhstan • S11 “English Phraseology and Business Terminology: the Points of Crossing.” Co‐ convenors Victoria Ivashchenko, The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine/The Institute of the Ukrainian Language, Kiev, Ukraine and Tatiana Fedulenkova, Vladimir State University, Russia • S12 “Research Publication Practices: Challenges for Scholars in a Globalised World.” Co‐convenors Pilar Mur‐Dueñas, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain and Jolanta Šinkūnienė, Vilnius University, Lithuania • S13 “ESP and specialist domains: exclusive, inclusive or complementary approaches?” Co‐convenors Shaeda Isani, Université Stendhal, Grenoble 3, France and Michel Van der Yeught, Aix‐Marseille University, France and Miguel Angel Campos Pardillos, University of Alicante, Spain and Marcin Laczek, University of Warsaw, Poland • S14 “Teaching Practices in ESP Today.” Co‐convenors Cédric Sarré, ESPE Paris, France and Shona Whyte, University of Nice, France and Danica Milosevic, College of Applied Technical Sciences, Nis, Serbia and Alessandra Molino, University of Turin, Italy • S15 “English as a Foreign Language for Students with Special Educational Needs – Chances and Challenges.” Co‐convenors Ewa Domagała‐Zyśk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland and Nusha Moritz, University of Strasbourg, France and Anna Podlewska, The Medical University of Lublin, Poland 4 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • S16 “The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures.” Co‐convenors Giuditta Caliendo, University Lille 3, France and Giuseppe Balirano, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy and Paul Sambre, University of Leuven, Belgium S17 “Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation in Diasporic Communities of Practice.” Co‐convenors Siria Guzzo, University of Salerno, Italy and Chryso Hadjidemetriou, University of Leicester, UK S19 “The Fast and the Furious: The Amazing Textual Adventures of Miniscripts.” Co‐convenors Francesca Saggini Boyle, University of Tuscia, Italy/University of Glasgow, UK and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, University of Chieti, Italy, esoccio@unich.it S20 “A Poetics of Exile in Poetry and Translation.” Co‐convenors Penelope Galey‐ Sacks, Valenciennes University, France and Sara Greaves, Aix‐Marseille University, France and Stephanos Stephanides, University of Cyprus, Cyprus S21 “Shakespearean Romantic Comedies: Translations, Adaptations, Tradaptations.” Co‐convenors Márta Minier, University of South Wales, UK and Maddalena Pennacchia, Roma Tre University, Italy and Iolanda Plescia ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, Italy S22 “Anachronism and the Medieval.” Co‐convenors Lindsay Reid, NUI Galway, Ireland and Yuri Cowan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway S23 “The (in)human self across early modern genres: Textual strategies 1550‐ 1700.” Co‐convenorsJean‐Jacques Chardin, Université de Strasbourg, France and Anna Maria Cimitile, Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Italy and Laurent Curelly, Université de Haute‐Alsace, France S24 “Renegade Women in Drama, Fiction and Travel Writing: 16th Century ‐ 19th Century.” Co‐convenors Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria and Efterpi Mitsi, University of Athens, Greece S25 “Picturing on the Page and the Stage in Renaissance England.” Co‐convenors Camilla Caporicci, University of Perugia, Italy/LMU, Germany and Armelle Sabatier, University of Paris II, France S26 “Icons Dynamised: Motion and Motionlessness in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.” Co‐convenors Géza Kállay, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary and Attila Kiss, University of Szeged, Hungary and Zenón Luis Martínez, University of Huelva, Spain S27 “English Printed Books, Manuscripts and Material Studies.” Co‐convenors Carlo Bajetta, Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italy and Guillaume Coatalen, Université de Cergy‐Pontoise, France S28 “Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy.” Co‐convenors Cian Duffy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Martina Domines Veliki, University of Zagreb, Croatia S29 “The Politics of Sensibility: Private and Public Emotions in 18th Century England.” Co‐convenors Jorge Bastos da Silva, University of Porto, Portugal and Dragoş Ivana, University of Bucharest, Romania S30 “And when the tale is told’: Loss in Narrative British and Irish Fiction from 1760 to 1960.” Co‐convenors Ludmilla Kostova, University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria and Barbara Puschmann‐Nalenz, Ruhr‐Universitaet Bochum, Germany S31 “Regional and World Literatures: National Roots and Transnational Routes in Scottish Literature and Culture from the 18th Century to Our Age.” Co‐convenors 5 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Gioia Angeletti, University of Parma, Italy and Bashabi Fraser, Edinburgh Napier University, UK S32 “The Sublime Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of the Sublime in British Literature since the 18th Century.” Co‐convenors Éva Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly University, Eger, Hungary and Kamila Vránková, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic S33 “Peripatetic Gothic.” Co‐convenors David Punter, University of Bristol, UK and Maria Parrino, Independent Scholar, Italy S34 “The Fiction of Victorian Masculinities and Femininities.” Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy and Adrian Radu, Babes‐Bolyai University of Cluj‐Napoca, Romania S35 “Reading Dickens Differently.”Co‐convenors Leon Litvack, Queen’s University Belfast, UK and Nathalie Vanfasse, Aix‐Marseille Université, France “Desire and "the expressive eye" in Thomas Hardy.” Co‐convenors Phillip Mallett, University of St Andrews, UK and Jane Thomas, University of Hull, UK and Isabelle Gadoin, Université de Poitiers, France and Annie Ramel, Université Lumière‐Lyon 2, France S37 “The finer threads: lace‐making, knitting and embroidering in literature and the visual arts from the Victorian age to the present day.” Co‐convenors Laurence Roussillon‐Constanty, Université Toulouse 3, France and Rachel Dickinson, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK S38 “Work and its Discontents in Victorian Literature and Culture.” Co‐convenors Federico Bellini, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy and Jan Wilm, Goethe‐Universität Frankfurt am Main, Germany S39 “Impressions 1860‐1920.” Co‐convenors Bénédicte Coste, University of Burgundy, France and Elisa Bizzotto, University of Venice, Italy and Sophie Aymès‐ Stokes, University of Burgundy, France S40 “The Neo‐Victorian antipodes.” Co‐convenors Mariadele Boccardi, University of the West of England, UK and Therese‐M. Meyer, Martin‐Luther University Halle‐ Wittenberg, Germany S41 “Tracing the Victorians: Material Uses of the Past in Neo‐Victorianism.” Co‐ convenors Rosario Arias, University of Málaga, Spain and Patricia Pulham, University of Portsmouth, UK and Elodie Rousselot, University of Portsmouth, UK S42 “Reinterpreting Victorian Serial Murderers in Literature, Film, TV Series and Graphic Novels.” Co‐convenors Mariaconcetta Costantini, G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti‐Pescara, Italy and Gilles Menegaldo, Université de Poitiers, France S43 “Victorian and Neo‐Victorian Screen Adaptations.” Co‐convenors Shannon Wells‐Lassagne, Université de Bretagne Sud, France and Eckart Voigts, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany S44 “Modernist Non‐fictional Narratives of Modernism.” Co‐convenors Adrian Paterson, NUI Galway, Ireland and Christine Reynier, University Montpellier3‐ EMMA, France S45 “Technology and Modernist Fiction.” Co‐convenors Armela Panajoti, University of Vlora, Albania and Eoghan Smith, Carlow College, Ireland S46 “Reportage and Civil Wars through the Ages.” Co‐convenors John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine, France and Alberto Lázaro, Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, Spain S47 “The paradoxical quest of the wounded hero in contemporary narrative fiction.” Co‐convenors Jean‐Michel Ganteau, University of Montpellier 3 and Susana Onega, University of Zaragoza, Spain 6 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • S48 “Spaces of erasure, spaces of silence: Re‐voicing the silenced stories of Indian Partition.” Co‐convenors Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome, Italy and Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania S49 “The Postcolonial Slum: India in the Global Literary Imaginary.” Co‐convenors Om Prakash Dwivedi, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee College, University of Allahabad, India and Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania S50 “Globalisation and Violence.” Co‐convenors Pilar Cuder‐Domínguez, University of Huelva, Spain and Cinta Ramblado‐Minero, University of Limerick, Ireland S51 “Perpetrator Trauma in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.” Co‐convenors Michaela Weiss, Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic and Zuzana Buráková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia S52 “Leadership politics in the United Kingdom’s local government.” Co‐convenors Stéphanie Bory, Université de Lyon III, France and Nicholas Parsons, University of Cardiff, UK and Timothy Whitton, Université de Clermont‐Ferrand II, France S53 “The Politics of Language in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Drama.” Co‐ convenors Ian Brown, University of Kingston, UK and Daniele Berton‐Charrière, Université Blaise Pascal, France S54 “The Inner Seas connecting and dividing Scotland and Ireland.” Co‐convenors Jean Berton, Université de Toulouse‐Jean Jaurès, France and Donna Heddle, University of the Highlands and Islands, UK S55 “I hear it in the deep heart’s core’: political emotions in Irish and Scottish poetry.” Co‐convenors Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK and Carla Sassi, Università di Verona, Italy S57 “Celtic Fictions ‐ Scottish and Irish Speculative Fiction.” Co‐convenors Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen, Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza, Spain and Colin Clark, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic S58 “The Symbolic Power of Humour: Gender Issues and Derision.” Co‐convenors Florence Binard, Université Paris Diderot, France and Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany and Michel Prum, Université Paris Diderot, France S59 “Religion and Literatures in English.” Co‐convenors Pilar Somacarrera, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain and Alison Jack, University of Edinburgh, UK S60 “Memory, Autobiography, History: Exploring the Boundaries.” Co‐convenors Irena Grubica, University of Rijeka, Croatia and Aoife Leahy, Independent Scholar, Ireland S61 “Contemporary Irish female writing at the intersection of history and memory.” Co‐convenors Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin, Ireland and Marisol Morales‐Ladrón, University of Alcalá, Spain S63 “Biography.” Co‐convenors Joanny Moulin, Aix‐Marseille University, France and Hans Renders, University of Groningen, the Netherlands S64 “Life‐Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections.” Co‐convenors Sandra Mayer, University of Vienna, Austria and Julia Lajta‐Novak, King's College London, UK S65 “Contemporary Writers on Writing: Performative Practices and Intermediality.” Co‐convenors Amaya Fernandez Menicucci, Universidad de Castilla‐La Mancha, Spain and Alessandra Ruggiero, Università di Teramo, Italy 7 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • S67 “Word and Image in Children’s Literature.” Co‐convenors Laurence Petit, Université Paul Valéry‐Montpellier 3, France and Camille Fort, Université de Picardie Jules Vernes, France and Karen Brown, University of Saint‐Andrews, UK S69 “Young Adult Fiction and Theory of Mind.” Co‐convenors Lydia Kokkola, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden and Alison Waller, University of Roehampton, UK S71 “Thinking about Theatre and Neoliberalism.” Co‐convenors Hélène Lecossois, Université du Maine, Le Mans, France and Lionel Pilkington, NUI Galway, Ireland S72 “Dilemmas of Identity in Postmulticultural American Fiction and Drama.” Enikő Maior, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania and Lenke Németh, University of Debrecen, Hungary S73 “Literary Prizes and Cultural Context.” Co‐convenors Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria and David Malcolm, University of Gdańsk, Poland S74 “21st Century Female Crime Fiction.” Co‐convenors Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria and Agnieszka Sienkiewicz‐Charlish, University of Gdańsk, Poland S75 “Media, culture and food ‐ meaning of new narratives.” Co‐convenors Slávka Tomaščíková, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia and María José Coperías‐Aguilar, Universitat de València, Spain S76 “Gendered Bodies in Transit: from Alienation to Regeneration?” Co‐convenors Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, University of Málaga, Spain and Manuela Coppola, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’, Italy S77 “Women on the Move: Diasporic Bodies, Diasporic Memories. Constructing Femininity in the Transitional and Transnational Era in Contemporary Narratives in English.” Co‐convenors Julia Tofantšuk, Tallinn University, Estonia and Silvia Pellicer Ortín, University of Zaragoza, Spain S78 “Travel and Disease across Literatures and Cultures.” Co‐convenors Ryszard W. Wolny, Opole University, Poland and Sanja Runtić, University of Osijek, Croatia S79 “20th and 21st century British Literature and medical discourse.” Co‐convenors Nicolas Pierre Boileau, Université d’Aix‐Marseille, France and Clare Hanson, University of Southampton, UK S80 “Writing Old Age in twenty‐first‐century British Fiction.” Co‐convenors Sarah Falcus, University of Huddersfield, UK and Maricel Oró‐Piqueras, University of Lleida, Spain S81 “Ekphrasis Today.” Co‐convenors Renate Brosch, Universität Stuttgart, Germany and Danuta Fjellestad, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden and Gabriele Rippl, University of Berne, Switzerland S83 “Literary and cinematographic prequels, sequels, and coquels.” Co‐convenors Ivan Callus, University of Malta, Malta and Armelle Parey, Université de Caen, France and Isabelle Roblin, Université du Littoral‐Côte d’Opale, France and Georges Letissier, Université de Nantes, France S84 “Cultural politics in Harry Potter: death, life and transition.” Co‐convenors Rubén Jarazo‐Álvarez, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain and Pilar Alderete, NUI Galway, Ireland S85 “Fantasy Literature & Place.” Co‐convenors Jane Suzanne Carroll, University of Roehampton, UK and Anja Müller, University of Siegen, Germany S86 “Calculables and Incalculables in Teaching English Today.” Co‐convenors Roy Sellars, University of St Gallen/University of Southern Denmark, Denmark and Graham Allen, University College Cork, Ireland 8 • S87 “Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations…of the English Nation (1598‒ 1600): Historical and Geo‐Political Contexts.” Co‐convenors Daniel Carey, Moore Institute for the Humanities, NUI Galway, Ireland and Claire Jowitt, University of Southampton, UK • RT1 “Literary Journalism and Immigration: A Stranger in a Strange Land” Co‐ convenors: John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine, and David Abrahamson, Northwestern University RT2 “Re‐defining the Contemporary in Anglo‐American Fiction”. Convenor: Ana‐ Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu RT3: “Narrative Strategies in the Reconstruction of History in the Work of Contemporary British Women Novelists”. Convenor: Ana Raquel Fernandes, University of Lisbon RT4: “Stories of Their Own: Gender and the Contemporary Short Story in English”. Co‐convenors: Jorge Sacido‐Romero, U Santiago de Compostela and Michelle Ryan‐ Sautour, Université d’Angers RT5 “Competition out of the ordinary: Roundtable on “top research” in English Studies”. Co‐convenor: Janne Korkka, University of Turku and Elina Valovirta, University of Turku. RT6: “The Spatial Turn”: What is Literary Geography Now?” Co‐convenors: Eleonora Rao, Università di Salerno and David Cooper, Manchester Metropolitan University. RT7: “Romantic‐Era Labouring‐Class Poetry: New Critical Directions”. Convenor: Franca Dellarosa, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, RT9: “Uses of literary texts and cultural studies to expand EAP practice: breaking new ground”. Convenor: Ann Gulden, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences RT11 “Creating a European Anglicists' Gender Studies Network”. Co‐convenor: Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Işil Baş, Boğaziçi University of Istanbul and María Socorro Suárez Lafuente, Universidad de Oviedo RT12 “Shakespeare in the Second Language Classroom”. Convenor: Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology • • • • • • • • • PhD Sessions Organiser Lachlan Mackenzie • Literatures in English: Sean Ryder (NUI Galway) and Katerina Kitsi (Thessaloniki) • Cultural and Area Studies: Teresa Botelho (Lisbon); Nicolas Parsons (Cardiff) • English Language and Linguistics: Josef Schmied (Chemnitz); Andreas Jucker (Zürich) 9 S1. Pragmatic Strategies in Non‐Native Englishes The pragmatic marker you know in learner Englishes Lieven Buysse, KU Leuven, Belgium Over the past few decades the surge of scholarly interest in pragmatic markers has also addressed non‐native speaker perspectives. Such studies for English have brought to light differences between native speakers and learners – largely albeit not exclusively resulting in reports of “underuse” by the learners – but it has also become clear that “learners” do not form a homogeneous group. Apart from L1 background, other factors that have been considered relevant are proficiency level, setting, and the type of pragmatic marker. The present study sets out to investigate one particular marker that has been shown to be highly frequent in native English, viz. you know. Four components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) will be examined to identify differences and similarities in the use of this marker by upper‐intermediate to advanced learners of Dutch, French, German and Spanish. The pragmatic functions of you know will be teased out and compared to those attested in a native speaker reference corpus, and the incidence of the marker and its functions will be compared between interlanguages and with native speaker practice. Interpreting care: Interpreters between the voice of medicine and the (ELF) lifeworld. A corpus‐based investigation of interpreter‐mediated doctor‐patient interaction in ELF and Italian Eugenia Dal Fovo, University of Trieste, Italy This paper presents a study on interpreter‐mediated doctor‐patient interaction in Italian and English as lingua franca (ELF) (inter al. Albl‐Mikasa 2015) based on real‐life data recorded in healthcare providing institutions of the city of Trieste (Italy). Interpreting in this area is provided by non‐professionals called cultural and linguistic mediators (Rudvin/Spinzi 2013): non‐Italian citizens with migration history, extensive knowledge of the Italian language and culture, and foreign patients’ background. Indeed, interpreting curricula in Italy rarely provide trainees with the necessary tools to tackle the multifaceted challenges healthcare interpreting poses, especially when involving ELF‐speaking patients. The study aims at investigating healthcare interaction as a form of institutional talk‐in‐ interaction, which, when interpreter‐mediated, requires an adjustment of discourse practices and configuration (Baraldi/Gavioli 2012). Particular attention will be dedicated to the use of ELF by non‐Italian speaking patients and its implications on mediated doctor‐ patient interaction. Albl‐Mikasa, M. (2015) “English as lingua franca”. In Pöchhacker, F. (ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of Interpreting Studies. Baraldi, C. / L. Gavioli (2012) Coordinating participation in dialogue interpreting. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rudvin, M. / C. Spinzi Mediazione linguistica e interpretariato. Regolamentazione, problematiche presenti e prospettive future in ambito giuridico. Bologna: CLUEB. ‘Are you going to ask me a question?' The discourse/pragmatic functions of interrogatives in learner interviewee speech Sylvie De Cock Centre for English Corpus Linguistics Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium/ Université Saint‐Louis Brussels, Belgium 10 The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) contains informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign language. In spite of the interview's fixed turn‐taking format (Lazaraton 1992) and of the interviewees' obligation to answer questions (Fiksdal 1990), interrogative clauses can be found in the learner interviewee turns in LINDSEI. This paper sets out to explore the discourse/pragmatic functions of these interrogative clauses and more specifically of the Wh‐questions and yes/no‐questions (Biber et al 1999) used by the learners in four subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD‐ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010), namely LINDSEI_CHINESE, LINDSEI_DUTCH, LINDSEI_FRENCH and LINDSEI_POLISH. The paper examines and illustrates the various discourse/pragmatic functions uncovered in the data (e.g. speech management, rapport building, metadiscursive function) and discusses both the impact of the LINDSEI interview format on some of the pragmatic strategies used by the learners and possible pedagogical applications of the study. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999), Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Fiksdal, S. (1990) The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of Cross‐cultural Gatekeeping Interviews. New Jersey: Ablex Norwood. Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (eds) (2010), The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD‐ROM. Louvain‐la‐Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Lazaraton, A. (1992) The Structural Organization of a language Interview: A Conversation Analytic Perspective. System 20/3, 373‐386. Where did that come from lah? The use of L1 discourse markers in English as a Lingua Franca Andy Kirkpatrick Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia This paper will use data from the newly released Asian Corpus of English (ACE) (now freely accessible at http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/ace/ ) which represents a corpus of 110 hours of naturally occurring speech events conducted by Asian multilinguals using English as a lingua franca. ACE provides a complementary Asian‐centred corpus to the more European‐centred Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE).The focus of the paper will be the transfer of the use of discourse markers or particles from the speakers’ L1 into their use of ELF. For example, in an earlier paper (Kirkpatrick and Subhan 2014) it was found that, while there was comparatively little morpho‐syntactic influence on the ELF of L1 speakers of Malay there was evidence of the use of Malay discourse markers in the speakers’ use of ELF. This paper will extend the study to include speakers of different L1s (including varieties of Chinese and Filipino languages) and will investigate whether these speakers transfer discourse markers from their respective L1s and, if so, for what pragmatic purposes. The paper will also examine whether the use of these L1 discourse markers in the speakers’ use of ELG causes any misunderstandings among interactants. Pragmatic strategies for expressing attitudinal and interpersonal meanings in ELF research articles 11 Biljana Mišić Ilić University of Niš, Serbia Scientific writing has been recognized not as an impersonal presentation of factual information but as a social act with interactional discourse elements used to express writer’s attitudes and to convince or otherwise influence peer audience (Myers 1989, Hyland 1996, inter al.). Scientific and academic writing in non‐native English, due to its profusion, availability of sources, as well as its social significance, provides data for the study of various features of higher level non‐native Englishes, including discourse and pragmatic strategies. Although various lexico‐grammatical and textual features and communication functions have been studied in different academic genres both in English and contrastively, pragmatic aspects have remained relatively under‐investigated. The aim of this study is to examine pragmatic strategies for expressing attitudinal and interpersonal meanings in social sciences research articles written in English by Serbian authors. The research includes quantitative and qualitative analysis of 25 articles from high‐ranked national journals published in English. Specifically, the analysis focuses on attitudinal markers, hedging devices and interrogatives from the structural and pragmatic perspectives, relating them to strategies of positive and negative politeness, and hopes to provide new insights into the pragmatics of non‐native English scientific writing and pragmatic strategies used within this particular genre and discourse community. An annotation scheme for identifying types of ‘repair’ in requestive speech acts produced by Japanese learners of English Aika Miura Tokyo University of Agriculture, Japan This study presents a multi‐layered annotation scheme identifying types of ‘repair’ in requests produced by Japanese learners of English at different proficiency levels. The study investigated the extracted data of shopping role‐play from the NICT JLE Corpus, containing the corresponding CEFR A1 (64), A2 (67), and B1 (64) learners. First, the learners’ requests were manually annotated as segments of ‘head‐act’ and ‘internal‐ modification’ as Figure 1 shows (Blum‐Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). The ‘head‐act’ was classified into ‘direct’ (e.g., “I want to buy this”.) or ‘conventionally‐indirect’ (e.g., “Can I try it on?”) strategies. ‘Internal‐modification’ was illustrated as a politeness marker “please”, discourse markers (e.g., “I mean”) and various patterns of “if‐clause”. The second annotation was made to see how they offset their inadequacy at English, based on the tags for ‘self‐corrections’ and ‘repetitions’, originally contained in the corpus. Two types of ‘repair’ (‘rephrasing’ and ‘repeating’) were identified in the learners’ requests. As a result, about 40 percent of the learners’ requests was produced with ‘repair’, and its ratio decreased as the proficiency developed. Thus, A1 and A2 learners showed 64.3% of ‘repeating’ and 35.7% of ‘rephrasing’, while B1 learners showed approximately 50% of both types. politeness-marker-please INTERNALinternal-modification discourse-marker... MODIFICATION MAINif-clause... main TYPE direct... HEADhead-act ACT-TYPE conventionally-indirect... 12 Figure 1 Annotation scheme of requests The functions of the discourse markers ‘so’ and ‘now’ in ELF project discussions Hermine Penz University of Graz, Austria The study of discourse markers in non‐native English discourse has only fairly recently become a focus of interest in pragmatic research (Romero‐Trillo 2002, Buysse 2012, House 2013). So has been found to be the most frequent discourse marker in both native and non‐native speaker discourse, yet its frequency turned out to be even higher in non‐ native speaker talk by Buysse (2012). This study aims to identify the frequency and function of so and now in intercultural project discussions using English as a lingua franca (ELF). The data comprises a corpus of group discussions in an international educational context. The analysis includes both quantitative and qualitative methods of discourse analysis. So surfaced as one of the discourse markers with the highest frequency (only and as well as but ranked higher) whereas now was less prevalent. Both discourse markers serve a variety of different functions in the group interaction analysed, most of which center around discourse structuring. Bolden, Galina B. (2009). „Implementing incipient actions: The discourse marker ‘so‘ in English conversation“. Journal of Pragmatics 41:974‐998. Buysse, Lieven (2012). “So as a multifunctional discourse marker in native and learner speech.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1764‐1782. Romero Trillo, Jesús (2002). “The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non‐ native speakers of English.” Journal of Pragmatics 34:769‐784. Schiffrin, Deborah (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prosodic patterns of pragmatic markers in native and non‐native Englishes Jesús Romero‐Trillo Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain The present investigation analyses the relationship between prosody and pragmatics from a theoretical and practical perspective. Specifically, it compares the realization of native and non‐native prosodic performance of feedback elements in speech, and their similarities and differences on the basis of statistical analyses. From a pedagogical perspective, I believe that the study of the acoustic features of Pragmatic Markers that realize feedback in conversation is essential to understand how these elements function as ‘punting poles’ that help speakers sail through the flow of conversation, and in the case of foreign speakers of English their need to master the prosody of these elements in order to be pragmatically correct. Opportunities for developing L2 politeness strategies in EFL classrooms in France Aisha Siddiqa Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France The present study explores the development of politeness strategies in requests among young English as foreign language (EFL) learners in France. Research in interlanguage 13 pragmatics (ILP) has demonstrated the inadequacies of traditional foreign language classrooms for developing pragmatic competence (Bardovi‐Harlig & Taylor, 2003). The integration of pragmatics in classroom activities is therefore advocated (Takahashi, 2010), but more research is needed, particularly with respect to younger learners (Kasper & Rose, 1999) and methodology (Bardovi‐Harlig & Hartford, 2005). This study extends the scope of ILP research by focusing on a larger group of younger learners, using multiple methods including a cartoon oral production task, role plays, classroom films, textbook analysis, and participant interviews. This paper analyses the observational data collected by classroom filming in French secondary schools, involving 250 EFL learners from three different levels (aged 11, 14, 17). The data set includes empirical examples of politeness strategies in requests, with analysis based on Blum‐Kulka et al. (1989). The paper also involves a critical analysis of the opportunities in classrooms to practice L2 pragmatics. Preliminary results suggest that the learners’ range of politeness strategies is quite restricted and the classroom activities focus on L2 lexico‐grammatical functions rather than aspects of L2 pragmatics. Pragmatic strategies in ELF communication in the academia: ways of achieving communicative effectiveness Ignacio Vázquez Orta Universidad de Zaragoza English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become a major and expanding field of academic research within Applied Linguistics. English is currently the dominant language in many domains, and academia is one of the most prominent ones. The focus of ELF research has turned over the past few years from linguistic description to more pragmatic concerns with the purpose of discovering why certain forms are preferred over other forms and the roles these forms play in intercultural communication. This study also turns to explore these concerns in academic settings. The aim of the present study is to investigate the role played by pragmatic strategies in the communicative effectiveness of ELF communication by lecturers in two teaching programs at the University of Zaragoza. Our main assumption is the critical role of accommodation as the single most important pragmatic skill in ELF communication and the different ways in which it is linguistically manifested. Our preliminary findings suggest that a skilled ELF lecturer is no longer a quasi‐native speaker of a particular native variety of English, but someone who has acquired the pragmatic skills needed to adapt their English use in line with the demands of the current lingua franca situation. Adversative pragmatic markers in learner language: A developmental perspective Valentin Werner University of Bamberg, Germany The intention of this paper is to extend the perspective on the functional acquisition of lexical pragmatic marking in learner English, an area that has received considerable attention in a number of recent corpus‐based studies (see, e.g., Buysse 2014, 2015; Aijmer 2015). While previous analyses have mostly focused on speech, and have considered a relatively homogeneous learner population in terms of proficiency, I shed some light on pragmatic marking in written discourse, and at different learner proficiency levels. To this end, I specifically contrast the usage of adversative pragmatic markers by intermediate learners with the one of advanced learners. I test when pragmatic markers first emerge in 14 learner language, and consider the factors type of the first language of the learners as well as the developmental patterns of individual pragmatic markers and variation between individual learners. The overall findings suggest (i) that different developmental patterns can be observed for individual pragmatic markers; (ii) that the first‐language background of the learners influences the time and rate of acquisition; and (iii) that the native‐like use of adversative pragmatic marking represents a “learner‐hard” feature, which is only mastered by advanced students. Aijmer, Karin. 2015. General extenders in learner language. In Nicolas Groom, Maggie Charles & Sughanthi John (eds.), Corpora, grammar and discourse: In honour of Susan Hunston, 211–234. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Buysse, Lieven. 2014. ‘So what’s a year in a lifetime so.’ Non‐prefatory use of so in native and learner English. Text and Talk 34(1), 23–47. Buysse, Lieven. 2015. ‘Well it’s not very ideal...’ The pragmatic marker ‘well’ in learner English. Intercultural Pragmatics 12(1), 59–89. 15 S2: “Negation and negatives: a cross‐linguistic and cross‐cultural perspective” Verbs derived with negative prefixes in English and Romanian: A Spanning Account. Adina Camelia Bleotu University of Bucharest, Romania The aim of the paper is to work out the internal structure of verbs derived with negative verbal prefixes in English and Romanian in a first‐phase syntax, where verbs undergo decomposition (Ramchand 2008) (<init, proc, res>), and in the spanning framework (Svenonius 2012, 2014, Ramchand 2014). I look at the negative verbal prefixes de‐ (deactivate), dis‐ (dishonour), un‐ (untie), competing for expressing ‘the undoing of a previous state’ (Marchand 1972: 636), and mis‐ (misdiagnose), expressing the meaning ‘to do something badly’, and at the corresponding prefixes de‐ (deactiva), des/dez‐ (dezonora), dis‐ (dispărea ‘disappear’) in Romanian; there is no counterpart for mis‐. I embrace the view that verbal prefixes scope lower than negation, since to deconstruct does not mean ‘not to construct’ (Lakoff 1969, Hust 1975), and I lexically decompose disassemble as ‘cause to no longer be assembled’, misdiagnose as ‘give a not correct diagnosis’ a.o. Ultimately, I recast lexical decompositions into first‐phase syntax and make use of spanning, a framework which spells out spans (i.e. extended projections), dismisses intermediate labels and uses direct linearization: the span spells out at a certain height (specifiers to the left of the heads, complements to the right). For a verb such as dishonor, dezonora, I put forth the representation <Init, Proc, Neg, N>, linearized as x [Neg Proc Init] N y. Thus, scope facts related to negation are captured in an economical and elegant way, showing that English and Romanian behave similarly. References: Hust, Joel R. 1975. Dissuaded. Linguistic Analysis 1: 173‐90. Lakoff, George.1969. On Derivational Constraints. CLS 5: 117‐39 Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present‐Day English Word Formation. 2nd ed. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck. Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first‐phase syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramchand, Gillian. 2014. Deriving variable linearization. A commentary on Simpson and Syed (2013). Natural language and linguistic theory 32 (1): 263–282 Svenonius, Peter. 2012. Spanning. Ms. University of Tromsø Svenonius, Peter. 2014. Spans and Words. Ms. University of Tromsø Negation as an Empirical/Conceptual Tool: A Case Study with V‐V Compounds Kazuhiko Fukushima, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan This case study with Japanese lexical V1‐V2 compounds reveals a descriptive/conceptual utility of negation, which is not immediately obvious considering English alone. The compounds are a very popular, but controversial target of research (Kageyama 1993, Matsumoto 1996, Nishiyama 1998, Himeno 1999, Fukushima 2005, Yumoto 2005 being major ones). One controversy is headedness. Following Williams (1981), many (eg. Kageyama 1993, Yumoto 2005) assume that V2 is the head (1). This supposition is problematic: the head is V1 with ‘adverbial’ V2 in (2), or they can be dual‐headed (3). Headedness crucially determines: (i) argument‐matching between V1‐V2, and (ii) case‐ 16 marking of the inherited arguments (Kageyama 1993, Fukushima 2005, Yumoto 2005 reveal perplexing intricacies.) So far, headedness is determined by speakers’ intuitions – there is no independent criterion. However, negation helps. With negative ‐nakat‐ta, affirmative continuations (4b,c) – (6b,c) display different patterns of contradiction (#), depending on the compound types. The verb creating contradiction is the head. Negation is also interesting from a theoretical/conceptual point – syntactic (Nishiyama 1998) vs. lexical (others above) accounts are at odds with each other. Compare (7) with (4): the (b) readings are shared while the (c) readings diverge. (7c) is possible with a regular V+te adverb (but not (4c)). Nishiyama (1998) presupposes the same syntactic ‘modificational’ structure for adverbs as well as cause/manner V1. A lexical account is home free; the two belong to separate domains. Negation offers independent criteria empirically and conceptually, which eventually enables a more solid testing and construction of predictions and hypotheses. Data: (1) right‐headed: odori‐tukare ‘dance‐get tired, i.e. get tired from dancing’, koroge‐oti ‘roll‐fall, i.e. fall down by rolling’ (2) left‐headed: mi‐oros ‘look‐lower, i.e. look down’, kaki‐nagur‐u ‘write‐hit, i.e. write in unruly fashion’ (3) dual‐headed (dvandva): naki‐sakeb ‘cry and scream’, hikari‐kagayak‐u ‘shine and glitter’ (4) a. Hanako‐ga odori‐tukare‐nakat‐ta. (cf. (1)) b. … demo odot‐ta. ‘… but danced’ ‘Hanako did not get tired from dancing.’ c. … #demo tukare‐ta. ‘… but got tired’ (5) a. Taroo‐ga gake‐o mi‐orosa‐nakat‐ta. (cf. (2)) b. … #demo mi‐ta ‘… but looked’ ‘Taroo did not look down the cliff’ c. … demo orosi‐ta ‘… but lowered’ (6) a. Ziroo‐ga naki‐sakeba‐nakat‐ta. (cf. (3)) b. … #demo nai‐ta. ‘… but cried’ ‘Ziroo did not cry and scream.’ c. … #demo saken‐da. ‘… but screamed’ (7) a. Hanako‐ga [ADV odotte] tukare‐nakat‐ta. b. … demo odot‐ta. ‘… but danced’ ‘Hanako did not get tired due to dancing.’ c. … demo tukare‐ta. ‘… but got tired’ References: Fukushima, Kazuhiko. 2005. Lexical V‐V compounds in Japanese: lexicon vs. syntax. Language 81: 568‐612. Himeno, Masako. 1999. Hukugoodooshi‐no Kozo‐to Imiyoohoo [Structure and semantic usage of compound verbs]. Tokyo: Hitsuji. Kageyama, Taro. 1993. Bunpoo‐to gokeisei [Grammar and word‐formation]. Tokyo: Hitsuji. Matsumoto, Yo. 1996. Complex Predicates in Japanese: a Syntactic and Semantic Study of the Notion ‘Word’. Stanford: CSLI. Nishiyama, Kunio. 1998. V‐V compounds as serialization. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 7: 175‐217. Williams, Edwin. 1981. On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of a word’. Linguistic Inquiry 12: 245‐274. Yumoto, Yoko. 2005. Fukugodoshi/Haseidoshi‐no Imi‐to Togo: Mojuru Keitairon‐kara Mita Nichieigo‐no Doshi Keisei [The semantics and syntax of compound verbs/derived verbs: verb‐formation in Japanese and English viewed from a modular morphological perspective]. Tokyo: Hitsuji. 17 It Goes without Saying (though I will Say it Anyway) Tanja Gradečak‐Erdeljić, University of Osijek, Croatia Dorijan Gudurić, University College London, UK It is not very frequently assumed that negation may play an active role in achieving specific conceptual frames, but as claimed by Langacker (2008) or Lakoff (2004), language enables the actual physical presence of words, even if in some kind of a negative construction, to create the positive conception of what is being denied. Our research focuses on the phenomenon of praeterition or apophasis as a rhetorical device in political discourse, where we noticed a frequent use of various types of negation constructions as introductory lines for the content which is actually not being negated but rather accentuated. Structures like ‘It goes without saying…’, ‘We don't want to mention that…’, etc., which are then followed by actual descriptions of affected participants or events, have been spotted in our corpus of public political speech events, in the media discourse and in other types of discourse involved in shaping the public opinion. The corpus gathered from both British and Croatian newspapers, and transcripts of political speeches will show that this linguistic phenomenon is universal and that the underlying cognitive processes very cleverly serve quite pragmatic purposes of manipulation by language. References: Lakoff, George. 2004. Don’t Think of an Elephant. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Negation as a Means of Face Management in Online Discussions Veronika Kloučková, Masaryk University, Slovakia The paper is based on a survey comparing the use of negation in two different varieties of digital discourse: the synchronous (real‐time) chat represented by the NPS Chat Corpus, and the asynchronous discussion forum represented by a corpus of my own compilation. Negation and the use of negatives is observed from the pragmatic point of view, and the notion of face management is handled as a central aspect of Brown and Levinson’s (1978) politeness theory. In general, participants of discussion forums and chat groups observe certain rules of communicative behaviour different from conventional face‐to‐face communication. Expressing negation can pose a risk regarding the participant’s face, because it usually goes hand in hand with expressing disagreement, rejection or refusal. However, the communication conventions of the two multiparty online discussion types are different, and so is the participants’ use of negation. The analysis of negation takes into account the different semantic forms of negatives preparing the ground for an examination of the pragmatic aspects of negation which bring forward the issues of indirectness, social distance and power negotiation. 18 References: Baron, Naomi S. 2008. Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blum‐Kulka, Shoshana. 1987. Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 112: 131‐146. Carston, Robin. 1998. Negation, ‘presupposition’ and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Journal of Linguistics 342: 309‐350. Crystal, David. 2011. Internet linguistics: A student guide. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Giora, Rachel. 2002. Masking one’s themes. Irony and the politics of indirectness. Thematics: Interdisciplinary Studies. Louwerse, Max and Willie van Peer (eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 283‐300. Herring, Susan C., Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen. 2013. Pragmatics of computer‐mediated communication. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Horn, Laurence R. 1985. Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity. Language 61 (1): 121‐174 Moeschler, J. 2006. Négation, polarité, asymétrie et évènements. Langages 162: 90‐106. Mœschler, Jacques. 1992. The pragmatic aspects of linguistic negation: Speech act, argumentation and pragmatic inference. Argumentation, 61: 51‐76. Moeschler, Jacques. 2010. Negation, scope and the descriptive/metalinguistic distinction. Generative Grammar in Geneva 6: 29‐48. Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics. London: Longman. Thurlow, Crispin, and Kristine R. Mroczek, 2011. Digital discourse: Language in the new media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Semantics of ‘Dry’ Adjectives across Languages Victoria A. Kruglyakova, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Russia Negation applied to the semantics of qualities (Goddard 2007) produces a large group of caritive adjectives. They describe a wide scale of characteristics that are brought together by the general meaning ‘lacking X’, ‘X‐less’. ‘Dry’ is one such adjective, applied to objects that are free or relatively free from any liquid, and especially water; devoid of natural moisture or no longer wet (Merriam Webster 2016). As any caritive does (cf. Tolstaya 2008 on Slavic languages), ‘dry’ favors semantic shifts, based on the ‘lack of’ pattern. We offer an overview of the most frequent and significant adjectives of this kind in 15 languages that we have studied (English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Khanty, Moksha, Hungarian, Georgian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian). Quite anticipated are the metaphors that express a lack of expected component (Gibbs 2008): Lithuanian sausa košė ‘porridge without butter’, Spanish sueldo seco ‘salary with no bonus’. But the most numerous are shifts to the emotional and mental domain. They can be further divided into subgroups according to the absent abstract element: a lack of emotional concern: Latvian sauss stils ‘matter‐of‐fact style’, Mandarin 干笑 gānxiào ‘forced lough’, Polish suchy głos ‘non‐emotional voice’; a lack of creativity: French auteur sec ‘author of lame style’, English: dry style of painting. The relation of lacking expressed through ‘dry’ adjectives to negation proves to be a plentiful source of metaphorisation. 19 References: Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. 2008. The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goddard, Cliff, and Wierzbicka Anna. 2007. NSM analyses of the semantics of physical qualities sweet, hot, hard, heavy, rough, sharp in cross‐linguistic perspective. In: Studies in Language 31/4: 765–800. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Merriam Webster Online, Retrieved February 24, 2016, from http://www.merriam‐ webster.com/dictionary/dry. Tolstaya, S. M. 2008. Prostranstvo slova. Lexical semantics in pan‐slavic perspective. Moscow: Indrik. Over‐ and out‐ as pragmatic markers inferring negation Catherine Moreau Bordeaux Montaigne University, France In this paper, I address the issue of negation through two markers: verbal prefixes over and out, which do not have an intrinsic negative meaning but which act as pragmatic markers of negation. In the utterer‐centred framework used here, these markers are seen as means of assessing a value in relation to a subjective boundary. Different semantic stages are defined in a notional domain. Negation is thus considered as the expression of an alteration which results from going beyond normal limits to such an extent as to possibly exit the domain. Overbook, overdo, for instance, imply excess hence “not having the expected value”. A comparison is made with French equivalents sur‐ and outre‐ as in surpasser (outdo) and outrepasser (override), all the more interesting as the very movement of going beyond results in diverging appraisals. The markers considered are studied in context and taken from a large corpus of oral and written English and French. References: Descles, Jean‐Pierre, Ewa Gwiazdecka, Azucena Montes‐Rondon. 2001. “Towards Invariant Meanings of Spatial preposition and preverbs”. Workshop on Spatial and Temporal Information Processing, ACL, Toulouse. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Negation in Academic Discourse and Pragmatic Rhetoric Olga Oparina, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia The very essence of science combines two directly opposite issues. On the one hand, it follows certain standards and regulations; on the other hand it implies critical thinking. The latter, in its turn, overthrows established settings, suggests new theories and approaches, and changes the existing world‐view. Such desired flexibility presupposes a certain style of rhetoric. The main goal is to persuade an addressee in the author’s point of view. It means to present the idea, to motivate and prove it, and to make it interesting and attractive for further investigation. Negation is a powerful tool to achieve this. B. Russell, an outstanding scientist and scholar, exploited the potential of negation and used various types of it in his texts. How 20 can it be treated? As his individual attitude and the rejection of the established world‐view postulates, or as the best way to illustrate and prove his standpoint? Some of Russell’s works contain negation in the title. What is it? Can we regard it as emphasis or as the means of attracting the reader’s attention? Individual pragmatic rhetoric and negation as its counterpart will be considered in this report. References: Chomsky, Noam. 2006. Language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Komova, Tatiana A. 1985. The Category of Negation in English Language as the Subject of Morphostylistic Analysis. Moscow State University Newsletter. Philology 2: 41‐45. Leonard, Sterling. 1929. The doctrine of correctness in English usage, 1700 ‐1800. Madison: Columbia University Pinker, Steven. 1995. The language instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Harper Collins Publishers Russell, Bertrand. 1922 [1914]. Our knowledge of the external world. London: George Allen & Unwin Sanders, Ted, and Wilbert Spooren. 2007. Discourse and text structure. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 916‐941. Evaluating Knighthood: Featuring the Discourse Functions of Negation in “Le Morte Darthur” by T. Malory Anastasia Sharapkova and Tatiana Komova, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia The medieval knighthood that has been attracting attention of historians, linguists and literary critics for centuries is a complicated phenomenon of military and Christian ethics, feudal society, and literary representation. The latter is no less important for understanding its philosophy than the first two. The chivalric romances, among which Malory’s work (1485) takes the most prominent place, gave credibility to the detailed classification of knightly virtues in later decades. The opposition of a good and a bad knight is created through the category of negation that may be linguistically analyzed on various levels: lexical, morphological, and syntactic. It allows the author not only to picture the bad, but also to stress and evaluate the ideal. Negation turns out to be not a distinct logical counterpart of positive utterances, but a powerful tool for featuring knighthood as a socially and ethically important endeavour. The presentation will show how it works in the text of “Le Morte Darthur” in relation to various characters, and women in particular. References: Kennedy, Beverly. 1992. Knighthood in the Morte Darthur, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Mazzon, Gabriella. 2004. A history of English Negation, Harlow: Pearson, Longman Linguistics Library Schmidt, A. V. C. (ed) 1982. Le Morte D’arthur the Seventh and Eighth Tales. Schmidt, S. J. 1973. Texttheoretische aspekte der negation. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 1.2: 178‐208. 21 Tottie, Gunnel, Wim van der Wurff, and Ingrid Tieken‐Boon van Ostade (eds). 1999. Negation in the history of English. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter Komova, Тatiana А. 1985. Категория отрицания в системе грамматических морфологических категорий английского глагола [The category of negation within the system of grammatical morphological categories of the English verb]. Мoscow: Moscow University Press Mantiyeva, B. A. 2006. Отрицание в понятийной и языковой картине мира в личностном и художественном дискурсе. [Negation in conceptual and linguistic picture of the world in personal and fictional discourse]. PhD dissertation in Germanic philology: 10.02.04. Мoscow: МГУ Genitive of Negation in the Croatian Language Diana Stolac University of Rijeka, Croatia A direct object in Croatian is an object in the accusative case or an object in the genitive case interchangeable by accusative. There are two direct objects in the genitive case – partitive genitive and genitive of negation (Slavic genitive). The conditions for a genitive of negation are that the predicate verb has to be transitive, and that the sentence has to be negative. Therefore, the genitive of negation can be realised only in negative sentences in which it is synonymous with the accusative, while in the deep structure of positive sentences the direct object is exclusively in the accusative case. Literature on the genitive of negation primarily deals with its origin and original meanings – partitive, ablative (Meillet 1897), its position in the Indoeuropean noun case system (Heinz 1965), and its status in specific Slavic languages (Trávníček 1938, Breznik 1943, Hausenblas 1958, Harrer‐Pisarkowa 1959, Gortan‐Premk 1962, Heinz 1965, Hlavsa 1975, for Croatian: Feleszko 1970, Menac 1979, Vince‐Marinac 1992, Stolac 1993, Stolac and Horvat‐Vlastelić 2004). This morphosyntactic fact is a feature of Slavic languages (which is why it is also called the Slavic genitive) in which it has different qualitative characteristics (stylistically marked/unmarked, interchangeable with the accusative with or without a difference in meaning, non‐interchangeable with the accusative). There are no equivalent syntactic structures outside of the Slavic language family. This paper comments on the differences between Croatian and English syntax which do not enable direct translation of the genitive of negation and require translation strategies which would preserve all of its features (amplified negation, stress of negation, stylistic markedness). Apart from translation, this is also an issue in teaching Croatian as a foreign language as the change in government between the positive and negative sentence confuses the users of Croatian as a foreign language. The relationship between the following examples is discussed: Vidim budućnost. // Ne vidim budućnost. (neutral affect) / Ne vidim budućnost (marked affect) and their possible translations: I don't see the future. / I see no future. References: Breznik, Anton. 1943. Stavčna negacija v slovenščini. Razprave AZU 1: 157–200. Feleszko, Kazimierz. 1970. Składnia genetiwu i wyrażeń przyimkowych z genetiwem w języku serbsko‐chorwackim. Wroclaw, Warszawa, Krakow: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich – Wydaw. PAN. 22 Gortan‐Premk, Darinka. 1962. Padež objekta u negativnim rečenicama u savremenom srpskohrvatskom književnom jeziku. Naš jezik, Nova serija 12: 130–148. Harrer‐Pisarkowa, Krystyna. 1959. Przypadek dopełnienia w polskim zdaniu zaprzeczonym. Język polski 39: 9–32. Hausenblas, Karel. 1958. Vývoj předmetového genitivu v češtině. Praha: ČSAV. Heinz, Adam. 1955. Genitivus w indoewropejskim systemie przypadkowym, Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Heinz, Adam. 1965. System przypadkowy języka polskiego. Krakow: Uniwersytet Jagielloński. Hlavsa, Zdeněk. 1975. Denotace objektu a její prostředky v současné češtiné, Praha: Academia. Meillet, Antoine. 1897. Recherches sur l'emploi genitif‐accusatif en vieux‐slave. Paris: É. Bouillon. Menac, Antica. 1979. Slavenski genitiv u suvremenom hrvatskom književnom jeziku. Jezik 26/3: 65–76. Stolac, Diana. 1993. Slavenski genitiv u jeziku Tituša Brezovačkoga. Filologija 21‐22: 425‐ 430. Stolac, Diana and Anastazija Horvat Vlastelić. 2004. Slavenski genitiv kao problem kontrastivnih sintaktičkih opisa. In: Suvremena kretanja u nastavi stranih jezika. Stolac, Diana, Nada Ivanetić, and Boris Pritchard (eds). 431–442. Zagreb, Rijeka: HDPL. Trávníček, František. 1938. Záporový genitiv v češtině. Slovo a slovesnost. 129‐138. Vince‐Marinac, Jasna. 1992. Vrste riječi i genitivno‐akuzativni sinkretizam. Suvremena lingvistika 34: 331‐337. Lexical Bleaching of the Verbal Construction Fail to X – A Contrastive Corpus‐Based Study Andrej Stopar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia The English verbal construction fail to X allows two interpretations: in the first, the verb has the full lexical meaning of ‘not being successful in what you are trying to achieve’, whereas in the second, it shows signs of lexical (also: semantic) bleaching (cf. Hopper and Closs Traugott 2003), and can thus be interpreted as a grammaticalized marker of negation (Eckardt 2006; Mackenzie 2008, 2009). As a result, in the latter case, the verb fail is no longer analyzed as a full lexical verb selecting infinitival complementation (i.e., VP1+VP2), but as a verb of intermediate function modifying the full lexical verb (cf. Quirk al. 1999: 136ff). In terms of its semantics (Kartunnen 1971, 2012), the verb fail in the bleached construction is analyzed as a two‐way implicative verb, i.e. a verb that yields “an entailment both in positive and negative contexts”. Taking into account the syntactic and semantic properties of the construction fail to X, the present analysis examines its distribution in two types of corpora. General corpora (BNC and COCA) are used to examine the distribution of both, the non‐bleached and bleached, meanings in English. To further elaborate the findings and contrast them on a cross‐linguistic level, two parallel English‐Slovenian corpora (Evroterm and ELAN/TRANS5) are used to observe the translations of the construction fail to X into Slovenian. The contrastive approach in the analysis of the parallel corpora of translations also makes it possible to identify the lexical and grammatical structures that Slovenian uses to express the double function of the construction fail to X described above. 23 References: Eckardt, Regine. 2006. Meaning Change in Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopper, Paul J., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. “Implicative verbs.” Language 47: 340‐358. —. 2012. “Simple and Phrasal Implicatives.” Proceedings of *SEM: The First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, Montréal, Canada, June‐7‐8, 124‐131. Mackenzie, Lachlan J. 2008. Failing without trying. Jezikoslovje 9 (1‐2): 53‐85. —. 2009. English fail to as a periphrastic negative: an FDG account. Working Papers in Functional Grammar 82: 1‐28. Quirk, Randolph et al. 1999. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman. On Negation in English: A Diachronic Study Lidija Štrmelj, University of Zadar, Croatia The article deals with the development of negation in English in the period from the ninth to the fourteenth century. It explores the morpho‐syntactic features of negative constructions in Middle English on the basis of the Late Old English and Late Middle English translations of the Gospel according to John, both composed after the same Latin source text, the Saint Jerome’s Vulgate from the fourth century. By comparing the two translations we aim to investigate the change in the frequency of a particular word order in negative constructions, including a restriction or extension of structure, and to state, if possible, some general trends in that sense. In particular, we try to examine the usage of prefixes and suffixes, prepositions, pronouns and adverbs for word‐negation and sentence‐negation. It is interesting to see the variety of negative forms in the context of Middle English shift from a synthetic to an analytic system, which, on the one side, brought about a relatively fixed word‐order, and, on the other side, allowed multiple negation, since the processes of standardization had not yet begun. References: Bergen, Linda van. 2008. Negative Contraction and Old English Dialects: Evidence from Glosses and Prose. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2008: 275‐312, 391‐430. Brinton, Laurel J., and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2006. The English Language: a Linguistic History. Oxford University Press Canada. Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville‐Petre. 1992. A Book of Middle‐English. Oxford: Blackwell. Closs Traugott, Elizabeth. 2005. Syntax. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol.1, The Beginnings to 1066, ed. Richard M. Hogg, 168‐286. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, Olga. 2006. Syntax. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 2, 1066‐ 1476, ed. Norman Blake, 207‐383. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenbaum, Sidney, and Randolph Quirk. 1990. A Student's Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Grünberg, Madeleine. 1967. The West‐Saxon Gospels ‐ a Study of the Gospel of St. Matthew with Text of the Four Gospels. Amsterdam: Poortpers N. V. 24 http://faculty.acu.edu./~goebeld/vulgata/newtest/john/vjo11.htm. (accessed 7 25, 2006). http://www.sbibleboom.ru/wyc/loh1‐htm. (accessed 8 28, 2006). Hogg, Richard M. 2005. Phonology and Morphology. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol.1, The Beginnings to 1066, ed. Richard M. Hogg, 67‐164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemenade, Ans van. 2002. Word Order in Old English Prose and Poetry: The Position of Finite Verb and Adverbs. Studies in the History of the English Language. A Millennial Perspective, eds. Donka Minkova, Robert Stockwell, 355‐373. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lass, Roger. 2006. Phonology and Morphology. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 2, 1066‐1476, ed. Norman Blake, 91‐147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ogura, Michiko. 2008. Negative Contraction and Noncontraction in Old English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 2008: 313‐329. Quirk, Randolph, and Charles L. Wrenn. 1977. An Old English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reznik, P.B., T. S. Sorokina, and I. V. Reznik. 2001. A History of the English Language. Moscow: Flinta, Nauka. Visser, Frederick Th. 1969. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Vol. 3: Syntactical units with two verbs. Leiden: Brill. Pleonastic Negation from a Cross‐linguistic Perspective Irena Zovko Dinković, University of Zagreb, Croatia Gašper Ilc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia In recent linguistic theory, pleonastic negation is treated either as an instance of a lexically present but semantically vacuous negation, often placed in relation to negative polarity (e.g. Portner and Zanuttini 2000, Espinal 1992, van der Wouden 1994, among others) or as a special subtype of negation that differs from “proper” or sentential negation in terms of its syntactic as well as semantic scope, and may actually be considered a form of modality (Mueller 1991, Abels 2005, Yoon 2011). We follow the latter approach and discuss pleonastic negation as it appears in various syntactic structures in English and other languages, primarily Slovene and Croatian. In doing so, we observe that, even though the syntactic environments in which pleonastic negation occurs are highly comparable, there seems to be a parametric variation as to the level of optionality of pleonastic negation, and to the type of mood with which pleonastic negation is used (Ilc 2004, Zovko Dinković 2015). Based on empirical data, we argue that the difference in the scope of negation between sentential and pleonastic negation is mirrored directly in their syntactic properties: while the former licenses n‐words, the latter cannot license them. Both types of negation, however, may trigger the Genitive of negation in languages still displaying the Genitive of negation in negated clauses (e.g. Slovene). The observations and the analysis presented in this paper are aimed at contributing to a better understanding of pleonastic negation by attempting to prove that it is neither semantically empty nor a feature of sentence negation, but rather a linguistic phenomenon akin to other means of expressing modality in language. 25 References: Abels, Klaus. 2005. ‘Expletive negation’ in Russian: A conspiracy theory. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 13: 5−74. Espinal, Maria Teresa. 1992. Expletive negation and logical absorption. Linguistic Review 9/4: 333−358. Ilc, Gašper. 2004. Skladenjska okolja pleonastičnega zanikanja. Slavistična revija 60(4): 659‐676. Muller, Claude. 1991. La négation en français. Geneva: Droz. Portner, Paul and Raffaella Zanuttini. 2000. The force of negation in WH Exclamatives and interrogatives. In Negation and polarity: Syntactic and semantic perspectives. Horn, Laurence R. and Yasuhiko Kato (eds.) Oxford: OUP. 193−231. Wouden, Ton van der. 1997. Negative contexts: Collocation, polarity and multiple negation. Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics. London, New York: Routledge. Yoon, Suwon. 2011. ‘Not’ in the mood: the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of evaluative negation. PhD dissertation. Chicago: University of Chicago Zovko Dinković, Irena. 2015. Ekspletivna negacija u hrvatskome. In Dimenzije značenja. Belaj, Branimir (ed.) Zagreb: Zagrebačka slavistička škola. 323‐336. 26 S3 “Cross‐linguistic and Cross‐cultural Approaches to Phraseology” Symbolic and Semantic Meanings of Emerald in English and Georgian Biblical Expressions Manana Shelia Sokhumi State University Ekvtime Takaishvili Teaching University Tbilisi, Georgia Phraseological units show the features of a culture and convey the way of thinking and values of each nation. They express the figurative sense of words and make the language more colourful. The Bible is a source of enlightenment and inspiration and instructs us in all areas of life. Biblical expressions concentrate on wisdom of all nations and cultures. This paper aims to conduct a complex study of symbolic and semantic meanings of emerald as one of the precious stones in English and Georgian biblical expressions and make a detailed analysis of the gemstone, its etymology, cognitive features, symbolic categories of colour and object. The present research makes an attempt to compare and investigate the usage of emerald in English and Georgian biblical expressions. Comparative approach allows us to reveal similarity and differences of the given gemstone in expressions of both English Bible (KJV, NIV) and Biblia‐Georgian variants. Descriptive and comparative analysis is a necessary precondition of profound studying of lexical and phraseological units. The paper focuses on symbolic properties and various virtues of emerald that is the valuable and highly prized grassy‐green variety of beryl. Emerald is always associated with the landscapes and the richest greens. In many folklores and literatures precious stones have been used to symbolize and create the image of nature. Emerald Isle is the poetic name for Ireland due to its fine green natural landscapes. Emerald is also the poetic name for Georgia, a mountainous country in South Caucasus, the world's cradle of wine. This gemstone has been frequently used in Georgian literature to describe the country’s amazing nature. English Phrasal Verbs as Cognitive Phraseological Units: Typology and Teaching Valeriy Shabaev Novosibirsk State Technical University Novosibirsk, Russia Phrasal verbs are widely believed to be particularly difficult to master (1) because of their idiomaticity and (2) because the choice of verb‐particle combinations seems so unsystematic. According to cognitive linguistics (CL), however, those combinations are in fact motivated. Several small‐scale experiments have already demonstrated that revealing the linguistic motivations behind phrasal verbs can help learners better comprehend and remember these lexical units. We report a larger study in which CL treatment of phrasal verbs was integrated into an extended general EFL course. The results of the study signal that (1) not all phrasal verbs lend themselves equally well to straightforward CL teaching, and (2) for CL pedagogy to be optimally effective. It requires a certain level of cognitive investment on the part of the learners, something which cannot under all circumstances be taken for granted. 27 Among the apparent sources of phrasal verbs mastering difficulties are (1) lack of transparency in meaning and (2) the semantically random nature of the particles [in Russian linguistic tradition – postpositions]. However, the research carried out within the framework of CL has demonstrated that much of what was traditionally considered arbitrary in language is in fact systematic and motivated. Brugman’s in‐depth analysis of particle over and Lindner’s of out and up were early, influential contributions to the view that particles in phrasal verbs are like any other aspects of language in showing a great deal of semantic coherence. Some linguists have seen the potential of this view for the classroom and have produced large‐scale adaptations of CL theory in an attempt to make it easier for learners to acquire phrasal verbs. Here, we will try to answer three points. (1) Are learners likely to transfer insights into the motivation of particular phrasal verbs to their processing of phrasal verbs they encounter subsequently? (2) Can the positive results obtained with regard to the samples of phrasal verbs that have so far been targeted be directly generalized to the class of phrasal verbs in general? (3) Will classroom applications mirror experimental results? Culture‐Specific Nominative Patterns in English Phraseology: A Linguo‐Cultural Study Elena Ryzhkina Moscow State Linguistics University Moscow, Russia Traditionally, phraseology is viewed as one of the most “conservative” subsystems of the language, for it is not liable to free variation of its units, borrowing, and other ways of replenishment typical of the lexical system as a whole. However, this belief was challenged by a massive research into the stylistic and non‐conventional functioning of idioms, initiated by Alexander V. Kunin in the late 1960s and later taken over by his followers. That series of studies, which eventually crystallized as a branch of linguistics termed “phraseological stylistics”, worked out a new conception of phraseology as a flexible, self‐ developing system, open to various types of renovation, including structural or/ and semantic modification of codified units in discourse. A considerable influx of idiomatic neologisms coupled with visible dynamics in the existing phraseological fund, markedly intensive in the last decades of the 20th century, put on high agenda a range of new issues concerned with innovative phenomena in phraseology. One of the most relevant problems to be studied is the balance between human creativity involved in the use and variation of codified idioms in discourse, on the one hand, and the language norm, on the other. The present research provides an insight into the language mechanisms which regulate the neological processes in modern English phraseology and also into the extralinguistic, primarily cultural factors which both condition and constrain the evolution of phraseological units. The basic assumption the study proceeds from is that innovations in phraseology should be treated as a system phenomenon which is stipulated by the general tendencies the language displays in its development and which depends on the language‐specific nominative strategies, including the fund of nominative means accumulated throughout the language history. This also extends to non‐conventional modifications of idioms, for they do not fall out of the system but, indeed, rest on the language norm. Thus, an 28 extensive analysis of empirical material shows that most neologisms and nonce‐phrases created on the basis of codified English idioms fit in certain nominative patterns existing in English. The major thesis of the study is that the patterns which underlie the modification of codified idioms or the formation of new ones are largely language‐specific. This is substantiated by cross‐language and cross‐cultural analyses of phraseological calques borrowed from the same source (e.g.: German Strohwitwe/ Graswitwe => English grass widow and Russian соломенная вдова) which display different modes of functioning and vectors of evolution – peculiar to the respective language and, moreover, to the respective national culture. The methodology employed in the research derives from the linguoculturological approach to the study of phraseology, much of which was elabourated by Veronika N. Teliya and her disciples. The study shows that national culture has a pervasive influence on the development of phraseology, defining to a great extent its general trends, modes, and specifically the language nominative patterns which serve to produce new units. These patterns factually represent the cultural concepts, important for the language community. Modern Languages and the Modern‐Language Phraseological Expressions Nino Sanaia Sokhumi State University Tbilisi, Georgia Phraseological expressions with unclear figurative denotation are usually met in the modern languages, the etymology of which can be realized through the mythology of the language. The analysis of the mythology reference is the solid means of the study of the phraseological etymology. The goal of the study is to use the mentioned methodology to analyze the phraseological level of non‐related languages as the legacy of antique culture. The influence of antique mythology in line with the universal figurative‐associative thinking caused isomorphism in the phraseology of modern languages which had been influenced by the antique, especially Greek culture. The study is also interested in terms of the dissemination area of isomorphic figurative phrases. The research establishes possibility of a logical connection between the symbol of “Arian’s thread” in the myth about Theseus and metaphorical word combinations like: suivre le fil de ses idées , perdre le fil de ses idées (In French language); нить мыслей (In Russian); azrebis Zafis dakargva; fiqris Zafi davwyvite (yazbegi), azri gamiwyda (In Georgian) in modern languages. In my opinion the metaphorical image of the "thread" here represents a logical sequence of thoughts. This fact is also proved by the circumstance that in French two homonyms coexist derived from Latin filum (thread). One of them: fil (m) means thread and another file (f) – sequence (NPR: 230). These language facts have suggested us an idea that the Arian’s thread in a myth about Theseus is also an escape from a difficult situation, can mean a sequence of thoughts, their logical chain and even more. We think that this symbol vails some doctrine or knowledge. Z. Gamsakhurdia making comments on the Greek myths comes up with idea that the goal of a campaign of Theseus to Crete is acquisition of spiritual knowledge 29 (Gamsakhurdia 1991: 202). Though he does not mention the symbol of thread, we think he more means the same wisdom. Considering structure of rituals in the Greek myths, R.Gordeziani states a similar thought about the myth of Theseus. He considers that the structure of this myth corresponds to the structure of ritual of consecration of youngsters as a whole. Leaving home and travelling in far countries, Victory over death and killing of the villain, Experience of love and reception of the fatherly inheritance – All these elements are obligatory stages of consecration (Gordeziani 2005: 55). Hence, the metaphorical image of "thread" in the modern languages designating sequence of thought is semiotic transformation of symbol of «Arian’s thread” – a symbol of spiritual knowledge. To sum up we might say, the same phraseological figurative expressions in modern languages are usually caused by the universal understanding of mythology. In our case, the analyses of the myth of Theseus made it easy, on the one hand, to delve deeper into the etymology of the phraseological figurative expressions and, on the other hand, interpret their content in a modern way confirming the efficiency of the method. Antithetical Proverbs Lali Ratiani Sokhumi State University Tbilisi, Georgia The vocabulary of the German language is constantly enriched with phraseological units which make the language more colourful and reflect the national culture of the world. Proverbs play a particular role in the transmission of the people’s cultural and national identity as well as cultural‐national vision of the world is embodied in the figurative contents of expressions. They exist in the language as ready‐made units and are always activated in live speech and mass media. The analysis given in the paper is presented by antithetical proverbs as they are the “index of culture and mentality, the most important source of their features description”. The sphere of realization of the antithesis are mainly individual phrases, sentences, some sections, of the text found in literature but proverbs create particular and productive ground of this phenomenon and in this regard they are presented by a quite interesting object. Almost the exact analogue of none of the German antonyms is found in the Georgian language by neither lexical composition, nor structure. The features of the antithesis are conditioned by a native speaker’s cultural background. The determination of the specific cultural background and its exact interpretation for a language‐speaker must be recognized as a necessary concomitant moment of study. The culture and language are two semiotic systems by their common signs and structural differentiated features. Language is the basis of culture, the main specific sign of culture and the means of expression of national‐specific features and is considered as means of ethnic integration and ethno‐differentiation. As a support of the antithetical proverbs study should be taken cultural achievements of specific native speakers and at the same time the pragmatic dimension conditioned by national culture. This phenomenon should be discussed/occurred within two‐purely linguistic and linguo‐cultural frame. The antithesis is based on the opposition of objects and phenomena perceived by the subject hostility based on the objects and phenomena that acquires additional 30 significance in the context, the significance caused by situation adds to oppositional semantics the illustrations of which are given by proverbs. On the basis of the study, it was possible to make a stereotypical conclusion, which is obligatory for the realization of antithetical proverbs in the German, English, Georgian and Russian languages. Aesthetic Evaluation in English Phraseology Elena Mesheryakova Volgograd State Social Pedagogical University Volgograd, Russia Julia Mesheryakova Volgograd State Social Pedagogical University Volgograd, Russia In the language an evaluation is materialized in the form of certain value judgments, and they usually possess a proper expression (or subjective) evaluation, and some qualitative characteristics of the object being evaluated. Aesthetic evaluation category is expressed by the lexical (adjectives, pejorative vocabulary and idioms) and syntactic (the context, the situation of communication and social and status properties) levels. In this study, we will focus on phraseological units in English, containing a lexical minimum of the positive and negative aesthetic evaluation (250 units). In modern linguistics an idiom means a single semantic unit which tends to have some measure of internal cohesion, such that it can often be replaced by a literal counterpart that is made up of a single word. National concept of beauty is reflected in phraseology and therefore is inextricably linked with the concepts of appearance, behavior and inner world. I.S. Con notes that the appearance ‘is valuation of the basic properties and qualities of the inner world’ (Con, 1978: 80). English phraseological units pay special attention to the beautiful appearance of a human. Beautiful appearance of a person is expressed in the following comparative combinations: graceful as a swan, as pretty as picture, as handsome as a young Greek god, as handsome as paint, as shining as star. It seems that the main person in the description of the exterior are the ones to contemplate the visual characteristics that are comparable with the standard or existing image of a young Greek god, graceful swan, art. An ugly person appearance is worded in the following idioms in the English language: ugly as a scarecrow, ugly as a toad, ugly as a dead monkey, ugly as sin. Ugly appearance is compared with a bogey, toad, reptile, monkey dead, sin, suggesting that there is a negative aesthetic evaluation in the English language mapping of the world. English linguistic culture emphasizes the presence of illness attribute to describe an ugly person by means of phraseology. The image of the ugly / unhealthy person is represented by a large group of idioms: bag of bones, walking corps (skeleton), one of the pharaoh's lean kine. Thematic fields of health and beauty of the English language in their intersection are composed of a phraseological unit group with the meaning of ‘ugly and lean’: bean‐steak, string bean, bare‐bone, barber's cat. Positive aesthetic evaluation is fixed in the following features: 1) a work of art, 2) a comparison with the deity, 3) comparing with flowers and stars, 4) comparison with the noble animals and birds. The negative aesthetic judgment is fixed in the following features: 1) poor health, 2) excessive and insufficient growth and body weight, 3) lack of taste in clothes, 4) comparison with dirty animals, 5) the comparison with the deadly sin, 6) age 31 specification of negative evaluation appearance (clumsiness teenagers and evil ugly old women). “The phrase, the whole phrase, nothing but the phrase”: the pervasiveness of phraseology in European documents Denise Milizia University of Bari Aldo Moro Bari, Italy This paper is part of a larger‐scale project which investigates words and keywords, phrases and key‐phrases in ESP, in particular in the legal language of European documents. The bilingual/parallel corpus – English and Italian – used for this study includes all the treaties drafted in the European Union, from the Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris in 1951, to the Treaty of Lisbon, signed in Lisbon in 2007 but approved and ratified only two years later. Being the purpose of this research merely linguistic, the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, here called the EU Constitution for the sake of convenience, is also taken into consideration, even though it was rejected by France and the Netherlands in 2005. The current project is being carried out with students of law and political studies who too often find themselves in the situation of having to translate not individual words (for which the dictionary would do) but legal phraseology which is known for being convoluted and abstruse (Williams 2013), and which is one of the greatest constraints on legal translators (Meunier and Granger 2008). The analysis starts form the assumption that language is phraseological, both in its general and specific varieties – legal, in the case in point – and that text is essentially phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2004; 2008). Lexical items are primed to occur in, or avoid, certain structures or grammatical/lexical words (Hoey 2005), thus in the English version of the European Treaties we find IN CONFORMITY WITH but never IN CONFORMITY OF or IN CONFORMITY TO, whereas in the Italian version all three prepositions – CON, DEL, AL – are found occurring with IN CONFORMITÀ (Milizia 2011). Thus, IN CONFORMITY is attracted to the preposition WITH and is repelled by OF and TO, for no obvious reason other than habit. Yet, research has shown that IN CONFORMITY WITH, despite being grammatically correct, is used only four times in the European Treaties, whereas IN ACCORDANCE WITH occurs on 444 occasions. The three‐word cluster IN ACCORDANCE WITH is indeed the most frequent phrase in the European Treaties (Milizia 2010). By means of the Clusters facility provided by Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (Scott 2011), the EU Constitution is referenced against the Lisbon Treaty, to analyse the phrases but mainly the key‐phrases that emerge in the old document and have been dropped in the new: EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK LAWS, HIS OR HER, HE OR SHE emerge top of the list. Interestingly, the concept of FRAMEWORK LAW/LEGGE QUADRO is an inherent part of Italian legal culture, but it does not traditionally play a part in British culture (Williams and Milizia 2007). The Evaluative Features of the Image “Death” in Proverbs and Sayings (On the Material of English and Russian Languages) Alexei Lzylov Smolensk State University Smolensk, Russia. 32 The paper studies proverbs and sayings that also bear the name of paremiological units. We share the opinion that proverbial expressions may be considered a constituent part of the realm of a larger scale. In other words proverbs are viewed as a constituent part of the sphere of phraseological units of the language. Phraseology, being a comparatively young linguistic discipline, attracts much attention in modern linguistic studies as it has proved its importance within the set of other linguistic disciplines. There is no natural human language that would lack a set of expressions, which plane of content would not equal the meanings of its constituent parts taken separately. Phraseological units are to exist and correspondingly studied as long as human languages are used by their speakers. The paper concentrates on the study of the evaluative features which constitute an important part of the plane of content of proverbs and sayings. The sphere of proverbial expressions is characterized by its ability to objectify all evaluative meanings, both positive and negative. The evaluative potential of paremiological units of the two languages is studied on the basis of the conceptual image “death”, which is considered to be one of the cornerstones of human consciousness. Death is objectified in proverbs not only directly, but also figuratively, by means of metaphor and personification. The semantic features of the image “death” are examined comparatively on the basis of two languages: English and Russian, which have created a rich stock of proverbial expressions in the history of their development. The development of languages is known to be an interrelated and inter‐conditioned process which also influenced the paremiological sphere. The study of the proverbial material of the two languages drives us to a conclusion that the proverbs under consideration are able to express both universal truths and the ideas that have a national specific character as every language has enough intellectual potential to create their own, unique phrases, reflecting relevant concepts, existing in human mentality. Adjectival Comparative Phraseological Units as an Element of Cognitive Mechanism of Comparison Ekaterina Volkova Severodvinsk Sea College Severodvinsk, Russia According to Alexander V. Kunin, adjective comparative phraseological units structurally include following three elements: the thing that is compared (the subject of comparison); the thing to that it is compared – the sample, the reference carrier of a characteristics (the object of comparison); and the characteristics which gives foundation for comparing (the basis of comparison) (Kunin 1996: 272). Comparing as a cognitive process is considered by scientists more generally. After G.L. Denisova we accepted the following definitions of the comparing mechanisms: ‘the comparing subject’ – the top knot, which is marked by the statement, or presented in it implicitly; ‘theme’ – presentation of the comparison; ‘module’ – an idea of characteristics, the comparison is based on; ‘standart’ – the object the thing is compared to (Denisova 2009: 6‐7, 11]. Three out of four elements characterize the adjectival comparative phraseological units: the subject of comparison, the theme is represented by the basis of comparison (the way a native speaker thinks of the word taken as a basis of comparison. 33 The theme of adjectival comparative phraseological unit is invariant and depends on the case of use. The subject, module and standard remain unchanged. Referring to the comparison, a person uses the entire accumulated experience. However, some scientists argue that the modules that are often recoursed by language carriers are completely deprived of expressiveness due to lack of specificity. A set of objects in different categories always has each of characteristics. And here takes effect the metaphorical essence of comparing as a mental activity. Metaphor individualizes the subject in an attempt to catch and transmit its uniqueness. Nina D. Arutyunova believes that metaphor is especially exposed to lexemes, which include culturally marked signs (Arutyunova 1999: 28). ACPE then starts playing the role of ‘trigger’ that when running gives the thinking process the direction towards getting more detailed and specific information on comparing module. On the image of ‘God’ in American and Polish paremiology – a contrastive study from a linguo‐cultural perspective Bożena Kochman‐Haładyj Rzeszów University Rzeszów, Poland The paper aims at comparing and contrasting a corpus of selected American and Polish religion‐ related proverbs – featuring God as a constitutive element – with a view to revealing certain characteristic features in the attitude towards religiosity in two respective linguo‐cultures. More precisely, an attempt will be made to select the religion‐oriented proverbial texts from both languages and group them in terms of the general messages they put across in order to search for common ground and specific differences. It is to be hoped that Mieder’s general plead for more articles dealing on a crosscultural level with misogyny, stereotypes, religion, animals, etc. in proverbs (Mieder 2004: 81‐82) will be at least partly fulfilled. The analytical section of the paper is based on two unparalleled and invaluable paremiographical collections. The American God‐related proverbial texts are selected from A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992) edited by W. Mieder, et al. In turn, the empirical research on Polish proverbs with the element of ‘God’ in their wording is conducted on the basis of a fairly recent and detailed paremiographical reference compiled by D. & W. Masłowski in their Wielka Księga Przysłów Polskich ‘The big book of proverbs’ (2008). Even a cursory glance at a structured set of American and Polish paremiographical collections pertaining to religion leads us to discover that the category of proverbs with the lexeme ‘God’ in their wording is the most numerous in both languages. Also, a peculiar observation that may be suggested is the fact that in both linguo‐cultures there are proverbs which may be subsumed under a single logeme of a profound trust in God, who is the source of true happiness, prosperity and sense of life (e.g. American Who trusts in God builds well; Polish Kto Boga w sercu nosi, ten chleba nie prosi ‘The one who’s got God in heart, does not ask for bread’). The opposing force to God is the image of the devil, that in many proverbs is presented as the one who uses every means and trick to seduce a poor Christian (e.g. American God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks; Polish Kto się w starej babie kocha, ten dwa razy grzeszy: Pana Boga obraża i diabła cieszy ‘The one who falls in love with an old woman, sins twice: offends God and pleases the Devil’). Word combinations in English academic writing by Italian undergraduate EFL students: a corpus analysis of essays Donatella Malavasi University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy 34 In descriptive studies of academic discourse, the tendency to examine characteristic lexico‐grammatical features of genres (Swales 1990, 2004; Bhatia 1993), has been accompanied by a burgeoning interest in the analysis of recurrent sequences of words, variously called phraseology, lexical bundles, formulaic language (Biber et al. 1999; Wray 2002; Cortes 2004; Biber & Barbieri 2007; Granger & Meunier 2008; Simpson‐Vlach & Ellis 2010). From a Second Language Acquisition perspective, although multi‐word units have started to be explored in native‐speaker and non‐native speaker writing, few studies have focused on the examination of recurrent word combinations in EFL academic texts (Chen & Baker 2010; Ädel & Erman 2012). In an attempt to partially fill this gap, this study investigates the formulaic language most frequently used in academic writing by a group of L1 Italian learners of English. Data for this study consist of a corpus of essays in English Linguistics written by third‐year students majoring in Foreign Languages at an Italian University. With the support of corpus linguistic tools, recurrent lexical bundles will be identified and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, the learner corpus will be compared with the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus to shed some light on aspects of convergence and divergence between learner and native speaker production in the use of word combinations. Theoretical problems of the Study of Phraseological Units Natalia Kluzheva Vladimir State University Vladimir, Russia Phraseology means the branch of linguistics dealing with stable word‐ combinations characterized by certain transference of meaning. Specialists in phraseology face a number of problems. They describe the variants of phraseological units and they determine the specific features of words in phraseological units. Specialists in phraseology also define the correlation of phraseological units with parts of speech, determine the syntactic role of phraseological units, and study the formation of new word meanings in relation to phraseological context. The scope of phraseology is broadest when such usage is independent of the nominative or communicative value of the unit. The scope of phraseology is narrowed when phraseological units are defined by the criteria of the semantic unity of the word group’s meaning and of the word group’s equivalence to a single word in terms of nominative function. In fact, phraseological units or idioms can be described as the most picturesque, colourful and expressive part of the language’s vocabulary. Most Russian scholars today accept the semantic criterion of distinguishing phraseological units from free word‐groups as the major one, and base their research work in the field of phraseology on the definition of a phraseological unit offered by Professor A.V. Kunin, the leading authority on problems of English phraseology in this country: “A phraseological unit is a stable word‐group characterized by a completely or partially transferred meaning.” The definition suggests that the degree of semantic change in a phraseological unit may vary. Professor A.V. Kunin includes proverbs in his classification of phraseological units and labels them communicative phraseological units. From his point of view, one of the main criteria of a phraseological unit is its stability. If the quotient of phraseological stability in a word‐group is not below the minimum, it means that we are dealing with a 35 phraseological unit. The structural type – that is, whether the unit is a combination of words or a sentence – is irrelevant. The paper deals with the problem of identification of phraseological units. Semantic aspect of English colour idioms Maia Marghania Sokhumi State University Ekvtime Takaishvili Teaching University Tbilisi, Georgia Phraseology of English language is so vivid and diverse. To understand English clearly one should know not only its standard vocabulary but also its styles, dialects, proverbs, sayings, phrasal verbs and idioms, the way they are used in various spheres. It is generally known that phraseological units are notable for their special structural stability and integrity. Most of them are characterized by figurative imagery and metaphoric meanings. They are complex formations in which history and culture of a nation are revealed. From this viewpoint phraseology has become the subject of study of linguistics, ethno‐linguistics, anthropology and psycholinguistics as well. It should be noted that phraseological units‐ idioms cover the significant sector of the lexical fund of a language. As idioms cannot be derived from the meanings of their components and correspond to semantically quite different words it is noteworthy to study them. The paper deals with the semantic, expressive cognitive features of phraseological units, especially, colour idioms and their connections with figurative language. The study examines colour idioms in English frequently employed as part of our spoken and written discourse. They develop figurative meanings, evoke imagery and add depth to our words. Among the idioms containing colours, a visual cue can often be found in the origin of the phrase. The analysis also reveals that idioms have an expressive function and dynamic semantics. They make our speech emotional, diverse, more flexible and figurative. Figurativeness is considered the main factor of forming the semantic structure of phraseology. On the comparative analysis of phraseological pictures of the world Elizaveta Ivanova St. Petersburg State University St. Petersburg, Russia One of the main approaches to language semantics in modern linguistics is the analysis of the reflection of cognition, mentality and culture in language signs. In Russian linguistics this approach resulted in numerous reconstructions of certain conceptual spheres based on the semantics of language signs and termed language pictures of the world. It is necessary to make a reservation here by pointing out that linguists aim at the description of this or that fragment of a language picture of the world, rather than at its reconstruction as a whole, for the latter would demand the efforts of several generations of researchers. The approach in question originates from the views of W.von Humboldt, E. Sapir, L.Weisgerber, later – A. Wierzbicka and J. Bartminski. In general, the language picture of the world can be defined as an interpretation of reality reflected in language signs (Bartminski 2005: 88). 36 As far as the analysis of this or that language picture of the world is concerned, we can say that phraseological units represent an immensely useful language resource, in many ways rewarding for those working in the field. This could be explained by the vivid imagery of phraseological units, in particular those based on metaphor. The conceptual structure that is modeled on the basis of the semantics of phraseological units is called a phraseological picture of the world. It is regarded as an integral yet clearly delineated section of the language picture of the world as it is. A most interesting direction of research is the comparative analysis of phraseological pictures of the world of different languages, for it allows the researcher to penetrate into the “imagery logic” of the interpretation of reality, to trace cultural similarities and differences and to define certain regularities of cognition. The paper is targeted at exploring some aspects of the comparative analyses of phraseological pictures of the world, of their fragments, to be more exact, based on phraseological units of various types, including proverbs. The analysis encompasses English, Spanish, German and Russian phraseological units. Some principles of their comparison are outlined, additionally some controversial issues are looked at more closely. The specific features of seeing the world through the semantics of phraseological units of the above mentioned four languages are the main focus of attention. Lexical and Stylistic analysis of Russian, English, Georgian Biblical Phraseological Units Zoia Adamia Ekvtime Takaishvili Teaching University Sokhumi State University Tbilisi, Georgia The research is devoted to a comparative study of Biblical phraseological units in Russian, English and Georgian. Comparative analysis is a necessary precondition of profound lexical and stylistic studies of phraseological units. It is known that language is a means of communication between people, showing their culture and a certain level of development of society. The text of the Bible is exclusively orthodox and canonized. That fact might have guaranteed a considerable monotony and similarity of its various translations into other languages. However, it is far not so. Russian and Georgian translations of Biblical phraseological units much more considerably coincide among themselves, than Georgian and English or Russian and English ones. It is apparently should be explained by the following: 1. The era of converting to Christianity by these or those people strongly influenced the character of translation, in particular the lexicon and syntax of translation. 2. The Georgians and Russians keep to one tendency of Christianity, i.e. – Orthodoxy. It has been gone on for centuries. It has put its mark on their understanding of Christian dogmas, a role of religion in believers’ everyday life. 3. The European countries and peoples, converting to Christianity, relied on the knowledge in the field of classical philology, folklore, myths elements which are seen in biblical texts and many times have been specified throughout centuries. For those centuries, both translators’ skills and consumers’ tastes of translations have changed, Besides some phraseological units have got a thin coating of archaism or actually became archaic in the language. 37 In conclusion, we will emphasize that the comparative analysis of Biblical phraseological units of various languages will be useful to compiling of the typological passport (Vladimir D. Arakin's idea [Arakin 1983: 33]) of phraseology of each concrete language. Fantastic Variations and How to Translate Them: Style, Language and Other Issues in UK Contemporary Fantasy Fiction Linda Barone University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy The paper, which title alludes to J. K. Rowling’s 2001 book Fantastic Beasts and where to Find them, deals with language variation, diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, but also the one I call ‘fantastic’ – namely the typical fantasy attitude to invent evocative proper names and to make an extensive use of creative allusions and puns – in a translation perspective. I will analyse and discuss works by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling from the point of view of translation with the underlying assumption that the deeper the variationist dimension is – above all the one connected to wordplays, allusions and onomastics – the more lacking and ineffective the translation at a pragmatic level will be. The desired effect on the reader is often undermined contravening one the most important principles in translation which is “recreating essentially the same effect on the TT readership as the ST does on the ST audience” (Munday 2009: 210). I will explore how problematic areas in translation can determine the success or the failure of a translated writer. The case of Terry Pratchett’s Disc World saga is emblematic in that only few of his novels have been translated into Italian and those which have been did not allow him to become as popular in Italy as he is in UK because some of his fundamental traits – creative allusions and humour based on wordplays – vanish in the passage from the source language to the target language. It is a great pity that Sir Pratchett cannot be, in the world, what he was for English native speakers up to March 12, 2015, the day in which Death told him “DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH” (Pratchett and Gaiman 1990: 198), that is the second most‐read living British author after J. K. Rowling. On Phraseological Units and Their Nature Maia Aghaia Sokhumi State University Tbilisi, Georgia Over the last twenty years phraseology has become an important field of pure and applied research in Western European and North American linguistics. Phraseological units reflect the wealth of a language displaying cultural paradigms of the speakers of a particular language. Phraseological unit as the particular units of language came into the focus of linguists’ attention at the beginning of the 20th century. In the second part of the 20th century stable word‐combinations became the object of scientific investigation. Phraseological phrases are present everywhere and we see a fast growing role of phraseology in a wide range of linguistic disciplines. As we know, phraseological combinations contain one component used in its direct meaning while the other is used 38 figuratively. The phraseological unit is a stable, coherent combination of words with partially or fully figurative meaning. Phraseological units are difficult to understand because they have unpredictable meanings and grammar, and often have special connotations. Studies in the field of phraseology show that phraseological units have an important role in language. The vocabulary of a language is enriched not only by words but also by phraseological units. Phraseology represents expressive resources of vocabulary. Phraseological units are word‐groups that cannot be made in the process of speech, they exist in the language as ready‐made units. The aim of the paper is to show how phraseology makes language more expressive and picturesque. Besides English speakers are able to use a wide range of phraseologisms in order to make their speech more academic and fluent. I press the necessity to include phraseology into English and Georgian language teaching because it is so needy and essential to master the language properly. I made some semantic and structural comparisons of English and Georgian phraseologies and despite the fact that we are dealing with radically different cultures, there have been found obvious similarities in them. Systematicity in Phraseology: Basic Source Frames for Idioms Containing the Word 'Fire' Alexandra Smirnova Saint‐Petersburg State University Saint‐Petersburg, Russia In most dictionaries idiomatic expressions are listed in alphabetical order below the main dictionary entry for the head word. Such lexicographic representation is due to the common belief that these expressions are multi‐word lexical units which meaning cannot be predicted on the basis of the meanings of their components when these are used independently. Nowadays, however, a number of researchers in phraseology have made an attempt to challenge these views by demonstrating that most idioms retain associative bonds with their source frames in which the same expressions are used literally (Omazic 2008; Tolochin, Loukjanova 2013). This fact indicates that these units maintain their original semantic identity even within the target domain and serve as specific conceptual links between two different situational models. As a result, in a dictionary it should be possible to regroup idiomatic expressions sharing the same semantic component in their structure according to their relation to basic source frames. Analysis of idioms containing the word ‘fire’ in the modern English language has shown that they can be divided into three groups according to their semantic relation to one of the three source frames in which the word ‘fire’ is used literally: ‘Controlled Burning Used for Utilitarian Purposes’, ‘Uncontrolled Destructive Burning’, ‘The Use of Firearms in a Military Conflict’. In each of these situational models the word ‘fire’ has a specific sense. Every time an expression containing this word is used idiomatically in a target domain, one of the three senses of the word ‘fire’ is activated serving as a semantic base, which ensures the existence of stable associative bonds between the idiom and its source frame. Therefore, the description of phraseological units can be incorporated in the main text of the dictionary entry, relating idioms to the specific sense of the word which realises its idiomatic potential in their structure. Such lexicographic representation of idiomatic expressions would reveal in a more coherent way systematic relations that exist between different situational models in a 39 given language, presenting important sources of idiomaticity for the speakers of this language. It would have important implications for foreign language learning, enabling foreigners to get easily acquainted with the system of conceptual links of the given linguistic community. 40 S4: New advances in the study of the information structure of discourse Communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence in presentation sentences with initial rhematic subjects Martin Adam, Irena Headlandová Kalischová Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Brno, Czech Republic Within the framework of Firbasian theory of functional sentence perspective, the distinction between the presentation and quality scale sentences plays a vital role (i.a. Firbas 1992, Svobo2005, Dušková 1998, 2008, Chamonikolasová 2010). The present paper proposes to discuss one of the most common configurations of the so‐called presentation sentences, viz. structures with initial rhematic subject (e.g. An uninvited dwarf came). Since the prototypical presentation sentences of this sort actually violate the end‐focus principle (with the most prominent, rhematic element occupying the initial position), questions arise in terms of appropriate prosodic treatment in spoken discourse. The research objective of this paper is to examine the way native speakers place the intonation centre in such structures, i.e. to map the correspondence between the degrees of communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence. For the purpose of the proposed discussion, the authors decided to analyze J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit; the written form against its spoken version (an audiobook narrated by R. Inglis). The procedure comprised several stages: first, the presentation sentences with initial rhematic subject were extracted manually, second, the prosodic treatment of their spoken counterparts was assessed, and finally, the correspondence between the distribution of communicative dynamism and that of prosodic prominence was determined. Inversion as a Device for Structuring Information in Children’s Stories Jean Albrespit Université Bordeaux‐Montaigne, UFR Langues et civilisations, France The aim of this paper is to examine different types of inversion involving prepositional phrases and adverbial particles such as “Off to the beach they go” in children’s fiction in English. Usual explanations in terms of text coherence and emphasis will be reassessed. My claim is that a change in word order indicates that a change in the narrative structure is taking place and at the same time that the register has changed as well (from ‐for instance‐ a rather formal, written register to a more spontaneous, oral one). The phenomenon is particularly salient in fiction for children and rarely occurs in spontaneous speech apart from a few stereotyped expressions. The notion of style and register is thus examined in its relationships with linguistic constructions. A comparison will be made to French, which has recourse to deictic markers or interjections (“Et hop, les voilà partis!”), in order to analyze the different strategies selected by each language. This research is based on a corpus of children’s books in English, in French and a parallel corpus of English books and their translation into French On English Thematic Subjects with Adverbial Semantics Gabriela Brůhová, Markéta Malá Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic 41 The paper analyses English sentences with thematic subjects conveying adverbial‐like semantic roles. These subjects were detected as translation counterparts of Czech sentence‐initial thematic adverbials realized by prepositional phrases with the prepositions na, v/ve, do, z/ze complemented by a noun. The Czech sentence (Adv‐V‐S) displays an initial scene‐setting adverbial. In the corresponding English structure (S‐V‐O) the adverbial is reflected in the thematic subject, which results in the adverbial‐like semantics of the subject. However, due to the syntactic divergence the English sentence complies both with the grammatical word order and the basic distribution of communicative dynamism. The sentences are analysed from syntactic, semantic and FSP aspects. On the FSP level the paper studies the potential of the sentences to implement the Presentation or Quality Scale. The data appear to support Adam´s claim that although the construction “seems to implement the Quality rather than the Presentation Scale, displaying a thematic subject and a rhematic object, in its deep structure […] it conceals a presentation idea” (Adam 2013: 148). Since it is the “semantic content of the verb that actuates the presentation semantics of the sentence” (Dušková 2015: 260), major attention is paid to the syntactic‐semantic structure of the verb in relation to the semantics of the subject. The position of function words in FSP Jana Chamonikolasová Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic The paper examines function words from the viewpoint of one of the theories of information structure, the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective. This theory studies the dynamic character of different language units and their contribution to the development of communication. Although the focus of most recent research into information structure is on language units expressed by content words like nouns, lexical verbs or adjectives and adverbs, the representatives of the Brno FSP theory have considered in their analyses also function words like auxiliary and modal verbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and particles. These closed‐class words expressing primarily grammatical or attitudinal meanings are interpreted within the FSP theory as elements of a special category, which, however, share with other language units the capacity to carry different degrees of communicative dynamism and to contribute to the development of further communication. The paper presents an overview of the classification of communicative units according to their degree of communicative dynamism, explains the position of function words within the scale of thematic, transitional, and rhematic elements, and indicates the frequency of different FSP functions of function words in the examined corpus. Although function words usually carry relatively low degrees of communicative dynamism and perform transitional and thematic functions, they sometimes take over the role of the most dynamic element within a clause or phrase and become rhematic. Syntactic and FSP aspects of fronting as a style marker Libuše Dušková Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic The paper attempts to answer the question whether different types of fronting can serve as a style marker. Attention is primarily paid to emphatic and contextual fronting, which are expected to have different distribution in speech, especially conversation, formal 42 writing, and narrative. Accordingly, the sample texts include dialogic and narrative parts of fiction, and academic prose. The differences in the distribution are assumed to be connected with the respective FSP structures: in emphatic fronting the fronted element is the rheme, whereas in contextual fronting it is the diatheme. Hence emphatic fronting displays a prominent deviation from the basic distribution of communicative dynamism, whereas contextual fronting achieves agreement with it. As compared with the unmarked ordering in which both types display the fronted element in the postverbal position, in the fronted arrangement the FSP function of these elements acquires an additional feature: in emphatic fronting it is emphatically or emotively intensified, which is a feature found in speech; in contextual fronting the fronted element serves as a direct link with what has preceded, which is a characteristic of academic prose and narrative. In general, the paper investigates how the devices offered by the language system are made actual use of in texts. Information structure of alternating psych constructions in cross‐linguistic perspective Ángel L. Jiménez‐Fernández, Bozena Rozwadowska University of Seville, Spain; Uniwersytet Wroclawski, Poland We investigate the information structure of Experiencer verbs in English, Spanish and Polish with a view on the relationship between topic/focus articulation and the choice of the verb from alternating doublets such as frighten vs. fear, dislike vs. bother, bug, or annoy, love or enjoy vs. delight, etc., illustrated in (1): (1) a. Extreme side effects frighten patients. b. Patients fear extreme side effects. We argue that, depending on what participant is the topic/focus of the sentence, speakers prefer one verb over the other. We have run tests with native speakers of the three languages, which include question/answer pairs, such as those presented in (2‐4): (2) Q: What is Angela afraid of/scared of/terrified of? (Focus on Theme; Topic on Experiencer) A: okAngela fears snakes. A’: #Snakes frighten Angela. (3) Q: Who is afraid of snakes /scared of/terrified of? (Focus on Experiencer; Topic on Theme) A: #Angela fears snakes A’: okSnakes frighten Angela. (4) Q: What’s up? (Expected answer: all‐focus) A: okAngela fears snakes. A’: okSnakes frighten Angela. We will discuss the results of the experiment in comparative perspective and the contribution of information structure analysis (so far overlooked in the literature) to the debate about the puzzle of psych verbs. Information Structure of English and Slovene Existential Sentences Monika Kavalir University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Slovenia Traditionally, the analysis of information structure in both English and Slovene has been based on Czech functionalism (e.g., Halliday and Matthiessen 2014; Toporišič 2000). It has, 43 however, never been applied to and contrasted specifically in terms of existential sentences. The study presented here examines a corpus of 100 English existential sentences and their Slovene translations. Special attention is paid to the choice of theme and rheme as well as the verb. The analysis is based on Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) and Firbas (1992). Due to cross‐linguistic differences, several problematic areas emerge in the analysis of Slovene examples. The treatment of clitics, for example, differs from the way they are usually analysed in Slovene: it is argued that they are obligatorily thematic and therefore cannot represent the topical theme. The analysis of modal adjuncts on the other hand, differs from the Hallidayan model as these seem closer to fulfilling the criteria for acting as the topical theme. The comparison of English and Slovene existential sentences gives rise to the idea that English sentences can be seen as consisting of clearly distinguishable theme and rheme, whereas Slovene sentences operate along a continuum and instead of a strict theme‐rheme division the most thematic and rhematic elements can be determined. Dynamic semantic scales in it‐clefts with focused subject Anna Kudrnová Charles University, Faculty of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic The English cleft construction is a device that can fulfil multiple functions, one of which is expressing information structure, in Prague School‐based research known as functional sentence perspective (FSP). Various FSP studies (Firbas 1992, Chamonikolasová and Adam, 2005, etc.) suggest the existence of two main tendencies (plus some subtypes) in information structure of a sentence, which are referred to as dynamic semantic scales: Presentation scale, which introduces a new element on the scene, and Quality scale, which ascribes a quality to a bearer of quality. Clefting is one of the ways to express information structure more explicitly, but its relation to dynamic semantic scales has not yet been widely studied. This paper presents a preliminary, corpus‐based analysis of English it‐ clefts with focused subject; the material is extracted from Intercorp, a multilingual translation corpus. The main goals are to analyse the FSP function of it‐clefts with the help of some existing criteria (e.g. classification by Prince, 1978) and ultimately their Czech translation equivalents – a comparative analysis with Czech (a language with different means of expressing FSP) could contribute to a better understanding of the issue. Pronominal summarizing: the means of signalling, retrievability span, and idea constraint Jiří Lukl Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic As far as their functions in sentences are concerned, the deictic pronouns this and that, and particularly the impersonal it, are rather versatile. Among their functions is the ability to represent long stretches of text and several ideas simultaneously. Primarily, this “summarizing” function is of interest because it seems to contradict some views held by a number of scholars, including, for instance, Wallace Chafe (limited number of ideas active at the same time) and Jan Firbas (retrievability span). The first goal of the study will thus be to determine the average number of sentences and ideas that can be represented by these “summarizing pronouns”. In addition, in order for the “summarizing” function to be effective, the addressee/reader needs to be able to recognize that something is being summarized. Determining the syntactic and lexical signals by which this recognition is 44 facilitated will be the second goal of the analysis. Finally, the study will determine whether there is a correlation between the way the “summarizing” function is being signalled and the number of sentences and ideas the “summarizing” pronouns contain. The expectation is that the greater the number of sentences and ideas represented in the pronouns, the more prominently the “summarizing” function needs to be signalled. The analysis will be performed on five topically enclosed texts (i.e. a chapter), two of academic prose, two of fiction prose, and one of popular science prose. Give them a Title: On the Global Theme of Research Articles Renata Pípalová Charles University, Faculty of Education, Prague, Czech Republic Research articles rank among the most prominent academic genres and familiarize their readers in a succinct way with the most recent results of academic research. Due to the immense rate of publication these days it has become vital to stand out from the crowd in order to gain adequate attention. This may be achieved, among other things, by the suitable selection of a title. Since titles are freely available and visible even in paid online journals, they are in open competition and serve a multitude of functions. For example, a title should identify the global theme of the paper, lure the readers, or raise expectations. This paper is based on data gathered on the titles of linguistic research articles published recently by six renowned peer‐reviewed international journals. An endeavour was made to select only titles produced by English native‐speaking authors (irrespective of the variety of English employed) or those affiliated with universities established in English‐ speaking countries. Reviews and editorials were disregarded. Examining their ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions, this paper strives to identify some of the prominent linguistic tendencies and patterns in titles of research articles, giving particular attention to the FSP parameters of the headlines. "Pretty fantastic what they have done": Evaluative focusing constructions and information structure Teresa Pham Vechta University, Faculty III, Germany Constructions like clefting, extraposition, topicalization, or dislocation (cf. Biber et al. 1999) have been studied intensively with regard to information structure. However, beyond managing the textual information flow, such focusing constructions often contain evaluative lexemes (e.g. adjectives like excellent, ridiculous; cf. Hunston/Sinclair 2000). Therefore, the present paper aims at enhancing our knowledge of how these constructions support the linguistic expression of evaluation. The paper is based on the manual analysis of a corpus of academic and non‐academic book reviews (ca. 24.500 words), published online and in print in linguistic journals (Brinton et al. 2015; Carlson et al. 2015) and on the cataloguing website Goodreads (Chandler 2015). The corpus examples of syntactic constructions deviating from the unmarked SVX pattern or established combinations of sentence constituents will be analysed as to parameters of information structure, but also as to the mention of specific sources (cf. Sinclair 1988) and participating roles of evaluation (cf. Hunston/Sinclair 2001). A first scrutiny shows, for example, that extraposed sentences like It is crucial to do a diachronic investigation (Brinton et al. 2015) are particularly well‐suited for objectifying evaluations in academic reviews by placing 45 emphasis on a rhematic evaluative category in the superordinate clause while concealing the evaluator. FSP and the Essence of a Text Leona Rohrauer temporarily no affiliation due to maternity leave I would like to present the results of a small FSP experiment exploring the FSP potential for textual analysis. First, five short texts varied as regards the field of discourse will be analysed in that their rhematic progressions will be identified alongside with their thematic progressions. The words (lexical units) functioning as themes/themes proper within the FSP structure of sentences (defined as basic distributional fields) will be put into a set together with the words functioning as rhemes/rhemes proper. Second, five linguists having the experience with publishing their research outcome and thus having acquired the routine of identifying key words in their academic papers will be asked to identify the key words in the analysed texts. These keywords will be compared to the set of carriers of the themes and rhemes identified at stage one of the analysis. The initial hypothesis is that the set of key words identified by the linguists will be included in the set of words functioning as themes and rhemes in the analysed texts. These are presumed to provide the potential reader with a rather accurate estimate of the gist of the text. FSP analysis in small distributional fields: Focus on the subject Vladislav Smolka University of South Bohemia, Faculty of Education, České Budějovice, Czech Republic It is the experience of many researchers into Functional Sentence Perspective that the difficulty of analysis grows with the complexity and length of the sentences explored. However, the same seems to apply, though less noticeably, to small fields of distribution of communicative dynamism, particularly to sentences consisting only of the subject and the predicate. This has been intuitively grasped even by linguists who are not concerned with information structure, namely by phoneticians like Roach and Wells. They point out that in sentences like the phone's ringing; the brakes have failed, etc., the intonation nucleus typically falls on the subject rather than on the verb, which they consider unusual as it goes contrary to native speakers’ intuition.In FSP‐related literature, this topic was already given attention by Mathesius, who speaks of “thetic” sentences, and later explored by Firbas, who observes that the distinction between presentation and quality may be somewhat blurred in these sentences, since even verbs which do not suggest the characteristics of appearance/existence semantically are capable of performing the dynamic function of presentation. The aim of this paper is to outline the characteristics of the subjects and verbs occurring in such sentences and to explore the factors which render the former or the latter rhematic, particularly the context, and the absence of other clause constituents as competitors for the rhematic function. 46 S5. On the influence of English on word‐formation structures in the languages of Europe and beyond Vincent Renner (University of Lyon, France), Morphostructural borrowing: An overview Virtually all European languages have been affected by the ever‐increasing global dominance of English over the last decades. Contact‐induced borrowing has been amply described at the lexical level and, even if this has been less noted, it also often extends to word‐formation structures. This introductory paper discusses the concept of morphostructural borrowing, illustrates it with examples involving a variety of processes and languages, provides a tentative typology of the described phenomena and concludes with an emphasis on methodological issues in the study of contact word‐formation. Silvia Cacchiani (University of Modena, Italy), Recent trends in Italian compounding Over the last decades, a growing number of foreign neologisms, Anglicisms and false Anglicisms have been recorded in reference works, scholarly works and websites. Additionally, research in word‐formation argues for a growing influence of English compounding onto Italian (Adamo/Della Valle 2003a; Dardano, Frenguelli/Puoti 2005). Hybrid words are possible, and shifts from left‐ to right‐headedness can be observed, e.g. baby killer ‘young killer’, afa record ‘extreme heat and humidity’, D’alema‐pensiero ‘D’alema’s political vision’. Overall, foreign patterns apepar to encourage recourse to otherwise marginal patterns in Italian (Iacobini 2015). For instance, Lombardi Vallauri (2006) points out that naming and classificatory N‐N and N‐Name compounds like effetto serra ‘greenhouse effect’ or effetto‐Berlusconi ‘effect named after the consequences of Berlusconi’s behaviour’, are not new to Italian but productivity might have been boosted by English. In this context, this paper brings together insights from recent studies on Italian compounding in order to assess whether and to what extent contact with English and Englsih word‐formation patterns might have an influence on Italian compounding. Data is taken from reference works, popularizing publications and online sources and will be assessed along parameters such as headedness, semantic relation R, and phonotactics of the calque, mixed compound, or pseudo Anglicization. Roxana Ciolăneanu & Alina Villalva (University of Lisbon, Portugal), The influence of English on morphological compounding in Romanian and Portuguese In the present paper we aim at looking at instances of possible incipient morphological borrowing in Romanian and Portuguese from English within the context of “societal multilingualism” (Romaine 2006). We are well aware that contact‐induced grammaticalization is a gradual and long process, involving several generations of speakers (Heine & Kuteva 2003: 533). However, in the field of word‐formation, the influence of English on Romanian and Portuguese, two languages that basically favour the derivational processes, seems to be already visible in the ever‐increasing number of compounds (e.g. Ro. toxico‐dependent, Pt. toxicodependente). The tendency in Romanian to move from a structurally‐derivative type of language to a compounding‐based system, under the influence of foreign linguistic models (mainly French and English) was noticed back in the 60s (Dimitrescu 1962: 397). Some of these compounds are already registered in dictionaries, some others are not, but they are frequently met in specialised texts and newspaper articles. Our analysis will be based on the following criteria: a) Frequency (already established compounds vs. one‐off cases of individual linguistic creativity); 47 b) Syntax: the argument + head order is not the natural order in Romanian and Portuguese word structures; c) General language vs. specialised language (e.g. Ro. dependență de alcool vs. etanolo‐ dependență). Pierre Arnaud (University of Lyon, France), Is French relational subordinative compounding under English influence? French has Relational Subordinative [NN]N (RSNN) compounds (e.g. sauce tomate "tomato sauce"). The expansion of RSNN compounding in contemporary French has been frequently noted. A number of authors have claimed that the category originated in English, and the present research is aimed at determining the influence of English on French RSNN compounding. Searches in various early dictionaries and technical treatises uncovered 68 pre‐1800 units, which proves that English cannot have introduced RSNN compounding into French. The translation equivalents of a random sample of 100 English RSNN units were then searched. Only two French equivalents are similar compounds. Obviously, French does not massively calque English compounds. In the other direction, 35% of French units do not have a word‐for‐word English equivalent, which indicates some independence of the pattern. Initial attestations show that in the vast majority of word‐for‐word pairs the English unit appeared first, but this does not constitute definitive proof of causality. However, in a domain like computing, where most innovation took place in English‐speaking environments, there are significantly more word‐for‐word translation pairs than in the general lexicon. French RSSN compounding was not introduced by English, but there is indirect evidence of English influence on its productivity. Isabel Balteiro (University of Alicante, Spain), Funtástico! English and Spanish morphological intertwining This paper focuses on hybrid blends between English and Spanish. Although the phenomenon was documented a few decades ago (Rodríguez González 1989 mentions USAmericano, USAdas and yugre < ‘yuppie’ + ‘progre’), there is little academic analysis of a number of blends between English and Spanish lexical material, except for a brief section in a study by López Rúa (2014) on names of Spanish music bands. It must be noted that we shall not focus on traditional hybrids, e.g. Spanish words with a Spanish lexeme and an ‐ing suffix (such as puenting, or balconing, often studied within false anglicisms), nor on the reverse process, i.e. English lexemes with a Spanish suffix (rockero). Rather, we shall concentrate on the convergence between two lexemes that drop part of their phonetic and/or spelling material in order to create a word which is new, and yet recognizable from its constituents. For instance, the Spanish vegetable grower Verdifresh sells an Ensalight (www.verdifresh.info/5‐ensaladas/247‐ensalight), a blend between (‘ensalada’ – salad – and ‘light’, a false Anglicism for ‘low‐calorie’), which is accompanied by a sort of Mexican roll called Wrapidos (www.verdifresh.info/ensaladas/wrapidos‐new‐york), and the website “Funtástico” (http://www.funtastico.es) tempts us with a number of techno and computer gadgets. Anne‐Line Graedler (Hedmark University College, Norway) & Gisle Andersen (NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Norway), English morphological patterns in Norwegian: The enigmatic ‐s suffix Traditionally, the ‐s ending in Norwegian was only used as a possessive suffix in nouns, but with increased lexical influence from English the association of ‐s with plurals is expanding. A related category is the suffix ‐ings which often functions as a stylistic marker 48 of informality, as in dritings 'dead drunk'. Moreover, the English ‐s suffix also occurs as part of singular noun forms, e.g. en caps 'a cap’. Interconnection and morphological similarities and differences are fundamental factors in relation to both loanword integration and the influence of English morphological patterns. This paper will present current productivity of the ‐s and ‐ings suffixes based on empirical evidence from the large Norwegian Newspaper Corpus, which represents about two decades of contemporary newspaper language. The aim is to chart the inventory and identify predictors that may affect the degree to which the suffixes occur: what kinds of lexical items that are coded with plural ‐s and ‐ings in Norwegian, to what extent the two suffixes are productive beyond originally English words, their effect on semantic and pragmatic functions, and how various factors such as frequency, orthography, structural complexity, etc., affect variation between domestic and foreign plural suffixes. Rania Papadopoulou & George J. Xydopoulos (University of Patras, Greece), The influence of English on Modern Greek: A morphosyntactic approach Nowadays the influence of English on MG is attested at the lexical level (e.g. ténis < tennis, dizáin < design) reaching in some cases idiomatic phraseology through calquing (e.g. kléo páno apó to ximéno γála < cry over spilt milk). Influences of English on MG are also observed at the morphosyntactic level inducing changes to the MG grammatical system: phrasal verbs, e.g. pérno píso < call back, zitáo ékso < ask (sb) out; pre‐modified NPs, the pre‐modifier being an uninflected loanword, e.g. tzaz musikí < jazz music, Vodafone sínδesi < Vodafone connection; the adverb prin (ago) transformed into a postposition, mimicking ago; alternated thematic structures of some verbs, mimicking the equivalent verbs in English e.g. promiθévo me < provide with (V+PP vs. V+NP) epikinonó + NP (V+NP vs. intransitive); new causative form structures, e.g. éxo ta maliá mu vaména < I have my hair dyed instead of éxo vaména ta maliá mu. In this work, we analyze a set of collected MG patterns that seem to be mimicking the equivalent English patterns, examine their formal characteristics (morphological, syntactic etc.), compare them with the equivalent structures attested in English, and investigate the changes that they cause in the MG grammatical system. Ivo Fabijanić (University of Zadar, Croatia), English word‐formation types in Croatian: Current trends in the adaptation of Anglicisms Globalization and its implications on wor(l)d transformations are huge. The English language has at least a two‐fold function in this process: direct (incidental) function as a medium of communication, and indirect (coincidental) function as a medium of transformations within the linguistic structures of borrowing languages. The influx of English lexemes is becoming more evident in both formal and informal contexts (replicas become more susceptible to models). In our previous research we suggested the widening of analysis of anglicisms–nominal syntagms, as a result of which new methodology of their classification and analysis was devised, i.e. a three‐degree adaptation of nominal syntagms: zero, compromise, and complete transmorphemization. This article aims to shed more light on current anglicisms and their adaptation into Croatian at the morphological level within multiword expressions. Anglicisms are not anymore limited to simple and open‐class words, but more and more complex words are formed with different English bound morphemes. There are also multiword expressions and phraseological units, both in their hybrid forms and calqued forms, parahrasal verbs, clippings, abbreviations, original English blendings and Croatian ones, made on the English 49 model. Moreover, some recent examples of anglicisms have proved the existence of calqued syntactic structures/elements in Croatian. Virginia Pulcini & Matteo Milani (University of Turin, Italy), Neoclassical combining forms in English loanwords: Evidence from Italian Most European languages expanded their vocabulary through word‐building from Latin and Greek elements already during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but more intensely from the 18th century. This common source explains similarities throughout the vocabularies of European languages, especially in technical and scientific terminology. The neoclassical element is formally visible in English compounds containing affixes and combining forms of Latin and Greek origin, some of which have been quite productive in the course of time. When these English compounds are borrowed by Romance languages, speakers are likely to recognize (formally and semantically) the neoclassical element which is attached to the English element of the loanword. In this paper we argue that the presence of these classical elements, which have a common historical and linguistic origin in the source and in the recipient word stocks, will favour the borrowing process from English into Romance languages. To this end, we have analyzed the neoclassical combining forms found in Anglicisms recorded in Italian dictionaries, i.e. anti‐ (e.g. anti‐age), aqua‐ (aquapark), auto‐ (autoreverse), cyber‐ (cyberspace), eco‐ (ecolabel), extra‐ (extra‐large), hydro‐ (hydrospeed), inter‐ (intercity), intra‐ (intranet), mega‐ (megabyte), micro (microchip), mini‐ (minibus), multi‐ (multitasking), mal‐ (malware), no‐ (no global), non‐ (non‐stop), para‐ (paraflying), super‐ (superstar), tele‐ (telemarketing), and will observe their productivity in comparison with other combining forms of non‐classical origin (e‐, under‐, over‐, up‐). Data are taken from dictionaries and web‐based corpora. Reima Al‐Jarf (King Saud University, Saudi Arabia), Lexical hybrids in Arabic Arabic has loan words from ancient and modern languages. Not only has Arabic borrowed lexical items, but it has also borrowed a number of derivational prefixes and suffixes from Turkish, Greek, Farsi and English. Here, the borrowed affix combines with native Arabic roots (free morpheme) to form new lexical items (single words, blends and two‐word compounds). Specifically, the following English affixes ‐cracy, geo, hydro, mania, meter, hyper, topia, net, pedia, ‐book, net, com, sat, soft, leaks, wiki‐, ‐tube, web, press, media, mini, phobia‐, ‐phobia, petro, Euro, logy, logia are being added to Arabic roots to form lexical hybrids such as ‫ﺟﻳﻭﺳﻳﺎﺳﻲ ﺍﻟﺩﻡ ﻗﺭﺍﻁﻳﺔ ﺳﻼﺡ ﻣﺎﻧﻳﺎ ﺍﻧﻘﻼﺏ ﻣﻳﺗﺭ ﺍﺳﺋﻠﺔ ﺑﻳﺩﻳﺎ ﺍﺳﻼﻡ ﻭﻳﺏ ﺍﺧﻭﺍﻧﻭﻓﻭﺑﻳﺎ‬ ‫ ﻭﻓﺎﻟﻳﻛﺱ ﻫﻳﺩﺭﻭﺯﺭﺍﻋﻲ ﺑﺗﺭﻭﻛﻳﻣﺎﻭﻳﺎﺕ‬and others. Many of those lexical hybrids first appeared in the media during the Arab spring. The present study aims to explore the following: (i) the structure of lexical hybrids in Arabic; (ii) how productive they are; (iii) denotative and connotative meanings and whether they have the same meaning as the donor language; (iv) whether they are used in Standard or colloquial Arabic; (v) in which domains they are used; and (vi) the historical, political, and socioeconomic settings of the various contact situations. José Sanchez Fajardo (University of Alicante, Spain), Cultural Anglicisms in Cuban Spanish: A corpus‐driven analysis Owing to its geographical proximity to the U.S., and the oft‐quoted political and socioeconomic relations with the North‐American nation, Cuba has embodied the phenomena of cutural transmission and borrowing. The study of cultural loans reveals that not only have a number of linguistic borrowings been assimilated into Cuban Spanish but they have also added cultural novelty and innovation e.g. fraternidad < fraternity, 50 scout, bride maid < bridesmaid, kitchen shower. Thus, this presentation is intended to: 1) study the concept of cultural borrowing more thoroughly, 2) revise Cuban Spanish lexicographical works and corpora with the aim of extracting cultural loans, and 3) provide a general account of the typology of these anglicized lexical units. The present analysis of cultural loans is of great importance to shed more light on the phenomenon of linguistic borrowing in general. One of the earliest findings indicates that a cultural loan is precisely a gradable transversal concept being in conjunction with the process of linguistic borrowing. This unmeasurable index is aimed to qualify the process of anglicization in terms of semantic load, word adaptation, or obsoleteness. Jesús Fernández‐Domínguez (University of Granada, Spain), Internally or externally triggered morphological change? The case of Spanish verb compounds Spanish verb compounds with the structure [N + V]V are morphologically opaque and often infrequent today, and are perceived as archaic remnants of a now unproductive word‐formation process (e.g. aliquebrar). This verb‐creating pattern has remained hardly productive in time but, despite this, some of the few resulting lexemes can still be found in Contemporary Spanish.In contrast, two morphological processes seem to be emerging for the formation of Spanish verb compounds. One takes previously existing nouns and generates compound verbs, as in bioestimular (to biostimulate) from bioestimulación (biostimulation). A second comparable process also involves back‐formation and creates compounds with two native Spanish constituents, as in bocabrir (to leave sb. open‐ mouthed) from boquiabierto (open‐mouthed). It seems, then, that Spanish verbs compounds are being generated via two different routes, both with right‐headed properties and originated by back‐formation. This paper approaches the structure, formation and re‐flourishing of such Spanish verb compounds. Their properties are analysed and their origins and constituents evaluated in order to question the parallels between these lexemes and their English counterparts. The aim is to explore productivity levels in each of the paradigms and to test whether they are reviving due to the structural influence of English. Alicja Witalisz (Pedagogical University of Kracow, Poland), English linguistic influence on the morphological system of Polish: N+N compounds The article discusses a new, contact‐induced word‐formation rule, used in Polish to form right‐headed N+N compound words. Polish compounds are typically left‐headed and appear as N+inflected N, N+Adj and N+PP formations. Right‐headed compounds must necessarily contain the interfix ‐o‐. The new word‐formation rule used to derive right‐ headed affixless N+N compounds in Polish is a by‐product of English lexical influence. English N+N compounds borrowed as loanwords were at first unanalyzed morphologically and adopted as simple lexemes, yet, the growing English competence of Polish speakers enabled them to analyze morphologically English compound loanwords and apply the same word‐formation rule in the production of native right‐headed N+N creations. They are often hybrids and make use of English lexical material, e.g. P. Góralburger (P. góral 'highlander' + E. burger), P. balkon party (P. balkon 'balcony' + E. party), P. wiochmen (P. wiocha 'village' + E. man). The research material includes contact‐induced N+N compound words, classified into the following categories: loanwords, loanblends, loan translations, hybrid creations and pseudo‐anglicisms, as well as Polish native creations that have been coined by analogy to foreign N+N expressions. 51 Akiko Nagano (Tohoku University, Japan) & Masaharu Shimada (University of Tsukuba, Japan), Language contact between English and Japanese and the borrowing of left‐headed nominal modification construction Vakareliyska and Kapatsinski (2014) discuss the productivity of [N [N]] constructions in Bulgarian in which an English loan noun modifies a Bulgarian native noun, such as ekšūn geroj ‘action hero’. In this paper, we will report a similar process of construction borrowing now underway in Japanese, that is, the English nominal modification construction by a PP (e.g., hero in a movie) being adopted as a naming strategy. In the following left‐headed [N1 [P‐N2]] expressions, native Japanese noun N2 is selected by an English preposition and modifies native noun head N1: (1) [ N1 [ on N2] ] [tamagoyaki [ on natto ]] omelet put.on natto ‘omelet topped with natto’ (2) [ N1 [ in N2] ] [tamagoyaki [ in natto ]] omelet put.in natto ‘omelet with natto inside’ These expressions are coined as names. Syntactically, in in (1) and on in (2) are close to the genuine English prepositions in realizing the left‐headed structure, but semantically, they are used in the sense of ‘with’, selecting the locatum argument. We will discuss contact‐ related factors that underlie the emergence of this new construction. Elizaveta Tarasova (IPU New Zealand), The use of loan abbreviations in Russian analytical composites In the last years a number of loan abbreviations entered the Russian language, e.g. DVD, IT, IP. The morphological status of such loans in Russian is unclear and their degree of assimilation is often difficult to determine. They may occur with the orthography of the donor language, e.g. VIP‐зал (VIP hall), CD‐плеер (CD player), but some of them have acquired Russian orthography, e.g. sidi (CD), pisi (PC), piar (PR), and are involved in the formation of new lexemes, e.g. piarshchik (PR specialist), aitishnik (IT professional). The presented research focuses on N+N endocentric structures in Russian, in which the first element is an abbreviation borrowed from English, e.g. SMM‐uslugi (SMM services), PR‐aktsiya (promotion of a product/service). The study is based on the analysis of about 300 units and looks at how the use of loan abbreviations in such sequences influences their assimilation in Russian. The analysis considers factors that motivate the formation of new single lexemes, as well as analytical composites with loan abbreviations in the recipient language. The study contributes to the understanding of growing analytical tendencies in Russian morphology, and also provides some new insights into the ways in which changes in vocabulary may influence grammar of the language. Rafał Augustyn (Maria Curie‐Skłodowska University, Poland), On the rise of clipped formations in the contemporary Polish language: Is English to blame? Similarly to other Slavic languages, Polish word‐formation relies heavily on derivation, and in particular suffixation. But this appears to gradually change now due to the global 52 dominance of the English language. Apart from rapid inflow of direct English borrowings, semantic calques or loan translations into Polish following 1980, we can observe an unprecedented shift in the productivity of certain word‐formation or other morphological processes. In particular, we deal with an increasing number of compound and prefixoid formations on the one hand, and clippings on the other, all of which were far less common (esp. compounding) or largely untypical (clipping) methods of creating new words in Polish before, but rather characteristic of Germanic languages, including English. Polish linguists have already studied this recent trend for more frequent use of prefixation and compounding in the contemporary Polish language (e.g. cf. Jadacka 2001, Waszakowa 2005), but so far little attention has been given to clipped forms. This paper aims at (i) providing a possible cognitive motivation behind selected popular clippings in Polish (e.g. wykon – ‘performance’, słit focia – ‘selfie’) based on the Cognitive Linguistics theoretical framework, and (ii) showing the differences, mostly on the morphological level, in the way Polish and English clippings are formed. 53 S6. “Multimodal Perspectives on English Language Teaching” Developing multimodal communicative competence in university students in English as a foreign language: A practical example Francesca Coccetta ‐ Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy The extensive research into multimodal discourse (e.g. Routledge Studies in Multimodality) triggered by Kress and van Leuween’s seminal work Reading Images (1996) has lead to the reconsideration of Hymes’ (1972) concept of communicative competence in a multimodal perspective (e.g. Royce, 2002) and the consequent integration of multimodal literacy into the language classroom (e.g. Royce, 2002; Campagna and Boggio, 2009; Coccetta, 2015). This paper will report on how research into multimodality developed within the SFL framework (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) has been integrated into the syllabus of a university English course with the aim of equipping students in English as a foreign language with the tools to cope with a selection of multimodal texts characterizing the present‐day society. To do so, during the course the students engage in activities which guide them in the exploration of the complex array of semiotic resources contributing to a text’s meaning and develop their multimodal communicative competence. The paper will provide a description of the materials created for the course and the teaching method employed. Campagna, S. and Boggio, C. 2009. Multimodal business and economics. Milano: LED. Coccetta, F. 2015. Multimodality for non‐language specialists: reconsidering the ESP syllabus in a multimodal perspective. In F. Dalziel and G. Henrot Sostero (eds.), L’innovazione nell’apprendimento linguistico all’Università di Padova. Padova: Padova University Press, pp. 221‐230. Halliday, M.A.K and Matthiessen, C. 2004. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Arnold. Hymes, D. 1972. On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 269‐293. Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. 1996. Reading images. The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge. Royce, T. 2002. Multimodality in the TESOL classroom: Exploring visual‐verbal synergy. TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), pp. 191‐205. An implementation of a “multiliteracy pedagogy”: Digital stories Victoria Zenotz ‐ Public University of Navarre, Spain The influence of society on literacy practices has been acknowledged for long. More recently, the different technologies, and particularly the Internet, have become part of modern society, opening a multimodal world, where communication and literacy have also turned multimodal since learners must not only face the spoken and written word but also meanings conveyed through images and sounds. Researchers such as those belonging to the New London Group (2000) consider that learners must participate in real social practices in the classroom connected to these multimedia technologies. They use the term “multiliteracies” because apart from the multimodality alluded above they believe that literacy teaching has to consider the diversity of cultures and languages. The first part of the presentation discusses concepts such as “multiliteracies” and critical literacy. With the aim of improving learners’ critical literacy “multiliteracy pedagogy” was 54 implemented. The research described is a longitudinal study carried out at a secondary school in the north of Spain (2012‐2015), where learners were involved in the creation of digital stories. The qualitative data obtained through several instruments offer some valuable insights into the ways to develop multimodal literacy in a cultural and linguistically diverse society where critical perspectives are vital. New London Group, (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures, in B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. Macmillan: South Yarra, pp. 9–38. Adaptive remediation and the transfer of writing knowledge in multimodal composition Michael‐John DePalma – Baylor University, Waco, Texas Inquiry concerning the transfer of writing knowledge has been of longstanding interest to writing researchers. One important development in recent scholarship is the ways transfer has been reconceptualized in relation to multimodal composing practices. This emerging body of research argues that transfer not only entails reusing past writing knowledge in new situations; it also entails reshaping writing knowledge. A key concern for scholars working from this perspective is discovering ways that English language teachers might help multimodal composers facilitate the mobilization and adaptation of their print‐based writing knowledge when remediating written texts into new media compositions (e.g., digital stories, audio essays). In response to this exigency, my presentation discusses an approach called adaptive remediation that can help writers develop meta‐awareness about how they might use and reshape prior composing knowledge and available semiotic resources in ways to suit their rhetorical objectives in processes of remediation. In sharing this approach, I aim to assist English language educators in our efforts to help students transfer writing knowledge across media and, in the process, make rhetorically‐sound decisions about how to adapt and reuse multimodal literacies in a variety of contexts. Taking it to the Streets: Using multimodal semiotic systems to encourage student participation in language learning Ayesha Heble – Sultan Qaboos University, Oman Teachers all over the world would agree that student motivation is one of the most critical aspects of the learning process, but how much control do they have over it? Most of the variables that influence motivation seem to be out of the purview of the teacher, controlled by objective conditions within the broader socio‐economic context, or subjective conditions within the individual learner. This paper would like to suggest that teachers can indeed influence student motivation through the setting up of tasks that increase student participation in classroom activities by using the various different semiotic resources at their disposal. It examines the semiotic options available to students and how these might be exploited to help them in their learning of language. Some of the semiotic systems include signs & images, words and their meanings, sentences & structures, written discourse, spoken discourse, and computer mediated discourse. An example of the innovative use of technology with Arab students in an Advanced Language Studies course held at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman is described to illustrate how this might be achieved. Students studied various different semiotic systems as part of the course, and for their final assessment, were invited to interpret a particular topic in the 55 groups and present it in the form of a five‐minute video, using visuals, sound, and text to communicate their understanding of the subject. Mode Saliency and Mode Effect in Multimodal Listening Comprehension Question Design Mari Carmen Campoy‐Cubillo ‐ Universitat Jaume I, Spain This presentation introduces the notions of “mode saliency” and “mode effect” within the construct of multimodal listening comprehension tasks in foreign language learning (Campoy & Querol 2015). These two new terms are related to the concept of multimodality and the design of communicative activities that take into account non‐ verbal modes in language learning task design. Thus, making aspects of communication such as the tone of our voice (which may point to our mood or emotional state) or our face expression (frown indicating dislike) part of the listening comprehension task is seen as a key issue in the sense that it can add information to a verbal message or even replace it. It is suggested that in order to be able to deal with multimodal (spoken) texts in language learning environments, we need to be able to define such texts in terms of mode saliency and effect on the comprehension of a specific situation. Building referential connections between visual and verbal representations in a video sequence should be the guiding principle when designing video listening comprehension questions. These referential connections should also guide the teaching of multimodal text comprehension allowing space for the teaching of communicative modes as meaning‐ making language features. In line with Gee (2005) and Meyer (2005) we propose that the activation of learner multimodal knowledge structures makes multimodal learning more effective, and that multimodal structure knowledge needs to be part of the foreign language syllabus. Campoy‐Cubillo, M. C. & Querol‐Julián, M. (2015). Assessing multimodal listening. In B. Crawford Camiciottoli & I. Fortanet‐Gómez (eds.). Multimodal analysis in academic settings: From research to teaching. 193‐212. Gee, J. P. (2005). Learning by design: Good video games as learning machines, E‐Learning, (2), 5‐16. Mayer, R. E. (2005). Principles of multimedia learning based on social cues: personalization, voice, and image principles. In R. E. Mayer, (Ed.) The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. 345‐368. English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) workshops with a multimodal perspective: Spanish and Cuban professors’ responses Teresa Morell ‐ University of Alicante, Spain. Many university teachers worldwide are now confronted with having to use English as a medium of instruction (EMI) (Dearden, 2015). Although non‐native English‐speaking teachers are often solely concerned with the verbal mode, studies (e.g., Morell, 2015) have proven that awareness of the affordances of written, non‐verbal material and body language modes improve their multimodal competence and, in turn, the communicative potential of their verbal and non‐verbal discourse. In this paper, I will first describe the 20 hour EMI workshop given at the University of Alicante in Spain and at the University of Pinar del Río in Cuba to train teachers of diverse disciplines to improve their multimodal competence when teaching their content subjects in English. Second, I will compare and 56 contrast 20 Spanish and 20 Cuban academics' attitudes towards the use of EMI, and their multimodal competence when carrying out lessons after having participated in the workshops. Dearden, J. 2015. English as a medium of instruction ‐ a growing global phenomena. British Council www.teachingenglish.org.uk. Oxford University. Morell, T. 2015. International conference paper presentations: A multimodal analysis to determine effectiveness. English for Specific Purposes, 37, 137‐150. The teaching of doctor‐patient communication skills in English: A multimodal approach Daniele Franceschi ‐ University of Pisa, Italy This presentation examines doctor‐patient communication with the aim of helping learners of L2 medical English to become aware of some of the strategies that they may adopt in their role as physicians to enhance knowledge dissemination. In particular, it focuses on the analysis of those verbal and non‐verbal elements that appear to facilitate the communicative exchange (cf. Bezemer & Kress, 2016), while also contributing to establishing rapport with the patient. The data consists of authentic video‐recorded conversations between a patient with hepatitis C, who is reluctant to get treatment, and three doctors discussing his condition and the benefits, as well as side effects, of undergoing standard of care therapy. The material is freely accessible online through the Hepatitis C ‐ Caring Ambassadors website (http://hepcchallenge.org), as it is meant to be used by other hepatitis C patients to understand different points of view about treatment. For the present study, however, the conversations have been transcribed, annotated, and analysed following a multi‐semiotic approach (Baldry, 2000; Thibault, 2000; Baldry & Thibault, 2006). The doctors in these videos show how to successfully bridge the communication gap with their patient by making specific choices at various linguistic levels (e.g., higher explicitness, repetition, hedging, reformulation with non‐Latinate expressions, etc.) and by relying on non‐verbal elements (e.g. hand gestures, body movements and facial expressions), which also contribute significantly to meaning (McNeill, 1992). This multimodal approach needs to be specifically addressed in language teaching (McNeill, 1994), in that it can be beneficial to non‐L1 English speaking doctors who can thus improve their ability to communicate effectively and ultimately develop doctor‐patient trust. Baldry, A. 2000. English in a visual society: Comparative and historical dimensions in multimodality and multimediality. In A. Baldry (ed.) Multimodality and Multimediality in the Distance Learning Age, 41‐89. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli. Baldry, A. and Thibault, P. J. 2006. Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. A Multimedia Toolkit and Coursebook. London and New York: Equinox. Bezemer, J, and Kress, G. 2016. Multimodality, Learning and Communication. Abingdon, UK/New York, NY: Routledge. McNeill, D. 1992. Hand and Mind: What the Hands Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McNeill, D. 1994. What makes authentic language materials different? The case of English language materials for education. Paper presented at the Annual International 57 Language in Education Conference, December 15‐17, in Hong Kong. Eric Document Retrieval N. ED386057. FL023221. Thibault, P.J. 2000. The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement: Theory and practice. In A. Baldry (ed.) Multimodality and Multimediality in the Distance Learning Age, 311‐385. Campobasso: Palladino Editore. Towards a methodological approach for the analysis of interlanguage complaints from a multimodal perspective: From research to teaching Vicent Beltran‐Palanques ‐ Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain Over the past decades, researchers in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) have explored, among other aspects, how learners perform and acquire speech acts, focusing on the verbal component (e.g. Laforest, 2002; Félix‐Brasdefer, 2008; Taguchi, 2011). However, to the best of my knowledge, the interplay of verbal and non‐verbal aspects has not yet been explored from the perspective of ILP research. Gesture, for example, is one of the non‐verbal systems that have received more attention in the investigation of language learning events (Roth, 2001) and its study is gaining importance within the field of SL/ FL acquisition (Gullberg, 1998, 2006). Considering these aspects, in this paper I attempt to present a methodological approach for the analysis of spoken complaint sequences and gestures performed by a group of learners of English as a foreign language at two different proficiency levels, B1 and B2, as described in the Common European Framework of References of Languages. This study tries to shed some light on the traditional approach for interlanguage complaints analysis, thus, taking a multimodal interlanguage perspective. The methodological approach followed in this study and the results derived from it are discussed, as well as pedagogical implications for the integration of interlanguage pragmatics from a multimodal perspective. Félix‐Brasdefer, J. C. 2008. Politeness in Mexico and the United States. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Gullberg, M. 1998. Gesture as a communication strategy in second language discourse: A study of learners of French and Swedish. Lund: Lund University Press. Gullberg, M. 2006. Some reasons for studying gesture and second language acquisition (Hommage à Adam Kendon). IRAL‐International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 44(2), 103‐124. Laforest, M. 2002. Scenes of family life: Complaining in everyday conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(10), 1595‐1620. Roth, W. M. (2001). Gestures: Their role in teaching and learning. Review of Educational Research, 71(3), 365‐392. Taguchi, N. 2011. Do proficiency and study‐abroad experience effect speech act production? Analysis of appropriateness, accuracy, and fluency. IRAL International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 49(4), 265‐293. Multimodal literacy: Meaning negotiations in political cartoons on the refugee crisis Daniela Wawra ‐ University of Passau, Germany This paper introduces political cartoons as frameworks for teaching multimodal competence. Apart from language, images are an important means to represent and interpret what is going on around us. With the advent of the digital age even an iconic turn of communication has been proclaimed. Just like language, images can be analysed as texts 58 which contain “systems of knowledge and belief”, constructions of “social identities“, “social relationships“* and ideologies. All this is particularly true for political cartoons, which are multimodal means of communication, in which the verbal and visual modes jointly create meanings. They usually take up prominent societal topics and debates and take on the role of commentator and critic. We will present a selection of cartoons on the current refugee crisis and demonstrate how and in which directions they can initiate communication processes between teachers and learners. Learning objectives are a better understanding of different kinds of signs, their creative and ideological potential, the nature of meaning, the construction and functioning of a multimodal artefact, viz a political cartoon and thus ultimately the development of students’ multimodal literacy. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity. Fill, A. 2010. The language impact. London: Equinox. A multimodal approach to teaching oral financial genres: The case of earnings conference calls Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli – University of Pisa, Italy Earnings conference calls are now the primary channel for oral financial reporting in the globalized corporate world. During these events, teams of company executives present their companies’ financial results to professional financial analysts within an audio teleconference setting. The presentations are followed by Q&A sessions with the analysts. Despite the key role of this genre for corporate financial reporting, current business/financial communication textbooks deal with these events on a superficial level, providing little information about their distinctive structural, linguistic, and rhetorical features, not to mention their prominent multimodal dimension. Given this complex nature, earnings conference calls represent a particularly challenging genre for L2 business and finance students who need to be prepared for successful participation in these events that typically use English as a lingua franca. Building on extensive analysis of the linguistic and discursive features of earnings conference calls (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2013), this presentation offers a descriptive profile of this multimodal financial genre. Particular attention will be paid to the intersemiotic complementarity of the various modes that come into play (Royce, 2007), including prosodic features of the participants’ vocal production, accompanying verbal texts, and visual supports with numerical data and graphical images). This will be followed by an illustration of a practical application in the English for business/financial communication classroom. The aim is to help learners become aware of the multiple semiotic resources that can be exploited to effectively engage with others in this professional setting. Crawford Camiciottoli, B. 2013. Rhetoric in financial discourse. A linguistic analysis of ICT‐ mediated disclosure genres. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Royce, T. D. 2007. Intersemiotic complementarity: A framework for multimodal discourse analysis. In T. D. Royce and W. L. (Bowcher eds.), New directions in the analysis of multimodal discourse, pp. 63‐109. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 59 S8 “Change from above in the history of English” This seminar explores cases of change from above in the history of English. Change from above refers to the consciousness dimension of linguistic change, to changes that come from above the level of a speaker’s conscious awareness (cf. Labov 1965, 1994). It concerns cases of borrowings from languages which the dominant classes consider prestigious, or conscious selection, such as the retention and the re‐introduction of affirmative do in seventeenth century documents (cf., for instance, Rissanen 1991) or the diachrony of negative concord (among others, Nevalainen 2006). The seminar will discuss, among other issues, the (re)introduction of elements by the dominant social class in various stages of the history of English, their correlation with changes in other features, their (non)integration into the vernacular system, formal vs. functional approaches to change from above and the question of the coexistent systems. References Labov, William. 1965. “On the mechanism of linguistic change.” Georgetown Monographs on Language and Linguistics 18, 91‐114. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. “Negative concord as an English ‘vernacular universal’: Social history and linguistic typology.” Journal of English Linguistics 34.3, 257‐278. Rissanen, Matti. 1991. “Spoken language and the history of do‐periphrasis”. In Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English Syntax. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 321‐ 342. Change from above in the history of English: State of the art and perspectives Jim Walker & Nikolaos Lavidas Université Lumière Lyon 2, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki The aim of the presentation is to examine the different perspectives through which change from above (as an “importation of elements from other systems”; Labov 2007) has been considered a parameter for the diachronic development of English. In this respect, we will discuss several case studies and show how this explanation is strictly associated with the theory of language that scholars follow. Accordingly, the role of change from above can vary from having a nonexistent, nonlinguistic, or a peripheral role to a possible situation in transitional stages with speakers who can have parallel grammars and even to serving as evidence for deliberate linguistic changes (which can be associated with a social class or gender). A common characteristic for all approaches to change from above is that such change is related to language contact. This is unavoidable if the scholar identifies the change from above with borrowing from a prestigious language. We will argue that change from above is actually involved in any case in which characteristics of an earlier linguistic system still survive in opposition to the new characteristics. In this manner, the case of contact between dialects of the same language should also be addressed, when one of them has become the prestigious dialect (see the changes in rhoticity in New York according to Labov (1966 [2006]); cf. also Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006)), as well as the case of contact between the vernacular and an archaic variety. These types of contact can lead to diglossia, parallel grammars (with “bilingual” speakers who may use one or the other system according to the register, for instance), or 60 prescriptive rules (cf. van Gelderen (2004), for instance, on split infinitives and relative pronouns – or Curzan (2014) on the effects of prescriptivism on the history of English). According to this view, we will also discuss whether a change from above can only delay the introduction of a new characteristic or the completion of a typical change (cf. also the early approach of Kroch 1978) or whether this type of change also can initiate the introduction of new features (see the case of the passive progressive, whose first stages of development have been analyzed as “a conscious use of a restricted group of people” (Denison 1993, among others)). This discussion can reveal the role and value of all types of texts and registers for the particular paths of change and the spread of a change. For instance, diachronic research “cleaned” from learned registers in order to approach the vernacular of a particular period leaves several unexplained aspects of the diachronic development, such as instances of delay in the spread of a change or the re‐introduction of earlier features. References Curzan, A. 2014. Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denison, D. 1993. Some recent changes in the English verb. In M. Gotti (ed), English Diachronic Syntax, 15‐33. Milan: Guerini. Gelderen, E. van. 2004. Economy, Innovation, and Prescriptivism: From Spec to Head and Head to Head. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 7, 59‐98. Kroch, A. 1978. Toward a theory of social dialect variation. Language in Society 7(1), 17‐ 36. Labov, W. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2), 344‐387. Labov, W., S. Ash & C. Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, W. 1966 [2006]. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Words, Words, Words: The Contributions of Authors and Monuments to the History of the English Language Don Chapman Brigham Young University History of the English language textbooks commonly mention great authors, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, and great monuments, like the King James Bible, even though the influence of any one writer, literary or otherwise, on the English language will likely be minimal. The most probable reason for their inclusion in the histories is their contribution to the story of English, more than to the language itself: they provide “hooks” to capture the attention of students. Yet most histories also come up with ways that these writers and monuments at least ostensibly contribute to the English language, and this paper will examine some of those reputed contributions. The most common contribution that histories cite for writers and works is to the language’s stock of words and phrases. Shakespeare is mentioned for all his supposed coinages, for example, or his phrases that have entered English, like “it’s Greek to me.” Thus the importance of writers and monuments to the English language will largely depend on the importance we attach to words and phrases. While the lexicon has typically been one of the least important components in linguistic descriptions of a language, it is still a component, and perhaps a single writer or work that contributes words and phrases to the language deserves mention in a history of English. In this analysis, phrases will 61 require extra attention, since they have been treated as even less important than words in a language’s description. Yet phrases still play an important role in a speaker’s competence, and fixed phrases sometimes even keep familiar grammatical structures that otherwise drop out of language, such as “methinks” and “doth” in “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Much of this paper will therefore focus on the role of phrases from clear literary allusions to common phrases that have lost all literary pretense. Tracing the diffusion of a change from above in fifteenth century English correspondence: the digraph <th> in the Paston Letters J. Camilo Conde‐Silvestre & Juan M. Hernández‐Campoy Universidad de Murcia, Spain Research based on corpora of historical correspondence has not only confirmed the relevance of letters to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language changes in the past, it has also sanctioned the historical validity of some ‘sociolinguistic universals’ ―like, among others, the curvilinear hypothesis, the distinctions between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ prestige, ‘changes from above’ and ‘changes from below’― and has often permitted to trace the diffusion of historically attested changes over the social, geographical and temporal spaces, as well as their connection to age, social status, occupation, gender and mobility. In this paper, the sociolinguistic patterning of a spelling change in progress in fifteenth century English ―the diffusion of <th> replacing <þ> and <ð>― will be reconstructed by analysing the individual repertoires of letter writers in the Paston Correspondence (1425‐ 1504). The origin of <th> in Biblical Latin ―an external highly prestigious norm― makes of this spelling innovation a likely candidate for its characterisation as a change from above (Hogg 1992: 77; Lass 1992: 36; Benskin 1977: 506‐507; 1982: 18; Stenroos 2006). We believe that the analysis of its diffusion in the letters, in connection with some of the sociolinguistic variables mentioned above, may confirm this status, adding an interesting methodological dimension to the historical reconstruction of changes from above. References Benskin, Michael 1977. Local archives and Middle English dialects. Journal of the Society of Archivists 5(8): 500‐514. Benskin, Michael 1982. The letters <þ> and <y> in later Middle English, and some related matters. Journal of the Society of Archivists 7: 13‐30. Hogg, Richard 1992. Phonology and morphology. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol 1: The Beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67‐167. Lass, Roger 1992. Phonology and morphology. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol 2: 1066‐1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 23‐156. Stenroos, Merja 2006. A Middle English mess of fricative spellings: reflections on thorn, yogh and their rivals. To Make his English Sweete upon his Tonge, eds. M. Krygier & L. Sikorska, 9‐35. Frankfurt a. Maim: Peter Lang. Change from above in the early prescriptive pronouncing dictionaries of English Jean‐Louis Duchet & Nicolas Trapateau Université de Poitiers Our research has been conducted on a database stemming from a fully computerized re‐ edition (Trapateau 2015) of John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English language (1791, 1809) providing exhaustive lists of lexical units belonging to a lexical set or to a stress pattern. 62 In Walker's dictionary the word vertigo has three competing pronunciations, two of which are the consequence of a pressure from above: “learnedly” [vɛːˈtaɪɡo], “modishly” [vɛːˈtiːɡo], as opposed to “the genuine English analogy” of [ˈvɛːtiɡo]. Walker yields to the learned in his Dictionary. Similar pressures have generated changes from above in stress placement, reluctance to palatalisation, and vowel quality. 1) Stress placement European, /010/ is superseded by the Latin stress pattern in /2010/. 2) Palatalisation The noun duke pronounced [duːk] or [dʒuːk] “is not so vulgar as the former. Educate [edʒukeɪt], [dj] prestige form. Courtesy has an elegant pronunciation in [tsi] which has prevailed on the vulgar pronunciation tʃi a back‐formation of courteous [ˈkɜːtʃəs]. 3) Vowels before /r/ The word merchant was pronounced with [aː] like clerk. The spelling pronunciation which prevailed, [ˈmɛːtʃənt], changed further to [ˈmɜːtʃənt]. The same is true of errand, mercy. 4) Diphthongs The word wind as a noun was diphthongized but the “polite circles” have imposed [wɪnd] as the standard pronunciation. The noun envelope is pronounced in the French way [ˌonviˈloʊp] but the mere Englishman pronounces it like the verb envelop. The research will investigate such cases in which Walker says with ironical resignation that “in language as in many other cases, it is safer to be wrong with the polite than right with the vulgar.” Ælfric’s word‐building activity as an attempt to create religious and linguistic terminology in Old English Yekaterina Yakovenko Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Professor of Foreign Languages Department, National Research University "Higher School of Economics" Most lexical changes in the vocabulary that are accounted for by extralinguistic causes (growth of culture, science and technology, social development, international contacts, etc.) take place irrespective of humans’ will and intentions. However, history of English knows several examples of conscious changes introduced by individuals aiming at filling gaps in the vocabulary, ameliorating the language or carrying out a linguistic experiment. Though authors’ inventions, being quite often far from successful, remain on the periphery of the lexical system, such attempts should not be underestimated as they reveal nominative and word‐building potential of the language system. The given paper focuses on linguistic terminology introduced into English by Ælfric (10th c.) in his translation of Latin grammar going back to Priscian and Donat (“Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglicе”) as well as religious vocabulary appearing earlier but reinforced in Aelfric’s works (his translation of the Hexateuch, “Homilies” and “Lives of the Saints”). Ælfric’s metalanguage is quite various, including borrowings proper, semantic loans and periphrastic expressions. Semantic, etymological and morphemic analysis of semantic loans suggested by Ælfric proves their appropriateness to the system of the receiving language. Ælfric’s linguistic activity is investigated in the wide range of similar phenomena of language purism occurring in English and other Germanic languages (German, Icelandic) in later periods. 63 S9. Social identities in public texts The blog is served’: crossing borders between the role of ‘expert’ and ‘non‐expert’ in the language of food blogs Daniela Cesiri “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice – Italy Dept. of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies Food blogs have recently but increasingly grown in importance, taking the role of “virtual communities” (Blanchard 2004) in which people with common interests in food share information and recipes. This success is probably a consequence of the public concern in healthier dietary habits as well as in the social dimension that food preparation and consumption often involves. Food blogs can thus be seen as places of social interaction between the ‘expert’ (the food blogger) and ‘the non‐expert’ (the users who visit the blog), especially as regards the comments’ section in which bloggers and users exchange their ideas, viewpoints and experiences. In this regard, the present study examines the ‘Top 10 UK’s Food Blogs’ in order to investigate how food bloggers and users shape their ‘social identity’, the role that they construe in their posts. A qualitative analysis will look at the lexico‐grammatical and pragmatic aspects in the bloggers‐users interactions in order to look at the ways in which, within the social space of the blog comments’ section, they reciprocally position themselves along the continuum constituted by the social categories of ‘expert’ and ‘non‐ expert’. References Blanchard, Anita. 2004. Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project. In Gurak, Laura et al. (eds.). Into the Blogosphere. Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs. University of Minnesota: available at <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/>. Last accessed: January 2015. Constructing the self and the other in modern news discussion forums Jan Chovanec, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Social identity is an inherently relational phenomenon: the performance of any act of self‐ identity implies that there is some other individual or group that is implicitly or explicitly constructed as different from the speaker. The sense of collective social identity becomes particularly important when members of a specific group perceive some kind of an external threat, e.g. as a result of immigration. In that situation, they will tend to emphasize their claim to membership in their imaginary ingroup community by emphasizing their differences from – and incompatibility with – the outgroup. Drawing on the methodology of membership categorization analysis (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), social role analysis (van Leeuwen 1996) and cognitively‐oriented critical discourse analysis (Hart 2010), this paper documents how oppositional social identities are constructed in the semi‐public discourse space constituted by reader comments in internet news sites. Based on data from British newspapers – reader comments on articles dealing with the recent immigration crisis, the paper analyses the interplay between referential and predicational strategies that frequently construct, by 64 means of delegitimizing the other, the mutually oppositional identities of the ingroup and the outgroup. It is argued that the construction of these identities is realized not only through textual choices but also multimodally. While visual representation of the other is absent from reader comments, it is nevertheless reflected in the readers’ meta‐commentary on how the media manage visual material in their news stories. In this sense, reader comments constitute a site in which all kinds of identities are painstakingly constructed, jointly negotiated, and hotly contested, with readers involved in extensive deictic and referential positioning. References Antaki, Charles, Sue Widdicombe, ed. (1998) Identities in Talk. London: Sage. Hart, Christopher (2010) Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Leeuwen, Theo (1996) “The representation of social actors”. In: C. Caldas‐Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds.) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge 32–70. The socio‐pragmatic picture of the 18th‐century woman of pleasure Bożena Duda University of Rzeszów One of the greatest and, seemingly, ever‐lasting tabooed topics is sex and everything that goes with it. Prostitution has always been a controversial issue which has evoked mixed feelings and a fair amount of linguistic beating about the bush. The primary aim of this paper is to analyse and discuss the linguistic indicators employed in the representation of prostitution as a profession and prostitutes as a social group in the 18th‐century English public texts. The data for the analysis encompass the memoir‐style seduction story The prostitutes of quality (1758) and the pamphlet Modest defence of publick stews (1725). Both the works under analysis feature countless examples of reference to prostitutes as well as depict lives of prostitutes in great detail, both those working in the street and those kept as mistresses by the gentlemen of the society. The analysis of the data is to show how, at a micro‐level context, the addresser forms the detailed picture of the profession and, hence, builds the social identity of a prostitute, and whether a macro‐level perspective plays a role in the formation of the socio‐pragmatic picture of a woman of pleasure. Selected references: Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burridge, Kate. 2005. Weeds in the Garden of Words: Further Observations on the Tangled History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cleland, John. 1749. Memoirs of Fanny Hill. [available at: www.gutenberg.org] Date of access: December 2014. Culpeper, Jonathan (ed.). 2011. Historical Sociopragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Bejamins. Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Duda, Bożena. 2014. The Synonyms of Fallen Woman in the History of the English Language. Frankfurt a/Main: Peter Lang Edition. Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.). 1995. Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Bejamins. 65 Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nevala, Minna. 2011. “Altering distance and defining authority: Person reference in Late Modern English”. In: Jonathan Culpeper (ed.). Historical Sociopragmatics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Bejamins, 61–82. “Get the snip – and a job!” Displaying social identity in public disagreement exchanges online Isabel Ermida University of Minho – Portugal This article investigates the construction of explicit disagreement and the emergence of conflict talk in the comment boards of the British Mail Online newspaper website. In so doing, it sets out to examine how interlocutors manage their own, as well as others’, social identity. It focuses on the case of a young unemployed couple, parents of six, who are asking Social Security for a four‐bedroom flat. By resorting to Walkinshaw’s threefold framework for the analysis of disagreement – backgrounded, hedged and foregrounded disagreement – it concentrates on the linguistic and discursive strategies which online speakers employ to disagree about family policies in an explicit way. In light of the diversity of negative responses to this specific news report case, which range from mildly disapproving comments to blatantly offensive remarks, it also explores the interactional factors which influence the management of face and the occurrence of (im)politeness. Such factors as anonymity, asynchronicity, spatial disconnection and, crucially, third‐party targeting are advanced as possible explanations. Besides, the fact that online interaction is multi‐party seems to lead to what is coined “multi‐topic argument”, at the same time as the public character of the exchanges prompts the expression of strongly ideological positions regarding the broad concept of social class. Keywords: Disagreement, (Im)Politeness, Face, Conflict, Identity, Internet Selected bibliography: Angouri, Jo and Locher, Miriam A. 2012. Theorising Disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 44, Issue 12, September 2012, 1549‐1720. Bolander, Brook. 2012. Disagreements and agreements in personal/diary blogs: A closer look at responsiveness. Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 44, Issue 12, 1607‐1622. Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donath, J. 1999. Identity and deception in the virtual community. In Kollock and Smith (eds.), 31‐59. Langlotz, Andreas and Locher, Miriam A. 2012. Ways of communicating emotional stance in online disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics. Volume 44, Issue 12, 1591‐1606. Scott, Suzanne. 2002. Linguistic feature variation within disagreements: An empirical investigation. Text 22(2) (2002): 301–328 Upadhyay, Shiv R. 2010. Identity and impoliteness in computer‐mediated reader responses. Journal of Politeness Research. Volume 6, Issue 1, 105–127. Waldron, Vincent R., Applegate, James L. 1994. Interpersonal Construct Differentiation and Conversational Planning: An Examination of Two Cognitive Accounts for the 66 Production of Competent Verbal Disagreement Tactics. Human Communication Research, v21, n1, 3‐35. Walkinshaw, Ian. 2009. Learning Politeness: Disagreement in a Second Language. Bern: Peter Lang. Encoding of Social Identity in Central Bank Communication Laurence Harris This submission addresses the encoding of social identity in the annual speech delivered by the Governor of the Bank of England on the occasion of a banquet given at the Mansion House “in the honour of the Bankers and Merchants of the City.” The public texts under scrutiny form part of a corpus of 70 speeches, from the nationalisation of the Bank in 1946 to the present. The Governors belong to a “Community of Practice” (Wenger, 1998) which doubles up as a “Discourse Community” (Swales, 1990) sharing social norms and using specific lexis to achieve common goals. Membership of this close‐knit community is borne out by linguistic indicators such as stance, pronouns or modality (Martin & White, 2007) “In‐group” cohesion (Tajfel, 2010) may be threatened by an outsider, as was the case when Mark Carney was appointed as Governor in 2013. A comparative study of his Mansion House speeches with the larger corpus helps identify the way he adopts the social codes of the community and imprints his own social identity. He uses his interlocutive role to gain the trust of the community whilst ushering in his own agenda via the power of language (Bourdieu, 1982). Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire : L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2007). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tajfel, H. (Ed.). (2010). Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Reissue edition). Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press. Irish Identity in The Troubles: language representation (the case of The Irish Times) Elena V.Kostareva Associate Professor English Department National Research University Higher School of Economics The paper presents the results of using critical discourse analysis and quantitative corpus linguistic method for revealing the ways of social identity construction and deconstruction in public texts of The Troubles. Text resources under consideration are editorials, namely the texts of The Irish Times, the period of 1996, opinion rubric. Within 30 years of The Troubles, 1996 is one of the times between 1969 and 1998 when the situation would escalate into a civil war as a result of ceasefire cessation. The idea that social identity in Northern Ireland is based on religious and political apartness is a prevailing one. Still, we intend to highlight the variety of core and minor language features which enables readers to separate the perception of reality from the position of being “Irish” and “non‐Irish”. Emotive language is paid special attention to, as well as symbols externalized in concrete 67 nouns and authority figures mentioning are being analyzed. Thus, critical discourse analysis provides an ample opportunity to consider linguistic constituents of political, social, religious and other contexts within the frames of which the comprehension of identity is developing. This is also an attempt to investigate the language representation of authors’ neutrality which is supposed to be obligatory for media in societies in conflicts but, according to some studies, is obviated. “There really is nothing like pouring your heart out to a fellow fat chick”: Studying identity and community in plus‐size style blogs Hanna Limatius, University of Tampere In recent years, blogs have become more and more focused on social interaction. According to Seargeant and Tagg (2014, 5) the two “fundamental social dynamics” that characterize the use of social networking sites today are “the presentation of self” and “the building and maintenance of social relationships”. My paper shows how the concepts of identity and community are intertwined in the interaction that takes place within a group of plus‐size style bloggers. This group of bloggers can be characterized as a community of practice (Wenger 1998); they have developed their own norms, routines and conventions, including shared linguistic resources. A “plus‐size blogger identity” can be observed in the inclusive use of “us” when referring to a distinctive group (“us bigger girls”), in the use of jargon specific to plus‐size fashion and in the practice of discussing certain topics, like weight loss, in a way that is deemed “acceptable” by the community. Investigating how community and identity are created by and reflected in the language of blogs gives us a fresh point of view to a genre that is still sometimes mischaracterized as “vain or egocentric” (Puschmann 2013, 88). For plus‐size style bloggers, blogging is a source of empowerment and support. References Puschmann, Cornelius. 2013. “Blogging.” In Pragmatics of Computer‐Mediated Communication, eds. Dieter Stein, Tuija Virtanen and Susan Herring, 83‐108. De Gruyter Mouton. Seargeant, Philip and Caroline Tagg. 2014. “Introduction: The Language of Social Media”. In Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, eds. Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg, 1‐20. Palgrave Mcmillan. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press. Negotiating the defendant role in the trial proceedings of the Old Bailey: guilty or not guilty Minna Palander‐Collin & Ina Liukkonen University of Helsinki This paper focuses on the construction of social roles in trial proceedings and the role of the defendant in particular. An earlier corpus‐based correlational sociolinguistic study on role construction in the Old Bailey Corpus, 1720‐1913, showed that the use of first‐person mental verb expressions (e.g. I think, I saw, I know, I believe) separated the lay roles of the courtroom, i.e. defendants, victims and witnesses, from the professional roles of judges and lawyers (Palander‐Collin submitted). Moreover, the defendants typically resorted to 68 first‐person expressions showing a strong epistemic stance (I know) as if to distance themselves from the accusations against them. Victims and witnesses, on the other hand, argued with strong evidential claims (I saw, I heard). This paper looks more closely at epistemic and evidential stance and the use of the first person in a smaller set of defendants’ statements. Late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century data will be collected on court cases in the Old Bailey Corpus (Huber et al. 2012) where the defendant was found guilty and not guilty respectively to see whether the defendant’s role construction through stance‐taking could be used to “predict” the outcome of the trial. Earlier studies indicate that it may indeed be possible to connect language use with such real‐life impacts. Kahlas‐Tarkka and Rissanen (2007), for example, have shown that discourse strategies adopted by defendants, especially cooperativeness, had an important effect on a successful defence in the Salem witchcraft trials. Moreover, psychological research has focused on the language of lies and self‐deception, and Pennebaker (2011: 143‐144) claims that real experiences as opposed to lies can be associated with various linguistic characteristics, such as more frequent use of self‐reference and fewer cognitive and emotion words. References Huber, Magnus, Magnus Nissel, Patrick Maiwald & Bianca Widlitzki. 2012. The Old Bailey Corpus. Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries. www.uni‐ giessen.de/oldbaileycorpus. Kahlas‐Tarkka, Leena & Matti Rissanen. 2007. The sullen and the talkative. Discourse strategies in the Salem examinations. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8 (1): 1‐24. Palander‐Collin, Minna. Submitted. First‐person mental phrases in the Old Bailey Corpus, 1720‐1913 (OBC). In Huber, Magnus (ed.), Sociolinguistic Studies Based on the Old Bailey Corpus. Pennebaker, James W. 2011. The Secret Life of Pronouns. What our Words Say about Us. New York etc.: Bloomsbury Press. Satire and social identity in eighteenth‐century English anonymous dialogues Anni Sairio, University of Helsinki This paper explores how social identity is constructed in eighteenth‐century (semi‐)anonymous texts which use satire in an attempt to expose folly and vice in society. It is a case study of six dialogues between mythological, historical, and contemporary eighteenth‐century figures (e.g. Mercury and ‘a fine Lady’, Plutarch, Charon and a Modern Bookseller, and Berenice and Cleopatra), written by the sophisticated Bluestocking hostess Elizabeth Montagu (1718‐1800). Three of the dialogues were included in Lord Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1762) with the appellation of “a Friend”, and the other three remained unpublished (now included in Eger ed. 1999). Eighteenth‐century culture of politeness and sociability contains a legitimate space for satire (see e.g. Klein 1994, Griffin 1994), and a poignant theme in these texts is the criticism of frivolous sociability at the expense of learning and virtue, two important points of self‐identification in the Bluestocking circle. The dialogues are examined in light of the Bluestocking ideal of self‐discipline and self‐mastery (Backscheider 2013) as well as the response of the published dialogues by the readers and Montagu’s own circle (“Mrs. Modish is a great favourite with the town, but some ladies have tossed up their heads and 69 said it was abominably satirical”, Montagu notes (Montagu ed. 1813: iv, 260). The analysis is based on stance‐taking particularly in terms of attitude and affect (Besnier 1990). Backscheider, Paula R. 2013. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Besnier, Niko. 1990. Language and affect. Annual Review of Anthropology. 419‐451. Eger, Elizabeth (ed.) 1999. Bluestocking Feminism. Vol 1. General editor Gary Kelly. London: Pickering & Chatto. Griffin, Dustin H. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Klein, Lawrence E. 1994. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth‐century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montagu, Matthew (ed.) 1813. The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu: With Some of the Letters of Her Correspondents. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Establishing social identities in advertising with linguistic indicators: social selves at work in magazine ads Elsa Simões Lucas Freitas Universidade Fernando Pessoa (Porto – Portugal) Ads show us how people very quickly step in and out of the social roles they are placed in and the way they interact with the group they identify with. Linguistic elements in the ad copy are paramount for establishing social identity. In ads, the viewer will either accept or refuse to be a part of an idealised group (‘target‐audience’). A plausible social identity for the sender should be defined at the onset as well, for credibility’s sake. It is my purpose to determine how the identities of sender and receiver and appropriate interlocutive roles are quickly established/conveyed with linguistic devices. Thus, a number of selected print ads will be analysed, focussing on the ingenious uses of: - person reference (who is the ‘I’ sending the message? Who is the ‘you’ at the receiving end?), - deictic elements (why is the message appropriate for time and context? Why is it felt as relevant and opportune?) - interpersonal and authorial stance (how are participants positioned?) - modality (how are emotions and feelings conveyed/confirmed in ads when time and space are so scarce?) - appraisal (which values are perceived/conveyed as desirable? How is this used as a reinforcement of the idea of belonging to a social category?) This close analysis of linguistic elements will be followed by a more general reading of the ads selected, in order to relate the crucial role of these markers with the overall seductive/persuasive effect of the message. Construction and deconstruction of Irish identity in The Troubles literature Svetlana A. Strinyuk Associate Professor English Department National Research University Higher School of Economics 70 The paper was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2016‐ 2017 (grant № 16‐01‐0038) and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program The paper focuses on the analysis of content and language markers of construction and deconstruction of social identity in Irish literary texts of The Troubles (1968‐2000) written in English. Reading in the Dark S.Deane, The International, Love in Troubled Times G.Patterson, Eureka Street, R.M.Wilson, Cal B.MacLaverty are seen within the framework of nationalist vs post‐colonial or, more precisely, post‐colonization perspective. Using critical discourse analysis (M. Foucault’s ideas as a theoretical background) I identify content (socio‐cultural) discourse markers, linguistic strategies of construction and deconstruction of identity and the means of their realization. Research showed that the idea of being victimized lies in the heart of Irish identity representation in “The Troubles” novels of the period concerned. Close investigation revealed that political history (partition and being victimized), religious identification (Catholic/Protestant), concept of place (locus) (connected with national and religious identification) and folklore (often stereotypical “Irish”) make a hierarchical system of content markers identified in novels created from both nationalist and liberal perspective. Constructive linguistic strategies found in novels of MacLaverty and Deane mainly include promoting unification, solidarity and identification. They aim at representing similarity, positive self‐presentation and more important in case of Ireland ‐ shared suppression and sectarian division. Linguistic realization of constructive strategies include lexemes of respective semantic fields, inclusive “we” for identification of family/community/nation, personification (Ireland, Irish hearts), naming places identified with communal division (Bogside, Derry, peace walls, Belfast etc.). Destructive strategies implemented by Patterson and Wilson employ negative presentation (through negative attribution), emphasis on liberal/international values (vs intra‐national/communal), strong dissimilation (comparisons, assimilative attributes), irony and pejorative attribution towards national. Discursive analysis of literary texts gives empirical data for understanding identity as a dynamic, changing, and sometimes ambivalent system. We assume that in literary texts social identification is based on ideas of shared history, past, territory and culture despite personal writer’s stance on Irish political and social milieu. It means that in novels with both nationalist and liberal aspiration the same content discursive markers may be identified although particular strategies and linguistic means in novels which tend to construct or to deconstruct nationalist identity differ significantly. Linguistically and Socially Identifying Oneself in Newspaper Opinion Pieces Bledar Toska University of Vlora, Albania The aim of this short presentation is to investigate how the use of some linguistic structures can help writers of opinion pieces construct their discourse and build an efficient public image in social contexts and in silent interactional discursive acts with readers. The promotion of a credible, positive and professional social identity is extremely important in these pieces since it enables their writers to identify themselves in society and/or similar circles. As instances of persuasion texts, opinion pieces are structured in such a way as to convey particular viewpoints on various concerning issues and to invite readers to align with them. The linguistic analysis of these structures at the micro‐level 71 revels aspects of social identity as related to the other. This talk analyses instances of self‐ mentions, hedges and boosters from a discoursal and metadiscoursal perspective in Albanian newspaper opinion pieces. The small scale, but systematic analysis explores a corpus of 500 pieces, amounting to half a million words. Various illustrations will exemplify the particularities of these devices as well as issues related to gender variation in the realm of social identity promotion in society and readership. Looking at Italy: writers’ attitudes in 17th Century English Travelogues of Italy Laura Pinnavaia (University of Milan) While eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century English travelogues about Italy seem to have been the focus of more consistent scholarly attention over the decades, especially in literary studies (Batten (1978), Black (1996), Black (2003), Espey (2004), Glendening (1997), Kirby (1952)), seventeenth‐century travelogues still have much to reveal, despite some work produced in this area (see Lafouge (1989), for example). In Pinnavaia (2013), recurring lexical features, found in thirty‐seven seventeenth‐century English travelogues of Italy, retrieved from the computerized archives Early English Books Online (see primary sources), already seem to hint that such travelogues have a characterizing style of discourse and represent a genre of literature in themselves, so strongly denied by eighteenth‐century scholars and reviewers of travel literature (see Batten (1978)). In the wake of this preliminary research, the aim of this paper is to study further seventeenth‐ century English travelogues about Italy to understand the way the world is represented. Written at a time when Italy was simultaneously Eden and Hell owing to its artistic beauties on the one hand and the quandaries of its religious and political institutions on the other, the travelogues relate interesting social events, i.e. “people, objects, means, times, places” (Fairclough 2003: 133) accompanied by differing opinions and evaluations. The differing positions and attitudes of the writers reside principally in the morpho‐ syntactic structures and rhetorical devices deployed. By analyzing the authorial choices regarding deixis, modality, transitivity, nominalization, and verb processes, we hope to bring to the fore the way in which these writers looked at Italy. References Acton, William (1691) A new journal of Italy containing what is most remarkable of the antiquities of Rome, Savoy and Naples: with observations made upon the strength, beauty and scituation [sic] of some other towns and forts, London, printed for R. Baldwin. Anon. (1660) The character of Italy or, The Italian anatomiz'd. by an English chyrurgion, London, printed for Nath. Brooke at the Angel in Cornhill. Anon. (1674) A discourse of the dukedom of Modena containing the origin, antiquity, government, manners and qualities of the people: as also the temperature of the climate, with the nature and fertility of the soil, London, printed by J.C. for William Crook. Balfour, Andrew (1700) Letters write [sic] to a friend by the learned and judicious Sir Andrew Balfour… containing excellent directions and advices for travelling thro' France and Italy, with many curious and judicious remarks and observations made by himself, in his voyages thro' these countreys, published for the author's original m.s., Edinburgh, s.n. Barri, Giacomo (1679) The painters voyage of Italy in which all the famous paintings of the most eminent masters are particularised, as they are preserved in the several cities of Italy… written originally … by Giacomo Barri …. Englished by W.L. of Lincolns‐Inne, Gent., London, printed for Tho. Flesher. 72 Bromley, William (1693) Remarks made in travels through France & Italy with many publick inscriptions / lately taken by a person of quality, London, printed for Thomas Bassett. Burnet, Gilbert (1686) Some letters containing, an account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, &c. Written by G. Burnet, D.D. to T.H.R.B., Rotterdam, printed by Abraham Acher. Burnet, Gilbert (1687) Some letters containing, an account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, &c. Written by G. Burnet, D.D. to T.H.R.B., s.l. s.n. Burnet, Gilbert (1688a) Some letters, containing an account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, some parts of Germany, &c. in the years 1685 and 1686 written by G. Burnet, D.D. to the Honorable. R.B.; to which is added, An appendix, containing some remarks on Switzerland and Italy, writ by a person of quality, and communicated to the author; together with a table of contents of each letter, Amsterdam, printed for the Widow Swart, Bookseller in the Beurs Stege. Burnet, Gilbert (1688b) Some letters concerning the present state of Italy written in the year 1687 being a supplement to Dr. Burnet's letters, s.l., s.n. Burnet, Gilbert (1689) Dr. G. Burnet's Tracts, in two volumes. Three letters concerning the present state of Italy, London, printed for J. Robinson… and A. Churchill. Clenche, John (1676) A tour in France & Italy, made by an English Gentleman 1675, London, printed for the author. Cogan, Henry (1654) The court of Rome. Wherein is sett forth the whole government thereof; all the officers belonging unto it, with the value of their offices, as they are sold by the Pope also the originall, creation and present condition of the cardinals: together with the manner of the now Pope Innocent the tenth's election; coronation, and hiding in state to take possession of his lateranense church. Besides many other remarkable matters most worthy to be knowne. And a direction for such as shall travell to Rome, how they may with most ease, ands commoditie view all those rarities, curiosities, and antiquities, which are to be seene there. /Tranlsated out of Italian into English by H.C. Gent., London, printed for Henry Herringman. Dallington, Robert (1605) A suruey of the great dukes state of Tuscany In the yeare of our Lord 1596, London, printed by George Eld for Edward Blount. English Gentleman (1696) Choice observations made in travels through France and Italy; wherein all the remarkable buildings aqueducts, statues, inscriptions, and other curiosities, whether publick or private, are plainly and exactly described, London, printed for William Whitwood, at the Crown in Little Britain. de Fer, Nicolas (1694) The third volume of historical travels over Europe containing the most select curiosities of Italy, the various constitutions of government under several sovereign princes and states; their strength, their riches and revenues; the sundry customs, manners, coyns, and trade of the people. Together with a particular description of the city of Rome, the conclave, the election of the Pope, and promotion of the cardinals. Accompany'd with a great number of remarks never yet before imparted to the world. Done out of French, London, printed for Hen. Rhodes, at the Star, the corner of Bride‐ Lane in Fleetstreet. Gabin, Antonio (1691) Observations on a journey to Naples wherein the frauds of romish monks and priests are farther discover'd / by the author of a late book entitled The frauds of romish monks and priests, London, printed by Samuel Roycroft for Robert Clavell. Lassels, Richard (1670) The voyage of Italy, or, A compleat journey through Italy in two parts: with the characters of the people, and the description of the chief towns, churches, monasteries, tombs, libraries, pallaces, villa's, gardens, pictures, statues and antiquities: 73 as also of the interest, government, riches, force, &c. of all the princes: with introductions concerning travel, Paris, to be sold in London by John Starkey. Lassels, Richard (1686) The voyage of Italy, or, A compleat journey through Italy in two parts: with the characters of the people, and the description of the chief towns, churches, monasteries, tombs, libraries, pallaces, villa's, gardens, pictures, statues and antiquities: as also of the interest, government, riches, force, &c. of all the princes: with introductions concerning travel / by Richard Lassels who travelled through Italy five times, as tutor to several of the English nobility and gentry, London, printed for Robert Clavel, and Johnathan Robinson. Lassels, Richard (1698) An Italian voyage, or, A compleat journey through Italy in two parts: with the characters of the people, and the description of the chief towns, churches, monasteries, tombs, libraries, pallaces, villa's, gardens, pictures, statues and antiquities: as also of the interest, government, riches, force, &c. of all the princes: with instructions concerning travel, London, printed for Richard Wellington. Lipsius, Justus (16‐?) Lipsij Roma illustrata, London?, s.n. 16‐? Lipsius, Justus (1692) Justi Lipsii Roma illustrata, sive Antiquitatum Romanarum breviarum. Et Georgii Fabricii…veteris Romae cum nova collatio; ex nova recensione Antonii Thysii… cui accesserunt in hac editione Justi Lipsii tractatus peculiares… , London, Abelis Swalle & Tim. Childe. Lipsius, Justus (1698) Justi Lipsii Roma illustrata, sive Antiquitatum Romanarum breviarum. Et Georgii Fabricii chemnicensis veteris Romae cum nova collatio. Ex nova recensione Antonii Thysii, J.C. cui accesserunt in hac editione Justi Lipsii tractatus peculiares, viz. De veterum Latinorum scriptura. De re pecuniaria. De nominibus Romanorum. De ritu conviviorum. De censura & censu. de anno deque ejus diversitate: itme ratione intercalandi. Cum figuris Aeneis in usum studiosae Juventutis, opus tam ad historias, quam poetas, caeterosq[ue] authores Romanos explicandos, utilissimum, London, William Whitwood. Misson, Maximilien (1695) A new voyage to Italy with a description of the chief towns, churces, tombs, libraries, palaces, statues, and antiquities of that country: together with useful instructions for those who shall travel thither, done into English and adorned with figures, London, printed for R. Bentley, T. Goodwin, M. Wotton, S. Manship. Misson, Maximilien (1699) A new voyage to Italy with curious observations on several other countries, as, Germany, Switzerland, Savoy, Geneva, Flanders, and Holland: together with useful instructions for those who shall travel thither: in two volumes / done out of French, London, printed for R. Bentley, T. Goodwin, M. Wotton, S. Manship, B . Took. Raymond, John Gent (1648) An itinerary contayning a voyage, made through Italy, in the yeare 1646, and 1647. Illustrated with divers figures of antiquities, London, printed for Humphrey Moseley. S. Desdier, Monsieur de. (1699) The city and republick of Venice in three parts / originally written in French by Monsieur de S. Desdier, London, printed for Char. Brome. Sandys, Georges (1615) A relation of a journey begun an: Dom: 1610 Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and ilands adioyning, London, printed by Richard Field for W. Barrett. Sandys, Georges (1621) A relation of a journey begun an: Dom: 1610 Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and ilands adioyning, London, printed by Richard Field for W. Barrett. Sandys, Georges (1627) A relation of a journey begun an: Dom: 1610 Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and ilands adioyning, London, printed by Thomas Cotes for Ro. Allot. 74 Sandys, Georges (1632) A relation of a journey begun an: Dom: 1610 Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and ilands adioyning, London, printed by George Miller for Ro. Allot. Sandys, Georges (1637) A relation of a journey begun an: Dom: 1610 Foure Bookes. Containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the remote parts of Italy, and ilands adioyning, London, printed by Thomas Cotes for Andrew Crooke. Sandys, Georges (1652) Sandys travailes containing a history of the originall and present state of the Turkish empire, their lawes, governement, policy, military force, courts of justice, and commerce, the Mahometan religion and ceremonies: a description of Constantinople, the Grand Signiors seraglio, and his manner of living, also, of Greece, with the religion and customes of the Graecians : of Aegpt, the antiquity, hieroglyphicks, rites, customs, discipline, and religion of the Aegyptians ...: a description of the Holy‐Land, of the Jews and severall sects of Christians living there ...: lastly, Italy described, and the islands adjoyning ...: illustrated with fifty graven maps and figures, London, printed by Richard Cotes. Sandys, Georges (1670) Sandys travailes containing an history of the original and present state of the Turkish empire, their laws, government, policy, military force, courts of justice, and commerce, the Mahometan religion and ceremonies: a description of Constantinople, the Grand Signior's seraglio, and his manner of living, also, of Greece, with the religion and customs of the Graecians : of Aegypt, the antiquity, hieroglyphicks, rites, customs, and discipline, and religion of the Aegyptians: a voyage on the River Nylus: of Armenia, Grand Cairo, Rhodes, the Pyramides, Colossus, the former flourishing and present state of Alexandria : a description of the Holy‐Land, of the Jews and several sects of Christians living there: of Jerudsalem, sepulchre of Christ, Temple of Solomon, and what else either of antiquity, or worth observation: lastly, Italy described, and the islands adjoyning, as Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicilia, the Aeolian Islands, of Rome, Venice, Naples, Syracusa, Mesena, Aetna, Scylla, and Charybdis, and other places of note: illustrated with fifty graven maps and figures, London, printed for Rob. Clavel et al. Sandys, Georges (1673) Sandys travailes containing an history of the original and present state of the Turkish empire, their laws, government, policy, military force, courts of justice, and commerce, the Mahometan religion and ceremonies: a description of Constantinople, the Grand Signior's seraglio, and his manner of living, also, of Greece, with the religion and customs of the Graecians : of Aegypt, the antiquity, hieroglyphicks, rites, customs, and discipline, and religion of the Aegyptians: a voyage on the River Nylus: of Armenia, Grand Cairo, Rhodes, the Pyramides, Colossus, the former flourishing and present state of Alexandria : a description of the Holy‐Land, of the Jews and several sects of Christians living there: of Jerudsalem, sepulchre of Christ, Temple of Solomon, and what else either of antiquity, or worth observation: lastly, Italy described, and the islands adjoyning, as Cyprus, Crete, Malta, Sicilia, the Aeolian Islands, of Rome, Venice, Naples, Syracusa, Mesena, Aetna, Scylla, and Charybdis, and other places of note: illustrated with fifty graven maps and figures, London, printed for John Williams Junior. Schottus, Franciscus (1660) Italy in its original glory, ruine, and revival being an exact survey of the whole geography and history of that famous country, with the adjacent islands of Sicily, Malta, &c. : and whatever is remarkable in Rome ( the mistress of the world) and all those towns and territories mentioned in ancient and modern authors / translated out of the originals for general satisfaction, by Edmund warcupp, Esquire, London, printed by S. Griffin for H. Twyford, Tho. Dring and I. Place. 75 Turler, Jerome (1575) The traueiler of Jerome Turler deuided into two bookes. The first conteining a notable discourse of the maner, and order of traueiling ouersea, or into straunge and forrein countrys. The second comprehending an excellent description of the most delicious realms of Naples in Italy. A woorke very pleasant for all persons to reade, and right profitable and necessarie vnto all such as are minded to traueyll, London, printed by William How for Abraham Veale. Secondary sources Batten, Charles L., Jr. (1978) Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth‐ century Travel Literature. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Black, Jeremy (1996) Italy and the Grand Tour: The British Experience in the Eighteenth Century. Annali d'Italianistica 14, 532–41. Black, Jeremy (2003) Italy and the Grand Tour. Yale: Yale University Press. Espey, David (2004) Studies in Eighteenth‐Century Travel Writing and Beyond: Genre, Science, and the Book Trade. Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 15, 367–79. Fairclough, Norman (2003), Analysing Discourse, Routledge, New York. Glendening, John (1997) The High Road: Romantic Tourism, and Literature, 1720–1820. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirby, Paul Franklin (1952) The Grand Tour in Italy 1700–1800. New York: Vanni. Lafouge, Jean‐Pierre (1989) Italy in Travel Books of the XVIIth Century. Cahiers du dix‐ septieme: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3.2, 115–30. Pinnavaia, Laura (2013) “Traveling Words, the Words of Traveling: 17th Century English Travelogues of Italy” in Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL‐LEX 3), Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Helsinki. Transgressive and transactional sex in Early Modern England – a corpus based view Tony McEnery and Helen Baker, Lancaster University, UK In this paper we will explore how those engaged in transgressive and transactional sex in early modern England were constructed in public discourse. Our paper will build upon the work of McEnery and Baker (2016). That work was based on the EEBO corpus (v3) built at Lancaster University from texts released by the EEBO TCP. This provided almost a billion words of data for the seventeenth century. We will consider two questions relating to marginalized groups. Firstly, we will look at how homosexuals, including homosexual prostitutes, were represented in the period, as this is a group McEnery and Baker (ibid) did not consider. Secondly, we will consider to what extent public discourse is monolithic in its representation of sexual transgression. To explore this we will introduce and use a genre classification of the EEBO corpus developed at Lancaster University. This will allow us to explore whether what appears to be a general view built from a ‘whole corpus’ view of EEBO is, in fact, sustainable when we look across different genres. McEnery, T. and Baker, H. (2016) Corpora and The Humanities, London: Bloomsbury. “Trewe liegeman” versus “false traitour”: Naming as propaganda strategy in the Wars of the Roses. Tamara Peeters 76 When studying propaganda, many of the strategies employed involve positive self‐ presentation and negative other‐presentation (Lewis 1964: 2). This paper explores this phenomenon in a small, specialised corpus of English texts which were intended to reach a wide audience during the period 1450‐1499, also known as the Wars of the Roses,. The focus will be on the way many of these texts feature the identity of a ‘true liegeman’ to justify actions or writings, and the way the authors position themselves and the ‘false traitors’ they oppose in relation to the king, or England as a whole. This will be done using a combined quantitative and qualitative approach, which helps to place and interpret the results in their historical context. Special attention will be paid to the opposing pairs that are found frequently in descriptions of the self and the other, such as the nouns ‘liegeman’ and ‘traitor’, or the adjectives ‘true’ and ‘false’. This will provide further insights into the way the identity of a ‘true liegeman’ to the king was constructed and used to justify actions that might otherwise be have been considered treasonous. References: Lewis, P.S., 1965. War Propaganda and Historiography in Fifteenth‐Century France and England. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 15, pp.1–21. 77 S10 “Comparative and Typological Studies of English Idioms” The Role of the Great Chain of Being Metaphors in English Idioms Marcin Kuczok University of Silesia Poland In the views of cognitive linguists a significant number of idiomatic expressions in English are motivated by conceptual metaphor (Gibbs 2007), which is the matter of a mapping between the source and the target domain in our mind rather than a kind of formal operation on structures. One group of conceptual metaphors are ontological metaphors, whose source domain is an entity (Lakoff and Johnson 2003/1980/). It is possible to clarify ontological metaphors as reifications, vegetalizations, animalizations, personifications and deifications, which corresponds to the hierarchy of the so‐called Great Chain of Being (GCB), with inanimate objects at the bottom, then plants, animals, people and G(g)od(s) at the top. As claimed by Krzeszowski (1997), these metaphors play an important role in expressing the axiological aspect of language, since they decide about the positive or negative charge of expressions. At the same time, however, they impose certain restrictions on the possible directions of metaphorical mappings. The aim of the paper is to analyze how the GCB metaphors function in examples of English idioms collected from dictionaries (Spears 2000, Siefring 2004). The study will focus on the types of the GCB metaphors in idioms and on the axiological charge they provide in the light of Krzeszowski’s claims. We will present the typical and untypical examples of English idioms motivated by the GCB metaphors in order to try and identify the possible regulations in this kind of metaphorical motivation behind idioms. Fantastic Variations and How to Translate Them: Style, Language and Other Issues in UK Contemporary Fantasy Fiction Linda Barone, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy The paper, whose title alludes to J. K. Rowling’s 2001 book Fantastic Beasts and where to Find them, deals with language variation, diatopic, diastratic, diaphasic, but also the one I call ‘fantastic’ – namely the typical fantasy attitude to invent evocative proper names and to make an extensive use of creative allusions and puns – in a translation perspective. I will analyse and discuss works by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling from the point of view of translation with the underlying assumption that the deeper the variationist dimension ‐ above all the one connected to wordplays, allusions and onomastics ‐ the more lacking and ineffective the translation at a pragmatic level. The desired effect on the reader is often undermined contravening one the most important principles in translation which is “recreating essentially the same effect on the TT readership as the ST does on the ST audience” (Munday 2009: 210). I will explore how problematic areas in translation can determine the success or the failure of a translated writer. The case of Terry Pratchett’s Disc World saga is emblematic in that only few of his novels have been translated into Italian and those which have been did not allow him to become as popular in Italy as he is in UK because some of his fundamental traits – creative allusions and humour based on wordplays – vanish in the passage from the source language to the target language. It is a great pity that Sir Pratchett cannot be, in the world, what he was for English native speakers up to March 12, 2015, the day in which Death told him “DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, JUST THINK OF IT AS 78 LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH” (Pratchett and Gaiman 1990: 198), that is the second most‐read living British author after J. K. Rowling. On the Idiomatic Usage of Deictic Verbs Yelena Yerznkyan Yerevan State University Yerevan, Armenia Susanna Chalabyan Armenian State University of Economics Yerevan, Armenia It is widely recognized among linguists that deixis plays a paramount role in the use and understanding of everyday language. Nevertheless, given its theoretical importance, this linguistic category is one of the most semantically understudied core areas of linguistics. Assuming that the 'deictic centre' ‐ the origo ‐ is not always the speaker, deixis is dealt with here from a much broader point of view and covers a far wider range of phenomena including different linguistic means: grammatical, lexical, as well as phraseological. The research is aimed at a contrastive study of deictic motion verbs in English, Armenian and Russian with special reference to the metaphorization processes accounting for the rise of their idiomatic usage. Due to the apparently emotional function of this secondary semiosis process, deictic verbs are very likely to acquire new meanings for the sake of expressivity. The paper will present how items with a definite prototypical deictic meaning develop the emotional‐evaluative meaning fulfilling a pragmasemantic function of deictability. The research is determined by the necessity to study the structural and semantic features of different types of linguistic signs as well as by the anthropocentric approach according to which the language is observed not as an abstract system but as a background for the individual’s communicative and cognitive activity. Idiom and Revision in John McGahern’s The Dark Martin Keaveney NUI Galway Although the papers of John McGahern have been deposited at NUIG since 2003, there has still not been a thorough investigation of his writing process. Research in the Co.Letrim writer has mainly been limited to political, sociological and aesthetic fields of criticism. Stanley Van Der Ziel in ‘'All This Talk and Struggle': John McGahern's "The Dark"’ briefly engages with McGahern’s perspective strategy in the early novel while John Cronin in ‘'The Dark' Is Not Light Enough: The Fiction of John McGahern’ discusses choice of form in both The Dark and the debut work The Barracks. I have spent the past eighteen months examining McGahern’s manuscripts with particular focus on the second novel, The Dark, published in 1965, using the primary theoretical framework of ‘Process’. My paper explores McGahern’s method of composition with reference to his use of idiom to achieve his artistic and narrative objectives. This 79 advances a more sophisticated awareness of McGahern’s method of composition to that previously undertaken by critics. The work under exploration here is a section of McGahern’s his first published piece: ‘Episodes from a Novel’ which appeared in X magazine in 1961. The gestation of the passage which later became Chapter 3 of The Dark demonstrates a meticulous editing strategy which engages often with phraseological units to compel aesthetic and narrative execution. The idiomatic approach correlates with McGahern’s employment and refinement of free indirect discourse, compression and expansion to achieve artistic objectives and clarifies his own theories of creative process which he wrote on in ‘The Image’ (Love of the World 5). The methods discovered are seen to serve the author in two important ways: introducing ambiguity to the text and adjusting the vulnerability levels of characters. I isolate four subsections of the chapter and trace their evolution through the author’s deposited archives at NUIG. I also contrast the drafts with the corresponding piece published in X. Examination of these revisions deepens critical understanding of The Dark through the archival development of the father and son relationship, and also elucidates the foundational strategies of the McGahern oeuvre in terms of his repetition of drafts, his evocation of idiomatic units in his work, experimentations with perspective and use of narrative devices such as free indirect discourse. It ultimately enriches studies on the creative process of a professional author. Structural Traits of Idioms: Cross‐Linguistic Perspective Anahit Hovhannisyan Gyumri State Pedagogical Institute Gyumri, Armenia Idioms are reverberations in the human consciousness of objective reality, stops in the cognition of the material world. Cognition is not a simple or straightforward process. Full understanding of the fundamental principles of a given sphere is attained gradually, sometimes after considerable time had been wasted in beating wrong tracks. In the present article an attempt has been made to affect a systematic contrastive analysis of the morphological structure of English and Armenian idioms. The starting point for our contrastive analysis is the modeling or patterning of idioms. We might say this is the study of something invisible in target language when this language is viewed from another, in our case, from native one. Why modeling? It goes with harmony with the aim of our research as we are interested in structural modifications of idiomatic phrases (constructions). It's a way of building bridges between grammar and phraseological preoccupations. By contrasting languages phenomena we can really penetrate into the specific character of this or that language and understand its internal basic regularities. So far we have been speaking about structural load of our research; idioms are studied from different angles: from morphological (part of speech) structure, from the point of view of the number of constituents and from the point of view of the type of various relations reigning among the counter‐ members of idiomatic phrases. Such an approach will provide much more complete and systematic character to our research analysis. 80 S11 “English Phraseology and Business Terminology: the Points of Crossing” Teaching Types of Semantic Transference in Business English Terms Tatiana Fedulenkova Vladimir State University Vladimir, Russia While reading business papers, economic periodicals, etc., students often come across expressions which are difficult to understand because they are semantically encoded, e.g.: to be loaded up meaning ‘to have a big bag of fund valuables which are very difficult to realize’, over spot – ‘currency addition at long term agreements’, loan strings – ‘money given under certain political and economic conditions and restrictions’, etc. Not only beginners but advanced ESP students as well find great difficulty in decoding such terms since—being phraseological units with full transference of meaning of their components—they are indeed very difficult to identify, even when the learners are experts in business and economics. Let your ESP students try and guess the meaning of such financial terms as a) above board b) catch a cold c) Ockham's razor and the like and you will see that they will be unable to do it without your assistance or appeal to dictionaries that define the meanings of those terms as follows: a) ‘honest and legal’ (Longman 2007: 1), b) ‘to lose money in a business deal’ (Tuck 2000: 80), c) ‘law of minimal admittance in the economic model’. Even if the student encounters an idiomatic term with a partial transference of meaning—when some components of the phrasal term are used in their direct lexical meaning—it is often the case that he/ she needs the ESP teacher's help to disambiguate the expression. E.g., the set expression sharp practice is often misunderstood, as it appears to have the meaning of ‘business dealings, which are not honest’ (Seidl 1983: 204). The terms kamikaze pricing, Delphi method, easy money, halo effect are also semantically transformed. The ultimate practical aim of teaching a foreign language is to help students to acquire complete mastery of the form and content of the language, so that they can easily communicate using vocabulary items, idioms and grammatical constructions correctly and appropriately. To achieve that purpose, types of semantic transference in word combinations and elements of phraseology are taught first, before ESP classes. Honey bees and cowslip’s bells: secondary Legal Studies John F. Bourke La Trobe University Melbourne, Australia Rosemary Lucadou‐Wells University of Queensland St Lucia, Australia. Applying Shakespeare’s business ideas to 81 This paper posits the application of integrative learning theory across the disciplines of Legal Studies and English Literature for upper secondary students. The methodology is qualitative and could be seen as quasi‐experimental1. Causal inferences for Business Law concepts are drawn from selected Shakespearian quotations. Integrative learning can be seen as a teaching practice where students are encouraged to make connections between various subjects in the curriculum and academic knowledge2. Studies have shown that when students make connections between different subjects in the curricular their engagement and learning is enhanced. This is particularly true in K to Year 12 students3. The move to introduce Legal Studies as a subject for Years 11 and 12 students in Australia can be traced to 1975 when the various state Law societies and educators articulated the importance of introducing Australian students to the responsibilities and rights of Australian citizens4. The paper identifies Business Law ideas in selections from William Shakespeare’s works and applies them to Legal Studies for upper secondary students. The selections demonstrate contemporary Business Law principles. By making connections between the subjects of English Literature and Legal Studies students are given an opportunity to develop interdisciplinary understanding and the intellectual flexibility 5 necessary for survival in an increasingly demanding global environment. The paper concludes that by linking content, subject boundaries are diminished. This facilitates reflective learning and enhances problem‐solving capabilities. Phraseological Units in Business English and their Structure Lia Filatova Vladimir State University Vladimir, Russia Dealing with Business phraseology of the English language it is not difficult to notice the fact that there are some words that frequently form phraseological units, e.g.: bear market, grey market, sick market, thin market, single market, to boom the market, to flood the market, to bull the market and etc. Closer estimation shows that most of phraseological units with the words money, market and partner have the model A+K, where the adjunct is represented by adjectives (dear, fresh, funk, fractional, floating, hard, hot, idle, senior, easy, black, sleeping etc.) or nouns (bull, bear, paper and etc.). The illustrations for the adjectival adjunct are as follows: a) fresh money – additional capital, esp. loan capital, as opposed to old money, which is exiting capital (Adam 1993:306); b) sensitive market – a trading situation that is easily affected by some outside influence such as war, political change, natural disaster (Tuck 2000:383); c) nominal partner – a person whose name is used for the good of the company (Tuck 2000:281), etc. The illustrations for the noun adjunct are as follows: Anoma Armstrong and Evelyn Ogren, Evaluation Models and Strategies, (Melbourne: Evaluation and Training Services Australia, 1986) 2 MT Huber, P. Hutchings and R. Gale, Integrative Learning for Liberal Education, (https: // www.aacu.org) 3 SM Awbrey, D Dana, VW Miller, P Robinson, MM Ryan and DK Scott (eds) Integrative Learning and Actions: A call to wholeness: Studies in Education and Spirituality. (New York: Peter Lang, 2006) 4 Patty Kamvounias, “Legal Studies in Secondary Schools: the New South Wales Experience”, Legal Education Review 21 (1994) 5 (1) 5 Project Zero: Interdisciplinary Studies Project, (Harvard: Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2015) 1 82 a) danger money – extra money or high wages paid to people working in hazardous conditions (Tuck 2000:115); b) bear market – a situation in a stock market or currency market where prices are falling because lots of shareholders are selling (Tuck 2000:52); c) fringe market – any market that exist for a commodity in addition to its main market (Adam 1993:295), etc. As to the word business, it enters as a component not only in two‐word strings but in a variety of grammatical models characteristic of phraseological units that have more complicated structures: get down to business, go into business, go out of business, launch a business, man of business, be open for business, set up in business, open up a business, close down a business, be in business, etc., e.g.: have a head for business – be skilful at commercial activities, e.g.: He'll get a good price for your car, he's got a real head for business (Tuck 2000:69). The ability of these key words to attract other words and form word combinations and set expressions, which acquire a global meaning due to the global semantic transformation of components, makes them the center of business communication. Business English Phraseological Units as Specialized Terms in Specific Domains Anna Bocharnikova Tatiana Fedulenkova Vladimir State University Vladimir, Russia In the sphere of economics and finance there are many set expression with a full or partial transference of meaning which may be referred to phraseological units. The study of such expressions is very important, especially in business and finance, to avoid misunderstanding, because the meaning of the whole word combination cannot be perceived through the meaning of its components, as in: bilateral monopoly – 'a situation where there is only one buyer and one seller in a market' (Tuck 2000: 271), Occam's razor – 'the ruthless analysis of a problem which eliminates all superfluous factors' (Gulland 1994: 198), etc. Such phraseological units serve regularly as terms in specific domains: a) economics: token coinage – 'a system like the one used now in Britain, where coins have a value that is much higher than the value of the metal they contain (Longman 2007: 96); b) banking: secured debenture – 'a loan made to a company, using the assets of the company as security' (Tuck 2000: 378); c) finance: green shoe – 'when the financial institution sells all the available shares in a company's share issue or secondary offering and then sells more, or the number of shares sold in this way' (Longman 2007: 239); d) commerce: price ring – 'a group of sellers in the same industry who have agreed to fix a minimum price for a product' (Tuck 2000: 320); e) marketing: customer profiling – 'the activity of collecting information about the people that you want to sell products to' (Longman 2007: 421); f) stock exchange: bed and breakfasting – 'selling shares just before the end of the financial year and buying them back at the beginning of the next to register a loss for tax purposes (Tuck 2000: 52); etc. 83 The analysis results in about two dozens of specific domains embracing Business English terminology of phraseological character, which might have its pragmatic value in the sphere of communication and in teaching as well. 84 S12 ‐ Research Publication Practices: Challenges for Scholars in a Globalized World Seminar B: Tuesday 8.30 – 10.30 8.30‐8.35 – Seminar presentation 8.35‐8.55 ‐ A contrastive (English‐Czech) study of rhetorical functions of citations in linguistics research articles (Olga Dontcheva Navratilova, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) 8.55‐9.15 ‐ Cross‐cultural variation in Architectural Engineering and Design: a preliminary analysis (Maria Freddi, University of Pavia, Italy) 9.15‐9.35 ‐ Challenges of scholarly publication: A cross‐linguistic and cross‐disciplinary study of criticism in academic book reviews (Sonia Oliver del Olmo, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain) 9.35‐9.55 ‐ Writing a conference abstract in English: A challenge for non‐Anglophone writers (Renata Povolná, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) 9.55‐10.15 – Citation in research writing of native and non‐native English speakers: the interplay of discipline and culture (Jolanta Šinkūnienė, Vilnius University, Lithuania) 10.15‐10.30 – Discussion Seminar C: Tuesday 11.00 – 13.00 11.00 ‐11.20 ‐ Non‐natives’ use of signalling nouns to bolster scientific credibility in English (Geneviève Bordet, Université Paris Diderot Paris 7, France) 11.20‐11.40 – The practices of a novice Mexican scholar in writing for scholarly publication (Pejman Habibie, The University of Western Ontario, Canada) 12.00‐12.20 ‐ Global and local publishing trends of the Social Sciences and Humanities from the research policy perspective (Rūta Petrauskaitė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania) 12.20‐12.40 ‐ Research dissemination through academic.edu and researchgate.net: academic writing perspectives (Josef Schmeid, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany) 12.40‐13.00 – Discussion Seminar D: Tuesday 17.00 – 19.00 17.00‐17.20 ‐ Publishing in English: ELF writers and textual voices (Marina Bondi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy) 17.20‐17.40 ‐ Explaining, defining, concluding…: The use of reformulation markers in ELF and in ENL research articles (Silvia Murillo, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) 85 17.40‐18.00 ‐ Evaluation in research article introductions in the Social Sciences written by English Native Language (ENL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users (Enrique Lafuente, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) 18.00‐18.20 ‐ It would be expected to find differences’: An analysis of it‐clauses with an interpersonal function in ELF RAs (Pilar Mur‐Dueñas, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) 18.20 – 18.40 – Discussion 18.40 ‐19.00 ‐ Final summary and discussion of seminar ABSTRACTS A contrastive (English‐Czech) study of rhetorical functions of citations in linguistics research articles Olga Dontcheva Navratilova Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic This study explores the rhetorical functions of citations in a specialized corpus of linguistics English‐medium research articles by Czech and Anglophone scholars. Drawing on the typologies suggested by Thompson and Tribble (2001) and Petrić (2007), the investigation aims at identifying the rhetorical functions of integral and non‐integral citations in the corpus. The findings of the contrastive analysis of variation in the functions of citations and their distribution across the generic moves of research articles by Anglophone and Czech linguists indicates that there are divergences in the strategies they use to create intertextual connections when attributing information or activities to others, evaluating previous research, indicating gaps, relating their research to the work of others and making claims aiming at extending existing knowledge. The reasons for these divergences are related to the intended readership and the linguacultural context in which Anglophone and Czech linguists strive to construct their identities as members of the global and/or local academic community. Rerferences Petrić, B. 2007. Rhetorical functions of citations in high‐ and low‐rated master’s theses. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 6: 238‐253. Thompson, P. & Tribble, C. 2001. Looking at citations: Using corpora in English for academic purposes. Language Learning & Technology, 5 (3): 91‐105. Cross‐cultural variation in Architectural Engineering and Design: a preliminary analysis Maria Freddi University of Pavia, Italy The proposed paper offers a preliminary analysis of a small sample of research articles (RAs) in English written both by English natives and native Italian scholars to look for variation in thematic development and various features of text organisation (Halliday, Matthiessen 2014), with special focus on linking adverbials (as in Biber et al. 1999). The RAs are from the Architectural Engineering, Industrial Design and Engineering Design fields, at the intersection between the sciences and the humanities. Articles from specialised journals published in the UK and the US are compared to journals published in 86 Italy, with a view to identifying differences and similarity between the writing practices of the same community of researchers coming from different linguistic backgrounds. Corpus methods (particularly comparison of frequency distributions from different samples) are combined with genre analysis and the contrastive rhetoric approach (Connor 1996) as an effective tool to pinpoint traces of lingua‐cultural differences within one field. References Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, E. Finegan 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Connor, U. 1996 Contrastive Rhetoric. Cross‐cultural Aspects of Second Language Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. and C. Matthiessen 2014 Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Routledge. Challenges of scholarly publication: A cross‐linguistic and cross‐disciplinary study of criticism in academic book reviews Sonia Oliver del Olmo Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain The growing and generalized use of English in research publication today has created the need for non‐native scholars not only to learn English, but to have a good command of the discourse features of all research genres (Swales 2004:43).This pressure to publish in English has made visible the existence of certain rhetorical and epistemological differences across languages and, in particular, between Spanish specialized discourse and that of the Anglophone tradition. In this sense, it is within professional discourses, that the appropriate use of modality becomes vital for authors presenting their knowledge in their scientific communities. Although hedging typical realizations might be considered modal verbs, they are not the only devices available. Therefore, this paper based on a corpus of 60 Book Reviews (BR) in English and 60 BR in Spanish sets out to find reasons behind the existence of a wide range of linguistic forms through functional and conventional associations. And by showing the factors influencing the choice within hedging expressions we will explain the meanings conveyed by each lexical and grammatical choice both in Spanish and English academic BRs in Medicine and Applied Linguistics. References Swales, J.M. 2004. Research Genres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Writing a conference abstract in English: A challenge for non‐Anglophone writers Renata Povolná, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic With the growing internationalization of all scholarship, English indisputably performs the role of an international lingua franca, and publishing in international journals is now almost synonymous with publication in English. Since publication can be viewed as documentary evidence that the writer qualifies for membership of the target discourse community, the use of English as an additional language has become an important prerequisite for scholars who intend to present their research to an academic audience at international conferences. Conference organizers perform the role of gate‐keepers who have the right to accept or refuse an abstract for a presentation and subsequent publication. Thus scholars from non‐Anglophone backgrounds have to master the writing of this research‐progress genre because otherwise they may risk being refused participation at conferences and publication in conference proceedings. 87 The paper analyses the rhetorical organization of conference abstracts written by Anglophone writers and others from countries where Slavonic languages are spoken. The findings of this corpus‐based genre analysis reveal cross‐cultural variation in the rhetorical structure of conference abstracts and linguistic realizations of rhetorical moves applied by abstract writers from different backgrounds. The paper also suggests recommendations for future conference calls and novice writers who intend to publish in English. Citation in research writing of native and non‐native English speakers: the interplay of discipline and culture Jolanta Šinkūnienė Vilnius University, Lithuania The continuous growth of the importance of English as the lingua franca of the research world has triggered a number of studies into the disciplinary and cultural factors that influence the way academic texts are shaped and developed (Fløttum et al. 2006, Hyland 2005, inter alia). One of the key elements in research writing is citation, as it performs a number of functions essential to the scientific exchange of knowledge. The focus of this paper, based on a self‐compiled corpus of 60 articles in English, is on citational practices in research articles written by Lithuanian and British English speakers in sociology, literature and linguistics. The study investigates frequency distribution, syntactic integration and types of citations in the research papers written by scholars of two different lingua‐cultural backgrounds in three different disciplines, but in one language, in an attempt to find out key influencing factors in the use of citations. References Fløttum, K., Dahl, T. & Kinn, T. 2006. Academic Voices: Across Languages and Disciplines. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hyland, K. 2005. Metadiscourse: Exploring Interaction in Writing. London/New York: Continuum. Non‐natives’ use of signalling nouns to bolster scientific credibility in English Geneviève Bordet Université Paris Diderot Paris 7, France In a globalized world, the publishing process is regulated by a strict gatekeeping process. One decisive criterion is the researcher’s capacity to conform with the requirements of a genre. The focus here is set on the use of “shell nouns” determined by “this” as a cohesive device in PhD abstracts written in English by English and French native writers. So far the role of the PhD abstract has attracted little interest although it provides interesting insight into the enculturation process of novice researchers in a discipline. This process involves acquiring the ability to demonstrate credibility through an adequate selection of keywords. A case in point is the selection of shell nouns determined by “this” in an abstract. Based on a comparable interdisciplinary corpus of 500 abstracts, the role of determined shell nouns is studied so as to 1) assess their impact on the textual cohesion 2) evaluate the connection between the selected terms and the discipline’s epistemological values 3) consider the influence of the writer’s linguistic origin on the handling of this device. This study aims at assessing to what extent non‐native (French) writers are at a disadvantage in achieving cohesion and thus the resulting credibility. 88 The practices of a novice Mexican scholar in writing for scholarly publication Pejman Habibie The University of Western Ontario, Canada Given global competitiveness for quality research articulated through scholarly publication, this study examined scholarly publication practices of a novice scholar in a Mexican academic context. The study explored (1) the challenges she faced in writing for scholarly publication in English‐medium academic journals, and (2) the ways in which she developed the academic literacies necessary for scholarly publication and was supported in Mexican academic context in communicating her work through scholarly publication. The theoretical framework drew on the notions of Discourse Community (Swales, 1990) and Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The methodological orientation adopted a qualitative case study design. The data were collected through a semi‐structured interview with a Spanish‐as‐a‐first language scholar in a university in Mexico. Knowledge produced (a) provides insights into scholarly publication practices of Latin American emerging academics, and (b) contributes to the knowledge base about best practices to strengthen EAL scholars’ visibility in global scholarship. References Lave, J., & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Global and local publishing trends of the Social Sciences and Humanities from the research policy perspective Rūta Petrauskaitė Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania The area of SSH is known for their relatively more significant national or regional orientation. Many social scientists and humanities scholars find it more appropriate to convey the essence of their subject matters in their mother tongues. Writing in a domestic language also makes it more accessible to local audiences, to whom the findings are likely to be more relevant. Research policy of most countries is heading towards a global drive and a prevailing trend of internationalization of research based on English as a lingua franca. Research evaluation as the main instrument for research policy at present undergoes a major shift moving from a traditional bibliometric approach based on citation indexes and other impact measurements towards alternative means of measuring research impact, specifically its societal impact. It is worthwhile to observe how this shift might influence the choice of the publishing language. Moreover, a wide spreading open access approach has its impact on the role of a language. The paper takes into account the changing situation around research and its evaluation related to preferred language of publication in non‐English speaking countries. It is based on a wide overview of the academic journals of SSH, published in Lithuania, the trends of their internationalization. Research dissemination through academic.edu and researchgate.net: academic writing perspectives Josef Schmeid Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany This contribution puts linguistic publications in a wider frame of academic research cycles, in which researchers should collaborate to contribute to the advancement of learning. It is 89 not surprising therefore that social media platforms have been suggested as a modern opportunity to share research data and results, esp. with scholars from “less privileged” institutions with limited access to international journals or young researchers with a limited personal network. This critical evaluation of platforms like academic.edu and researchgate.net starts from participant observation, includes texts from the on‐line and published debate on the platforms’ usefulness and finishes with some personal advice for young and experienced scholars. For the linguist, both platforms are also an interesting source of data, if we want to analyse differences in national research traditions and publication genres in a wide sense. The usage of modal verbs (may/might, should, must) or preferences of personal pronouns (1st person singular of plural, 2nd person) serve as examples to discuss cultural differences between European (esp. British, German and Italian) and African and Asian scholars. All these publishing considerations have to be discussed critically in a European forum. Seminar D: Tuesday 17.00 – 19.00 Publishing in English: ELF writers and textual voices Marina Bondi University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy The paper explores a small corpus of unrevised journal articles written by academic language users of English for publication purposes (SciELF). The SciELF corpus is contrasted with a corpus of published articles for general reference. The comparison highlights differences in markers of authorial voice and in forms of introducing other textual voices. Authorial voice is seen as a complex set of complementary choices manifesting the writer’s presence in the text (forms of self mention and illocutionary frames) and his/her ongoing dialogue with the reader and the scientific community (prominently but selectively included by reporting other voices). A preliminary overview of keywords highlights significant variation in the use of expressions of stance and epistemicity (both underrepresented in SciELF), logical connectors (e.g. thereby, thus) as well as in expressions used to introduce other textual voices and report diverging or converging voices. Closer attention is paid to verbs of reporting, looking at the preference for prototypical general verbs (study, analyze, emphasize) and the limited use of more specific or more ambiguous verbs such as assume, predict, suggest, etc.). The results are discussed with reference to the notions of ELF, EIL and language brokering. Explaining, defining, concluding…: The use of reformulation markers in ELF and in ENL research articles Silvia Murillo Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain Reformulation/ paraphrase is a prominent strategy in academic spoken ELF (Mauranen, 2012). In order to explore whether this is also a common strategy in written ELF communication, in this paper I will contrast reformulation markers and their uses in an ELF corpus of research papers and in a comparable ENL corpus, focusing on the processes they introduce (specification, explanation, definition, denomination, conclusion, etc.). For these purposes, I will analyse the SciELF corpus (2015, University of Helsinki), a component of the WrELFA corpus which consists of 150 unedited research papers of both hard and soft science disciplines, and a comparable subset of the articles in ENL of the corpus SERAC (2008, University of Zaragoza), including articles in Applied Linguistics, Business Management, Sociology, Mechanical Engineering, Urology, and Food Technology. 90 I will try to assess if any significant differences can be found between the two corpora in the specific choice of reformulation markers and the processes introduced, and also in the different “similects” (Mauranen, 2012) of the SciELF corpus. References Mauranen, A. 2012. Exploring ELF: Academic English Shaped by Non‐native Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evaluation in research article introductions in the Social Sciences written by English Native Language (ENL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users Enrique Lafuente Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain Evaluation is a key rhetorical strategy in article introductions, where researchers require their whole rhetorical arsenal to carve a niche for their work and increase their chances of publication. Research indicates that the way authors use evaluative language may be affected by their linguistic and cultural background. Hence, non‐native English researchers may struggle to comply with the rhetorical expectations of native gatekeepers when trying to publish their work internationally. The present paper tries to investigate cultural and linguistic differences in the use of evaluation in RA introductions in the social sciences. To do this, two comparative subcorpora of RA introductions in the social sciences will be used, one including published texts written by ENL researchers and a second corpus of introductions extracted from RAs manuscripts written by ELF users as part of the Sci‐ELF corpus. Concordance output will be produced electronically and read in context to identify and classify evaluative acts. This analysis will try to identify differences in the use of evaluation between ENL and ELF users. More specifically it will seek to establish whether RA manuscripts written by ELF users tend to display preferred functional values, or significant variations in the type of value and entity evaluated. It would be expected to find differences’: An analysis of it‐clauses with an interpersonal function in ELF RAs Pilar Mur‐Dueñas Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain Publishing in English‐medium international journals is becoming more and more necessary for academics to pursue their scholarly careers and gain recognition within their field of study. In this context, a great deal of academic knowledge is produced using English as a lingua franca among peers from different linguacultural backgrounds. It is the aim of this paper to study written scholarly ELF communication, focusing specifically on a grammatical structure, the it‐clause fulfilling an interpersonal function. This construction can serve to encode attitudinal evaluation (e.g. it is essential to/that), and epistemic evaluation (e.g. it may be argued that, it is likely that/to, it is evident that). The interpersonal use made of it‐clauses in the Sci‐ELF corpus, consisting of 150 unrevised RA manuscripts (University of Helsinki, Finland), will be compared to its use in a comparable corpus of ENL published RAs, a section of SERAC (University of Zaragoza, Spain). The analysis will focus on its overall frequency of use, the rhetorical interpersonal functions fulfilled (attitudinal, hedging, boosting), the particular lexical choices made in terms of evaluative adjectives and verbs, and the degree of modalisation encoded. The analysis will contribute to a much needed description of ELF in written academic discourse. 91 S13: ESP and specialist domains: exclusive, inclusive or complementary approaches? Convenors Shaeda Isani (France) Miguel Angel Campos Pardillos (Spain) Marcin Laczek (Poland) Michel Van der Yeught (France) SEMINAR A: MONDAY 22ND AUGUST 16.00‐18.00 FOCUS: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL APPROACHES Susan Birch‐Bécaas, University of Bordeaux, France The ESP teacher/researcher and domain‐specific expertise: reflecting on necessary skills and knowledge. ESP has traditionally been a “practitioner’s movement” (Johns 2013: 6) devoting its research to establishing learner needs, and Hyland (2013: 107) refers to “research‐based language education”. However, Van der Yeught (2010) describes specialist languages as independent knowledge domains which are objects of study in their own right. Learner needs are established by discourse analysis, genre analysis and study of professional communities but what type of specialized knowledge is required of ESP teachers and what degree of expertise in the domain? The training of ESP teachers is of particular importance in the current French higher education context as more and more posts are opened for university lecturers in ESP, but qualified candidates are lacking. In this paper, we propose to examine the role of the ESP teacher and the extent to which knowledge of specialist domains makes for successful ESP teaching. We will focus in particular on the domain of ERPP (English for Research and Publication Purposes) and courses for Masters and doctoral students to illustrate the areas in which ESP teachers need to be competent. We will also discuss the necessary collaboration with subject specialists as inside informants and team teachers with the growing move towards CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) courses and internationalization in European higher education. References Hyland, K. 2013. “ESP and Writing”. In Paltridge and Starfield (eds) The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, UK. Johns, A. M. 2013. “The History of English for Specific Purposes”. In Paltridge and Starfield (eds) The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, UK. Van der Yeught, M. 2010. Editorial ASp, 57. Galina Gumovskaya, National Research University HSE, Moscow, Russia LSP: English for Language Pedagogy In accordance with the LSP classification put forward by T. Hutchinson and A. Waters (CUP, 1987), English for Teaching is an outcome of English for Social Sciences. It pursues academic purposes in different spheres of knowledge, Language Pedagogy among them. As a teacher, I have gained appropriate expertise in the Language Pedagogy domain during my twenty years of experience at Moscow State Pedagogical University. In this respect, my approach to the theme problematized by S13 seems to be inclusive and it results in successful ESP research‐projects of my Master's degree students in the area of pedagogical terminology and complex interaction with pupils and peers. The empiric material is the well‐known and much discussed issues of The TKT Course (CUP) and Teaching by Principles, An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy 92 (Pearson/Longman). The research contributes to the development of students’ professional competence in Language Pedagogy. Being involved in collective research, students contribute to the development of principles and approaches to theoretical aspects of LSP as a verbal system of professional communication. They come to the conclusion that LSP is not fundamentally different from LGP in terms of linguistic usage but differs rather in terms of particular modes of language that are common in different professional settings. Philippe Millot, University of Lyon, France “It goes without saying”: Conceptions of competence in English as a professional lingua franca The nature of competence in English in professional settings is very often taken for granted: English is generally seen as a business language used for fulfilling business purposes regardless of the professional domain. However, some advances in managerial and ESP research suggest that the contents of competence tend to vary from one professional setting to another, each socio‐professional network having its own way of considering what matters in language competence. These findings suggest in turn that competence may certainly be defined by a set of core features but, also, by a very broad set of conceptions defined by the professionals themselves. In this paper, we present an ongoing study of how French professionals experience the concept of competence in English as a Lingua Franca in their day‐to‐day practice. The study is based on interviews, an online survey, and a corpus analysis. The data originate from various types of organisations (small and medium‐sized companies, and large multinationals) and various specialised domains such as information technologies, human resource management, and engineering. Our results show that competence in English as a professional lingua franca is a multifaceted concept including ordinary talk, professional styles, deviation from Standard English, as well as organisational and domain‐bound terminologies. Teaching in this field should therefore embrace these realities. Caroline Peynaud, Grenoble‐Alpes University, France Defining press genres: domain‐specific knowledge and ESP competence in question. Press discourse is a highly regulated type of discourse, made up of specific formats following precise rules, explicitly defined and imposed by journalists themselves. Numerous textbooks and professional documents detail the genres that are found in the press and the elements that compose them. Press professionals thus position themselves as discourse specialists having a reflective and prescriptive practice related to their writing activity. In this context, what can the positioning of an ESP specialist studying press genres be? According to Swales (1990: 55), professionals may produce a nomenclature that can be taken into account in analysing genres. This paper aims at clarifying the relative role of the knowledge produced by the actors of the field and of ESP researcher competence in genre analysis. One of the genres that has been most precisely described by press professionals is the feature article, defined as a style of writing focusing on people rather than on events, as opposed to hard news (Ellis, 2001: 85). Confronting the point of view of professionals with the analysis of a corpus of feature articles evidences the fact that domain‐specific knowledge cannot be ignored, but neither can it be substituted for ESP competence in the study of genres. References Swales, John. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: CUP. Ellis, Barbara. 2001. The copy‐editing and headline handbook. Basic Books. Begonia Soneira Beloso, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain 93 Deciphering Archispeak from a non‐native linguist's perspective There is a reasonable amount of field expertise needed when dealing with an ESP variety. In the case of Architecture, many practitioners are reluctant to think that their jargon can be learned, analyzed, taught or understood by an outsider. This is true to a certain extent: a pure outsider would have difficulty interpreting this discourse due to its technicality and the many linguistic boundaries drawn by its knowledge community whose gate‐keeping strategies go beyond mere terminological needs. The study of English for Architecture becomes crucial for those non‐native students and professionals who need English as their professional lingua franca when challenged by a labor market which is as global as the discipline itself. In this context, the role of the ESP specialist becomes crucial as a course/materials designer. There are a number of intermediate steps to be followed before even envisaging the possibility of describing this variety of ESP and most of them have to do with conquering the content of this technical language mainly through its lexis. This paper aims at displaying the main challenges, tools and strategies to be followed in order to succeed in this task. SEMINAR B: TUESDAY 23RD AUGUST 8.30‐10.30 FOCUS: EXPLORING INTERFACE TOOLS BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND DOMAINS Natalie Kübler, University Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France Bridging the gap between domain‐specific and linguistic knowledge in ESP: a context‐based approach Teaching or doing research in ESP means that the English teacher has to adapt to the different domains s/he teaches in. As it is difficult for ESP teachers or researchers to acquire domain‐ specific knowledge in all domains, we argue in favour of an approach which allows them to adapt to any domain in which they have to teach or do research. This paper explores a context‐ oriented linguistic approach (Gledhill & Kübler 2016), which enables linguists and practitioners to acquire specialised knowledge in ESP. First, we explain how the corpus‐driven methodology adopted here develops into three phases: becoming familiar with the specialist domain, identifying the lexico‐grammatical patterns specific to the specialist domain, and getting used to the specific phraseology of the domain (Kübler 2014). This approach relies on the assumption that ESP phraseology differs from English for General Purposes and that phraseology is different according to the specific domains (see, for example, Tribble’s “local prosodies”, 2000). We intend to show the necessity of acquiring the theoretical and methodological approach corpus linguistics provides, in order to acquire specialist knowledge. We demonstrate, with a few examples taken from our teaching experience and contacts with experts, how this corpus approach works and how it helps linguists and teachers to take an informed stance towards experts in the domain. Finally, these examples, relying on linguistic evidence, allow us to explain why acquiring specialist knowledge (Van der Yeught 2010) and interacting with experts is necessary for ESP teaching and research. Gledhill, Chris & Kübler, Natalie. 2016. “What can linguistic approaches bring to English for Specific Purposes?” Asp, 69, 2016: 65‐95 Kübler, Natalie. 2014. “Mettre en oeuvre la linguistique de corpus à l'Université”. Les Cahiers de l'ACEDLE: Revue RDLC, Vol.11, n°1, pp.37‐77. ISSN: 1958‐5772, <http://acedle.org/spip.php?rubrique230> Tribble, C. 2000. “Genres, keywords, teaching: Towards a pedagogic account of the language of project proposals”. In Rethinking Language Pedagogy from a Corpus Perspective, L. Burnard & T. McEnery (eds), 74‐90. New York: Peter Lang. 94 Van der Yeught, Michel. 2010. "Editorial", ASp [on line], 57, retrieved 22 February 2016. URL: http://asp.revues.org/930 Olga Ranus, Poznan University of Life Sciences, Poland Coaching principles and techniques as means of access to specialised domains in ESP Coaching is defined as a development process through which a person is supported while achieving a personal or professional competence result or a goal. It is also described as the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another. Translating it into the realm of language teaching, the role of a teacher is to support and to motivate students to make their own conscious decisions about their learning processes. With its focus on defined goals, Coaching and related disciplines such as Neurolinguistic Programming can be of great importance when it comes to teaching English for Specific Purposes where content knowledge and specialist domain are of unique relevance. Although Coaching and NLP have its sceptics (particularly as far as teaching applicability is concerned), there are sound reasons to believe they are compatible with ESP classroom practice. The purpose of the presentation is first to describe the role of the ESP teacher as a language coach and, second, to show how Coaching principles and techniques can be used in teaching ESP to Engineering and Life Sciences students. Steven Breunig, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Literate expertise: A complementary strategy for ESP To address the conflict between the requirements of language learning and domain‐specific expertise within English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this paper presents a complementary strategy based on the theoretical construct of “literate expertise” (Scardamalia & Bereiter 1991). Literate expertise focuses on the dynamics between language and domain knowledge. Specifically, it highlights the interactive role of writing and reading for transforming domain‐ specific knowledge through developing an elaborate set of problem‐solving strategies for engaging with texts, even texts embodying linguistic and domain knowledge unlike one’s own. Following an introduction to literate expertise, the paper reviews relevant research on language and literacy in different disciplines (e.g. Shanahan et al. 2011), to develop a complementary strategy for ESP based on literate expertise. It ends with a presentation of a pedagogical experience for L2 students of English Studies and a consultation between an ESP practitioner and an expert within the specialized field of medicine at the University of Southern Denmark. The theoretical and practical implications are related, including macro‐textual and micro‐ structural elements (Braidwood & McAnsh 2013). For ESP practitioners and specialists as language learners, literate expertise provides a theoretical frame for reflection and contributes to practice (Belcher 2006), by stimulating meaning construction within and across specialized domains for enhancing knowledge and for communicating in a conceptually coherent way. References Belcher, Diane. 2006. “English for Specific Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined Futures” in Worlds of Work, Study, and Everyday Life. TESOL Quarterly. Vol. 40. No. 1. 133‐156. Braidwood, Eva & Suzy McAnsh. 2013. "The flowering of EAP/ESP: Customised support for the development of communicative competence in writing in the disciplines”. In Language Learning in Higher Education. Vol. 2. Iss. 1. 173‐198. Scardamalia, Marlene & Carl Bereiter. 1991. “Literate expertise”. In Toward a general theory of expertise. K. Anders Ericsson and Jacqui Smith, eds. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 172‐194. 95 Shanahan, Cynthia & Timothy Shanahan, Cynthia Misischia. 2011. “Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines: History, Mathematics and Chemistry”. Journal of Literacy Research. Vol. 23. No. 4. 393‐429. Charlène Meyers, University of Mons, Belgium Metaphors as Linguistic Keys to Access Knowledge Metaphors are an essential part of LSP that shape, among other aspects, terminology and phraseology. Indeed, metaphors in science can be constitutive of a theory (Boyd, 1993 [1979]) or even form coherent webs (“réseaux cohérents”) (Prandi, 2012), revealing the conceptual essence of a particular domain. Until recently, metaphors were only seen as popularization tools to help novices understand a specialized domain. But studies tend to show that experts use metaphors in specialized contexts (Resche, 2012; Vandaele, 2002; Oliveira, 2009). Even so, metaphors are not often taken into account, especially in teaching specialized translation. We argue that awareness of metaphors should be emphasized in translation classes as they can help draw conceptual links between language as it is used by experts and field‐specific knowledge, both aspects being essential to translators. Taking as a primary hypothesis that metaphors can help translators understand the logical structure of a text as well as the characteristics of the concepts they define, we intend to show, through the analysis of examples from trainee translators, that metaphors can give a powerful and quick insight into knowledge in a sight‐translation context with preparation time being limited to 10 minutes. References Boyd, R. 1993 [1979]. “Metaphor and theory change: What is ‘metaphor’ a metaphorfor ?” in A. Ortony (dir.), Metaphor and Thought. 481‐532. Cambridge: CUP. Oliveira, Isabelle. 2009. Nature et fonctions de la métaphore en science : l’exemple de la cardiologie. Paris: L’Harmattan. Prandi, M., & Rossi, M. 2012. "Les métaphores dans la création de terminologie". Terminologie: textes. Discours et accès aux savoirs spécialisés. 7‐19. Brest: Glat. Maria Angeles Ruiz‐Moneva, University of Zaragoza, Spain Teaching ESP in Spain in Technical, Legal and Medical Domains The aim of this paper is to briefly analyse the current panorama of teaching ESP in Spain and determine whether there are significant differences depending on the branch of knowledge concerned. Recurrent traits have been found regarding aspects such as the facility to cope with learners’ needs, or the importance of familiarising learners with the specific lexis, genres and also the discourse and rhetorical conventions of specialised professional registers. On the basis of my teaching experience, I shall focus next on the areas of Computing, Agricultural Engineering, Medicine, Economics and Legal English. First, in the case of Computing, learners were far more interested in practising oral and written skills than in technical vocabulary. This is certainly due to the fact that the basis of most of such lexis is English, and so learners are already familiar with it. Second, in the fields of Agricultural Engineering, Medicine, or Economics, a discourse approach based on the specific text‐related functions was proven to be a successful teaching focus. Most importantly, it helped establish communication between learners with a specialist background and teachers with training in philology and linguistics. Finally, in the area of Legal English and legal translation, the approach adopted was based on the rhetorical features and conventions associated with each type of legal document. It was extremely helpful to apply translation techniques along the lines proposed by Alcaraz and 96 Hughes (2002). Learners’ progressive familiarisation with the distinctive traits of the English legal system, in contrast to the Spanish one, was also found useful. Moreover, in all cases, students have shown increasing interest in acquiring transversal skills, so that, apart from dealing with specialised texts, they also show interest in such activities as job interviews, drafting CVs, letters of application, etc. SEMINAR D: TUESDAY 23RD AUGUST 17.00‐19.00 FOCUS: APPROACHES THROUGH SPECIALISED DOMAINS Katia Peruzzo, University of Trieste, Italy Legal English in the classroom: the IUSLIT experience In 2011, the University of Trieste set up the Department of Legal, Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies (IUSLIT) organised into two sections, Legal Studies and Studies in Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators, which has given a new boost to research on legal translation and interpreting. One of the projects where the need for collaboration between ESP and domain‐specific expertise has clearly come to the fore is the translation of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure into European English (Gialuz et al. 2014), completed by an interdisciplinary team of translators and lawyers. In the light of this project and based on teaching experiences carried out in both IUSLIT Sections, this paper provides some reflections on the importance of specialised knowledge in ESP teaching and argues for collaborative academic efforts in order to train two types of ESP practitioners: (1) translators with sufficient knowledge to understand both the pitfalls of legal English and the multi‐layered legal scenarios in which English is actually used, and (2) lawyers sensitive to how English is actually used in different legal contexts. Such collaborative attitudes in the learning environment make it possible for the two professional profiles to work together more effectively by both raising awareness of the role of English as Europe’s lingua franca and spurring further research in this field. References Gialuz M., Luparia L. & Scarpa F. (eds). 2014. The Italian Code of Criminal Procedure. Critical Essays and English Translations. Padova: Cedam. Miguel Angel Campos Pardillos, University of Alicante, Spain Legal English in Europe: the evolution of English vocabulary as a response to non‐native culture‐specific items The traditional approach to the analysis and teaching of Legal English and its translation has focused on its specific contextual framework, the common law system. Thus, most studies have dwelled on the fact that many terms designate institutions or procedures (e.g. “solicitor”, “queen’s counsel”, “trust”) which do not exist, or are substantially different, in other systems. However, this approach to legal English as a rara avis may lead us to disregard the fact that English is also used for international communication between non‐native speakers, and that the same specific referential problems also occur when describing many other legal languages and systems, even within the same legal tradition. However, since the untranslatable inevitably has to be translated, the English language used in international contexts has risen up to the task of acting as a lingua franca, which has resulted in a number of terms which either did not exist in English, or calques modifying the present usage of existent words. We shall examine a number of such creations, both as a description of the state of the language and as a factor to consider in our teaching materials so that they are more useful for international communication and for drafters and translators. 97 Jessica Stark, Aix‐Marseille University, France Disciplinary knowledge and language specialisation: the case of English for diplomacy This presentation addresses the issue of the intersection between disciplinary knowledge and language specialisation in English for diplomacy. The question of whether a form of disciplinary knowledge for diplomats exists at all has long been debated (Busk 1967; Smith 2011). Diplomacy is often presented as an activity where practice and experience lead to "tacit" forms of knowledge (Loriol et al. 2008) – the so‐called "art of diplomacy" – which can be considered more important than disciplinary knowledge per se. By drawing on insights provided by the writings of diplomats themselves, we suggest that they do master a type of overarching professional knowledge rooted in specific communicative practices. These involve cross‐cultural interaction and negotiation skills that may have an impact on language specialisation in the domain (Kurbalija 2002). References Busk, Douglas. 1967. The Craft of Diplomacy: Mechanics and Development of National Representation Overseas. London: Pall Mall Press. Kurbalija, Jovan. (ed). 2002. Knowledge and Diplomacy. Malta: DiploPublishing. Loriol, Marc, François Piotet & David Delfolie (2008). "Le travail diplomatique. Un métier et un art". Rapport de recherche pour le ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes (MAEE), Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne‐CNRS, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Travail – UMR 8593. Smith, Raymond E. 2011. The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books. Fanny Domenec, University Paris 2, France ESP’s added value in approaches to corporate discourse The latest ABC conference, which gathered scholars from various fields ranging from discourse analysis and technology development to management and stakeholder relations, brings evidence of the increasing need for multidisciplinary approaches to specialized varieties of English. This paper aims to determine and illustrate the relevance of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in such a diverse field of research. The main issues addressed are: a) the multidisciplinary nature of ESP, b) its application to corporate discourse and c) the need for inclusive approaches to study specialized discourses and milieus. A literature review explains how ESP uses language as a starting point to understand textual evolutions in communicative practices, but also the culture of the milieu under study and the general context (Van der Yeught 2010, Resche 2013, Isani 2014, Williams 2014). To characterize the specific contribution of ESP to the study of corporate discourse, a comparative approach is adopted, contrasting a sample of papers in discourse analysis and management with a selection of papers in ESP. Results suggest that by bringing insight into the production and reception of specialized discourses, ESP is both innovative and inclusive. As such, interactions between ESP researchers and their peers in other fields of English studies or in specialist domains should be strongly encouraged. References Isani, S. 2014. “Ethnography as a research‐support discipline in ESP teaching, learning and research in the French academic context”. ASp 66, 27‐39. Resche, C. 2013. Economic Terms and Beyond: Capitalising on the Wealth of Notions. Bern: Peter Lang. Van der Yeught, M. 2010. “Éditorial”. ASp 57, 1‐10. 98 Williams, C. 2014. “The future of ESP studies: building on success, exploring new paths, avoiding pitfalls”. ASp 66, 137‐150. Maria Teresa Musacchio & Raffaella Panizzon, University of Padua, Italy Learning the language of emergencies: introducing post‐graduate students to the translation and adaptation of a specialised magazine One of the milestones to be achieved in the training of advanced language and translation students is the ability to acquire domain‐specific knowledge, terminology and phraseology at some degree, as well as the ability to reframe concepts and adapt them to the system of knowledge of a target culture in a relatively short amount of time. Nowadays, teachers can make use of a number of online and offline resources to guide learners in this process such as corpora, termbanks, manuals, journal articles, online tutorials and the like. In the present work we discuss the complementary approach applied to introduce post‐graduate language and translation students at the University of Padua to the body of knowledge necessary for the translation from English into Italian of the magazine of the European project Slándáil (607691) on emergency management (EM), and to the successful management of language resources such as corpora and termbanks. Challenges arising from the specific features of this field as well as from inherent cultural differences in the conceptualisation of EM will be discussed. The project was addressed to a real‐life lay and semi‐specialised audience and the Italian translation was released in January 2016 to the Italian project partners. 99 S14. Teaching Practices in ESP Today Convenors Danica Milosevic, College of Applied Technical Sciences, Nis, Serbia Cédric Sarré, Université Paris‐Sorbonne, France Alessandra Molino, University of Turin, Italy, Shona Whyte, Université de Nice, France Session A – Wednesday 24 August 14:00 to 16:00 : Teaching ESP in business and humanities/social sciences 14h00‐14h25: Barbora Chovancová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic “Soft skills and mediation in legal English: Towards a new methodological approach in ESP” In the last couple of decades, the field of English for Specific Purposes has become well established in the academia, as attested by the growing number of courses as well as textbooks that are catering to this segment of ELT. While ESP theory has emphasized the necessity of paying close attention to the students’ immediate and future contexts of language use, and thus carrying out relevant needs analysis (Huhta et al. 2013), we can see – not infrequently – that the practice has been lagging behind. Thus, many ESP syllabi are still concerned with teaching general English that is merely “enriched” with a significant component of terminology of a given field. This paper argues that one of the central components of ESP courses, as revealed by the process of ‘transferred needs analysis’ (Chovancová 2014), consists of soft skills. Those go beyond fluency of speech and accuracy of terminology since they involve the students’ ability to effectively communicate and negotiate in work‐related professional contexts. This is particularly acute in the area of law where a significant amount of work consists of legal professionals mediating technical information to lay people. Identifying this situation as ‘intralanguage translation’ or ‘mediation’ (CEFRL), the paper presents several activities for developing this area of soft skills and demonstrates that this approach combines several desirable effects that range from the use of authentic materials, presentation of believable scenarios and practice of reformulation rather than verbatim reproduction of discipline‐specific content (such as citing acts and regulations). 14h25‐14h50: Gaetano Falco, Università degli Studi di Bari A. Moro, Italy “Developing a cloud‐based sharing knowledge‐environment for learners in English for Economic and Financial Purposes” Ever since its birth in the 1960s, research on ESP teaching practices has been the concern of different disciplines, e.g. rhetorical studies (Trimble 1985), needs analysis (Dudley‐ Evans & St. John 1998; Flowerdew 2013), genre studies (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993, Dudley‐Evans 2000), discourse analysis (Hyland 2000), corpus linguistics (Flowerdew 2014). This paper suggests a methodology for teaching English for Economic and Financial Purposes (EEFP); a multidisciplinary approach is recommended, which integrates theoretical contributions from cognitive linguistics (Evans and Green 2006) and ethnography (Dressen‐Hammouda 2014) and takes advantage of new information technologies, with a view of achieving user‐generated contents (Stone 2009). The proposal stems from a 10‐year‐long experience as a teacher and researcher of translation of EEFP in an MA course at the University of Bari. Considering that: a) EEFP entails proper decisions at terminological, syntactic and genre level; b) the involvement of a specialist is a sine qua 100 non to improve students’ cognition; c) multimodality can support students’ learning, our aim is to use an emic perspective, which is notoriously “collaborative” (Dressen‐ Hammouda 2014), in order to develop students’ encyclopedic knowledge in EEFP. For this purpose, students are trained to use Cmap Tools to build concept maps on specific subjects and share them in the cloud for feedback from experts in Economics and Finance. 14h50‐15h15: Irina Keshabyan, University of Murcia, Spain “Intercultural Competence in Teaching Business English” This work explores the importance of Intercultural Competence in teaching Business English (BE), as its main aim is to show the role of this type of competence with respect to the awareness of cultural differences to communicate successfully in a foreign language, English in this case, in distinct business contexts. To achieve this, some theoretical background on the concepts of Communicative Competence, Intercultural Competence, and BE, as a part of ESP, is offered. Also, the relationship between Intercultural Competence and BE is examined. To give an overall view of the Communicative Competence the works of Hymes (1966) and Bachman and Palmer (1980) are analysed. At the same time, the works of Hofstede (2010) and Frendo (2005) amongst others provide an insight into different dimensions of culture and the growing importance of Intercultural Competence in teaching BE. Newton et al (2009) emphasise the intercultural factor in communicative language teaching and learning so as to enable different people to communicate successfully in distinct contexts. In this respect, it is important to understand that BE needs a specific approach to teaching as it varies from general English and represents a variant of International English. In fact, learners need to do business in English, not just speak about business in English (Frendo, 2005). Finally, a sample study is presented to show how intercultural competence can be introduced into the BE course design. 15h15‐15h40: Linda Terrier & Christelle Maury, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France “Meeting the challenges of teaching specialised varieties of English to first year students in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences: a preliminary study” In order to try to meet the challenge of putting together a curriculum that would allow for an introduction to specialised varieties of English while taking into account the specificities of first‐year students in the Humanities and in Social Sciences, the teaching team at our University has decided to build a single English course for all first year students of ESP (2000 of them each year), regardless of their English level (which ranges from A0 to C1). This course was built following the research on learner‐centred approaches and environments and on learner autonomy. Students are in particular asked to complete two projects which are to be presented orally during the final exam: the first project is personally‐oriented while the second one is domain‐specific. For this second project, students are asked to develop a project around their domain of study. For the 2016 ESSE conference and the first seminar on “Teaching Practices in ESP Today”, we will analyse in what ways this specific course actually meets the challenges of introducing first‐year Humanities and Social Sciences students to relevant varieties of specialised English. To this purpose, we will be analysing the eight hundred “project books” that the students will be handing in during their final exams in order to determine to what extent students have entered the realm of a specialized variety of English. This will be measured using three criteria: the link between their academic discipline and the actual 101 theme they have chosen for their project; the lexical fields they have developed; and the degree of specialization of the documents they have chosen (using criteria such as source, domain‐specificity and level of expertise in the field required to grasp the content of the document). We will then correlate the degree of entrance into the realm of a specialized variety of English with two independent variables: that of academic discipline and that of initial level of expertise in English. The underlying hypothesis is twofold: first that some academic disciplines within the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences may favour the introduction of specialized varieties of English to first‐year students; secondly, that the better the initial level in English, the easier such an introduction will be. Finally, we expect that overall motivation for the course (as measured by the final grade) will influence the extent to which the students have been able to refine their knowledge of a specialized variety of English. 15h40‐16h00: Viviana Gaballo, University of Macerata, Italy “A Holistic Approach to ESP Teaching and Learning” Integrating Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into the ESP classroom has become common practice in this Information Age and Knowledge Society. As part and parcel of the learning process, technology makes a wide range of tools available to learners, encouraging new ways of sharing and constructing knowledge. CMC has become an essential feature in ESP settings for its great capacity in building an online community of practice that extends beyond classroom boundaries. Out‐of‐class activities now complement classroom learning by involving learners in using the foreign language for real communication purposes. While current literature on ESP generally addresses only one theoretical foundation or one research methodology (e.g., discourse analysis), this paper responds to the need for having multiple theoretical perspectives coalesce to allow a more holistic view of ESP pedagogy, and for combining social and cognitive constructivist approaches. While focusing on the triangulation of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC), Networked Learning (NL), and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as applied to ESP classes in BA and MA Political Sciences and Communication Studies programmes, this paper provides examples of how ESP learners’ content‐related and communicative competence can be enhanced by the synergic action of CLIL, CMC and Networked Learning. Session B – Thursday 25 August 08:30 to 10:30 : ESP teaching for specific skills and in technical domains 08h30‐08h55: Sophie Belan – Université de Nantes, France "Examining the effects of form‐focused pre‐task activities in a Business English task‐ based blended‐learning programme" This presentation will focus on a task‐based blended‐learning programme implemented by a team of researchers and teachers from the Applied Foreign Languages department of the University of Nantes, France, to try and find solutions to the issues they faced in their 1st year Business English classes: overcrowded classes, leading to limited individual feedback, lack of motivation and high drop‐out rates. Based on a socio‐constructivist and cognitivist approach, the programme combines classroom sessions with distance group work using a Moodle learning platform. Students carry out several business‐oriented collaborative "real‐world" tasks (Ellis 2003). Feedback on oral and written productions is given in the 102 form of advice and suggestions. In the post‐task phase, students are encouraged to use form‐focused micro‐tasks (Demaizière & Narcy‐Combes 2005) in an online resource center. Previous studies have focused on students' and teachers' representations (Narcy‐ Combes & McAllister 2011; McAllister, Narcy‐Combes & Starkey‐Perret 2012; McAllister & Narcy‐Combes 2015), on the effects of the programme on accuracy, fluency and complexity of written production (McAllister 2013 ; McAllister & Belan 2014) and on the students' use of the virtual resource center (McAllister 2013; Starkey‐Perret et al. 2015). Following these studies, changes have been made in the programme, the latest being the introduction of contextualised form‐focused pre‐task activities. This paper will present the results of a study carried out between January and May 2016 to determine the effects of the new form‐focused pre‐tasks on the acquisition of the targeted forms. 08h55‐09h20: Savka Blagojević ‐ University of Niš, Serbia “Explicit Teacher Instruction for ESP Students on Academic Lecture Listening Comprehension” The paper describes an empirical study aimed at investigating the influence of the explicit teacher instruction for improving ESP students’ listening comprehension skills of the lectures within their study fields. Such skills are vital for non‐native English speaking students who attend study programmes and classes delivered in English and should be given more attention, especially in the ESP courses at master’s level. The empirical study involved two groups (14 students each) of master students in psychology, chosen on the basis of the same language performance. The first group was given the listening comprehension instructions, (presentation and practice of listening strategies) during 10 teaching hours, while the second – the control group, did not receive any explicit teacher instruction. After that, the listening comprehension of the two groups was tested and compared. The obtained results showed that the students who were exposed to teacher instruction significantly outperformed the control group, and greatly benefited from being instructed. Yet, in order to get more general conclusion and better insight into the role of teacher instruction for improving lecture listening comprehension of ESP students, the procedure described in the study should be applied to ESP students from different study fields and the results discussed. 9h20‐9h45: Françoise Raby, Université Toulouse 3, France “The Twin Emergence Hypothesis for L2 teaching at Toulouse FabLANG” In the wake of the development of fablabs in education (BLICKENSTEIN, 2013), the FabLANG was created in June 2015 at the technological institute of Toulouse: IUT A. It is a place where innovative teaching methods are collaboratively created by LSP teachers with a view to linguistically preparing LSP students for their future activity in the workplace. At the same time, FabLANG researchers draw from the paradigm of emergent and dynamic theories to evaluate these new work arrangements or methods. The LSP model of the Twin Emergence Hypothesis will show how linguistic and pragmatic emergence mesh within FabLANG activities. Presentation of the model will be based on empirical evidence gathered from video and audio recordings of students at work in the context of the FabLANG. 9h45‐10h10: Danica Milosevic, College of Applied Technical Sciences, Nis, Serbia “Necessity for audio‐visual stimulus: the use of video materials in English for technical sciences (ETS)” 103 The modern world is facing a rapid development of technology and technical devices on a daily bases. What seems to be a state of the art technology today becomes an obsolite and discardable piece of science tomorrow. Living in the digital era, ETS practicioners have an obligation towards their students to follow the trends in cutting edge technology in order to provide them with the topics and language inputs that are of actual interest to the professionals in this specific domain. It would be hard to do that if ETS practicioners, who are by no means experts in technology, could not rely on new‐ achievement‐ in ‐science ‐ and ‐technology‐ video materials as additional resources found on the Internet. In the said area of expertise, a video material is sometimes an indispensable tool for obtaining more tangible pieces of information on technical devices and modern technology, than those to be found in scientific books or magazines. Visual presentations can dispel numerous doubts which arise in understanding of such a complex technical material quite successfully. The aim; therefore, is to show the benefits of video materials for ETS practicioners and their students likewise, by reflecting upon some concrete examples from practice. 10h10‐10h30: Alicia Otano, Universidad de Navarra, Spain “English for Professional Practice: ESP for future Spanish architects” This paper presents the experience of designing and teaching an ESP course for students on the Global Architecture Program at the University of Navarra, Spain – in particular, meeting the specific needs of such students, who are proficient in everyday colloquial English (CEFR C1–C2) but tend to have limited competence in academic and professional communication skills. What the students need to master are the technical lexical fields and distinct registers required for accurate and appropriate communication in the global workplace. This paper explores the content development process for this 3 ECTS credit elective subject, including background research to determine the prospective student profile and the close collaboration with other professors at the University of Navarra’s School of Architecture to define student knowledge and needs, and to build a recommended bibliography. Although the subject design process was initially defined by the program development department at the School of Architecture, student involvement in the selection of material and active participation in project presentation and critique has become equally important as a shaping force. Their input and responses enhance overall interest, motivation and ongoing participation. This subject reflects what can be done with a functionally fluent ESL group that needs to learn to communicate professionally as architects in a globalized economy. Session C – Thursday 25 August 11:00 to 13:00: Narratives of Teaching ESP; Health and social services 11h00‐11h25: Shona Whyte, Université de Nice, France & Cédric Sarré, Université Paris‐Sorbonne, France “From 'war stories and romances' to research agenda: towards a model of ESP didactics” 104 In today's networked world where English is a basic skill, essential for communication in many spheres of academic, professional and social life, the need to move beyond anecdotal, romantic views of language learning and use has never been more pressing. Master (2005) called for the field to build on empirical research findings instead of "war stories and romances" in order to construct a viable theoretical ESP framework, while Douglas (2010) sees a complementary practical need: "defining and refining the concept of specific purpose language teaching is an ongoing task for practitioners" (Douglas, 2010). However, terminological confusion makes this is a challenging enterprise for those involved in teaching and researching ESP. This paper begins with a discussion of key terms in ESP teaching, including didactics and pedagogy, acquisition and learning, applied linguistics and language education, with the aim of defining a current interpretation. Taking ESP in French education as our example, we explore the role of English in higher education (cultural studies versus specific purposes training; Braud et al., 2015, Whyte, 2013) compared with secondary school level (language and culture versus content and language integrated learning CLIL). The paper identifies research themes emerging from a range of contexts covered in a new special interest group in ESP didactics (DidASp) within the French ESP research association GERAS. The goal is to propose a new model for ESP didactics at the intersection of modern languages, languages for specific purposes and second language acquisition. The present paper offers first steps in this direction with implication for ongoing research in ESP teaching and learning. 11h25‐11h50: Bouchra Brahimi, Blida University, Algeria “The Use of Storytelling as a Teaching Strategy to Enhance ESP Students’ Linguistic Proficiency: Case Study of Second Year Pharmacy Students at Blida University‐ Algeria” The use of narratives in a learning context plays a pivotal role in expanding students’ horizons. The introduction of storytelling in the world of ESP will bring about a prominent effect on students’ linguistic knowledge. With regard to ESP teaching, it is of utmost importance to focus on the authenticity of the teaching material to present the language components in context rather than making the students acquire the language system through isolated grammar structures and vocabulary. This paper suggests using story‐ based instruction with pharmacy students to enhance vocabulary acquisition and grammar mastery. The aim of the current study was to shed light on the importance of storytelling in promoting pharmacy students’ linguistic knowledge. A group of 40 second year students was selected then taught using the storytelling strategy. The results emerging from a focus group discussion held by the end of the teaching sessions revealed that students were highly motivated and satisfied with this teaching strategy which gave them the opportunity to discover the imaginary side of the scientific field and helped them to internalize some vocabulary words and recognize grammar structures. 11h50‐12h15: Elena Sasu, Université de Poitiers, France “English for the Health Sciences in France: A National Overview and a Local Case Study” This paper will focus on the French national approach of English language teaching for the health sciences as observed in practice, with sources ranging from the recommendations of the French national Groupe d’Etude et de Recherche en Anglais de Spécialité (GERAS) – Health Sciences group, existing bibliography within the national context, ministerial directives, university learning agreements, to the local and personal approach. 105 More particularly, the acute need for English in the Pharmacy and Medicine university careers will be examined from the perspective of: ‐ Teaching strategies (peer teaching, role‐plays, etc.) ‐ Language certification: compulsory for certain university careers or Master programmes, admissions for Management Degrees in private schools or international programmes, resulting in the obvious need to create a specific certification for health sciences students ‐ Critical appraisal of medical research articles: compulsory for the national residency exam starting 2016‐2017 ‐ Scientific reading: the vast majority of the bibliography young doctors/residents and researchers in medical and health sciences need is in English, but the French key‐word approach used for national exams – for which they train for six years, is not in the least sufficient; context and co‐text are as important as the medical science itself. 12h15‐12h40: Rebecca Franklin‐Landi, Université de Nice, France “Teaching good practice through bad television fiction: using FASP at the medical faculty” In 1999 Michel Petit first published an article defining FASP (fiction à substrat professionnel) as a tool in the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Since then this subject has been developed and applied to different fields of ESP by various experts in France (Isani in ELP, Charpy in Medical English). During this period the original definition of “professional literary fiction” has also been expanded upon in order to include movies and television series anchored in a particular professional milieu. We will briefly present the evolution of this genre before focusing on a sequence from an American medical television series to show how it was used in the classroom in order to reinforce good practice through the identification of on‐screen professional faux‐pas and/or the recognition of correct procedures. Questionnaires were given to the students before, during and after viewing the extracts in order to identify an evolution in their attitude to professional fiction as well as a possible progression in their medical practice awareness. We shall compare and contrast the results obtained with the students’ attitudes to this type of learning situation in order to show that television FASP is an interesting and pertinent pedagogical tool in the ESP classroom. 12h40‐13h00: Jane Helen Johnson, University of Bologna, Italy “Constructing an ESP course for Social Services undergraduates: corpus tools to the rescue” While appropriate language and discourse is acknowledged as fundamental for successful social services work (Thompson 2010), the lack of existing material on the market for teaching ESP to Social Services students at undergraduate level (Kornbeck 2003, 2008) prompted this researcher to explore various corpus linguistics techniques to put together a meaningful language course for undergraduate students at an Italian university. Corpus linguistics has been exploited in an ESP/EAP framework particularly for investigating genre and vocabulary (e.g. Krishnamurthy and Kosem 2007; Hyland and Tse 2007; Ghadessy et al 2001; Scott and Tribble 2006; O’Keefe et al 2007; Breeze 2015). However discourse analysis has received less attention in the ESP classroom. Corpus‐ Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington et al 2013), with its focus on how language is used to influence others’ beliefs and behaviour, may be an appropriate tool for developing material within such an ESP course, enabling creation of awareness‐raising activities for 106 use in the classroom as regards the effects of different language choices in a discourse context. For this purpose, a corpus of material drawn from the content area of social work (Flowerdew 1993) has been put together. The talk will discuss the utility and classroom application of such material. 107 S15. ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE FOR STUDENTS WITH EDUCATIONAL NEEDS – CHANCES AND CHALLENGES Convenors: Ewa Domagała‐Zyśk, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland Nuzha Moritz, University of Strasbourg, France Anna Podlewska, The Medical University of Lublin, Poland SPECIAL The seminar has been designed as a space for discussions and sharing for linguists interested in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to children, adolescents and adults with special educational needs (SEN). For many years in the past D/deaf, blind, intellectually challenged or dyslexic students were excluded from learning foreign languages in special schools. Today they participate in mainstream education on a par with their peers. This situation creates both significant chances and new scientific problems and methodological challenges. The purpose of the seminar is thus to share research results and ideas about the following issues: 1). Conceptual representations for words in English in individuals with sensory or cognitive challenges; 2. Teaching and learning strategies to enhance both motivation and language performance; 3. The role of oral communication and sign languages in EFL classes for the D/deaf. Why start teaching English early to deaf pupils? Patricia Pritchard Statped vest, Bergen, Norway This paper will discuss why it is necessary to begin teaching English early, and how sign‐ bilingualism can be used in the classroom. English skills should include both the development of English literacy and provide pupils’ with a means of face‐to‐face communication. The choices pupils have between different language modalities, due to great variations in learning styles and hearing and speaking skills, will also be discussed. The choice of “oral language” used in direct communication should match pupils’ individual needs and can range from BSL/ASL, Signed English, English speech, “chatting” or combinations of the above. Method A study (Pritchard, 2004) showed that teaching and using British Sign Language (BSL) is feasible and can provide language awareness and motivation. A teaching program for second graders will be described where different modalities were used in direct communication. Also how reading and writing skills were introduced. Teaching strategies used included BSL and phonic reading based on the awareness of English sounds (visually, tactile, auditory) and their written symbols and typical spelling patterns. Conclusion Results of the teaching program will be presented as a standardised test of BSL development, an assessment of reading and a film. Deaf Young Adults’ English Literacy Development in a Peer‐Supported Virtual Learning Environment Huhua Rita Fan University of Central Lancashire Overwhelming evidence indicates the unsatisfactory English literacy attainment of Deaf learners, and this issue is especially pertinent in countries with few dedicated resources 108 such as India. In such contexts with a thin resource base, there is a challenge of setting up teaching, learning and assessment that is tailored to the needs of Deaf learners. Underpinned by the notions of bilingual‐biculturalism, ethnography, peer‐to‐peer learning, and ‘functional multiliteracies’, this research explores the design concept of a Virtual Learning Platform for Deaf young adults in India, the SLEND (Sign Language to English by the Deaf). The aim is to investigate learning experience and learning outcomes. Eventually, a Virtual Learning Ecosystem for Deaf adult learners is proposed. By documentation and analysis of the project proposal, project meeting minutes and focus group discussions, the research identifies the characteristics of the learning platform SLEND and its context, from the viewpoints of both researchers in the UK and Deaf project staff (Research Assistants and Peer Tutors) in India. Meanwhile, the efficiency of the SLEND is tested by examining Deaf learners’ responses through questionnaires and field observation. Furthermore, Deaf Indian learners’ English literacy learning attainment is benchmarked against an internationally‐accepted standard, adapted from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). These data include both summative elements (pre‐test, post‐test and delayed‐test along with self‐assessment skills questionnaires) and formative elements (“can‐do” statements for each session and observations of natural language use). Bringing film to English as a foreign language (EFL) for the deaf and hard of hearing class. Anna Podlewska The Medical University of Lublin There are many convincing reasons for bringing film to English as a foreign language (EFL) for the deaf and hard of hearing class. In the first place, moving pictures are increasingly available through DVD, including the DVDs that accompany various English courses, the Internet, and TV broadcasting. In addition, video watching is, for the majority of students, a pleasure in itself – an activity that they associate with relaxation. Film motivates students by engaging them with the story it tells and thus provides a stimulating framework for classroom discussion and communication. It also exposes the classroom audience to authentic and varied language as well as a wide range of paralinguistic behaviour. Moreover, moving pictures add variety to the heavily reading biased EFL for the deaf and hard of hearing classes. Finally, the medium of film is a rich source of the natural mouth movements of speech necessary for lipreading practice. The value of film as a language teaching and learning resource in the EFL for the deaf and hard of hearing classroom can be described with reference to the usefulness of selected film clips and before‐, while‐ and after‐you‐watch activities, as well as in terms of viewing techniques and their role in the acquisition and development of language skills and competences. The aim of this paper is to discuss all of the aforementioned perspectives. The cultural competence challenge: Enhancing deaf and hard‐of‐hearing English learners’ general knowledge Mgr. Zuzana Fonioková, Ph.D. and Mgr. Lenka Kroupová Zuzana Fonioková Support Centre for Students with Special Needs, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic As instructors of English for students with hearing impairments, we have identified a pressing need to address, alongside language skills, also the cultural competence of our students. We have repeatedly observed that our students lack cultural knowledge and 109 hence often experience comprehension difficulties when reading texts that refer to specific cultural phenomena, even such that are generally well‐known among intact learners. For this reason, we have designed a course in American and Deaf American Culture which is going to focus on raising cultural awareness of deaf and hard‐of‐hearing English learners. This paper aims to present our project and reflect on the possible benefits of such a course. As part of the project, students will explore the US (and US deaf) culture through a series of interactive activities and workshop sessions comprising reading short stories (including US Deaf literature), film/documentary screening sessions (with English subtitles) and post‐screening discussions, individual project work, a cooking session, interactive language exercises (using e.g. cartoons, adverts). The topics will include US culture, US Deaf culture, food culture, entertainment, family, ethnic and cultural diversity, consumerism, major feasts, and others. Apart from the cultural competence, the course will enhance the participants’ skills in the English language. Furthermore, thanks to the project activities we hope to extend the learning outside the classroom and show students possibilities for developing their own ways of acquiring a foreign language. Multilingual perspective in EFL for d/Deaf learners Jitka Sedláčková English Department, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno The presentation deals with the concept of multilinguality and the potential of employing the multilingual perspective in foreign language learning and teaching of d/Deaf and profoundly hard of hearing (HOH) learners. Although multilingualism and multilingual didactics have received increasing attention, it has not been investigated in detail as a useful perspective in foreign language learning in the specific group. First, the question of the role of national sign and spoken languages in foreign language acquisition of d/Deaf and profoundly HOH learners will be discussed. It will be illustrated with data from interviews conducted with d/Deaf young adult learners concerning their language history and reading in English as their foreign language (EFL) as well as verbal protocols produced during EFL reading tasks. Subsequently, pedagogical implications will be drawn based on the multilingual perspective, which stresses the importance of building on previous language learning. Willingness to communicate of deaf and hard of hearing participants of a Polish‐ British project Multilingual – getting together Anna Nabiałek Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland Willingness to communicate (WTC), considered by many authors the primary goal of language instruction, is defined as language learners' readiness to initiate discourse at a particular time with a specific person or persons, using an L2. Communication anxiety is one of the leading factors affecting WTC. Lowered levels of anxiety seem to lead to greater WTC and in turn more frequent and successful communication in the L2. In case of people with hearing loss anxiety seems to be particularly severe, especially in interactive hearing/non‐hearing integration groups. The aim of this presentation is to present the results of a project in which a group of Polish hard‐of‐hearing students interacted with a group of supportive native speakers (staff and students of Deaf Studies from the UK). The English‐speaking group encouraged and stimulated students' efforts in the use of a foreign language. While engaging in a tour of Poland ‐ visiting Lublin, Warsaw and Poznań ‐ both 110 groups deepened their knowledge of Polish and British Sign Languages while communicating primarily in the English language. Deeper and deeper ‐ how best to improve the vocabulary skills of postgraduate deaf and hard of hearing students. Beata Gulati Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, Poland The author of this article faces the challenge of teaching deaf and hard of hearing students specialized English. The action research aims to discover the strategies used for vocabulary development for the hearing impaired. The class atmosphere, meaningful context, repetitions lead from unknown through acquainted to established vocabulary. Direct as well as indirect vocabulary instructions are implemented in order to study and revise high frequency words that appear in students’ textbooks and more complex concepts that are unknown to them and not connected with their everyday life experiences. Lessons become creatively organized practice sessions to use vocabulary in a variety of activities. The expanded Frayer Model, multiple meanings defining, recognition of figures of speech (idiomatic expressions, personifications), word and mind maps, songs, films, video clips with subtitles, songs in sign language, underlying important words in the text, word games and puzzles, are only a few of them. Depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge increases students’ ability to communicate, to understand what they read, to succeed academically as well as in their future career. key words: postgraduate, deaf and hard of hearing students, vocabulary. Enhancing oral communication in EFL classes for the Deaf and hard of hearing students Nuzha Moritz University of Strasbourg ‐ France The dream of every teacher is to have a dynamic, creative and productive class. Using cartoons to teach deaf and hard of hearing is interesting, fun, and could enhance both motivation and language performance. The focus of this presentation is the use of cartoons to teach English sounds and intonation to deaf and hard of hearing students. As cartoons come in a variety of forms they are widely used in teaching foreign languages and considered to be highly productive and successful. Cartoons are normally used in their written forms to teach grammatical structure, vocabulary, storytelling etc. In this pilot study we would like to show how the combination of audio and video stimuli in cartoons could enhance auditory and expressive speech skills which contribute to a desirable attitude and stimulate deaf and hard of hearing students to action as well as providing enjoyment and good learning skills. In a previous research we had shown some reasons of the unintelligibility of deaf and hard of hearing students which is due to some extend to pronunciation errors and confusion between some sounds and inappropriate intonation. Cartoons are not only colourful and entertaining they contain a wealth of sounds, voices, onomatopoeia, emotions… and cultural material which can be exploited for teaching oral communication to the deaf and hard of hearing students. 111 S16: The Discursive Representation of Globalised Organised Crime: Crossing Borders of Languages and Cultures Convenors: Giuseppe Balirano, Giuditta Caliendo, Paul Sambre Giuseppe Balirano University of Naples L’Orientale De‐queering Proxemics: A semiotic reading of the representation of masculinity in Neapolitan organised crime fiction The recent Cinema and TV screening of the Neapolitan Camorra seems to be spreading a somewhat incorrect interpretation of “queer masculinity” in non-verbal interactions among Camorra mobsters. Non-verbal forms of communication are a major constraint for audiovisual translators when adapting a complex multimodal product into other languages (Chiaro et al. 2008). In particular, very little attention has been paid to the way the Neapolitan crime syndicate has been discursively re-semiotised and therefore mis-perceived in English-speaking contexts through translated audiovisual products. When non-verbal communication crosses national, cultural and linguistic boundaries via subtitling, some cultural misinterpretations may, in fact, prevent the full appreciation of the source text since the way in which space is used and interpreted is always a culture-bound factor (Kendon 1977; 1990). Based on an integrated multimodal methodology (Kress et al. 1991), which comprises both quantitative and qualitative analyses of a large multimodal corpus of films, TV series and documentaries produced in Italy and subtitled in English – where criminals’ micro-space is left to the interpretation of foreign viewers –, this paper posits a different semiotic reading of the misinterpreted male homosexuality in the filmic semiotisations of Camorra men’s proxemics. Chiaro, Delia; Heiss, Christine; Bucaria, Chiara (2008). Between Text and Image: Updating Research in Screen Translation. London: John Benjamins Publishing. Champagne, John (2014). “Italian Masculinity as Queer: An Immoderate Proposal.” Gender and Sexuality in Italy, 1-2014. Hall, Edward T. (1963). “A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior”. American Anthropologist 65 (5): 1003–1026 Hall, Edward T. (1966). The Hidden Dimension. Anchor Books. Kendon, Adam (1977). Studies in the Behavior of Social Interaction. Lisse: Peter De Ridder Press. Kendon, Adam (1990). Conducting Interaction: Patterns of behavior in focused encounters. Cambridge University Press. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen (2001). Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Messina, Marcello (2015). “Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra: A Politically Incorrect Use of Neapolitan Identities and Queer Masculinities?”, Gender and Sexuality in Italy, 2-2015. Giuseppe Balirano, PhD in English for Special Purposes, is Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Naples ’L’Orientale’. His research interests and publications lie in the fields of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, Humour, Masculinity Studies and Audio Visual Translation. He is the director of the inter-university research centre, I-LanD, for the linguistic investigation of identity, language and diversity. His recent publications include: Language, Theory and Society (2015), Languaging Diversity: Identities, Genres, discourses 112 (2015), Masculinity and Representation (2014), Variation and Varieties in Contexts of English (2012), and The Perception of Diasporic Humour: Indian English on TV (2008). Media Representations of Italian Mafias as Global Criminal Actors: a multimodal critical discourse analysis Giuditta Caliendo Université de Lille 3 This paper investigates the discursive representation of organized crime from a critical perspective, highlighting the constitutive role of language and multimodality in constructing the global identity of the two most powerful Italian crime syndicates today, the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta. The analysis draws on a corpus of international video documentaries describing their criminal activities and released after 2007, when a series of crucial events gave these two crime syndicates international visibility. The main research hypothesis of this study is that the process of identity construction of the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta as global criminal actors is performed via multiple modes of meaning‐making in the documentaries under scrutiny. Particular attention is devoted to the discursive construction of these organizations’ idiosyncratic practices, sets of beliefs and modus operandi that make them unique and autonomous vis‐à‐vis the more widely known Cosa Nostra. This contribution addresses the lack of work on the representation of crime in Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Machin/Mayr 2012b; Tabbert 2015). As claimed by Machin and Mayr (2013: 356): “While there has been extensive research on media representations of crime in Media and Cultural Studies and in Criminology this has been a neglected area in Critical Discourse Analysis”. Machin, D./Mayr, A. 2013. Personalizing Crime and Crime‐fighting in Factual Television: an Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images. Critical Discourse Studies, 10:4, 356–372. Machin, D./Mayr, A. 2012a. The Language of Crime and Deviance: An Introduction to Critical Linguistic Analysis in Media and Popular Culture. London: Continuum. Machin, D./Mayr, A. 2012b. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage. Machin, D./Van Leeuwen, T. 2007. Global Media Discourse. A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Tabbert, U. 2015. Crime and Corpus. The Linguistic Representation of Crime in the Press. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van Leeuwen, T. 1996. The Representation of Social Actors. In Caldas‐Coulthard C.R./Coulthard M. (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 32‐70. Giuditta Caliendo is Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) at the University of Lille 3, France, and a former Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Washington, USA. Her research interests include institutional discourse, legal translation, critical discourse analysis and genre analysis. She is a member of the teaching board of the PhD School “Mind, Gender and Language” (“Languages, Linguistics and ESP” curriculum) of the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ and co‐editor of the volumes: Urban Multilingualism in Europe (with R. Janssens/S. Slembrouck/P. Van Avermaet), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 113 forthcoming; The Language of Popularization: Theoretical and Descriptive Models (with G. Bongo), Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. Genre(s) on the move: Hybridization and Discourse Change in Specialized Communication (with S. Sarangi/V. Polese), Naples: ESI, 2011. The Discursive Representation of the ‘Ndrangheta in the British Press Mirko Casagranda University of Calabria Together with the Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta is one of the most notorious criminal syndicates in Italy. Originally from Calabria, since the second half of the twentieth century it has partly spread in Northern Italy, Europe and North America also due to the massive migratory movements from what is still known as one of the poorest regions in Italy. Although this criminal organisation deals especially with illegal business such as smuggling and drug dealing, it is also known for its strict influence on the social system of some Calabrian communities, which are controlled by the ‘Ndrangheta clans. Several publications on its hierarchical structure and its impact on Calabrian culture have been published and it has recently made headlines all over the world too. This paper deals with the coverage of the ‘Ndrangheta in the British press, with a specific focus on the online version of The Guardian. Multimodal critical discourse analysis will be employed in order to analyse the ways in which the ‘Ndrangheta is discursively constructed in Great Britain. Such discourse, moreover, stigmatises unlawful behaviour by shaping a political and cultural representation of Italy which, in turn, contributes to the construction of British identity as well. Fairclough, Norman, 1995, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London: Longman. Fairclough, Norman, 2001, Language and Power, London: Longman. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen, 2006, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther, 2010, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge. Lirola, Maria Martinez and Jan Chovanec, 2012, “The dream of a perfect body come true: Multimodality in cosmetic surgery advertising”, Discourse & Society, 23:5, 487‐507. Machin, David and Andrea Mayr, 2012, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction, London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun A., 1998, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, London: Sage. van Dijk, Teun A., 2014, Discourse and Knowledge. A Sociocognitive Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mirko Casagranda, PhD, is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Calabria. His areas of interest include Postcolonial Englishes, Critical Discourse Analysis, Translation Studies and the Linguistics of Names. Among his publications, the books Traduzione e codeswitching come strategie discorsive del plurilinguismo canadese (2010) and Procedure di naming nel paesaggio linguistico canadese (2013). He is a member at large of the Executive Council of the American Name Society. 114 The language of fear: cybercrime and “the borderless realm of cyberspace” in British news Massimiliano Demata Università di Bari “Aldo Moro” Cybercrime is popularly perceived as the work of a faceless, invisible enemy who can strike anyone unexpectedly, and whose consequences may be dire as it can involve financial scams, hacking, identity theft and harassment. Cybercrime tops the list of “Emerging Crimes” published by the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). This document defines cybercrime as “an emerging form of transnational crime” and highlights the difficulty to contain it by claiming that it “takes place in the borderless realm of cyberspace” (emphasis mine). On the basis of a corpus of texts from British newspapers, this paper argues that cybercrime is a highly problematic area in discursive representations of crime. Unlike older criminal organizations who have a national identity (e.g. the Italian and Russian Mafias, the Japanese Yazuka, the Colombian drug cartels), cybercrime syndicates are located in different regions of the world. Their crimes are ubiquitous, unexpected, and often unpreventable, and exploit the opportunities provided by a global communication network as well as a globalized economy. News events about cybercrime fuel narratives within a “fear society”, in which fear of technology is aligned with fear of crime. The result is a complex discursive representation: cybercrime syndicates are still framed as an outgroup (as in traditional media representations of criminal organizations), but they are portrayed, verbally and visually, as an obscure and menacing force, with the real risks posed by them inflated or misunderstood, and with a language which both reflects and feeds the public’s desire for shocking information. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, New Delhi, Sage. Moore, S. D. H. (2014) Crime and the Media, London, Palgrave. Richardson, J. E. (2008) Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis, London, Palgrave. Tabbert, U. (2015) Crime and Corpus: The Linguistic Representation of Crime in the Press, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Yar, M. (2013) Cybercrime and Society, 2nd ed., London, Sage. Massimiliano Demata is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Bari, Italy. He took his DPhil in English at the University of Oxford, where he also taught extensively, and in 2014 he was Fulbright Visiting Professor at Indiana University. He has published a book on the language of George W. Bush and several essays on British and American political discourse, translation and ideology, and computer mediated communication, as well as essays on the Gothic Novel and Byron. In 2002 he co‐edited, with Duncan Wu, British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review. Bicentenary Essays. Documenting Drug Kartels. An Analysis of Secrets of Mexico’s Drug War (Elena Cosentino 2015) Inge Lanslots KU Leuven 115 Since President Felipe Calderón declared the War on Drugs in 2006, the depiction of the U.S.‐Mexican Border and of Mexican (as well as of other Latin American) immigrants in the U.S. seemed to have taken an even more negative turn. Through the analysis of Elena Cosentino’s Secrets of Mexico’s Drug War (2015), the present paper will investigate how documentaries depict this complex phenomenon, which implies the crossing of national, cultural and linguistic boundaries. Cosentino’s documentary addresses the power of drug kartels across borders as well as the issue of collusion and double dealing on the part of US law enforcement. Of particular interest is the discursive representation of the social actors involved, such as representatives of law enforcement (drug enforcement, border patrol, magistrates…), criminals (drug and human traffickers) or penitents, victims, immigrants, Mexican and U.S. citizens. The analysis will focus on how the reality of these actors, who communicate in English and/or Spanish, is translated within the documentary genre raising awareness about their ramifications on and about the need to fight the drug kartels in a globalized society. Adriaensen, Brigitte & Valeria Grinberg PLA (eds). (2012). Narrativas del crimen en América Latina. Berlin: LitVerlag. Allum, Felia, Francesca Longo, Daniela Irrera & Panos A. Kostakos. (eds). (2010). Defining and Defying Organized Crime. Discourse, Perceptions and Reality. London: Routledge. Ansley, Fran & Jon Shefner (eds). (2009). Global Connections and Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Cosentino, Elena. (2015). Secrets of Mexico’s Drug War. UK: BBC Díaz‐Cintas, Jorge & Gunilla Anderman. (2008). Audiovisual Translation: Language Transfer on Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fairclough, Norman. (2007). Language and globalization. London: Routledge. Gentzler, Edwin. (2008). Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. London: Routledge. Hernández, Anabel. (2013). Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords And Their Godfathers. Translated by Iain Bruce and Lorna Scott Fox. Introduction by Roberto Saviano. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Machin, David & Andrea MAYR. (2013). Personalising Crime and Crime‐fighting in Factual Television: an Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images. Critical Discourse Studies. 10(4): 356–372. Remael, Aline, Pilar Orero & Mary Carroll. (2012). Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility at the Crossroads. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Shohat, Ella & Robert Stam. (2003). Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vulliamy, Ed. (2010). Amexica: War Along the Borderline. London: Bodley Head. Ward, Paul. (2005). Documentary. The Margins of Reality. London/New York: Wallflower Press. Wood, Andrew et alii. (eds) (2004). On the Border. Society and culture between the United States and Mexico. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Inge Lanslots is assistant professor in Discourse Analysis and Italian Culture/Translation at KU Leuven. She is specialized in cultural memory and genre studies. Her research deals with the representation of discourse on mafia‐like organizations, migration, Italy’s 1968, the G8 2001 (Genova). She is also co‐editor of Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani and the Moving Texts Series (Peter Lang). 116 The multimodal representation of Sicilian and Calabrian anti‐mafia grassroots movements in global English video discourse Paul Sambre KU Leuven The present contribution zooms in on TV news video coverage about grassroots Italian anti‐mafia movements and their civil representatives, as they call for an alternative, less repressive framing of resistance against the mafias of their Sicilian (Corleone, Palermo) or Calabrian (San Luca, Reggio Calabria) region, and represent peaceful resistance to Cosa Nostra and the ‘Ndrangheta (Friedman, Epstein & Wood 2012), in contrast with more traditional images of Cosa Nostra, Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta which display powerful, invisible mafia bosses and sometimes powerless crime fighters. In global English discourse about the mafia, other voices gradually appear: those of commercial and civil anti‐racket movements, rural grassroots initiatives on seized Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta assets and properties, and school teachers courageously breaking the rules of silence in education (Superti 2009, Di Maggio 2011, Crowther 2014). We describe thematic issues, social actors and discursive multimodal resources used in this new discourse of resistance (Machin & Mayr 2013, Van Leeuwen 2005), based on a corpus of English video news coverage (Al Jazeera, France 24 English, BBC ), through the theoretical critical discourse analytical lense of Fairclough’s (2006) ideas about the impact of local grassroots initiatives on dominating global (institutional) discourse. Caliendo, G., Lanslots, I., Sambre, P. 2016. La ‘Ndrangheta, da Sud, oltre frontiera, a Nord. Sul discorso distopico intorno ad una malavita organizzata. Civiltà Italiana fc.: 135‐ 145. Crowther, N. 2014. Rising up against the racket: Palermitani facing the Sicilian mafia head on. Journal of Public & International Affairs 25: 131‐139. Di Maggio, U. 2011. Libera Terra: I beni confiscate alle mafie per lo sviluppo locale. Sociologia del Lavoro 123: 177‐190. Fairclough, N. 2006. Language and globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Fiandaca, G. 2007. Women and the Mafia: female roles in organized crime structures. New York: Springer. Friedman, J., Epstein, R., Wood, S. 2012. The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Jewkes, Y. 2015. Media and Crime. London: Sage. Machin, D., Mayr, A. 2013. Personalising Crime and Crime‐fighting in Factual Television: an Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images. Critical Discourse Studies 10(4): 356–372. Puccio‐Den, D. “Difficult remembrance”. Memorializing mafia victims in Palermo. In: P.‐J. Margry, C. Sanchez‐Carretero (eds.), Grassroots memorials the politics of memorializing traumatic death, 51‐70. Sambre, P. fc. Herméneutique du sujet et commémoration de deux homosexuels persécutés. Albrecht Becker et Pierre Seel dans le documentaire Paragraphe 175. In D. Rochtus, B. Van Huffel (eds.), La France, L’Allemagne et l’Ordre Nouveau. Approches politiques et littéraires, Leipzig : Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Superti, C. 2009. “Addio Pizzo”: can a label defeat the mafia? Journal of International Policy Solutions. 11: 1‐11. Van Leeuwen, T. 2005. Introducing social semiotics. London and New York: Routledge. 117 Paul Sambre is an assistant professor at the University of Leuven, where he teaches discourse studies and Italian linguistics. He is a member of MIDI, a research group for the study of multimodality in discourse and interaction. His research is at the intersection of cognitive and critical approaches to discourse studies. He examines multimodal grammar from a construction grammatical view and, in the critical tradition, works on global discourse about Italy’s mafias and European Capitals of Culture. 118 S17 “Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation in Diasporic Communities of Practice” SPEAKING ORDER 17.00‐17.30 ‐ Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation: the case of Greek Cypriot and Italian adolescents in the UK; Siria Guzzo (University of Salerno) Chryso Hadjidemetriou (University of Stockholm) 17.30‐18.00 ‐ The formation of the Broken Plural by bilingual Iraqi‐English children from a sociolinguistic perspective; Alyaa AL‐Timimi (University of Essex) 18.00‐18.30 ‐ Young Bristalians: language & identity in a multicultural city; Anna Gallo (University of Naples "Federico II") 18.30‐19.00 ‐ On The Functional Approach to Absolute Constructions in Scientific Prose Style (with Special Reference to Engineering Research Articles); Minoo Khamesian (Babol University of Technology) Contact, Identity and Morphosyntactic Variation: the case of Greek Cypriot and Italian adolescents in the UK Siria Guzzo University of Salerno Chryso Hadjidemetriou University of Stockholm The present study investigates language maintenance and shift in two European immigrant communities in the UK, namely the Italians of Bedford and Peterborough and the Greek Cypriots in North London. Specific attention will be paid on exploring and discussing their longstanding migration to the UK, cultural heritage and identity construction. In this respect, the speech of 3rd generation informants will be investigated, with particular attention to their use of WAS in standard WERE contexts of positive polarity and their use of quotative markers. In the wake of a great deal of research (Ferrara and Bell, 1995; Tagliamonte and Hudson, 1999; Macaulay, 2001; Buchstaller, 2004; 2005; 2006; Buchstaller and D’Arcy, 2009; Cheshire et al. 2011; Fox, 2012), this study specifically analyses be like and its ‘new competitor’ this is + speaker (Fox, 2012) aiming at investigating their pattern(s) of use and questioning whether new or old quotatives foster linguistic innovation among the speech of young adolescents of immigrant background in England. Moreover, Cheshire and Fox (2009:1) found that ‘in inner London, variation in adolescent speech is strongly influenced by ethnicity, resulting in a lower overall frequency of was levelling, and in negative contexts, a missed pattern of levelling to both wasn’t and weren’t’. Earlier results from the Greek‐Cypriot adolescents show a lower frequency in usage of WAS in standard WERE contexts of positive polarity. The analysis compares the results from the Greek‐Cypriot study with the London English project data and also takes into consideration the friendship networks, social integration, and heritage identity positioning comparing and contrasting the results from the Italian dataset. This paper reports work‐in‐progress. Ethnographic fieldwork and observation as well as audio recordings within the Greek and the Italian informants have been ongoing since September 2011. The present corpus consists of fourteen 13 to 19‐year‐old speakers of Italian origin, both males and females. The informants were selected on the basis of their social network (Boissevain, 1974) and in accordance with the ‘friend of a friend’ technique (Milroy, 1987; Eckert, 2000) In addition, twenty‐eight adolescents attending a supplementary Greek school in Enfield aged between14‐18 year old were interviewed as part of a larger project examining issues of language contact, language variation and change, and the role of the community language (i.e. Cypriot Greek) in identity‐ construction. The majority of the adolescents were born in London to Greek Cypriot 119 parents who in turn were either born or migrated to the UK at some point in their adult life.Indeed, data collected in London, Bedford and Peterborough will be compared and contrasted in order to verify to what extent the speech of young speakers of European immigrant origins share the same trends. Keywords: multilingualism, language contact, heritage community, past tense BE, quotative system Boissevain, Jeremy. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Buchstaller, Isabelle. The sociolinguistic constraints on the quotative system – British English and US English compared. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2004. – . “Putting perception to the reality test: the case of go and like”. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. Papers from NWAVE 32. 10 (2005): 61‐76. – . “Diagnostics of age‐graded linguistic behaviour: the case of the quotative system.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (2006): 3‐30. Buchstaller Isabelle and Alexandra D’Arcy. “Localized globalization: A multilocal, multivariate investigation of quotative be like”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13 (2009.): 291‐ 331. Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Susan Fox and Eivind Torgersen. “Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: the emergence of multicultural London English”. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2011): 151‐196. Cheshire Jenny and Fox, Susan. (2009) Was/were variation: A perspective from London. In Language Variation 21: pp. 1‐38 Eckert, Penelope. Linguistic variation as social practice. Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Ferrara, Kathleen and Barbara Bell. “Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: the case of be+ like”. American Speech 70 (1995): 265‐ 290. Fox, Susan. “Performed narrative. The pragmatic function of this is + speaker and other quotatives in London adolescent speech”. In Quotatives. Cross‐linguistic and cross‐ disciplinary perspectives, edited by Isabelle Buchstaller and Ingrid Von Alphen, 231‐257. Amsterdam: John Publishing Company, 2012. Macaulay, Ronald. “You’re like ‘why not?’ The quotative expressions of Glasgow adolescents”. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(2001): 3‐21. Milroy, Lesley. Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. The formation of the Broken Plural by bilingual Iraqi‐English children from a sociolinguistic perspective Alyaa AL‐Timimi, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex This paper investigates the acquisition of a most intriguing system of nominal plurality in Arabic, the Broken Plural (BP), in the speech of bilingual Iraqi‐English children. BP is an irregular plural form, derived by altering the consonant and vowel patterns inside the singular noun/adjective. There is no fixed suffix to be added, or a general rule to derive it.Monolinguals acquire it from their environment; they learn it spontaneously as they grow up and expand their vocabulary. The study includes 11 bilingual children living in the UK and ‘control groups’: 9 120 bilingual female adults living in the UK, 9 monolingual female adults and 18 monolingual children living in Baghdad. Data collection combined quantitative and qualitative techniques. The researchas a whole addresses the issues of how reduced Vernacular Iraqi Arabic (VIA) input can affect the formation of BP, the range of strategies that the bilingual children use to recoup their lack of knowledge and the correlation between these strategies and social variables, viz. parents’ level of education, language used at home (input), contacts, and attitudes. The data were analyzed into correct and incorrect responses based on monolingual female adults performance. The incorrect responses (repair strategies) were classified into various categories including: overgeneralization (used more frequently by bilinguals as a default form but was least favoured by the monolingual children); and the employment of ‘rudimentary semantic strategies’ rather than morphological markers (e.g. repetition/singular, new words (Aljenaie, et.al.2010)). The findings show a strong correlation between the social factors and the repair strategies.Bilingual children’s attitudes towards English positively correlate with their low proficiency in VIA; parents’ attitudes towards VIA, religion and identity as core values;and parents’command of Englishwere also found to play a crucial role in nurturing or impairing the use of VIA, which in turn affects acquisition of BP. ‐Aljenaie,K., Abdalla, F. & Farghal, F. 2010 . Developmental changes in using nominal number inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic. Kuwait University, Kuwait. First Language 31(2), 222–239. Young Bristalians: language & identity in a multicultural city ANNA GALLO, UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES “FEDERICO II” It is generally acknowledged that identities are flexible and multi‐layered, with their variability being significantly conveyed though language. Drawing upon few sociocultural descriptions of Italian communities in the South‐West of England (Bottignolo, 1985) andon earlier sociolinguistic research on Italian communities in the UK (Tosi, 1984;Guzzo, 2010), this work will offer some preliminary results about language behaviours of young Bristolians of Italian descent, included in a wider investigation on multicultural urban youth language. This analysis will take into accounthow community language and culture evolve in multicultural urban contexts. Itwill explorethe process ofidentity‐construction through language among 3rd generationBristalians, i.e. Anglo‐Italians in Bristol, and it will serve as a starting point to reflect uponhowlanguage contact and multicultural social networks may affect their language choices. By means of ethnographicand sociolinguistic approaches, this investigation will analyse part of alargercorpus consisting of interviews and questionnaires, collected via ‘friends of friends’ technique (Boissevain, 1974). Asyoung peoplehave proved to be preciousinformants in theinvestigation of language maintenance and shift, showingdifferent degrees of identity variation through language, this studywill investigate young Bristalians’ languageprimarily looking at code‐mixing and a/an allomorphy. Pluralization strategies might also be taken into account. Boissevain, J. 1974. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions. Oxford: Basil. Bottignolo, B. 1985. Without a bell tower. A study of the Italian immigration in South West England. Roma: Centro StudiEmigrazione. Guzzo, S. 2010. Bedford Italians at Work: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Italians in Britain. Recanati: La Spiga Edizioni. 121 Tosi, A. 1984. Italian in the English education system: Policies of high‐ and low‐status bilingualism. In C. Bettoni (ed.) Italian Abroad. Studies on Language Contact in English‐ speaking Countries. Sidney: Frederick May Foundation of Italian Studies, pp.147‐169. On The Functional Approach to Absolute Constructions in Scientific Prose Style (with Special Reference to Engineering Research Articles) Minoo Khamesian To be able to learn and use English,the lingua franca of science and technology, for effective international communication, one must begin by becoming acquainted with the basic language of his profession. In this respect, written academic discourseis a considerably broad notion which requires consideration of various aspects both on the linguistic and extra‐linguistic planes. The present work through linguostylistic analysis, i.e. both semantic and metasemiotic levels, investigated the functional aspect of absolute constructions in technical writing.It useda corpus of approximately 300 pages of engineering research articles of different spheres, i.e. civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering published in international journals.The results revealed that the distinctive morphosyntactic structure of absolute constructions is a purely linguistic factor whichwould provide to serve functions far beyond linguistics proper. Otherwise stated, absolute costructions, being concise and laconic (the trait provided by the morphological or formal peculiarities of non‐finite verbs) are capable of communicating complete informative line within a sentence. They contribute to the beneficial evolution of the discourse, making it compact and neat, giving an opportunity to fit more information into a smaller volume.In addition, due to their frequency in this style, they need to be paid their deserved attention while teaching EAP to engineering students. Key words: absolute constructions, functional style, engineering research articles 122 S19 “The Fast and the Furious: The Amazing Textual Adventures of Miniscripts” Forms of Micro‐textuality in the Victorian Novel: George Meredith and the Aphorism Prof Anna Enrichetta Soccio University G. d’Annunzio of Chieti, Italy “The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the master among Germans, are forms of eternity” wrote Frederic Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols (1889). As one of the shortest literary genres, the aphorism stays somewhere between literature and philosophy: however, it needs to be both in order to be fully understood. A great number of well‐ known English novels contain aphorisms, maxims, wise sayings and novelists are deeply aware of the importance of aphorisms in narrative showing that the relationship between short and longer forms of writing can be very simple or else very complex. George Meredith is a Victorian novelist whose works are outstanding examples of the complex interaction between long narrative and aphorism. Since his first novel, Meredith manages to construct his stories in which not only does he use text‐in‐the‐text strategies but he also develops ‘mini‐texts’ and ‘mini‐narratives’ on their own which are in the longer narratives but not of the longer narratives. My paper will explore such experiments in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Diana of the Crossways (1889) and One of Our Conquerors (1890) in which we find actual “books of aphorisms” that, while developing the story and commenting on it, constitute an entirely different level of writing. They have their own life and can be read even outside the main narrative as they convey specific views of the world that give shape and significance to the contradictions and complexities of the Victorian society. Cut Short: Microtextualizing the Great War Dead Dr. Janet L. Larson Rutgers University, USA In Epitaphs of the War (1919), a collection of disconnected verses, most two to six lines, Rudyard Kipling exploits the microtextual features of the ancient epitaph form— compressed expression, rapid reading time, tight focus and necessary exclusions—to convey what was shockingly new: the incomprehensible brutality with which modern industrial warfare cut lives short. Rather than creating ‘characters,’ Kipling stages 35 voiced focalizations, given generic, vocational, or geo‐locational titles indicating the war’s human range and global sweep, that tell in turn the death experience inscribed on a tombstone or speak from the spot where the victim fell. “Invert[ing] the scale of epic,” each epitaph is a laconic mini‐story; many voices are emotionally “flat”; and no proper names tether speakers to individual identities—identity itself is often uncertain or self‐divided, its focal lens cracked. Except for one verse detailing missing body parts, bodies are missing too. In a work made entirely of short forms, Kipling’s poetics of minimalism and absence multiplies the microtext’s effects while refusing a sense‐making structure—no overall sequential logic, connecting narrator, or patriotic framing. For Kipling’s microtextualizations also foster “an incredulity towards metanarratives” that withdraws ideological support for the contemplation of war’s psychology, socio‐politics, and phenomenology up close. Kipling once dubbed Epitaphs “naked cribs of the Greek Anthology” and wrote many “memorial inscriptions” for the Imperial War Graves Commission. The microtext’s tight focus frames Epitaphs’ admirable speakers respectfully. But this poem cannot sustain “purity of diction and singleness of thought” –excellencies of the epigrammatic style—as it 123 ranges from the stoic, the earnest, and the poignant through the confessional, darkly ironic, grisly, irreverent, and scatological. High poetic diction is succeeded by the vernacular, smooth rhymes by doggerel. Microtextual compression also undermines memorial gravitas by increasing the speed with which the poem shuttles through incommensurate focalizations. If Epitaphs largely “denies itself the solace of good forms,” its naked encounters with the dead enlist the contemporary reader, another “ghost” occupying a spectral gap as an unarticulated subject of address, to experience him/herself as more than a “witness”— as a living casualty of a continuing disaster. Explosive punch lines deliver blows to the head, heart, and senses—some shorts in sequence fire at the reader like a machine gun. As Jung perceived, long afterwards this conflict was still being “fought in the psyche.” Although Epitaphs offers some comforts, its microtexts conduct a poetic counter‐assault on affective distancing, revisionism, and expedient forgetting of a war that wasn’t over when it was over, certainly not for Kipling when he published these unofficial memorials in 1919. Information fractals: textual patterns in BBC news alerts Sara Gesuato University of Padua, Italy Nowadays, information is produced and spread at a fast pace so as to keep the public constantly informed on current events. This is done, for instance, by delivering brief news alerts to the interested readership via email. This paper examines the information structure of 100 BBC news alerts (about 10,000 words), collected over a 3‐month period. The typical BBC news alert comprises an email message with a briefest news update, and a link to an expanded news report. Both components include smaller information units. The email message presents a succinct news update in the subject heading (an shot dead in attempted robbery), and a slightly expanded version, with information about contextual circumstances and/or the source of information, in the body of the text (Killer of four‐year‐old Daniel Pelka found dead at prison in Yorkshire, says Prison Service). Both are realized as clauses (often with ellipsis of the finite verb in the predicate) and contain no function words except for prepositions. The news update on the website comprises: a) a main telegraphic heading, which may coincide with the email subject heading (Judge to review police handling of child abuse inquiries; Junior doctors begin second 24‐hour strike over contract); b) a photo/video‐clip with an optional caption in italics, which provides background information (The four‐piece Warrington‐based band were officially formed in May last year) in a complete sentence; c) a secondary expanded heading, also realized as a complete sentence (A disease linked to the Zika virus in Latin America poses a global public health emergency requiring a united response, says the World Health Organization); and d) a longer report, with further details, realized as a set of mutually relevant one‐sentence‐long mini‐paragraphs, each expanding on the immediately preceding text segment ("Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives," he declared, to great applause, as he railed against Washington, lobbyists and the media. /// He took 28% of the Republican vote, beating his rival, the frontrunner Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio. […].) BCC news alerts are stretchable, yet segmented “news pills”. On the one hand, virtually each new portion of the text recycles and enriches the previous content, as if zooming in on details of a repeatedly presented fractal‐like narrative structure. On the other, the conceptually unitary longer reports present content in incremental steps, each of which is however graphically realized as a distinct self‐standing mini‐text. The redundant and fragmented nature of the news alerts meets the needs of a news 124 “consumer” with a fast‐paced daily routine. These information chunks are minimally distracting (they require a short attention span) and disposable (each cyclically provides more of the same content) so that the flow of incoming information can be interrupted at any of the multiple “exit points” of a recurrently expandable news narrative. Blurring the Line between Obituary and Epitaph: the Săpânța Funerary Inscriptions Andreea Bratu University of Craiova, Romania Like all the other mini‐texts that refer to someone’s death (obituaries, eulogies, various types of funerary inscriptions), epitaphs are used to capture the essence of that person’s achievements and personality. In spite of this manifested purpose to highlight positive aspects of the dead person’s life, humorous epitaphs have been used ever since Ancient Greece in an attempt to alleviate the suffering caused by the loss of someone dear. The presentation will focus on atypical examples of funerary inscriptions, a unique combination of obituaries and epitaphs found in Săpânța, a Romanian village famous for its Merry Cemetery. Engraved on the crosses and accompanied by corresponding images, the texts take the form of short narrative poems told by the dead persons in an ironic, yet sweet, almost nostalgic tone. While reviewing the peasants’ life and death, these texts mirror social and historical realities of the past century and underline social identity, relations and events. In order to establish the characteristics of these humorous inscriptions, various aspects of epitaphs (structure, function, voice, style) are considered in the analysis. Key words: epitaph, narrative voice, text structure, humour, the Merry Cemetery. 125 S20 “A Poetics of Exile in Poetry and Translation” Co‐convenors Penelope Galey‐Sacks, Valenciennes University Sara Greaves, Aix‐Marseille University Stephanos Stephanides, University of Cyprus Monday 22nd August: 16h00 – 18h00 16h 16h20 16h40 17h 17h20 17h40 Valérie Baisnée (France) The Poetics of Exile in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry Zornitsa Lachezarova (Bulgaria) Translating Bulgarian Poetry into English : transforming exile into a dimension of home. Stefania Michelucci (Italy) Flying Above California : spaces from above in two poems by Thomas Gunn. Penelope Sacks‐Galey (France) The Ocean Home : Exile in George Szirtes’ Dead Sea Sonnets Leonor Maria Martinez Serrano (Spain) A Walk in the Woods, or Poetry in Translation : Robert Bringhurst’s The Lyell Island Variations. Charlotte Blanchard (France) Translation as Exile : the arrested welcoming of Adrienne Rich’s work in France. — Valérie Baisnée Université Paris‐Sud, France The Poetics of Exile in Contemporary New Zealand Poetry With colonisation and immigration as the foundations of its non‐indigenous culture, the theme of exile plays a central and complex role in the literature of New Zealand. In the colonial period, displacement and dislocation were familiar experiences as well as powerful sources of poetic invention while today, diasporic existence remains an appeal to a lot of artists. This is reinforced by the country’s geographical isolation, for as the poet Bill Sewell asks, “How can anyone be at home / on the edge of the world?” For a long time poets felt they were living in a barren wasteland, waiting to leave for other shores like the Godwit, a migratory bird often mentioned in New Zealand literature. Today, while poets enjoy a deeper connection to place, exile surfaces as a trope bridging the distance between places, but also between world and word. This paper will explore the poetics of exile in several twentieth and twenty‐first century New Zealand poems, with an emphasis on those by Janet Frame, for whom exile was felt as a permanent condition. Valérie Baisnée is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Paris Sud. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published several articles and essays on women’s autobiographies, diaries and poetry, and she is the author of Gendered Resistance: The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras (Rodopi, 1997), and Through the Long Corridor of Distance: Space and Place in New Zealand Women’s Autobiographies (Rodopi, 2014). 126 — Zornitsa Lachezarova Sophia University « St. Kliment Ohridski », Bulgaria Translating Bulgarian poetry into English: transforming exile into a dimension of home This paper focuses on the process of translating poetry from Bulgarian into English in an attempt to define the exilic space inhabited by the translator during this creative work. The specific features of this space include the deliberate alienation from both languages and cultures as well as from the text itself, with the purpose of establishing and organising a new dimension, a middle‐ground which bridges the gap between the original text and its prospective English‐speaking audience. To this end, the translator harnesses an array of tools to aid him in this voluntary estrangement from both worlds, while meticulously striving to avoid the complete detachment of his own perceptions from the cultural realities of the original text. Thus, the space of exile, the transition space from one text to another acquires a new image: it is a safe space where the creative process is given its own freedom and time. The formation of this new space parallels the re‐construction of the original in a context which is no longer alien to it. The exilic nature of the process initiates the necessity to foster a new benign environment where the ideas, feelings, and form of the original can thrive undisturbed, and the exile of a poem becomes its home. — Stefania Michelucci Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche, Genoa, Italy. Flying Above California : spaces from above in two poems by Thomas Gunn. Starting with theoretical premises drawn from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and adopting a method similar to the close reading of Anglo‐American tradition, the paper examines Thom Gunn’s poems about the experience of flying. Whereas in his early poetry the predominant theme is the expression of desire for freedom from the painful prison of the intellect, in the poetry written in the United States, we note a gradual opening to human relationships and to Nature, which is also Gunn’s vindication and revaluation of his own nature, of his long repressed and hidden homosexuality. From here on we see the increasing vitality that informs his mature works, in which the poet celebrates the liberating experience of LSD and the happiness he felt within the gay community. Characterized by that rigorous intellectual honesty and sincerity that give Gunn’s voice its unmistakable tone, his poetry constitutes a unique artistic experience in that it seeks to mediate between opposite poles: old Europe and contemporary America, traditional metre and free verse, and the language of the present and the lessons of great writers of the past, in particular the Metaphysical Poets. Stefania Michelucci is Professor of English Literature at the University of Genoa. Her publications include The Poetry of Thom Gunn: A Critical Study (2009), Space and Place in the Works of D.H. Lawrence (2002), the critical edition of Twilight in Italy and Other Essays by D.H. Lawrence (1997), and numerous articles on XIX and XX century authors. With Michael Hollington she has edited Writing and the Idea of Authority (2006). She has also worked on the relationship between literature and the visual arts and has published essays on Cézanne, Lawrence, Ruskin, Thom Gunn and Caravaggio. With Paul Poplawksi she has edited a special issue of the D.H. Lawrence Review on Lawrence and the arts (2016). Her current research includes a study of Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s poetry and a book on The Representation of British Aristocracy between the xixth and the xxth century. 127 — Penelope SACKS‐GALEY, Univerity of Valenciennes, France The Ocean As Home : Exile in George Szirtes’ Dead Sea Sonnets Poetry, like philosophy, is often a question of selfhood in progress and as such, embodies the Self as it relates to the Other of outer reality. It can then be defined as the creative tension between the « before » of Memory and the the « perhaps » of Desire. The poet constantly experiences this tension as both threateningly exilic and potentially fulfilling, to the extent that melancholy and promise inhabit the poem’s dwelling. Exile is a geography of the mind, at once temporal, spatial, affective and effective. This exile is further exacerbated by the gap betweeen feeling, thinking, and expression. The materiality of language is alien to expression of pure feeling, far more than to that of pure thought. Images are more opaque, more complex than concepts. Yet poetry, as a medium, doubly corresponds to the exile’s condition of negotiation and compromise, since it encourages cohabitation of both emotion and philosophical reflection through its combining of image and concept, of loss and desire, all the while maintaining that particular level of imperfection, or lacking that corresponds to loss of the fatherland. To this extent, the ocean, as personified in the « Dead Sea Sonnets » of the Hungarian/English George Szirtes is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the language voyage of exile. Penelope Galey‐Sacks is Reader of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Valenciennes, specialising in the poetics of modernism and experimental poetry. She has published extensively on pre‐modernist and modernist poets and especially on the visual works of Apollinaire, E. E. Cummings and the theory and practice of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. She is also a poet, writing and publishing her poetry in French ; some of it has recently been translated into Italian and Spanish. She is the author of the paper ‘Songlines and Entropy in Ron Silliman’s Ketjak’ in the collection Études anglaises (ed. Penelope Galey) – N°2/2012 – Flirting With Form: ‘Experimental poetry and contemporary audacity’, available from http://www.klincksieck. Forthcoming is a theoretical work on the creative imagination : The I‐maginary : presence, passages (Ed. Hermann, Dec. 2016). — Leonor María Martínez Serrano University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain A Walk in the Woods, or Poetry in Translation: Robert Bringhurst’s The Lyell Island Variations Seemingly written in response to the fragmentary epigraphs from various poets writing in different languages, “The Lyell Island Variations” is one of the most ambitious poem sequences in Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst’s entire literary corpus. In its definitive incarnation in Selected Poems (2009), the sequence consists of nine poems that constitute an exercise in intertextual gymnastics on the part of the poet, or, to borrow Bringhurst’s words, “an album of mere mistranslations”. They pay an astonishing homage to a number of pre‐eminent poets from different literary traditions, as the use of textual thresholds in different languages found in the epigraphs placed as brief quotations at the beginning of each single poem makes clear. When translating from other languages and traditions, Bringhurst (a true cosmopolitan and a tireless traveller) is not an exile anymore, because 128 he feels at home amid the voices of the ancestors. To place Pindar next to Michelangelo, Rilke, Valéry, Celan, Char or Neruda is certainly an act of intellectual bravery, as well as a forceful statement on his own poetics. To a serious poet like Bringhurst, it is of the essence to make poems that are firmly grounded on what has already been accomplished by the literary ancestors in the past. “The Lyell Island Variations” are brought together under the name of an island in Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), an archipelago off the coast of Alaska and British Columbia and home to the Haida, one of the native peoples of North America. This paper explores how in “The Lyell Island Variations” the poet is trying to rescue strange remnants of visions and tattered fragments of wisdom from voices speaking different human languages. Leonor María Martínez Serrano works as a Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Córdoba (Córdoba, Spain), where she pursued her doctoral studies and gained a PhD in Canadian Literature. She is a member of the research group Writs of Empire: Poetics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary Literatures in English at the University of Córdoba, too. Her research interests include Canadian Literature, World Poetry (European, American and Canadian poetry), High Modernism, First Nations and Oral Literatures, Philosophy & Ecology, Literary Translation, and Comparative Literature. — Charlotte Blanchard PhD student, Bordeaux University, France Translation as exile: the arrested welcoming of Adrienne Rich’s work in France Unlike in German, Spanish, and Italian, Adrienne Rich’s poetry has never been published in a collection in French. A few of her poems have been published in magazines or on the internet. Thus only fragments of her work are available in French. Her poetry is in an in‐ between situation: an introduction in French has been initiated but it has not been yet been fully assumed. To understand why this exile is aborted, I will study the context of reception in the source and target cultures, and compare her work with other translated female poets from the same period. Using the tools developed in the sociology of translation, two main directions will be explored: Rich’s activism as a hindrance to welcoming her work in French, and the publication of translated poetry in France. 129 S21. Shakespearean Romantic Comedies: Translations, Adaptations, Tradaptations Convenors Márta Minier (University of South Wales – UK) Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University – Italy) Iolanda Plescia (‘Sapienza’ University of Rome – Italy) Written in a mature phase of Shakespeare’s career, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night represent the quintessence of ‘romantic comedy’, a successful genre that since Shakespeare’s time has unfailingly met the tastes of audiences all around the world. The seminar aims to explore the language of Shakespearean comedy in this specific sub‐ corpus and the particular challenges it poses not only in translation from language to language (interlingual translations), but also in transit and transfer to modern audiences within the same language (intralingual translations) and from one medium to another (intersemiotic translations) in the English‐speaking world and beyond. Specific takes on textual hybrids ‐ tradaptations ‐ are among the topics of the seminar. Translating, Standardizing, Correcting and Improving Shakespeare: Aland Durband’s, John Philip Kemble’s and Francis Gentleman’s Versions of Twelfth Night Holger Klein, University of Salzburg, Austria The Internet motto of the dual‐text series Shakespeare Made Easy reads: "Taking the fear out of Shakespeare". Teaching experience confirms that there is quite a need for this, and a modern paraphrase is one way towards this goal. Like Gayle Holste for Much Ado and As You Like It, Alan Durband presents his version of Twelfth Night as only the first step on the road to understanding and appreciating Shakespeare's original. Leaving aside the book's other elements, my paper will look at the lexis. Thus, for instance, "too much" for "excess" (1.1) and "bear [...] denial" for "bide [...] denay" (2.4) work, but "if you cheek him" for "if thou thou'st him" would require annotation. As we know, earlier periods were much less cautious and modest. I shall give most attention to Kemble, whose changes cover scene switches (like 1.2 before 1.1, a common feature), additions, mostly of stage directions, cuts for various reasons (reduction of length, elimination of obscurities, sometimes of vulgarity or indecency or blasphemy − e.g. "God" becoming "heaven" in 2.3), limited modernization such as "an" for "and" meaning 'if' (passim) or "kick‐shaws" for "kicke‐shawses", 1.3, and near‐systematic standardization, notably "Duke" for "Count". It would seem difficult to try and pin down Kemble's copy text, though there probably was one, he is e.g. hardly likely to have decided at times between F1 and F2 on his own. Some changes can safely be attributed to Pope, others to Capell, etc. As a kind of substitute for such bibliographical searching I shall also look at Francis Gentleman's version, antedating Kemble by some forty years, thus roughly from the same phase of Shakespeare reception. The reading version of Durband − whose changes can also be categorized − shows assumptions about the lexical range of today's new readers of Shakespeare. The performance‐driven versions of Kemble and Gentleman contribute to our insights into tastes and attitudes of the later eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. So‐taming the Shrew: A Modern Adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew 130 Kübra Baysal, Kastamonu University School of Foreign Languages, Turkey Planned as a remaking of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy play, The Taming of the Shrew, the film produced by the BBC in the “Shakespeare Retold Series” in 2005 is directed by David Richards and stars Shirley Henderson in the role of Kate and Rufus Sewell as Petruchio. Reflecting a very modern, innovative and funny version of the original play along with a modern language preserving the general frame of the key dialogues in the play, the film presents some distinct changes as well as new perspectives to the play, such as clarifying its originally ambiguous end, or imagining what may have happened in Kate and Petruchio’s marriage afterwards, which indeed come to satisfy and further tingle the expectations of the modern audience while keeping the most crucial points like names, places and the general plotline as they are in the original source, which possibly serves to preserve the credibility of the film as a Shakespearean adaptation. Translating Shakespeare’s As You Like It into Modern English: Challenges and Rewards Gül Kurtuluş, Bilkent University, Turkey Shakespeare’s popularity and authenticity throughout centuries in different nations and countries is quite evident, however as the time period between the audience and Shakespeare’s plays widens various problems appear in terms of translation and adaptation of his plays. Use of language in his plays is not only problematic for foreign speakers but poses challenges also to native speakers. Translators who translate Shakespeare’s works into other languages or into modern English face challenges in keeping the meaning of his language and maintaining the poetic style of the playwright. As You Like It, a romantic pastoral comedy is one of those problematic plays in terms of adaptation and translation, which illustrates historical and cultural differences, and deviation and transformation in English language. Translating Shakespeare’s “Green World” into the Moving Pictures Radmila Nastic, University of Kragujevac, Serbia Shakespeare’s mature comedies are dramatic representations of the workings of human imagination towards the fulfilment of dreams and desires, Norhtrop Frye famously wrote. The fulfilment takes place away from everyday world of the city and court, in a natural environment where envy and ambition are weak. This natural world is usually represented as a forest or some other miraculous though not unreal space, like Illyria in Twelfth Night. This “green world,” whose origins go back in time to the beginnings of literature and mythology, is paradigmatically represented in As You Like It. My presentation undertakes to study how well this world translates into film. A preliminary research showed that among its best renderings are the BBC versions (The BBC Shakespeare series), and that their success is due both to the excellence of the setting and the skill of the leading actresses. Helen Mirren in the 1978 As You Like It, and Felicity Kendall in the 1980 Twelfth Night, masterfully visualized the “miracle” of love, which is central to the plays, while the scenes of action were made both probable and fantastic. Intersemiotic and Interlinguistic translation of Twelfth Night: Adaptation and Dubbing 131 Roberta Zanoni, University of Verona, Italy The filmic adaptation of Twelfth Night enables us to discuss several features of intersemiotic translation, while its Italian dubbing allows us to consider a particular kind of interlingual translation, destined to cinema. The main characteristic of dubbing is, in fact, not only that it partakes in the already very complex passage from a language to another, but also that it presupposes the need to adapt to a multimodal medium. The Italian dubbing of the film, thus, will be analysed both in the light of the reference to the source text and in its presence inside an intersemiotic translation. The “faithfulness” of the film to the play will also be taken into consideration, in particular concerning the role of the language displayed in it. This attention will be of great importance when considering the Italian text which should respect the sound patterns of English in order adapt to the mouth movements of the characters without, at the same time, altering the content and the complexity of Shakespeare’s words. The focus of the analysis will be to evaluate whether the translational passage has fulfilled these goals and to further develop the knowledge of such a complex and controversial translational practice such as dubbing. 132 S22. “ANACHRONISM AND THE MEDIEVAL” Co‐convenors: Lindsay Reid and Yuri Cowan Chronos to Kairos: Representation of History in William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida Evrim Dogan Adanur, Atılım University William Shakespeare is one of the greatest anachronists. Together with all the historical inaccuracies for the sake of dramatic effect, he also uses intentional, unintentional, and “necessary” anachronisms in his plays. While writing his version of the “Homeric” tale of the Trojan War, Shakespeare brings together the controversies of the rampantly changing early‐modern world from a feudal to a capitalist one in Troilus and Cressida. In a tale stemming from the antiquity and transformed, even reproduced during the medieval age through the romance tradition, Shakespeare brings together the “old” and the “new” in his handling of the medieval/feudal Trojans and early‐modern/capitalist Greeks. The “chivalric” medieval age finds its representation especially in Trojan Hector and the “modern” in Greek Ulysses. This paper examines the ways in which the past and the present are culminated in Troilus and Cressida and the “chronos” is transformed into “kairos” with the juxtaposition of contemporary ideologies in a seemingly Homeric world. Chaucer’s Ghoast: “Ovidian” Tales and Vernacular Spectres in Early Modern Literature Lindsay Reid, National University of Ireland, Galway In 1672 a book compiled by an anonymous “lover of antiquity” was printed in London. This volume bore the curious title Chaucer’s Ghoast: Or, A Piece of Antiquity. Containing Twelve Pleasant Fables of Ovid. The work’s title page also featured the well‐known Horatian line “Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, &c.,” thereby suggesting the author’s learned interest in resurrecting “ancient” texts. Despite the classical veneer of this epigraph, immediately palpable in the work’s very title is a sense of counter‐chronological slippage. The ghost of Chaucer turns out to be Ovid, with the Roman represented as the original author of the volume’s faux‐Middle English “Pleasant Fables.” The oddities in attribution do not end here, however, for Chaucer’s is not the only vernacular spectre haunting the text. Rather, the volume’s purportedly “Ovidian” tales are actually lightly modernized (uncredited) versions of twelve stories excerpted from the work of another medieval English author altogether: Gower. I draw upon this matrix of authorial (mis)attributions and the concomitant language of spectrality in this seventeenth‐century text to speculate about the ways in which these poets’ identities—one Roman, two English, one “ancient” in our contemporary sense, two medieval—were anachronistically intertwined in the early modern English popular imagination. ‘The Danish Boy’ – Anachronism in William Wordsworth’s Ghost Poem Robert William Jensen‐Rix, University of Copenhagen William Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Danish Boy: A Fragment’, first published in Lyrical Ballads of 1800, is a landscape vignette featuring a ghost playing his harp in a Lake District landscape. This ghost is an anachronism, a temporal asynchronicity, which encroaches upon the present. Wordsworth’s poem can be seen to follow a fad for adapting Norse stories focused on the supernatural. But, the paper will argue that the ghost in the poem is 133 not played for cheap thrills; rather he represents the uncanny power of skaldic song, which haunted the present – not least as a recurrent topic in eighteenth‐century antiquarianism. Wordsworth’s poem rehearses a recognisable romantic scenario of loss and separation, in which the harper functions as a symbol of a once‐held poetic power. However, as a ghost whose song is heard in the present, the harper stirs the hope that the voice of the past is not entirely silenced. The fact that Wordsworth had originally planned to use the poem as a preamble to a longer medieval‐style ballad makes it interesting to explore the ‘Fragment’ as comment on reviving the past (anachronistically) in modern literary production. “Weary is the knight who is her thrall”: The Anachronistic Quest of the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft (1894‐1896) Koenraad Claes, University of Kent Several little magazines of the British Fin‐de‐Siècle have an element of anachronism whereby not only their literary contents but also the illustrations, ornaments and production methods conspicuously referred to age‐old models instead of to the art and literature of their day. While some critics at the time dismissed this tendency as escapist and derivative, for the Arts and Crafts Movement this was not a mere affectation, but a means to propagate alternative modes of artistic production modelled on pre‐modern practices. A prime example of this phenomenon is the hand‐printed Quest (1894‐1896) issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, which can be considered a periodical analogue to the books of Morris’s contemporaneous Kelmscott Press. Though produced in one of the leading industrial cities in Britain, it featured articles on guild socialism and village architecture as well as medievalist literary contributions that were allegories of its aesthetic and political principles, decorated with engraved initials and illustrations that hark back to medieval manuscripts and the earliest printed books. This paper will show that the Quest’s anachronistic obsession with the idealized Middle Ages was an aesthetic statement meant to reinforce its political struggle against the flaws it found in late‐ Victorian society. Playing at History: Anachronism and Crusader Kings 2 Yuri Cowan, Norwegian University of Science and Technology The Paradox Studios grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings 2, which enables the player to take control of a medieval dynasty, playing successive individuals over the course of their lives day by day, month by month, and year by year, has become a minor phenomenon in the gaming world. Although the game begins at an historical starting point such as 1066, the break with history is almost instantaneous. The borders of counties, duchies, and kingdoms in medieval Europe, Asia and the Middle East begin to mutate as soon as play starts, dictated not just straightforwardly by war and technology as in a traditional strategy game, but by the rules of feudal succession, religion, marriage, and of a complex system of individual diplomacy based on past interactions and on personal traits, including all the seven deadly sins and cardinal virtues. This paper will consider Crusader Kings 2’s anachronistic break with history in the light of “emergent gameplay,” in which the possibilities and constraints of the game dictate a rich tradition of narratives written by players describing their experiences, and will examine how the game makes mundane activities like marrying, seducing, having children, dying, converting, feasting, and scheming reshape the course of history. 134 135 S23. 'The Inhuman Self Across Early Modern Genres: Textual Strategies 1550‐1700'. Co‐convenors: Anna Maria Cimitile, Jean‐Jacques Chardin, Laurent Curelly Jean‐Louis Claret (Université de Provence, France): "From the cloven pine to the weeping logs: trees in Shakespeare’s Tempest." Surprisingly, the construction of the individual self in the Renaissance was sometimes carried out thanks to its transposition into some exterior elements: trees, that occupy a central part in such founding texts as the Bible or Homer’s Odyssey, stand out against the sky and sink their roots into the nurturing soil. In this respect, they invite comparison with humans who try to inherit their vegetal life force and wish their blood had the irresistibility of sap. The metaphor of the tree was a topos that Shakespeare’s characters regularly resort to: they compare themselves to trees or use them to assert their position in the world. It is particularly important in The Tempest. They are both the origin and the end, ranging from the womb of a cloven pine that keeps Ariel prisoner to the living logs that “weep for having wearied Ferdinand.” (III,1, 18‐19) But Prospero also refers to his past life in Milan as a growth that was impeded by Antonio, that is “the ivy which had hid (his) princely trunk.” (I,2, 86) In Elizabethan drama, the humanist refashioning of man is surprisingly conveyed by the transformation into trees and then the departure from these welcoming though petrifying hosts. Yuki Nakamura (Kanto Gakuin University, Japan): “Personified Abject in Early Modern English Revenge Tragedies” This seminar paper analyzes horror images of early modern English revenge tragedies, focusing in detail on the characterizations of both revengers and villains and their actions and behaviours, exploring the nature of horribleness, or what Julia Kristeva calls abject, as a preliminary step to the age of Enlightenment. Wendy Griswold states that horror in revenge tragedies “achieves its impact by violating what is regarded as natural by mixing cultural categories” (Renaissance Revival 1986, 78). The same discourse can be found among art historians and film critics who maintain that horror originates from actions of crossing the boundaries between human and in‐human. Moreover, in the genre of revenge tragedies, horribleness is personified by not only tyrants and villains but also revengers who transform into villains through inhuman actions of revenge. These revenging protagonists are, at first, human and represent the notion of the modern self or individual in that they are autonomous and self‐aware in their conflicts with tyrannous power. At the same time, however, their transformation is an essential factor in the whole system of a revenge tragedy because revengers, like Hamlet and Hieronimo, need to go to ruin in order to serve as a scapegoat for the state or society’s restoration of order at the end of the drama. Personification of the in‐human and its contrast with what is human is a representation of the Renaissance idea of order, and furthermore is a sign of forthcoming Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Carmen Gallo (University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy): “Human invention and divine agency in George Herbert’s The Temple” The paper means to focus on George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) in order to investigate the rhetoric strategies and meta‐poetical figures revolving around writing and self. In particular, it means to show the struggle for authorship between the religious poet, who meditates on the possibility of his own language and invention to praise God, and God 136 himself, which presents himself as the all‐pervading Logos, continuously claiming his power as Creator. Through the analyses of poems belonging to the central section, The Church, the paper will provide textual examples of the way in which the borders of the writing self are wittingly negotiated and performed in the space of the poem. The construction of his own identity as human being endowed with the divine power of language and fictional creation is indeed a pivotal key of Herbert’s complex religious experience, as he finds in the scriptural model (Psalms) its best rival and contender. As it will be shown, if biblical quotations and divine intrusions (direct speech by God are reported in the texts) seem to undermine human invention and pretence of creation, audacious plays on form and content overturn conventional hierarchies and deconstruct unexpectedly – through the wit he pretends to abhor ‐ the topos of divine inspiration. Finally, the focus on writing and the subjective confrontation with Scriptures will also be evaluated in the larger context of the Reformed attention to the Word, and in the light of the epistemological shift due to the sacramental crisis following the Eucharistic debates on Christ’s real presence in the world. Raymond‐Jean Frontain (University of Central Arkansas, USA): “Travel, Transgression, and the Dangers of Festive Self‐Presentation in Coryats Crudities” Thomas Coryate was a Renaissance transgressor extraordinaire. Born in a small village in Somersetshire, he traveled close to 10,000 miles, much of it on foot, in only nine years, eventually carrying the name of his beloved Odcombe to the furthest reaches of Eurasia. The son of a village parson, he used his wit to gain entrance to Prince Henry's household, where he was appointed Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary. Rarely in possession of money, he prided himself on the access that his oratorical skills earned him to the great and powerful, and boasted of the orations he was allowed to offer to members of the Royal Family, to English ambassador to India Sir Thomas Roe, and to the "Great Mogul" himself. Obsessed with language and its power to refashion the reader's or listener's perception of the writer/speaker, he pushed a developing English lexicon past existing limits, uninhibitedly fashioning words to meet his personal needs; indeed, as Ben Jonson slyly puts it in "A Character of the Authour" prefacing the _Crudities_, Coryate "is a great and bold Carpenter of words, or (to expresse him in one like his owne) a _Logodaedale_." Sensitive to the criticism he incurred when crossing these boundaries, he happily played the fool, seeking to disarm through self‐ mocking humor his better educated reader's, or more socially powerful listener's, possible resentment. Yet the most curious feature of his temperament, biographer Michael Strachan notes, is his fury not to be taken seriously by those whose favor he courts‐ ‐that is, to be taken for the fool that he so willingly played. If Coryate's presentation of his _Crudities_ bears witness to the defensive power of his festivity against the dangers incurred in transgression, placing Coryate in the margin of the ludic humanist tradition of More, Erasmus and Rabelais, then the failure of that festive self‐presentation may illuminate a peculiar problem of Renaissance self‐fashioning: how an intelligent, well informed, quasi‐humanist text is unable, finally, to survive its author's self‐presentation outside the text. Armel Dubois‐Nayt (Université Versailles–Saint Quentin, France): “Jane Anger’s Protection for Women (1586): Redefining the female sex in the Querelle des femmes” The so‐called female controversy or Querelle des femmes was in fact a debate about the superiority/ inferiority of the sexes or the equality between them. In that respect it was 137 more a gender controversy that opposed the self and the other. Beside the two sexes, the controversy also placed man and woman in relation to the inhuman and more particularly to the animal. This paper will take the example of Jane Anger’s Protection for Women (1586) to establish how the first defence of women, authored by a female personae, clearly redefined the female self and did so by reappraising the sexes in relation to the animal. It will look at Anger’s and her opponents’ reading of the genesis creation narrative but also compare the extent to which on both sides of the debate, pamphleteers use animal similes, metaphors and comparisons to defend or attack the sexes. It will argue that in that respect not only did Jane Anger redefine the female sex, she also started a feminist tradition that downgraded mankind as opposed to womankind to the animal kind. Claire Labarbe (Université Paris 3‐Sorbonne Nouvelle/Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France): “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Human Metamorphoses and the Characters of Nature” In this paper, I would like to focus on two seventeenth‐century publications which, although they may seem to us to belong to separate fields of study, both evoke various “curious” changes in the form of man. The anonymous character pamphlet A Strange Metamorphosis of Man, transformed into a Wildernesse. Deciphered in Characters came out in 1634. The format of this duodecimo collection of short descriptive essays reflects the contemporary craze for miniature books which aimed to encapsulate the entire world of man in the nutshell of a limited series of “characters.” John Bulwer's sligthly later Anthropometamorphosis, Man Transform’d; or, the Artificial Changeling (1650) is an anthropological quarto volume which tapped into the contemporary disciplines of medical anatomy and human physiognomy. These two publications illustrate the two possible forms of early modern “transformation” or “metamorphosis” recently explored by Susan Wiseman in Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1550‐1700 (2014). Whereas the 1634 pamphlet stages an imaginary substitution whereby man is replaced by nature, Bulwer examines the different modes of alteration through which man's nature is reshaped and distorted. The word “changeling” in Bulwer's title does not refer to one person exchanged for another but rather to a person “changed from itself.” I would like to argue that in describing man's various shapes as so many deviant corruptions of his nature, Bulwer aimed to validate the social supremacy of one particular type of man, the “English gallant.” Bulwer's ideal model of a “natural” man is paradoxically constructed through a rejection of cultural otherness, whose manifestations the author condemns as so many instances of barbaric art and animal depravity. Conversely, the 1634 pamphlet metaphorically substitutes man for the infinite works of nature and, by doing so, expands the boundaries of the self. The author's conception of man's symbiotic relation to the material and natural world he inhabits acts as a philosophical challenge to the centrality of man. This anonymous series of character metamorphoses thus undermines the critical understanding of the early modern self as a social construct modelled under the exclusive pressure of constraining religious and political forces. Tim Mc Inerney (Université Paris VIII – Vincennes‐Saint‐Denis, France): “Sons of Ham: Nobility in Early Modern Race Thinking” Few concepts have influenced understandings of the human body more than that of ‘race’. And yet, the notion of race as a ‘biological unit’ of mankind was not proposed until the end of the eighteenth century, and had already been debunked by the end of the 20th. Before 138 this time, ‘race’ existed as a heterogeneous, and curiously genealogical dimension of the Great Chain of Being world‐view. In early modern Britain, ‘races’ of men signified diverse understandings of linear descent – all bound up in a complex web of Biblical providence, natural order, and above all social rank. This paper explores how the traditions of nobility established a template of genealogical hierarchy that would become fundamental to early constructions of racial identity. It examines how the ideals of pure blood and breeding could be used to categorise different types of human being, and how these ideals steadily pervaded contemporary naturalism and human variety theory. Works discussed include Thomas Sydenham’s Treatise on the Gout (1684), Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of the Native Races of America, the Comte de Boulainvilliers’ État de la France (1722) and Maurice Shelton’s An Historical and Critical Essay on the True Rise of Nobility, Political and Civil (1718). 139 S24. Renegade Women in Drama, Fiction and Travel Writing: 16th Century ‐ 19th Century Convenors: Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo) and Efterpi Mitsi (National Kapodistrian University of Athens) Unruly Women and Female Rule: Cecilia Vasa’s Journey to England 1564 Anna Swärdh (Karlstad University) This paper examines the representation of Princess Cecilia Vasa (1540–1627) as transgressor of boundaries in a contemporary manuscript account of her journey from Sweden to London in 1564–65, James Bell’s Narrative of the Journey of Princess Cecilia, Daughter of Gustavus I of Sweden…. Cecilia Vasa was a great admirer of Elizabeth I (1533– 1603), and had learnt English and corresponded with the queen before her journey took place. She remained in London until May 1566, and Bell’s narrative seems to have been written during or soon after her visit. Several of Cecilia’s activities in connection with this journey would justify a description of her as a ‘renegade’ woman in the extended sense of that term, behaving in unconventional or nonconformist manners. This article focuses on how Bell’s narrative can be seen as contributing to such an understanding of her. Examining its representation of Cecilia from a rhetorical perspective will, for example, show how features such as narratorial commentary and classical references are used to cast Cecilia in an almost mythical or epic guise. In this way, Bell’s narrative can be seen as an early example of the fictionalisation of Cecilia’s life encountered in novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the paper will also suggest that a more political understanding of the narrative is possible. Artful Renegades – Staging Femininity to Undermine the Power Structures of the Court Ingrid Pfandl‐Buchegger (Universität Graz) In the early 16th century, when stage performances were under constant accusation of lewdness and licentiousness from the Church and civic authorities and performers were all male and still considered morally suspect, King James’s wife, Anna of Denmark, used the stage to pursue a sophisticated artistic way of undermining the absolute authority of her husband and promoting her personal interests in the power struggles at court. Anna challenged the masculine dominance at the most prestigious and expensive form of court entertainment, the masque, by usurping the dance floor with her ladies in waiting for several years. In the graceful and harmonious performance of the elaborate courtly dances and revels in these allegorical spectacles, the queen carefully designed her public appearance to display an image of assertive and independent feminine sensuality. Masques were a multi‐medial synthesis of poetry, music, dance, costumes and stagecraft, which during the reign of James I, were used not only to celebrate memorable occasions (such as triumphs or weddings), but had also become important political and diplomatic events, usually performed around Christmas (on Twelfth Night), or on Candlemas, and created by the best artists of the court. As such, they provided an occasion for the monarch to exhibit the wealth and sophistication of the court, and for the courtiers to represent their rank in society through an appropriate public appearance in front of domestic and foreign dignitaries. 140 In this presentation, I would like to analyse some of these female masques especially commissioned by Anna and discuss them not only as rare instances of female ‘performers’ at Whitehall. I would also like to examine how Anna tried to execute her own power schemes and counteract the male favourites of her husband and their influence at court. In the true manner of Renaissance self‐fashioning, she used these performances to forge an image of a strong queen for herself in public (a queen who even dared to exhibit a visibly pregnant body on the stage), and, additionally, by surrounding herself with her most faithful ladies (mostly allies in her ill‐famed Catholic faith) and thus trying to provide them with royal protection against religious persecution, she managed to create a strong sense of connectedness. ‘Homelesse Wayfarynge Women can onlie bring forth but Horribly Disfigured Children’: Monstrous Births and Female Marginality in Early Modern England Luca Baratta (University of Florence) One of the most relevant cultural phenomena in Europe, at the dawn of the early modern period, was the spread, during the conflict between Protestants and Catholics, of an apocalyptical imagery known as ‘prodigy canon’. A consequence of this incredible attention paid to the supernatural was the proliferation of printed texts, which shared the same interest for the ‘marvellous’. Monstrous births played a central role in this pervasive imagery: deciphered symbolically and allegorically as manifestations of God’s wrath, they became a harsh weapon in the propaganda war of the various religious and political groups, which fought each other in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the fields in which this kind of publications was more frequently employed was that of the social control of women. Many authors of street literature intentionally used monstrous births to show in a bad light women who did not respect specific models of behaviour, through the syllogism according to which deformed children were the manifestation of their mother’s secret crimes. In most cases, these secret crimes dealt with sexual morality. The present paper aims at investigating two pamphlets, printed in London in 1609 and 1615, in which the monstrous birth was ingeniously exploited to stigmatise a different type of guilt: the conscious marginality of the female protagonists, two “wayfarynge women”. During James I’s reign, vagrancy had become cause of great concern for the authorities in London. The Parliament had set about tackling the problem, introducing a series of Acts which acknowledged that the care of the poor was the community’s responsibility, but no remedy had been offered by these legislative measures: beggars continued to grow in number from day to day, while their presence was perceived as a danger for the state. And if this was true in every circumstance, it was much more evident when the “vagrant” was a woman. Begging women were considered to be a serious menace for the stability of family relationships (heads of families could be tempted by these anonymous ladies), unable to work and, if pregnant, a double burden for the hosting community. By definition women that continuously cross the boundaries of different communities, these female beggars can be considered particularly representative examples of what Eric R. Dursteler has defined “Renegade women”. Profiting from a recurring theme in the early modern English street literature, the two documents taken into account in this paper contributed to the debate about female vagrancy, interpreting the occurrence of a monstrous birth as the result of the mothers’ conscious extraneousness in social life. God himself, for the zealous authors of these 141 documents, would punish these women, who independently chose to live at the margins of society, thus avoiding any form of social control. Where the law was unsuccessful, the fright of a supernatural wrath would maybe manifest itself to support the state. The Lure of Crossing the Divide Between Christianity and Islam: Christian Women and Muslim Men on the Seventeenth‐Century English Stage Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo) I propose a reading of three seventeenth‐century English plays, each of which is concerned with the uneasy relationship between Christianity and Islam at a time when the ill‐defined entity generally known as the West today was not in the ascendant and apprehensions of the expansionist Ottoman Empire and its dependencies in North Africa played an important role in Western European political and cultural life. Within this context, renegadism emerged as the focus of a wide range of anxieties about the crossing of religious, political, social and cultural borders particularly by women, who were conventionally perceived as morally weak and therefore likely to be seduced by Oriental luxury and/or the possibility of gaining political power and influence in the East by sexual means. The figure of the actual or potential renegada or apostata shapes the plots of all three plays. Written in 1624, The Renegado, or the Gentleman of Venice by Philip Massinger is considered to have introduced the subgenre of the eroticized captivity narrative to the English stage (Michael Neill). While representing the dangers of sexual and religious renegadism for both women and men, the play ends with the triumph of Christianity over Islam: the captive Venetian Paulina retains both her chastity and her faith while the Ottoman Princess Donusa chooses to convert to Christianity and elope with her Christian lover. Powerful Muslim men, such as the Viceroy of Tunis and the Pasha of Aleppo, are effectively thwarted in their sexual and political schemes. The Tragedy of Mustapha, Son of Solyman the Magnificent (1665) by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, builds upon a passage from Richard Knolles’s The General Historie of the Turkes (1603), which denigrates the excessive ambition of the Sultan’s wife Roxolana and her undue influence over him. As a plotting Oriental woman Roxolana is contrasted with the virtuous Queen of Buda who represents “proper” femininity. There are potential rather than actual conversions in this play. The Ottoman princes Mustapha and Zanger fall in love with the Queen, which makes her a potential target for conversion to Islam. However, it is also suggested to her that she should attempt to convert Mustapha to Christianity and thus radically transform the Ottoman Empire. The Siege of Constantinople (1675) by Henry Neville Payne similarly reinterprets a story from Knolles’ Historie. It contrasts the renegade Calista with the virtuous Irene who is rewarded with a marriage to the Christian Thomaso. The apostata, on the other hand, experiences death at the hands of Sultan Mahomet, whom she believes to have ensnared sexually. In the three plays history and political fantasies become entangled as their authors strive to represent Christian and Muslim identities in a world torn by conflicts. Dangerous Games. Masquerade, Carnival and Cross‐dressing as discourse for re‐ negotiating identity in Aphra Behn’s Plays Tiziana Febronia Arena (University of Catania) In the English Restoration, the female body was a sexual object for male consumption. As De Lauretis (1987) argued, the construction of gender is the product of its representation 142 so that the construction of woman’s body followed those canons which encouraged patriarchal binary thought, where the feminine pole has always been regarded as the negative one. In her plays, Aphra Behn alters this social stability, in the liminal space, on the stage and during Carnival, breaking gender barriers and encouraging female resistance against social fixed roles. Her lady Cavaliers create a discourse of their own and try to create a new female identity exploring the possibility of roving among no fixed genders. Through the use of masquerade and cross dressing, Behn is able to perform the question of the fluidity of gender and to expose the illusion of representation, preparing the ground for subverting the binary patriarchal system and introducing a different vision of woman/women. The Other, the masqueraded character, the woman, real or fictive, becomes a source of ambiguity, hence of threat because it becomes a relevant tool offering access to power and secret knowledge. Aphra Behn shows gender mutability and instability, anticipating what Judith Butler (1990)would argue about gender, that is, that “gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific set of relations.” Identity is in Behn’s works assumed as a role, thus, masquerade is a dissimulation, a veil that hides the truth, a mask that covers the “true nature” of woman(Rivière). The uncontrolled mask becomes the site of both resistance and power. Gender itself was displayed as a liberating expression of how all identity can be moulded and manipulated at will. Behn’s comedies reflect, respond and raise questions about women’s concerns and the possibility of a female agency. Antifeminism and the Religious Clash of Christianity and Islam in Samuel Johnson’s Irene Samia AL‐Shayban (King Saud University) This paper proposes to read Johnson’s Irene as an antifeminist play. Central to this reading is renegadism as represented by the heroine Irene. The play, which seems from the surface to be concerned with religion, unfolds gender identity discourse where masculinity is superior and femininity is inferior. To undermine the renegade Irene and her decision to convert to Islam, Johnson dramatizes a complex and multilayered attack on femininity. This is done through different manipulations of the three characters, the Christian Greek, Irene, Mahomet, the Turkish Sultan and Aspasia, the Christian Greek. Irene is dramatized as the archetypal female sinner, the biblical Eve. The Muslim Turkish Sultan Mahomet is presented as an effeminate version of the archetypal tempter, Satan. The Christian Aspasia is stripped of her value as a woman and given the gendered role of a patriarchal man. The metaphorical Eve, Irene, falls to the temptation of the effeminate devil, the Turkish Sultan, and renounces Christianity to embrace Islam in return for the title of Queen. To furnish Aspasia with moral and religious credit, as a contrast to Irene, it is essential to deny her identity as a woman, who is by nature a sinner, and give her the identity of a man. With such approach it becomes apparent that Johnson’s target of attack is not Irene the renegade, but Irene the woman. “Here woman’s voice is never heard”: The Ambiguous Fate of Renegade Women in Romantic Hellenism Efterpi Mitsi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) 143 In a footnote to The Giaour, Byron, explaining the “not uncommon” practice of having “faithless” women drowned in the Ottoman Empire, mentions “[t]he fate of Phrosine, the fairest of this sacrifice [and] the subject of many a Romaic and Arnaut ditty.” In 11 January 1801, Euphrosyne Vasileiou, a Greek woman married to a wealthy merchant of Ioannina and alleged lover of Ali Pasha’s son Mouktar, was drowned in the lake of the city together with 17 other women, all accused by Ali of “immorality”. Her tragic end inspired numerous Greek folk songs, poems, novels, operas and films, as well as travellers and poets like Byron, becoming an ambiguous symbol of feminized Greece. On the one hand, Phrosine as the victim of the Muslim oppressor’s cruelty and despotism represented political persecution; on the other, in the accounts of British travellers flocking to the court of Ali, such as John Cam Hobhouse, William Martin Leake, C.R. Cockerell and Thomas Hughes, she exemplified the renegade woman, betraying family, religion and nation. By exploring the conflicting narratives of Phrosine’s story in travellers’ tales together with Byron’s Giaour (1814), as well as its resonance in Mary Shelley’s Greek tales, “The Evil Eye” (1829) and “Euphrasia: A Tale of Greece” (1838) ‐‐ both influenced by Byron’s Tale, my paper seeks the absent presence of renegade women in the intersections of Romantic Hellenism and Orientalism. Just as the changing narrators in The Giaour create contradictory points of view on the tragic love of Leila and the Giaour (a “stray renegade” himself), the history of Phrosine has been distorted, fragmented and lost. Like Leila, the Circassian “faithless” harem slave, she is given a sexual and mythical presence but is deprived of identity and voice; she emerges in the text only to be drowned, still haunting her storytellers. An unconventional explanation for a conventional ending: Lady Audley and the transgression of the boundaries of sanity Sarah Frühwirth (University of Vienna) Lady Audley, the doll‐faced, angelic‐looking protagonist of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), is an archetypal “renegade woman”. Not only does she transgress moral boundaries dictated by nineteenth‐century society, but also trespasses a vast number of legal boundaries by committing bigamy as well as a number of acts of violence, like pushing her first husband into a well or burning down the house in which her nephew, who is about to expose her, is sleeping. Her eventual cry of surrender “You have conquered – A MADWOMAN!” after her nephew has been able to bring forward sufficient proof of her crimes heralds the allegedly insipid ending of a novel which despite its outrageous and daring contents ends in accordance with nineteenth‐century ideas of poetic justice by locking up the transgressive heroine in a lunatic asylum. Whereas many feminist critics have argued against Lady Audley’s alleged hereditary insanity, I am going to contend that the novel in fact contains ample evidence that not only acquits the novel’s author of catering to the tastes of nineteenth‐century moralisers, but also confirms Lady Audley’s hereditary strain of madness and the assumption that she has already crossed the boundary between sanity and insanity well before the book’s controversial ending. Aleksandar Radovanovic, Angel on the Stage: Notions of Femininity and Social Purity in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan When Lady Windermere’s Fan premiered in 1892, Oscar Wilde captured the attention of the Victorian audience not merely by serving them with a disarmingly witty, yet appropriately conventional melodrama, but also by engaging them in the ongoing public 144 debate about the “woman question”. The polarizing issue of women’s rights looms as the background of Wilde’s examination of the vulnerable position of women in a society designed as a sexual marketplace. Pairing a prudish daughter with a worldly mother, Wilde juxtaposes the stereotypes of a pure woman and “a woman with a past”. His play toys with expectations of fidelity, sexual double standard and mercantile nature of marital arrangements, thus challenging gender roles and stressing the subjective nature of moral outlooks on femininity. Observing modification of ingrained gender codes as part of the Victorian culture’s progression towards modernity, Wilde stages a social transition from an idealized angel in the house to a decadent New Woman on the stage. Constance Fenimore Woolson, aka “Miss Grief” Theodora Tsimpouki (National Kapodistrian University of Athens) In 1879 at the age of thirty‐nine, grand‐niece of James Fenimore Cooper, Constance Fenimore Woolson set foot in Europe, where she remained until her death in 1894. Although she had acquired a taste for travelling at an early age, it was after the death of her mother that she crossed the Atlantic for the first time, leaving behind the idea of a permanent home and adopting instead a nomadic way of life. Like her close friend Henry James whom she met in Italy, Woolson became an acute observer of the conflicts arising in transitional cultures, as well as of cultural norms for gender and sexuality in late nineteenth‐century. An ambitious female writer herself, desiring recognition in a male dominated world, Woolson became increasingly frustrated by the social and artistic prejudice women were forced to endure. Drawing on the intersubjective and textual relationship of the two authors, in this article I will focus mainly but not exclusively on her most anthologized story, “‘Miss Grief’” (1880). As Anne E. Boyd notes, the story has enjoyed renewed attention from feminist scholars who elucidate its “indictment of the male establishment for suppressing the voices of women writers.” It also reveals much about Woolson’s own relationship with men who dominated the literary world. A close reading of the story affords great insight into Woolson’s specific experience as an active participant and an agent of her literary and personal life. ‘I seek vengeance no longer. No man is worth it!’: Gendered Rebellion in The Young Diana (1918) Erin Louttit (Independent scholar) Marie Corelli’s novel The Young Diana appeared rather late in her career, some years after the highly successful late‐Victorian novels for which she is now best known. Jilted by her fiancé and despised by her parents, the eponymous protagonist’s personal worth is measured – by others – exclusively by her feminine youth and beauty. She escapes this conventional and oppressive environment by faking her own death in order to volunteer for a dangerous experiment conducted by an amoral scientist who sees her worth as a scientific subject. The worldview in which she has been raised, and to which she initially conforms, embodies the limiting, stereotypical Victorian female roles of daughter, fiancée and spinster. Her determination to challenge this restrictive ideology is plain: Corelli’s protagonist seeks out the figures who self‐confessedly value women for their youth, beauty, money or domesticity, and enacts an explicitly gendered retaliation. The novel’s plot, combining the domestic, science fiction and social commentary, charts the heroine’s 145 awakening to and fighting against the social limitations placed upon her, setting her apart from her society by subverting that society’s conventions. 146 S25: Picturing on the Page and the Stage in Renaissance England Convenors: Dr Camilla Caporicci (Humboldt Fellow at LMU, Germany and University of Perugia, Italy) and Dr Armelle Sabatier (University of Paris II, France) Seminar chaired by Armelle Sabatier. Wednesday, August 24th 8.30‐8.45: Cristiano Ragni (University of Perugia, Italy): “An edifying “speaking picture”. Defending drama in Elizabethan Oxford”. 8.45‐9.00: Professor Ladan Niayesh (Paris University Diderot): "Mapping the stage, staging the map in early modern drama" 9.00‐9.15: Emanuel Stelzer (Bergamo University): “Seeing vs Looking at Staged Portraits in Early Modern English Theatre and Drama” 9.15‐9.30: discussion 9.30‐9.45: Ilaria Pernici (University of Perugia): “’Hero the fair’ and ‘amorous Leander’: how Christopher Marlowe drew a picture of two symbol lovers” 9.45‐10.00: Camilla Caporicci (Humboldt Fellow at LMU, Germany and University of Perugia, Italy): “Many there were that did his picture get”. The miniature in Shakespeare’s work” 10.00‐10.15: Fiammeta Dionisio (University of Roma Tre): “The Portraits of Imogen: The Flight of the Image and the Recovery of the Imaginary in Shakespeare's Cymbeline 10.15‐10.30: discussion Abstracts: Cristiano Ragni: “An edifying “speaking picture”. Defending drama in Elizabethan Oxford.” In Renaissance England, when playgoing became more and more part of the daily life, a heated controversy on the morality of drama broke out. It was fuelled by Calvinist extremists, the Puritans, who condemned plays for their supposed «empiety» and «evil». Resulting from the fierce iconoclasm of the radical exponents of the Reformed Church, these attacks ended up condemning drama for its creating dynamised verbal pictures, whose powerful impact on the audience the most alert Puritans did not fail to highlight. In this paper, I would like to investigate the theoretical framework of the controversy on drama, by showing how Puritans’ criticism specifically condemned the latter’s visual nature. I shall like to focus on one of the least studied controversies, the one between the theologian John Rainolds and the jurist Alberico Gentili, which broke out in Oxford at the beginning of the 1590s. Having written treatises against Catholic idols where he drew inevitable parallels with drama, Rainolds ended up condemning the concept itself of mimesis with a fierceness yet unseen in previous controversies. In his correspondence with Gentili, he went on to attack both the academic and the public plays precisely on the 147 basis of their visual nature and of the dangers these images represented for the audience («But one thing is to recite and one is to act»). In this regard, I will show how Gentili’s replies also stressed the visual nature of drama, but in a clearly positive light. The jurist carried out his personal defence by stressing how drama was a branch of poetry, which he praised as a “pictura loquens”, a speaking picture. By showing his likely tribute to Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, Gentili highlighted how it was precisely thanks to its dynamised verbal pictures that drama was indeed a prefect means to educate the audience and not something to be condemned indiscriminately. Professor Ladan Niayesh: "Mapping the stage, staging the map in early modern drama" "Taking its cue from D. K. Smith’s The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England (2008), this paper purports to analyse the theatrical transpositions of early modern cartography’s new resources in imaginative precision and rhetorical manipulation, such as the bird’s eye perspective and the panoramic view. Such devices insert the spectators within their representational fictions and make them participants in the enterprise of spatial reconnoissance and appropriation, somewhat in the manner of the two human figures taking up measures in the foreground of William Cunningham’s view of Norwich, printed in his Cosmographical Glasse (1559). The phenomenon appears in well‐ known standards like Tamburlaine and King Lear, but also in several now lesser studied heroic plays produced for the public theatre in the same period, such as The Four Prentices of London and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, which I will more specifically use as examples. Emanuel Stelzer: Seeing vs Looking at Staged Portraits in Early Modern English Theatre and Drama There are 75 English plays dating from 1566 to 1641 that feature the staging of a portrait. The idea that seems to emerge from studies on staged pictures (Tassi 2005, Elam 2010, Wassersug 2015) is that they were to be seen, not looked at. It seems that most of these pictures were either invisible to the spectators or so small that players had to produce in the minds of the audience the mental image of such objects through ekphrasis. It is interesting to ponder whether this was absolutely true: whether sizable pictures were only exceptions on the early modern English stage or if there was a tradition of displaying such visible artefacts. The effects that the spectators experience when looking at actors looking at a miniature or at a sizable portrait are very different in terms of proxemics and kinesics. Moreover, each type of picture speaks differently according to the perceiver’s visual culture. Using the critical tools offered by material and visual culture studies, and the semiotics of theatre and drama, I will discuss how key features of staged portraits can be reconstructed from textual and paratextual hints (such as contemporary stage directions) and how they can be evaluated on the basis of criteria such as size, price, and gender. Ilaria Pernici: «Hero the fair» and «amorous Leander»: how Christopher Marlowe drew a picture of two symbol lovers. Hero and Leander were two well‐known characters in the Elizabethan Age, especially thanks to the appreciation of classical works, such as Musaeus Grammaticus’ epyllion Hero and Leander and Ovid’s epistolary oeuvre, Heroides. Christopher Marlowe takes and reworks the two figures, symbols of love and deep desire – but also misfortune, and pays homage to them with a rich descriptive passage in the first 90 verses of his poem, Hero and Leander. Here, the two lovers’ bodies and garments are illustrated with meticulousness, 148 with details embracing all five senses: fabrics, flowers, precious stones. They’re enhanced with connections to other works (like Ovid’s Amores or Poliziano’s poetry), sometimes reminding us to Correggio’s majestic paintings or Mantegna’s abundances. Also, they’re coloured with the chiaroscuros of the more or less explicit references to Narcissus’, Pelops’, Cynthia’s myths. In this paper, I would like to highlight how Marlowe doesn’t just take advantage of the many available sources: thanks to his exceptional talent he invents, re‐invents and creates his own mythology, and hides other new meanings in these few lines. My aim is thus to analyze and focus on this portion of text, to explore its numerous literary, artistic, mythological aspects. In particular, I would like to demonstrate its complexity and to offer a reading as exhaustive and thorough as possible of this portrait of two portraits. Camilla Caporicci: “Many there were that did his picture get”. The miniature in Shakespeare’s work” The miniature, whose enormous success among the English aristocracy reached its peak in the second half of the sixteenth century, was not only an important element within the sophisticated “language” of the Renaissance court, but, considered in the light of Horace’s “ut pictura poesis”, presents certain characteristics which make it the perfect pictorial counterpart of the Petrarchan sonnet. Shakespeare, by considering the miniature from a variety of different standpoints, demonstrates a special awareness of its multifaceted role within the Elizabethan culture. While in Hamlet the reference to the king’s “picture in little” exemplifies the political use of the miniature, in A Lover’s Complaint the poet highlights its function in the Renaissance courtly “love‐game”. On the other hand, while in The Merchant of Venice the celebration of Portia’s miniature links the Petrarchan sonnet and the miniature as two forms of art answering to the same aesthetic principles, the idealistic aesthetics at the base of this paragone is called into question in Twelfth Night and in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where Shakespeare links the rejection of the Petrarchan representation of the beloved to a specific kind of visual portrayal, epitomized in the image of the “lady walled about with diamonds”. Fiammeta Dionisio: “The Portraits of Imogen: The Flight of the Image and the Recovery of the Imaginary in Shakespeare's Cymbeline” The aim of my work is providing a steamlined view on the fragmented proliferation of portraits of the heroine in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, where different aspects of femininity conflate without the effect of rendering a coherent image of woman. My analysis will start with an example of the poet's use of ekphrasys, the scene of the violated bedroom of Imogen, where she appears, to the man who had sneaked in, as an artwork among other works of art. In this close space, a ceiling fretted with golden cherubins, tapestries on the walls representing Cleopatra, and sculptures of Diana, ambiguously superimpose on the silent image of the sleeping heroine. I will then examine the complex threefold nature of Imogen as Diana (as Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, Selene, the lunar divinity, and Hecate, the guardian of women in labour and childbirth as well as the Lady of sorcery and witchcraft) by drawing parallels both with the composite iconography of Queen Elizabeth's portraits and with Correggio's Camera di San Paolo at Parma. In addition, I will focus on the intertwined motifs of rape and theft emerging through the pages of the drama. In this late Shakespearean play, the theme of the theft of artworks and the obsessive attempt to define a lost sense of femininity run parallel with the 'cultural amnesia' of the visual art that affected the Elizabethan era with the phenomenon of iconoclasm. In addressing a number of issues connected to the problem of representation, the Bard 149 explores the limits of Petrarchism and Metaphysical poetry and wittingly inserts the flourishing theatre art at the centre of a debate concerning the superiority of the 'sister art' of poetry over the lost 'sister art' of painting. 150 S26. Icons Dynamized: Motion and Motionlessness in Early Modern English Drama and Culture Co‐convenors: Géza Kállay, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Attila Kiss, University of Szeged, Hungary Zenón Luis Martínez, University of Huelva, Spain Two Instances of John Donne’s Iconography‐Based Kinetic Conceits Cora Alonso, Jesús (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid) Some critics studying the visual in Donne’s poems have pointed out that his conceits are kinetic because they are characterised by the use of verbs of movement, and in this they contrast with the static nature of the visual materials from which they seem to derive. To my mind, however, this assertion is wrong. In my paper, I analyse two examples of Donne’s iconography‐based kinetic conceits, and I prove that Donne does not dynamise static icons. In fact, their kineticism reproduces the dynamic effects –author‐intended in the first case but accidental in the second one– of two specific visual sources that can be clearly pinpointed because the conceits’ kineticism also works as iconicity, i.e. the reproduction with words of details of the images the conceits are based on. These conceits are lines 15‐ 18 in “To Sir Edward Herbert, at Julyers”, that are based on the reversibility of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting The Cook (1570), and lines 25‐26, 31‐32 in “To His Mistress Going to Bed”, modelled on the accidental movement illusion of the woodcut illustrating Cesare Ripa’s allegory of “Obligo” [Obligation] in his Iconologia. Jesús Cora has worked in higher education since 1993 teaching English literature for the most part, especially English Renaissance Literature. Currently, he works at UNED, the Spanish distance and online education university, and he is finalising a protracted Ph. Diss. on Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed” as an iconography‐based encoded political text. Understated Performance and the Audience's Imagination in Shakespeare's Drama Guéron, Claire (University of Burgundy) Hamlet's advice to the players not to "tear a passion to tatters" (Hamlet, 3.2.10) is often taken as a meta‐theatrical expression of Shakespeare's attachment to a naturalistic style of performance. More specifically, Hamlet's words reflect awareness of one of the main pitfalls of tragic performance, i.e. eliciting laughter, rather than "pity and terror", through overacting. This paper examines one of the ways in which Shakespeare's playtexts helped the players navigate this pitfall. At several crucial moments in the plays, the audience is made to imagine the emotion a character is experiencing, without the player needing to actually perform that emotion through voice, gesture or facial expression. In addition to sobriety of performance, this allows Shakespeare to show the audience a character in the process of restraining his emotions, an ability essential to such dissimulating characters as Iago and Angelo, for example. In this paper I will explore the devices through which the audience is made to imagine the inner turmoil roiling outwardly impassive figures, and discuss the mixture of empathy and irony resulting from such modes of spectatorship. This will also lead me to consider the semiotic status of the player's body when its performing function is thus co‐opted by the audience. Claire Guéron is Senior Lecturer at the University of Burgundy (Université de Bourgogne) in Dijon, where she teaches Elizabethan literature, literary translation, and drama. She has published several articles on exile, memory, knowledge and the semiotics of character in 151 Shakespeare's plays. She has also co‐edited an online collection of essays on Shakespeare and Italy and another on naming in early modern literature. She is currently interested in issues of audience participation and reception in early modern drama. Mysticism as Colonial Gaze: Missionary Narrative and Iconography Hübner, Andrea (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) Colonial encounter appropriated various discourses of European narrative and iconographic tradition in the movement of culture clash. The narrative of mostly Jesuit mystic writings in the New World are not only theological writings but also the discourse on the object (land and people) of the mission. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya ’s „burning desire to be the fellow in this noble task” seems to be the channel through which mystical impression is experienced operating or operated by colonial enterprise. The „noble task”, the 16th century „White Man’s Burden (Kipling) is a Spiritual Conquest as the title of his book tells us. Conquest is a religious excercise if Montoya’s title is interpreted against the title of Loyola’s book Spiritual Excercises where all prayer is recommended to be visualised and sensualised for a deeper religious experience. The staged emotions and passions of the baroque often dramatise divine ecstasy like in case of Bernini’s St Theresa. The mystical tradition of the mendicant missionary orders like the Franciscans and the Dominicans seem to prove that mysticism is also in a way an interpretation and representation of colonial experience, a dramatised impression of the lands conceived as ’vacant’ (Said) in terms of conversion and conquest. Inquisitional commission (Frank Graziano) may be understood as culture shock, as fear and agression in psychological sense elevated into religious realms or as the register in which the unknown can be translated into domestic terminology. In an interdisciplinary ‐ historical, cultural and social‐psychological‐ approach my paper wishes to investigate the phenomenon through the mutual interrelations of text and picture in the theoretical framework of social representation (Moscovici), cultural memory (Halbwachs, Assmann) and gaze theories (Lacan, Urry, etc). Through the Franciscan woman mystic Saint Angela of Foligno, the Dominican Saint Cathrine of Siena and the Jesuit Saint Theresa of Avila a female mysticism and missionary attitude will be considered in terms of a gendered reading of colonisation. Andrea Hübner is a university lecturer in cultural studies, art history, cultural anthropology, literature and social psychology. Her main fields of study are mostly interdisciplinary approaches in the interconnections of pictorial and written tradition in esoteric tradition, emblem art, iconography‐iconology, cultural memory, social representation, gaze theories, picture anthropology, architectural phenomenology, postcolonial theory, orientalism, narrative psychology, theology and culture, culture clash and ICC. She regularly participates at international conferences with lectures and has got numerous publications in the above mentioned fields. Kállay, Géza (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) Géza Kállay got his Ph.D. in Literature and Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium in 1996. He went through the “habilitation” process in 2003, and became full professor in 2007. He has been teaching at the School of English and American Studies (SEAS) of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest since 1985, giving lectures and seminars on Renaissance English drama and cultural history, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and philosophy. Current research areas include the relationship between literature and philosophy, Shakespearean tragedy and Hungarian literature. His recent publications include ’Nonsense and the Ineffable: Re‐reading the Ethical Standpoint in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’ (Nordic Wittgenstein Review (1)103‐130 2012). 152 https://elte.academia.edu/GezaKallay/Papers?s=email#add/close. He delivers a sub‐ plenary lecture at ESSE Galway entitled “Is There a Metaphysical Turn in Shakespeare Studies?” Stuck between Life and Death: Anatomia Vivorum as a Freezing of Time on the English Renaissance Stage Kiss, Attila (University of Szeged, Department of English) There appears to be a passion for the staging of prolonged performances of horrible deaths on the early modern stage. In revenge tragedies, the acts of murder and mutilation are repeatedly presented as elaborate studies of the process of dying. The causes of this obsession can be found just as much in contemporary representational questions as in the spectators’ appetite for gory spectacle. In this paper, my intention is to examine the cultural semantics that established a background to this experimentation with the dying body. The questions and anxieties of the early modern thanatological and epistemological crisis appear in the attempts of the tragic agents to freeze the continuity of time in order to witness the moment when their victims, in a performance of anatomia vivorum¸ enter the passage from life to death. Attila Kiss is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where he is also co‐ director of REGCIS, the Research Group for Cultural Iconology and Semiography (http://szeged‐english.hu/en/research/regcis). His publications include Contrasting the Early Modern and Postmodern Semiotics of Telling Stories (Edwin Mellen, 2011), and Double Anatomy in Early Modern and Postmodern Drama (Szeged: JATEPress, 2010). The focus of his current research is on the representations of anatomy and corporeality in English Renaissance revenge tragedies. Words, Action and the Task of the Translator: Alexander Neville's Elizabethan Oedipus Luis Martínez, Zenón (University of Huelva, Department of English) Jasper Heywood’s English renderings of Seneca’s Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560) and Hercules Furens (1561) pose three models of literary translation in the early modern period. While Troas opts for rhetorical amplification and dramatic additions as the basis of a highly ornamented style that exceeds the letter of the original, Hercules Furens shows exactly the opposite —i.e., a literal, austere text that is presented facing the original Latin text on the verso pages of the first octavo edition. Thyestes stands midway between the other two, both chronologically and stylistically, somehow signalling a path in Heywood’s artistic evolution. This paper analyses Heywood’s translations by considering their literary context and their stylistic features. On the one hand, these three plays are coetaneous with the first original English tragedy, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s The Tragedy of Gorboduc (1561), and a look at their prefatory materials, particularly those of Thyestes, evinces Heywood’s endeavour to construct a discourse of origins for the genre in English and thus a vernacular poetics of tragedy. On the other, the allegedly un‐theatrical nature of the original plays — i.e., the belief that they were not written for the stage — is taken here as a case in point to interrogate the ‘motionlessness’ of Senecan tragedy. Heywood’s amplifications, additions, repetitions, etc. are here assessed as dynamising strategies, particularly for their direct relation to recurrent themes in Seneca, like physical pain and the passionate processes that his protagonists undergo. Heywood’s rewriting of Seneca is a vindication of the translatability of the original as a starting point for a modern idea of 153 tragedy that privileges character —ethos— through the exploration of the passionate nature of the tragic self and violence as the ultimate drive of stage action. Zenón Luis‐Martínez is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Huelva (Spain), where he teaches medieval and early modern English literature. He is the author of In Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). He has published articles and book chapters on Renaissance and Restoration literature. He has edited Abraham Fraunce’s The Shepherds’ Logic and Other Dialectical Writings (Cambridge: MHRA, 2016) as part of the Research Project ‘English Poetic and Rhetorical Treatises of the Tudor Period’, of which he has been leading researcher. 154 S27 “English Printed Books, Manuscripts and Material Studies” Co‐convenors Carlo Bajetta, Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italy, Guillaume Coatalen, Université de Cergy‐Pontoise, France This seminar’s focus is on the physicality of English printed books and manuscripts, whether they be strictly literary or not. We are particularly interested in how particular editions and manuscripts shape the text’s interpretation and reading practices. Research topics include, and are not restricted to, finding rare editions and manuscripts, archival work, book and manuscript collections, printing practices and scribal work, paleography, manuscripts as books, the coexistence of manuscripts and printed books, editing printed books and manuscripts, electronic versus printed editions, editing and digital humanities. Bibliographical and manuscript studies have been on the cutting edge of literary theory and papers on authorship, the constitution of the text or hermeneutics are welcome. Material collections of rare books in English and the digital humanities : bibliophiles, and collectors in Britain, France and the USA at the turn of the 19th century Susan Finding, MIMMOC, Université de Poitiers This paper will examine the origins of four collections of rare works on economic history which were cited as exemplary by the economist J. M. Keynes, and the historian E. P. Thomson, and which form the most significant & well‐known collections of founding economic, social and political philosophy texts outside the British Library. These collections were assembled between 1880 and 1935 by four men, three of whom were professors of economics: a Frenchman, and Englishman and two Americans : Auguste Dubois (‐1935), Henry S. Foxwell (1849‐1936), Edwin Seligman (1861‐1939) and Henry R. Wagner (1862‐1957). They donated or sold their collections, often catalogued or serving as a basis for a bibliography, to university libraries. Poitiers University holds over three thousand items in several languages donated by Dubois of which nine hundred are in English. Seligman sold his collection to Columbia in 1929, while Wagner donated his to Yale. Foxwell's collection became the Goldsmith‐Kress collection containing over sixty thousand works, held by London University and Harvard's Baker Library, digitalised and available through ECCO (although the quality of the online versions is no better than that of the 1970s microfilms that were uploaded to the web). Research on the way in which these collections were formed shows that they were using specialised booksellers in London, a flourishing sector, with eight thousand sales of private libraries taking place in Britain between 1675 and 1900. Booksellers the collectors specifically used as suppliers include Stevens, Halliday, Maggs, Quaritch and Kashnor. Léon Kashnor (1880–1955) was himself a collector and specialist, whose sold his collections either in thematic blocks or complete, notably forming the basis of the National Library of Australia's collection of 16th to 19th century British economic & social texts (12000 items) and that of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (4000 items). 155 Issues discussed will include choice of works for inclusion in the collections, sytematic acquisition and completeness of collections, duplication and uniqueness, expertise, provenance and purveying. Current work on the Dubois collection in Poitiers also raises the question of selection of works to put online, and how to provide a critical apparatus for the electronic version. Come Martin “A note on this edition”: books that evolve from one version to the next Publishing a new edition of a book is usually a trivial matter: it mostly happens when the previous edition is out of print, or when there are errors in the current version that need to be corrected. But in a few instances, “a new edition” means changing parts or the entirety of a book’s content, thus making each edition exist as a distinct entity. Three examples of this practice would serve as a basis for my analysis: A Humument, initially published by Tom Phillips in 1970, is gradually changing with each subsequent edition, until the initial content is completely replaced; House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski supposedly went through different “first editions” before being published, and three different versions of the book existed before it settled into a so‐called “definitive” edition; Tristram Shandy, one of the English books with the most different editions, was given a new and innovative layout in 2010 by London publisher Visual Editions, adding to its existing visual qualities and thus effectively changing the way one reads the famous novel. These three books highlight the importance of seemingly innocuous choices when editing a book, such as its format or its fonts. They also remind one that even though text seems inert once it is fixed on the printed page, it can be reinvented and reinvested with the power of transformation and surprise. When the book writes back: margins, comments, and readers’ responses ALESSANDRA PETRINA Università degli Studi di Padova ‘Verses are wholly deduc’t to Chambers, and nothing esteem’d in this lunatique Age, but what is kept in Cabinets, and must only pass by transcription’. With these lines Michael Drayton expressed his unease, in an age of transition between manuscript and print, at the newly exalted status assumed by manuscript circulation, which made their contents rare and precious, ‘as though the world unworthy were to know’. Such a stance is not unique to Drayton, and challenges the traditional critical attitude towards early modern printing as a mark of the professional writer, since Drayton appears to attack it as an early marketing manoeuvre. At the same time, the image of the verses deduc’t, diverted or conveyed into a chamber, evokes the idea of a small community in which the manuscript word becomes object of sharing and exchange. The scribal community postulated by Harold Love in his The Culture and Commerce of Texts is thus not only responsible for a controlled and close circulation of the manuscript, but also for its multiplication and germination into variants, glosses and paratexts – a phenomenon readily observable in early modern English manuscripts, where individual works become loci of discussion intervention, commentary. The procreation of the readers’ responses constitutes in itself a test. Alessandra Petrina is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy. She has published The Kingis Quair (Padova, 1997), Cultural Politics in Fifteenth‐century England. The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (Leiden, 2004), and 156 Machiavelli in the British Isles. Two Early Modern Translations of the Prince (Farnham, 2009); she has also edited, among other books, The Medieval Translator. In principio fuit interpres (Turnhout, 2013); Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England (Farnham, 2013), The Italian University in the Renaissance (special issue of Renaissance Studies, 2013), and Natio Scota (special issue of Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2012). She is co‐editor of Scottish Literary Review, European editor of Renaissance Studies, and member of the Advisory Board of the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations Series. The Possibilities and Limitations of the Digital Folio Extensions of Selected Abbey Theatre’s Prompt Manuscripts Dr. Grzegorz Koneczniak Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland In the presentation I would like to discuss selected problems which I have encountered in the process of completing the book Prompting In/Ex/Tensions inside the Manuscript and the Digital Folio. An Exploration of Selected Early Abbey Theatre Production Books. Specifically, I would like to focus on the possibility of creating digital folio prompt books as the prototypical extensions of the theatrical production manuscripts from the beginning of the twentieth century. Such prompt manuscripts, created for the première performances of the plays staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, contain unique combinations of typed and handwritten textual, typographical and graphic elements. Their uniqueness makes it impossible to transfer them into the digital folio format which could be regarded as an alternative, and that is why I consider such prototypical prompt books, designed for mobile devices, the “extensions” of the original manuscripts. In the S27 seminar I would like to share the points and selected analyses included in the manuscript of Prompting In/Ex/Tensions inside the Manuscript and the Digital Folio before its publication. ESSE Galway August 22‐26 2016: Seminar on printed books, manuscripts, and material studies Defined by the company you keep? The shifting manuscript contexts and meanings of The Passion of Saint Christopher. Simon Thomson, Ruhr Universität Bochum Anglo‐Saxon manuscripts rarely give clear guidance on how their texts should be read, with limited punctuation, very few titles and rare (sometimes mendacious) naming of authors. Recent work has engaged with the shaping of meaning by layout and rubric, and with the interpretative influence of images and other design work.6 Thomas Bredehoft, meanwhile, has argued that the general absence of paratextual apparatus means that 6 See e.g. Thomas Gobbitt, 'Codicological features of a late‐eleventh‐century manuscript of the Lombard Laws', Studia Neophilologica 86 (2014): 48‐67; Teemu Immonen, 'The changes in the pictorial decoration of the Rule of St Benedict at Monte Cassino in the 10th and 11th centuries', Studia Neophilologica 86 (2013): 83‐103; Nick Baker, ‘Engaging with the Divine: Evangelist images as tools for contemplation’, in Making Histories: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Insular Art, York 2011, ed. by Jane Hawkes (Donnington: Shaun Tyas, 2013), 229‐ 41. 157 many Anglo‐Saxon texts – he takes Beowulf as a provocative test case – were not produced as, and should not be read as, ‘texts’ or ‘copies’ at all, but as ‘books’ or unique artefacts.7 One obvious paratextual feature that has not, yet, been widely considered is the selection of surrounding texts. Some form of, as yet poorly understood, quasi‐editorial decision‐making was involved in the selection of texts for a copying project, which has clear interpretative implications. Thus Cotton Julius E.vii, by incorporating the non‐ Ælfrician lives of St Mary of Egypt and of the Seven Sleepers into Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, is making a claim for their orthodoxy and significance. And the so‐called Wonders of the East has one meaning when found in the company of scientific, encyclopaedic texts, as it is in Cotton Tiberius B.v, and quite another when surrounded by stories of monsters and heroes, as it is in Cotton Vitellius A.xv. In this paper, I will discuss some of the different manuscript contexts for the Passion of Saint Christopher during the late Anglo‐Saxon period. Christopher is an ambiguous figure, a dog‐headed cannibal turned Christian preacher, martyred by the emperor Decius, whose narrative can be interpreted in quite different ways. Looking at Latin, Old English, and Celtic manuscripts, I will argue that manuscripts shape the reinterpretation of this text by recontextualisation, and that this has implications for how readers were expected to interact with books and their contents in the period. Peter Bocsor: The Manuscripts that Burst Open a Canon This paper discusses the eventful history of the manuscripts of Raymond Carver’s second collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) that paved the way for literary minimalism. The posthumous emergence of the manuscripts quickly pushed Carver’s breakthrough volume into the center of debates about authorship and canon formation, and what has become known as the Carver Controversy, the scholarly agitation over the extent of the contributions of Carver’s influential editor, Gordon Lish to the writer’s success and to that of the aesthetics of less is more, finally resulted in the unusual inclusion of significantly different parallel versions into the Carver canon. The comparative analysis of the parallel versions makes writing seem as a collective act of social manufacturing and allows us to identify the various paradigms of authority behind the competing, often conflicting practices of writing, editing, rewriting and posthumous publication. The paper argues for the need to turn to critical understanding when identifying the primary readings, and to regard the inherent polyphony of a literary canon as a call for a renewed effort of understanding, rather than a threat to our – more often than not projected – image of its author. The Digital Orationes Project: The Affordances of a Restoration Manuscript Prof. Anthony W. Johnson Åbo Akademi University, Finland Originally funded by the Academy of Finland, the Digital Orationes Project is an ongoing interdisciplinary initiative intended to bring an important unpublished Early Modern manuscript into the scholarly arena. Preserved as Lit. MS E41 in the archive of Canterbury Cathedral, this was compiled shortly after the English Civil War and represents one of the most substantial unpublished sources of English School Drama from the period. The texts include some 656 folio pages of short plays and dramatized orations in English, Latin and Greek, alongside works by major authors such as Horace or James Shirley. 7 The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from 'Beowulf' to 'Maus', Oxford Textual Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 158 The overall aim of the project has been to make available a state‐of‐the‐art digital archive to a wider audience, and simultaneously to create new affordances for its scholarly users. To do this we have critiqued and responded to palaeographic and digital best practices, and attempted to accommodate the physical affordances of the manuscript into the edition as closely as possible. Concentrating on Kress and van Leeuwen’s notion of ‘affordances’ (what may best be achieved through the different materialities of manuscript, printed text or digital form), the present paper accordingly reflects on the new potentials (as well as losses) opened up by the digitization of manuscript materials. The Early Modern medical treatise under study: the case of G.U.L MS 303 Treatise on the Diseases of Women. Soluna Salles Bernal1 University of Málaga The early Modern period witnessed the flourishing of scientific prose written in the vernacular, both printed and manuscript (Taavitsainen & Pahta, 2011). Within the latter we come across with an outstanding material, a hitherto unedited medical treatise dated in the second half of the 17th century and entitled Treatise on the Diseases of Women. The witness, housed in the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University Library and catalogued as MS Hunter 303, was originally written in French by the famous physician Jean Liébault in 1582 (Young & Aitken, 1908). The English version is authored by an unknown W. H. Gentleman, and it consists of three books (pp.1‐958) written with a humanistic script in paper. This study proposes to analyse the palaeographic and codicological features of the witness, as well as to present the electronic edition of its semi‐diplomatic transcription (Petti, 1977), which can be consulted at the Malaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. The confluence of early modern manuscripts and 21th‐century technology makes it possible to unveil the invaluable material stored in libraries. The Málaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. 2013. http://modernmss.uma.es. Petti, A. G. (1977). English literary hands from Chaucer to Dryden. Harvard University Press. Taavitsainen, I., & Pahta, P. (2011). Medical Writing in Early Modern English. Cambridge University Press. Young, J., & Aitken, P. H. (1908). A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons. Medical Manuscripts in the Hunterian Collection: The Case of Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 1351 Jesús Romero‐Barranco University of Málaga MS Hunter 135 belongs to the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University Library. It is a hitherto unedited sixteenth‐century volume containing five treatises on alchemy, geography and medicine (Young and Aitken 1908: 122): Medica Qvaedam (ff. hv‐32v), De Chirvrgia Libri IV (ff. 34r‐73v), Medica Qvaedam (74r‐159v), Practica Chirvrgiae (ff. 159v‐208v) and Medica Qvaedam (ff. 208v‐234v). The English part of the volume (ff. 34r‐121v) is currently being transcribed and will be incorporated to The 159 Málaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose, which freely offers electronic editions of early Modern English Fachprosa. The present paper has the following objectives: 1) to present the shortcomings and decisions during the editing process of MS Hunter 135; 2) to discuss the benefits of electronic editions as opposed to printed editions; 3) to provide a palaeographic and codicological analysis of the witness; and 4) to study the instances of intertextuality found among the folios of the manuscript. References: The Málaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. 2013. http://modernmss.uma.es. Young, John and P. Henderson Aitken. 1908. A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons. S28 “Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy” Romantic infancy in‐between freedom and control: Locke, Rousseau and their Romantic legacies Martina Domines Veliki, University of Zagreb This paper aims to depart from Locke's treatise on education, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and Rousseau's famous response, Émile ou de l'éducation (1762). Upon having read the French translation of Locke's treatise (Pensées sur L'Éducation des Enfants, 1721) Rousseau claimed that it was the first book on education he had read and that the subject was entirely new to him. Therefore, he hoped that after the publication of his own book, the new subject of infancy and education of a young man would finally be given extensive place in contemporary philosophical thought. According to Rousseau, ‘childhood’ is still an unknown stage in human life and ‘despite all the writings which are made for public utility, it seems that the first utility has been utterly disregarded – the art of raising human beings’ (Preface, Émile). The main temptation of this paper will be to establish a dialogical correspondence between the two works by focusing on the ideas of control and freedom in the eighteenth century social discourse. This type of correspondence would hopefully prove fruitful in elucidating the meaning of childhood and infancy in the works of Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the final recognition of childhood as being socially constructed. ‘A limited privilege of strength’: Thomas De Quincey’s childhoods. Cian Duffy, Copenhagen University In essays spanning a quite remarkable range of subjects, Thomas De Quincey (1785‐1859), the ‘English Opium‐eater’, repeatedly returns to the topic or trope of infancy. Such returns might be thought natural enough in a writer who was most celebrated in his day as an autobiographer and biographer, and whose work has, consequently, often been approached from biographical perspectives of one sort or another. But it is not merely in 160 life‐writing that De Quincey’s interest in infancy is prominent: the trope also features in essays on subjects so ostensibly diverse as the history of language and the history of the earth; the development of political economy and the development of personal identity; and the history of art and the history of the universe. Looking at a representative (if also necessarily brief) sample of De Quincey’s engagements with infancy, this paper will situate those engagements in relation to wider transformations taking place in the European episteme in the early nineteenth century. De Quincey rejects altogether the kind of stadial constructions of infancy developed by Enlightenment thinkers, in which infancy (of individuals, societies, languages, etc.) is seen as a discrete developmental stage to be outgrown. But neither is he wholly comfortable with the more genetic (we might as well call it ‘romantic’) model implied by Wordsworth’s famous dictum that ‘the child is father of the man’. Rather, De Quincey is often concerned to examine which latent potentials do not develop from infancy as well as to understand why they have not developed ‒ in a kind of proto‐evolutionary thinking which this paper will link to the emergence of disciplinarity in the early nineteenth century and its impact on the ways in which knowledge came to be structured. John‐Erik Hansson, “Republic and Empire: Politics in William Godwin’s Histories ‘for Schools and Young Persons’” In 1805, William Godwin founded the Juvenile Library, a business which was to occupy him for the next 20 years. There, he published celebrated books for children such as Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807). In addition to selling the works of others, Godwin wrote and published a dozen works of his own, for the use of children both in schools and at home. The books Godwin wrote covered a wide variety of genres, from fables to works on English grammar, two biographies and three histories: a History of England (1806 – abridged in the Outlines of English History in 1809), a History of Rome (1809) and eventually a History of Greece (1821). It is an analysis of these three books that I intend to offer in this paper. These histories, like the rest of Godwin’s writings for children, have only received a cursory glance in the scholarship. However, as I will show in this paper, they contain interesting clues concerning what Godwin might have been trying to achieve, beyond sustaining his numerous family, in writing for children at the beginning of the nineteenth century. More specifically, I will assess Godwin’s treatment of republic and empire in all three works, by looking at his way of dealing with the English Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth, his discussion of the laws of Minos, Lycurgus and Solon in the History of Greece, and what his general plan for the History of Rome, subtitled From the Building of the City to the Ruin of the Republic, actually is. I contend that, while Godwin does not offer a full and open defence of republicanism and condemnation of imperial conquest, these works do seem to point in that direction. The literary rituals and the birth of a romantic man Barbara Kaszowska Wandor (University of Silesia) The subject of the paper are the peculiar lying‐in rituals which are described in Jean‐ Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or Treatise on Education. Although the work has been approached theoretically in a number of ways, no study has considered this specific image, all the more the way it was adapted in the XIXth century literature. The present analyses employ the concepts of the ritual and the liminality formulated by Victor Turner. An attempt is made to interpret the functions of the image as a metaphor of the cultural antropogenesis. First, it is analyzed in the wider context of the descriptions of mythical 161 and sociocultural birth rituals, which could be found in the ancient and early modern literature (i.a. the works of Plato, Lucretius, Pausanias, Saint Augustine, humanistic educational treatises). We point to the striking common elements of all these images, such as their drawing the affinity between the lying‐in and the funeral rituals. Next, we demonstrate the creative elaboration of such classical topoi in the works of Rousseau, who reuses it in his project of the total decomposition of the humanist tradition. Finally, it is concluded that the maternal and infantile figures, projected in such descriptions by Rousseau, have a great impact on romantic social imaginary (applying the term of Charles Taylor). Scepticism versus Neoplatonism: The Cases of Feral Children in the Romantic Age Rolf Lessenich, University of Bonn William Blake, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley propagated a Neoplatonic view of the child as a prophet and poet close to the world of ideas, man's original home, imbued with the noble savage's natural goodness and rhythms of nature and subsequently spoiled by life experience and the process of growing up. Romantic Scepticism with its scorn of Plato's idealistic philosophy, however, contested this view, and found confirmation in the finding and experimental treatment of two feral children that went through the European press: Victor of Aveyron (found in France in 1798) and Kaspar Hauser (found in Germany in 1820). They turned up scratched, bleeding, speechless and savage in the negative sense of a lack of enculturation, showing no symptoms of natural rhythms and innate benevolence. Mary Robinson's poem »The Savage of Aveyron« (MS 1800, 1804), written in sickness three months before her death, features a lonely speaker meeting a lonely boy exposed to nature's cruelty. Instead of a benevolent Wordsworthian nature never betraying those who entrust themselves to her care and ever conversing with her solitaries so as to exclude any feeling of desertion, nature in Robinson's poem does not integrate or protect man. The paper will explore the challenge that Romanticism's dark underside, variously called Negative Romanticism, Pyrrhonic Romanticism, Romantic Disillusionism, Romantic Scepticism, or Romantic Byronism, aggressively advanced against Neoplatonic Romanticism in its view if children and childhood. 162 S29 “The Politics of Sensibility: Private and Public Emotions in 18th Century England” Chairs: Elena Butoescu / University of Craiova, Romania / elenabutoescu@yahoo.co.uk Alexander Zimbulov / University of Düsseldorf, Germany / zimbulov@phil.hhu.de PLEASURE, PASSION AND THE GOOD LIFE IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Alexandra Ileana Bacalu University of Bucharest, Romania My concern is to investigate the early eighteenth‐century emphasis on the “sensitive” dimension of emotion – the vocabulary of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, the analysis of passions as ‘sensations’ or ‘impressions’, the erosion of the “cognitive” component of mental and affective activity – and to trace its impact on the ways emotions were classified, analysed and described in the context of the eighteenth‐century culture of sensibility. One central line of investigation shall be the claim, shared by several thinkers of the eighteenth century, that one and the same passion may have several manifestations in terms of what has been variously called its “sensitive”, “qualitative” or “phenomenal” dimension, despite not modifying its underlying cognitive structure, i.e. the value judgement upon which it is built. Thus, attention to the “sensitive” component of emotion generates awareness of the versatility of the passions and results in more fine‐grained analyses of these. My paper then aims to examine the ways in which this particular eighteenth‐century shift in conceiving and describing emotion is linked to emerging pictures of ‘the good life’ which redefine the relationship between ‘pleasure’ and ‘virtue’. My purpose is not just to identify the precise “emotional regimes” which were deemed descriptive of ‘the good life’, but to pay particular attention to discussions of the affective labour which men had to perform towards it attainment, as well as to the manner in which these single out particular practices, professions and personae. I aim to examine the realignments which this nexus of ideas undergoes across a variety of genres, namely philosophical treatises on human nature and the passions, their popular and practical counterparts, as well as treatises on virtue and happiness, with focus on the English space. Alexandra Ileana Bacalu is a PhD student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, working on the therapeutic dimension of literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Her research interests include seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on the history of literature, psychology and medicine. THE COURTSHIP PLOT IN THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL: UNDERSTANDING THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY POPULAR ROMANCE Inmaculada Pérez‐Casal University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain Even though contemporary popular romance fiction can be traced back to the eighteenth century and the novel of sentiment, criticism has missed the importance of the courtship plot and its similarities and differences with today’s romance novels. In order to cover this area in popular romance studies, the present paper analyses the characteristics of the 163 courtship process in the work of key writers in the sentimental tradition such as Samuel Richardson or Charlotte Smith, so as to better understand the origins of the romance genre. This essay takes a new approach through the study of courtship as of one of the most significant elements in the novel of sentiment, and connects it with twentieth and twenty‐first century romance novels, a genre which has inherited many of its features, including the predominance of feelings, the ideal of companionate marriage, and the distribution of gender roles. Thus, this paper departs from more traditional analyses of sentimentalism and their customary focus on the creation of the "Domestic Woman", at the same time it inaugurates new lines of research that connect the past with the present. After graduating in English Language and Literature in 2013, Inmaculada Pérez‐Casal specialised in English Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela with an MA on the contemporary American romance novel. Her research focuses on Gender Studies and Cultural Studies, as well as popular literature and literature by women. Currently, she is working on her PhD at the University of Santiago de Compostela. CHARITY, PIETY, AND THE EIGHTEENTH‐CENTURY ENGLISH PAMPHLET Elena Butoescu University of Craiova, Romania In late Stuart and Georgian Britain charitable London was shaped both by economic forces and by the various cultural meanings people attached to its space. Both economic and social geography were changing in London after 1700 and the streets were populated with vulnerable people driven into poverty. The greatest age of the pamphlet reflected, among others, one of the essential shifts that marked the transition of London from an urban mass into a civilised and refined metropolis: public benevolence. As this article is less about charity per se than it is about the relationship between the institutional policies of benevolence and the pamphlet, my intention is to look at how the practices and laws of public charity operated in London and how pamphlet literature made the case for the implementation of some insurance schemes by the government. This paper argues that even if the concept of Pietas Londinensis existed via private or casual philanthropic acts, charitable societies and institutions had not been set up until the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, issues related to charity and public or private benevolence were heatedly debated and questioned in the pamphlets written by Daniel Defoe and other anonymous writers, who put forward various proposals with the purpose of healing common social ills and mobilising public opinion in favour of the poor and the wretched. Pamphlets revealed the absurdity of a system which threw debtors into prison, where they could not find any means of earning the money they owed to their creditors. Elena Butoescu is a Lecturer in British Literature (Eighteenth Century) at the Department of British, American, and German Studies, University of Craiova, Romania. She earned her MA in British Cultural Studies at the University of Bucharest and her MA in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Leeds. In 2011 she defended her PhD thesis in the field of eighteenth‐century British literary studies at the University of Bucharest. Her research interests include print culture and modernity, travel literature, cultural theory, film and postcoloniality, as well as British travellers to the Romanian Principalities. She has co‐ authored An Imagological Dictionary of the Cities in Romania represented in British Travel Literature (1800‐1940), Târgu‐Mureş, Romania, 2012. 164 THE CHARITY SERMON IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH‐CENTURY Regina Maria Dal Santo Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy This paper aims at showing the development of charity sermons in the Long Eighteenth‐ century, underlining how the ‘politics of rationality’ (what is best for the country regarding the provision of the poor?) gradually changes into a ‘politics of sensibility’ based on the sense of sight and on the spectacle the young destitute children could offer. The paper points out the changes which occurred in the rhetoric, vocabulary and focus of sermons. In particular, it analyses in detail these elements in sermons written from the year 1671 to the year 1801, underlining: - Changes in the adjectives used to describe the ‘objects of charity’ and how these were influenced by sensibility issues dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century - Changes in the rhetoric used to address the audience, shifting from arousing their fears to moving their pity - Changes in the focus of the sermon, from the benefits of the audience to the benefits of the destitute poor The analysis will also present the way in which children are preferred as ‘objects of charity’, not only for their young age and their capacity to arouse pity, but also for their innocence and incapability of lying about their sufferings. Moreover, they are also chosen for their malleability and still uncorrupted nature, highlighting how they could become good and industrious subjects. Regina Maria Dal Santo is an independent scholar cooperating with the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice where she completed her PhD in 2014. Regina has been researching sermons in the long eighteenth century since her graduation in 2006 and has published on Latitudinarian Happiness in Sterne (The Shandean, 2015) and John Tillotson, Self‐love and the Teleology of Happiness (English Literature, 2015). THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY IN HENRY FIELDING Dita Hochmanova University of Brno, Czech Republic As it has been illustrated by Nancy Armstrong and other scholars, various 18th‐century magazines, manuals and also fiction proved to be a powerful means of influencing the morality of the developing middle class reading public. The paper explores strategies of transmitting male and female role models via novels, specifically the novels by Henry Fielding, whose unique approach to interpersonal relationships challenged the predominant materialistic concepts of male and female social roles at his time. By using a complex system of stylistic methods devised to guide his readers’ judgment, Fielding mediates traditional notions of gender, re‐thinks their value and places them in the context of new sensibilities with the aim to stress the importance of reciprocity in human relationships and their quality defined by emotional response. On the other hand, his texts also address the issues of sympathy and its failure to generate action within the system of social hierarchies. Fielding therefore consciously exposes his readers to sentimentalist thoughts, urging them to see emotions as a healthy response and the basis for bonding 165 between people, and at the same time, he points to the limits of sensibility as well as the danger of its excess. Dita Hochmanova is a doctoral student at the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University of Brno. Her research focuses on the work of Henry Fielding in the context of satire and sentiment, but her interests also include the development of the novel as a genre. SENSIBILITY AS SYMPATHY IN JANE AUSTEN’S SENSE AND SENSIBILITY Vitana Kostadinova University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria This paper discusses an alternative type of sensibility as embodied by Elinor, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Traditionally, Elinor is associated with sense, but readers learn in the very first chapter of the novel that she possesses the strong feelings of the rest of her family. Certainly, quite a few critics have made a point of "Jane Austen's insistence that sense and sensibility must work together" (Hardy). Still, the private— public dichotomy sheds new light on the juxtaposition of emotions and rationality. Elinor's feelings are private, whereas Marianne wears her heart on her sleeve, but even so, these are just modes of handling sensations. What marks out Elinor’s sensibility more than anything else is her compassion for others; Marianne’s is decidedly egotistical, by comparison. In his Dictionary of the English language (1756), Dr Johnson defines sympathy as “fellow feeling; mutual sensibility; the quality of being affected by the affection of another” and establishes the link between compassion (“painful sympathy”) and sensibility that Jane Austen explores in the character of Elinor. Dr Vitana Kostadinova is a senior lecturer in English at the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. She is the author of Byron in Bulgarian Context (Plovdiv, 2009), a monograph in Bulgarian, and co‐editor of Byron and the Isles of Imagination: A Romantic Chart (Plovdiv, 2009), a collection of essays in English. Her publications include the Bulgarian contributions to the Byron and Shelley volumes in The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series. Dr Kostadinova's current research interests bring together translation, culture and Jane Austen. NEGOTIATING LAUGHTER AND TEARS: SENTIMENTAL CITIZENSHIP IN STEELE'S CONSCIOUS LOVERS Alexander Zimbulov University of Düsseldorf, Germany Restoration‐type satire had modelled a culture of amusement at the depravities of human nature mixed with the admiration for an aristocratic rake's ability to refine them into a paragon of wit. Richard Steele regarded such disengaged “laughter” as deeply reactionary: a “distorted passion” feeding the antisocial impulses (pride, malice, fear) of Hobbesean man who only understands the rule of the stronger. Steele's work, in contrast, should pave the way to the 'bourgeois' vision of sentimental citizenship at the juncture of social feeling and social duty. Paratexts to the triumphantly successful Conscious Lovers (1722) link the image of a “willing people” bonded to the crown by a “love” which, in turn, “prompts Great 166 ones to obey”, with cultural exercises in empathy ensuring genuine social ties. “Polite” audiences are invited to showcase their emotional capacities as a kind of passport qualifying for responsibilities in the new body politic. The play indeed revolves around the moral ideal of a self‐governing citizen fervently advancing various social commitments: its hero carefully reconciles family interests with his personal inclinations, refuses a duel for the sake of friendship, protects the virtue of a damsel in distress, puts decadent aristocracy in its place and aligns himself with the hardworking merchant. The 'sentimental' impetus, however, consistently stumbles over incongruities of erotic desire and economic interest which emphasise just how unusual – if not downright absurd – the protagonist's actions seem. There is jolly comedy when courtship almost fails over lectures on charity, but also some larger‐scale satire on the very politics of sensibility. Above all, interweaving monetary and moral rhetoric plays heavily on the irony that the Lockean republic, while consolidating around the protection of its citizens' economic interests, should so much praise their disinterested benevolence. Alexander Zimbulov (M.A. Comparative Literature, LMU Munich) is a PhD student and lecturer at the Chair of Modern English Literature at the HHU Düsseldorf (2012‐present). His interests in research and teaching include: libertine literature and the history of ideas in the 17th and 18th century; sentiment and satire; rise of the novel; aesthetics and art theory; feminist readings. 167 S30: "And when the tale is told": Loss in British and Irish Narrative Fiction from 1760 to 1960. Convenors: Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo) & Barbara Puschmann‐ Nalenz (Ruhr‐Universitaet Bochum) Tuesday 8:30 to 10:30 Introduction: Barbara Puschmann‐Nalenz & Ludmilla Kostova Objects May Appear Further Than They Are: Loss of Idealism in Joyce's “Araby” William Blick (Queensborough Community College, CUNY) Few say more with less than Joyce. From his epic novels and meditations on life, to his brief snapshots, Joyce has the power to draw up epiphanies and crises in his characters. No story recreates the sense of childhood loss better than Araby. With aspirations to enjoy a day at the local bazaar, the narrator realizes that everything is not what it seems when you are a child. Often what once was, isn't, and what is, may not remain. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate the loss accompanied with childhood innocence that Joyce demonstrates through a wide range of technique in such brief number of words. As noted critic, Harry Stone suggests, if Portrait of Young Man is Joyce’s Bildungsroman, than Araby is his portrait of an artist as a young boy. Stone goes onto to say, “The boy in "Araby," like the youthful Joyce himself, must begin to free himself from the nets and trarmnels of society. The boy must dream "no more of enchanted days." He must forego the shimmering mirage of childhood, begin to see things as they really are.” (Stone, 348). In a singular instance, Joyce conjures all the disillusionment of maturity and hones it to sharp edge and a bitter pill that we all must swallow. Once the protagonist loses his idealism, he can’t get it back. That is the reality that Joyce conveys so eloquently. Stone, Harry. "Araby" And The Writings Of James Joyce." Antioch Review 71.2 (2013): 348‐ 380. Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 Mar. 2016. Loss, Wasted Opportunities and Negative Effects of Self‐Sacrifice in May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean Brygida Pudełko (Opole University) In Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) May Sinclair portrays the life of the only daughter of upper middle‐class parents whose life is roughly contemporaneous with that of Sinclair herself, and who is very clearly educated for the role of Angel in the House. Harriet has been so thoroughly taught by her parents to practice self‐sacrifice and self‐ denial that she becomes emotionally impoverished and totally lacking in individuality. She has neither the intelligence nor the strength of character to rebel against her parents’ values. As a result of these inabilities, she becomes a mere shadow of her parents, and is driven to some pathetic deceptions to protect herself from the realisation that her values are questionable or that her life has been empty or wasted. The novel is a criticism of a whole social class and of the parents’ ideal of family life, since their trying to adhere to the ideal of the “holy family” suffocates and sterilizes the child. Harriett does not become a finer person as a result of her self‐sacrifice. Her giving up Robin is destructive both for her and for the other people involved, and the ideal of self‐sacrifice is viewed as the mechanism whereby Harriett is crushed both as a woman and as a human being. Loss of Innocence in Elizabeth Bowen’s Novels: Tragedy or a Step to Maturity? 168 Maria Rodina (Lomonosov University, Moscow) The paper deals with the process of growing up understood as loss of innocence in the novels by the Anglo‐Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899 – 1973). The fact of becoming mature and giving up childhood dreams and illusions is often quite a painful experience for Bowen’s young characters. The loss of innocence is a wide abstract notion which includes in different cases other various forms of loss such as loss of identity, people, beliefs, values, places, etc. The presentation covers the following novels by Elizabeth Bowen: The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938). The characters under consideration are children, teenagers or young people who suddenly face the realities of the adult world and have to react. The question is whether this loss as it is portrayed by the writer is negative or positive. On the one hand, it may be seen as a shaking and tragic experience causing “the death of the heart” (as one of Bowen’s novels is called) and transforming a young and beautiful soul into a corrupted and evil one. On the other hand, one can see it as a natural process of becoming older and wiser. A Novel without a Hero – Is It a Loss? Barbara Puschmann‐Nalenz (Ruhr‐Universitaet Bochum) William Thackeray's Vanity Fair reached its original readership in the form of a serialised novel published in Punch magazine in 1847‐48. It was directed to readers who lived about one generation removed from the time of the story – the Napoleonic Wars. While the spatio‐temporal setting, which includes the Battle of Waterloo, seems well‐suited for a representation of a heroic central character the subtitle already announced the lack of such a protagonist. The first question is after the reasons for this negation. The author's preference for portrayals of several female characters is obvious. The antagonists Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley are not exhibited as 'black and white', and the panoramic view of society contributes to blocking the emergence of a heroic protagonist. Second, the effects. What does the absence of a hero/ine do to the novelistic representation? I wish to argue that the 'disappearance of the hero/ine' reveals itself as an integral part of Thackeray's assessed intention to 'unscrew the old framework of society', including a literary and reading culture which stressed the individual. Moreover, the satirical extradiegetic third‐person narrator not only exposes human weaknesses, thereby preventing the heroic, but has also gained an opportunity for frequent metafictional comments, which subvert the building of reader illusion. Closing Statement (Co‐Convenors) 169 S31. “Regional and World Literatures: National Roots and Transnational Routes in Scottish Literature and Culture from the 18th Century to Our Age” Co‐conveners: Gioia Angeletti (University of Parma, Italy) Bashabi Fraser (Edinburgh Napier University, UK) “Transnational, Transcultural Blair in Spain” María Eugenia Perojo‐Arronte, University of Valladolid, Spain Hugh Blair was one of the first Scottish men of letters to acquire a wide popularity abroad, mainly through his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Together with the ossianic compositions, in whose popularisation Blair himself had a direct hand, and which were also promoted in the Lectures, the latter were instrumental for giving Scotland a cultural and literary resonance all over Europe. However, both the Lectures and their abridgments also became important vehicles for a wide dissemination of English literary works which were seminal for the transition from French cultural dominance to Anglophilia in early European Romanticism. At the same time, Blair’s work underwent a singular nationalization process in the translation practice for its adaptation to the new national contexts, thus raising issues of national identity and controversial alignments. A Spanish version of the Lectures and an abridgment were published in Spain at a crucial time for the shift in the cultural paradigm, giving way to a harsh controversy that acquired a political dimension. The aim of this paper is to explore the centrality of Blair’s work and its protean nature in this transcultural and transnational process as it happened in Spain at the turn of the eighteenth century. “Staging Contemporary Identities. Repertoire of the National Theatre of Scotland through the Prism of Multimodal Discourse Analysis” Paula Sledzinska, University of Aberdeen, Scotland Since its inaugural performances in 2006, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) has occupied a significant position in Scotland’s cultural landscape. Through its innovative structure of a touring theatre without walls, the company has challenged popular perceptions of national theatres as elitist monuments of national culture. The NTS’s innovative take on its ‘national’ format is nevertheless most fully expressed in its literary and musical repertoire which defies essentialist identity categorisations. This paper explores the NTS’s discursive treatment of ‘Scottish’ identities – their contemporary character and relevance in the broader context of the national and trans‐national imagining. It is particularly preoccupied with the multicultural and multilingual reality of Scotland’s urban centres largely shaped by powerful waves of intra‐ and inter‐national migrations. Drawing on Gunther Kress’s and Theo van Leeuwen’s developments in multimodal discourse analysis, I explore literary and musical discourses proposed in the NTS’s repertoire. Focusing on one of NTS’s most successful musical plays, Glasgow Girls (2012, 2013, 2014), I argue that the company confidently rejects old boundaries, national tales and iconographies, proposing a bold take on the global circumstances, influencing the formation of ‘Scottish’ identities today. “The Sense of (Un)Belonging: David Greig’s (Un?)Scottishness in Pyrenees and Damascus” Maria Elena Capitani, University of Parma, Italy 170 David Greig’s biographical journey and theatrical trajectory blend his Scottish roots with wider routes. Born in Edinburgh in 1969, he was raised in Nigeria. After graduating from Bristol University, Greig felt that he had to settle permanently in Scotland in order to become a writer, thus stressing how roots are crucial to the ‘textualisation’ and creative (re)negotiation of identity. Scotland – as well as the fluid notion of Scottishness – can be defined as a ‘present absence’ pervading Greig’s drama. Focusing on Pyrenees (2005) and Damascus (2007), two plays in which Scotland exists exclusively in absentia and/or in relation to the ‘Other’, this paper explores Greig’s linguistic and cultural geographies of (trans)national identity. Set in ‘non‐places’ outside Scottish borders (two hotels located in the South of France and in Syria, respectively), these plays offer a globalised version of Caledonian culture and identity, made up of clichés and frequently subsumed by Britishness. Permeable, multifaceted, protean and (un)written sous rature, Greig’s Scotland functions, in David Pattie’s words, “as the silent partner in a never‐to‐be‐completed conversation; as though the country has no substance in itself, but acquires meaning only through a process of continual re‐engagement “Indo‐Scottish Connections in the Cosmopolitan Historical Novel: the Case of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy” Elena Spandri, Università di Siena In attempting to move beyond a competitive model of comparison between centre and margin, European and non‐European cultures, recent Postcolonialism has increasingly committed to notions of differentiated modernities, as well as on the power of critical, rather than imitative, recontextualizations of Western historical and philosophical tradition [see Appadurai 1996, Chakrabarty 2000, Gankoar 2001, Damrosch 2014]. One of the discursive sites that has most conveniently lent itself to such significant adaptations is the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, which championed an advanced and pluralistic idea of modernity by locating it at the core of modern experience heterogeneous temporalities and multiple geo‐politics. The paper will focus on the fictionalized use of the Scottish Enlightenment social and economic thought in Amitav Ghosh’s historical trilogy, with specific focus on River of Smoke (2011). In attempting to build an inclusive and non‐ hegemonic history of the 19th century Opium Wars, Ghosh revives both the methods of conjectural history and the intellectual implications of the stadial theory, and upholds a discourse on empire that is underpinned by Adam Smith’s notion of commercial cosmopolis. The paper will examine the wide‐ranging narrative solutions and ideological scope of Ghosh’s revisiting, so as to shed light on one of the contemporary artistic and intellectual sites in which Scottish Enlightenment culture still proves relevant and inspiring for an accurate and sympathetic understanding of the trajectories of both world history and world literature. 171 S32.“The Sublime Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of the Sublime in British Literature since the 18th Century” In the words of J.B. Twitchell, the sublime has always been a complicated and ambiguous category. Nevertheless, a tension between the knowable, familiar world and the constant pressure of the unknown, the incomprehensible and uncontrollable, analysed in Edmund Burke´s influential study, remains a significant attribute of the sublime. The view of the sublime as a loss of a meaningful relation between words and the intensity of individual experience of reality (reflected in particular rhetorical devices) permeates aesthetics from Romanticism to postmodern art. The seminar is concerned especially with the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries (the Gothic, Romantic and Victorian traditions) but also with their influence on modern literature. Aesthetical discussions (Burkean and Wordsworthean, Kantian, poststructuralist) are welcome as well. Co‐convenors: Eva Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly University, Eger, Hungary Vrankova, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic and Kamila “Transgressing the Boundaries of Reason: Burke’s Poetic (Miltonic) Reading of the Sublime” Eva Antal, Eszterhazy Karoly University, Eger, Hungary In the 18th century, the aesthetic quality of the sublime was discussed and thematised by varied authors who focused on the relation between the human and the divine, emphasising the creative power of imagination in the aisthesis of the sublime experience. It seems that the interpretation of the sublime displays the limits of the human mind, while also speaking of the possibility of transgressing those limits either in the imaginative functioning or the bodily experience. In my paper, after a thorough introduction, I focus on Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Although the Lockean ‘clear and distinct’ ideas greatly influenced Burke in his philosophical argumentation, John Milton’s poetic impact is emphatically displayed in the ‘dark and obscure’ rhetoric of the work. Discussing the Miltonian obscurity, Burke is able to provide a complex sense not only to the concept but also to the self since he lays special emphasis on the importance of writing the self and reading–the writing and the reading self. “Defying the Male Sublime: Mary Shelley’s Approach to the Sublime in the Novels Frankenstein and Lodore” Antonella Braida, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France Since Jonathan Bate’s seminal monograph Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991), critics have accepted and encouraged ecological readings of British Romantic writers and poets, including Mary Shelley. This paper intends to show that her approach to nature in her fiction is intrinsically entangled with the debate on the sublime. Thus in Frankenstein, Clerval’s Wordsworthean ‘poetry of nature’ is contrasted with Frankenstein’s scientific approach to extreme natural phenomena like storms, often associated with the sublime. In Lodore, male characters feel challenged by the natural world into rejecting their own systems of values in favour of a return to Jean‐Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature beyond and before ‘culture’ and ‘property’. Female characters, on the other hand, are invited to 172 follow Cornelia’s hard‐learnt philosophy that “nature is the refuge and home for women” (Lodore, pp. 442‐3).8 The paper will illustrate the interplay between Mary Shelley’s proto‐ecological sensibility with the prevailing aesthetic discourse of the sublime in the novels Frankenstein and Lodore. “From Rhetoric to Imagination and Terror: John Dennis and the ‘Revelations’ of the Sublime in Early 18th‐Century British Literary Aesthetics” Zoltán Cora, University of Szeged, Hungary The presentation examines the literary aesthetic interpretation of the sublime by John Dennis, and how he managed to widen its originally rhetorical category. The English critic elevated terror and religious passion (the idea of God and Enthusiastick Terror) as primary sources of the sublime, while exploring the distinct characteristics and excessive depth of the relations and reactions of senses and emotions. Although as a neoclassicist, Dennis emphasised rhetorical efficiency in carrying out the sublime effect, yet he also presented the neat intricacy human sensibility and psychology might yield to the aesthetics of the sublime. The reinterpretation of Longinus’ Peri hypsous reinvigorated French and British classicist literary debates. Within this controversy the aesthetic theory of Dennis holds a similar proposition as reinterpreted later in Burke’s and Kant’s theories: a scheme which serves as a representation of the unity of terror, astonishment and joy on a deeper, half‐ subconscious level (sub‐limen). In this reflective and affective aesthetic interpretation the reality of the sub‐limen cannot be perceived directly; hence, an invention of the reality of the sublime becomes possible in the human mind, which opens up a vista for gaining an aesthetic though valid knowledge of the world, through the ‘terroristic’ aspect of sublimity. “Towards a Postcolonial Aesthetics: The Postcolonial Sublime in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children” Christin Hoene, The University of Potsdam, Germany There has recently been a surge in critical interest in the overlap between aesthetic theory and postcolonial studies. In 2014, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing published an interview with Robert Young on that topic and, a year later, an article by Bill Ashcroft. In that article, Ashcroft argues for reclaiming aesthetic theory in the context of postcolonial art, arguing that it produces an “aesthetic engagement” between producer and consumer which allows for a cross‐cultural engagement. Y et, a critically comprehensive category of postcolonial aesthetics still remains to be developed. My presentation on the postcolonial sublime in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children is a step in that direction. Analysing the sublime in the novel in reference to both Kant and Lyotard, I advance the category of the postcolonial sublime, which in the text acts as an aesthetic device to present the unpresentable and which thus allows the protagonist to provide testimony of both his personal experience in a newly postcolonial India and of the country itself. Also, and more broadly, I want to map out the possibilities that aesthetic categories such as the sublime offer us to better negotiate the political dimension of aesthetic theory in a postcolonial context. 8 Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. by Lisa Vargo, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997. 173 “Sage, Hero, Ironist: Thomas Carlyle’s Complex Engagement with the Sublime and the Ironic” Nataliya Novikova, Moscow Lomonosov State University, Russia The aim of the paper is to contribute to the debate about the literary sublime by bringing it into focus together with its seeming antagonist, irony. While the one is associated with the sweeping powers of transformative experience and the other is concerned with the ability to see shrewdly through any kind of pathos, both seek to enlarge the boundaries of individual consciousness at the same time verging on the brink of self‐destruction. The same paradox underlies their controversial relations with language since both the ironic and the sublime in rhetoric point to the deficiency and/or excess of verbal expression. Departing from certain points made in theoretic discussions (e.g. Booth 1974, Shaw 2006), the primary concern of the paper is to look at Thomas Carlyle as an outstanding example of double engagement with the ironic and the sublime discourse. Special attention will be given to a rich interplay of prophetic, visionary, grotesque and satirical figures in Sartor Resartus and On Heroes, Hero‐Worship, and the Heroic in History. “The Gothic, Romantic and Victorian tradition with respect to the poetics of the sublime. The Space of Transylvania and Victorian London in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Alice Sukdolová, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic In my presentation I would like to analyze the perception and construction of space in Bram Stoker’s most famous novel. The first setting, Transylvanian forests surrounding Dracula’s castle, can be understood as a form of sublime space with respect to the Gothic atmosphere of the unknown, terrifying and beautiful. In this respect Edmund Burke’s study can be used in my analysis. As for the theoretical background, I would like to use Deleuze and Guattari’s categories of defining space (i.e. the notion of the smooth and striated space) to trace the basic intertwining of the two categories. The general notion of space in Dracula can be understood as the space which becomes smooth with the presence of the Gothic aspect, presence of the Other, unknown sublime and perversely beautiful. My presentation would further explore the topic of the sublime space of the sea which appears in Dracula before his ship reaches the English shore. However, the question of the space sublimity of the English soil and especially the city of London remains unanswered. “H. G. Wells’s Scientific Romances and the Late‐Victorian Urban Sublime” Christophe Den Tandt, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium This paper interprets Herbert George Wells’s early science‐fiction novels as instances of the late‐Victorian urban sublime. The argument suggests that Wells’s works bring into play two components of the rhetoric of urban sublimity—the oceanic and the gothic sublime. Wells’s vision of the present and future indeed depicts cities either as boundless fields defying representation or as breeding grounds for evolutionary monsters. The paper examines two issues raised by Wells’s use of this urban idiom. First, it attempts to situate Wells within a specifically Victorian tradition. This requires charting the course of the urban sublime through the evolution of Victorian social fiction. It also implies defining Wells’s status within the sketchily defined movement of British literary naturalism as well as within the discourse of the Victorian social sciences. Secondly, the paper evaluates the 174 impact of Wells’s rhetoric of sublimity on the author’s politics. One wonders indeed how this urban idiom plays with regard to Wells’s elitist brand of socialism. Finally, the paper highlights to what extent the urban sublime could serve as a transitional stage between the romantic and the postmodern sublime, and to what extent early science fiction contributed to this evolution. “The Ethical Aspects of the Sublime in Modern English Fantasy (Rowling, Pullman, Higgins)” Kamila Vrankova, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic The theme of the paper is inspired by the fact that the transformations of the aesthetic category of the sublime, as defined by various scholars in different cultural and philosophical contexts, involve a thorough concern with an ethical aspect of the sublime experience. Examples can be found in Longinus, Dennis, Burke, Kant, or in Lyotard. In my paper, particular aspects of the sublime are explored in the connection with several texts of modern English fantasy fiction for young‐adult readers. The interpretation of these texts attempts to show that modern fantasy literature revives the sublime both as an aesthetic concept and as an ambiguous, intense experience. The links are searched between J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the Burkean concept of terror, between Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials and the Kantian idea of imagination, between Fiona Higgins’s Black Book of Secrets and Lyotard’s emphasis on the unknown and the unspeakable. The concern with the child hero (and the child reader) is observed with respect to the theme of tension between the individual’s limited physical capacities and the overwhelming (and possibly destructive) experience of vastness and power. 175 S33. Peripatetic Gothic “The chest in the attic”: Jealousy and Revenge in The Romance of Certain Old Clothes Michela Vanon Alliata It is now a well‐established fact that Henry James’s Gothic or supernatural fiction in general, from The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, his earliest ghost story (1868), to The Jolly Corner (1908), his last, far from representing a lesser or peripheral form of writing, is integral to the Jamesian canon, connected as it is to the great dynamic forces which play through his work in its entirety. A key figure of 19th‐century literary realism, an unusual and unanchored American who enjoyed a restless, peripatetic upbringing and translatlantic lifestyle, James throughout his career wrote eighteen tales that deploy either explicitely or implicity images of the ghostly. Given James’s disturbing explorations of the dark side of human nature, his recurrent exploration of the disquieting discrepancy between social appearances and hidden personal realities, it is no surprise that even in his realist major novels metaphors and tropes drawn from the Gothic abound. Central to much of James’s fiction are not only renunciatory gestures, scruples of consciousness, advances and retreats, but silent wars between people who hate where they pretend to love, who devour where they feign to give, and who negate where they seem to help. Written while he was in Cambridge where, as he remarked to his brother William, life was “about as lively as the inner sepulchre”, The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, despite the initial light tone of a comedy of manners, is a sharp‐edged anatomy of jealousy, rapacity and bitter rivalry over love between two sisters with a spectacularly Gothic closure in which retributive justice is finally dealt. Though at the time James was only twenty‐five, this eerie tale already shows an author of great imaginative scope, vigilant in his methods, dark in his concerns. Let the Peripatetic Vampire Child In: Gothic Permutations Maria Holmgren Troy The figure of the vampire is a peculiarly transnational phenomenon as it moves, sometimes with supernatural speed, between different countries, parts of the world, and media. As the title indicates, my point of departure for discussing the permutations and functions of the vampire child in different settings will be John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestselling Swedish vampire novel Låt den rätte komma in [Let the Right One In] (2004), which was translated into English in 2007. The Swedish film adaptation of the novel, directed by Tomas Alfredson and with the screenplay written by Lindqvist, was first screened in 2008; it reached an international as well as national audience to great acclaim. In 2010, Matt Reeves’s American film adaptation, or remake, was released under the title Let Me In. In my presentation, I will not only comment on the Swedish vampire child Eli’s movement between different media and translation into the vampire girl Abby in the American film, but also suggest that Eli might have a forerunner in Thai‐American S. P. Somtow’s eternally twelve‐year‐old vampire Timmy in Vampire Junction (1984), which has been considered a splatterpunk novel. Maria Holmgren Troy is Professor of English at Karlstad University, Sweden. She is the Director of the Culture Studies Group (KuFo) at this university. Much of her research has dealt with memory and trauma in literature. Other areas of research interest are 19th‐ century American fairy tales and contemporary gothic fiction. Together with Elizabeth 176 Kella and Helena Wahlström, she is the author of Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship, and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (Manchester UP, 2014). Troy’s other publications include Space, Haunting, Discourse (co‐ed. 2008); Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th‐Century Europe (co‐ed. 2007); Memory, Haunting, Discourse (co‐ed. 2005); In the First Person and in the House: The House Chronotope in Four Works by American Women Writers (1999); and essays on works by, among others, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Pat Barker. ‘Deep calls unto Deep’: Some Reflections on Nautical Gothic David Punter The theme of nautical, or maritime, Gothic is currently attracting a great deal of attention. There are many writers cited, from Melville through Conrad to William Hope Hodgson. Matters being thought about include the terror of the sea; the persistence of shipboard superstitions; the oceans as representative of fate; the profession of the sea as the ‘widow‐ maker’; histories of the pirate; the practice of ‘marooning’; and so forth. In this paper, I want to centre these discussions around a novel which was immensely popular in its time, but although it became a very well‐regarded film (starring Jack Hawkins) has now largely faded from view: Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea (1951). Here, against a backdrop compounded partly of storm and gale and partly of fears of enemy attack, men survive (or in many cases do not) experiences of estrangement, of exile from home, in the most harsh of environments. Monsarrat has constant recourse to Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, which redoubles the sense of the curse which hangs above all seamen as they navigate their way across impossible, unthinkable depths; he also assembles a group of anecdotes, typical of which is the episode of the ‘Dead Helmsman’, that constitute the terrifying coordinates of memory, as it is constantly reinvented in the absence of landmarks. Here is the ‘peripatetic’ in the sense of a journey which may never reach an ending, or only one in which we are surrounded by past shipmates whose graves will never be marked. Gothic Horror Fiction Elements in Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In (2012) Jelena Pataki, University of Osijek The aim of this paper is to explore the elements of Gothic fiction in the critically acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s 2012 film The Skin I Live In. The film is often viewed as a distinctly modern piece of art in that it dwells on contemporary issues referring to complex ethical and moral dilemmas connected to genetic engineering and the disintegration of an individual’s identity. However, despite the undeniable presence of the said issues, the idea is to show that the film’s structure is in fact solidly built on a much older, Gothic fiction matrix featuring many of its well‐established, easily discernible motifs and conventions. Starting with the classic Gothic topos – a helpless heroine set in an eerie, claustrophobic architecture and a grotesque atmosphere evoking a feeling of imminent doom – the paper will consider the film’s portrayal of concepts such as death, doubles and dreams in order to show that the work of the Spanish director bears many similarities to the canonical Anglophone genre. Inevitably, the paper will explore the distinct parallel between Mary Shelley’s seminal Gothic fiction text, Frankenstein, and the contemporary counterparts of its mad scientist and his Creation embodied by Almodovar’s Dr. Robert Ledgard and his Vera. 177 Jelena Pataki holds a degree in English and Croatian language and literature as well as in translation. She is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Cultural Identity Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, and a member of the Croatian Association for the Study of English (CASE). Her field of study is Anglophone literature and culture, with a special emphasis on fantasy and dystopian literature. She also works as a freelance translator. Her published translations include Croatian translations of Anne O'Brien’s The Virgin Widow (Nevina udovica, Zagreb: 24sata, May 2015) and Maya Banks’s Shades of Gray (Nijanse sive, Velika Gorica: Stilus knjiga d.o.o (24sata), July 2015), Pam Jenoff's The Winter Guest (Zimski gost, Zagreb: 24sata, November 2015), Karen Swan's Christmas in the Snow (Božić u snijegu, Zagreb: 24sata, December 2015). ‘Mary Shelley’s Gothic “rambles” in European countries and languages’ MARIA PARRINO Some contemporary critics maintain that we need to challenge the ‘tyranny of the Anglo‐ American narratives of the Gothic’ and show the ‘importance of translation and European writing in the development of the Gothic novel’ (Horner, 2002). There are two questions which emerge from such a consideration: first, is the idea of Europe the ‘natural’ result of geographical boundaries or is it a geopolitical and economic outcome, a construction ‘in theory’? (Dainotto, 2007). The second question concerns the issue of translation at large, not only in terms of language but also in terms of migration of motives, themes and imagery. By focusing on the issues of translation and migration it is possible to shift from a nation‐centered to a peripatetic perspective of Gothic novels and novelists. This paper examines the issues of writing and translating in Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, unarguably one of the Gothic novels which has been most translated across languages and genres. By analyzing Mary Shelley’s readings of European literature and her personal ‘rambles’ in European countries, this study aims to trace contaminations between her life and her literary production. How did Mary Shelley’s readings influence her writings (Mathilda from Alfieri’s Mirra; Valperga from Machiavelli’s Life of Castruccio Castracani)? Did she who studied Latin, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian ever question the issue of translation? Why did she offer to translate into English Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)? How did she who made the most famous Gothic creature a multilingual traveller narrate her own migration into foreign countries and foreign languages? The study suggests the extraordinary and unsettling power of crossing geographical, language and literary borders. Three is a Crowd? Poland and the Anglo‐French Transfusion of the Gothic Agnieszka Lowczanin ‘The import of terror’, a two‐way, fast‐flowing literary traffic between England and France in the eighteenth century, greatly shaped what we now recognise as Gothic fiction (Wright). Partly, it can be seen as an expression of Gallo‐ and Anglomania, mutual aesthetic fascinations which, as the century neared its end, became affected by political upheavals and patriotic propaganda and evolved into mutual phobias. However, for the aristocracies of Central and Eastern Europe, Gallomania was often a bridge to Anglomania, and in many aspects the two remained complementary (Butterwick, 56). This presentation will focus on the Polish fascination with England, fostered by the last Polish king, the Anglophile 178 Stanislaw August, and on the importance of the French detour in the import of Gothic to the territory of Poland at the time of the genre’s inception. 179 S34: The Fiction of Victorian Masculinities and Femininities The Bourgeois Male as the Product of Patriarchy in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley Mehmet Akif Balkaya, Aksaray University, Turkey The aim of this paper is to analyse the conditions of repressed women and the differences in gender through the portrayal of the hierarchical microcosm with prejudices and conflicts derived from gender discrimination and classism as represented in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Shirley (1849). Victorian Era is represented as a male‐dominated society in which women are neglected and degraded in such a way as even the writer Charlotte Bronte could publish her novel under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Bronte presents the status of women who are oppressed and silenced, and regarded as incompetent by the bourgeois male through the characters Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. This paper also aims to discuss the concept of marriage as putting forth that marriage was regarded as an economic integration in the Victorian Period. For instance, the factory owner Robert Moore associates marriage with economics as marriage is degraded to a commodity which could be bought and sold between the same class members Although Shirley advocates the development of women, she ascribes patriarchal attributes to women who are repressed by the prejudiced social rules which prohibit women from going to universtiy or choose their occupations. It will be concluded that Victorian man is prejudiced and narrow‐ minded as a product of the patriarchal values. Fallen Women and Prostitutes in Neo‐Victorian Fiction – Revising Her‐story Eliana Ionoaia, University of Bucharest, Romania Neo‐Victorian novels offer a revised her‐story for silenced female characters – Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet discusses lesbianism in the Victorian context as well as prostitution, while Katy Darby’s The Whore’s Asylum and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White focus on the situation of prostitutes. Another avenue of investigation relates to the life‐stories of famous literary fallen, mad women such as Bertha Mason (in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea). Finally, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things deal with fallen women who are given a voice and the power to control their destinies, while also touching on the topic of prostitution. This alternative history moves from the patriarchal perspective of the Victorian Age – history – to a narrative empowering of the female characters in Neo‐Victorian fiction – by means of revising their life stories. The situation of prostitutes and fallen women is present in numerous Neo‐Victorian writings, as it was missing from their Victorian counterparts. Victorian writers would have seen the prostitute and the fallen woman as an improper subject matter for their books, being introduced in the pages of novels only as negative examples. The opposite is true for Neo‐Victorian novels which empower both fallen women and prostitutes. To a certain extent, however, the Neo‐Victorian works still uphold the dichotomy between the bias against sexualised women and approval for the same behaviour on the part of males. The alchemy of writing: George Eliot and The Lifted Veil Loredana Salis, Università di Sassari, Italy Since its first publication, George Eliot’s ‘dismal’ novella The Lifted Veil (1859) has received cursory attention from both critics and Eliot scholars, and where readings of it have been proposed, they have focussed primarily on the author’s aesthetics and concern with realism, on her sources and interest in mesmerism and phrenology, on her preoccupation with the achievement of sympathy through literature. Some have examined the role of the 180 protagonist, who is often seen as an unreliable narrator, a victim of Victorian sexual bias, the artist manqué and, at best, a cynic. While these readings shed a light on a text that is undeniably peculiar, they nevertheless neglect Eliot ’s own gender politics and the way she plays with and challenges her reader’s assumptions in relation to gender roles. Taking the couple Latimer/Bertha as exemplary of the writer’s aim, this paper contends that The Lifted Veil draws the reader into a less comfortable yet enchanting territory where nothing is predictable and the alchemy of writing takes place. A deliberately and provocatively disturbing narrative of an outré kind, the tale testifies Eliot’s impulse for experimentation, for transgression, and ultimately dismissal of cultural expectations. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh: Woman and Poet Both Complete Hande Seber, Hacettepe University, Turkey Realising the lack of an established female poetic tradition, Elizabeth Barrett Browning took the male poetic tradition as her starting point. She made use of its literary forms and themes to build for herself and for her poetics a place, and thus to bring to the fore the female voice which had been silent for centuries in literature through idealisation and suppression. Her female identity and concerns about her gender were always in the centre of her poetic vision. Aurora Leigh, which was published in 1856 and marked the climax in her poetic career is significant within this context as it presents a Victorian woman’s determination and struggle to become a poet despite all the restrictive gender roles imposed on her by the society. Through her fictional character Aurora, who is usually associated with the poet herself, Elizabeth Barrett Browning mirrors her own poetic progress and determination, and at the same time presents her concerns about woman’s place in life and art. This presentation, therefore, aims to discuss and illustrate Aurora’s attempts to question and challenge the fictions of Victorian femininity after she feels herself “[w]oman and artist, – either incomplete” (II. 4), and her success in reshaping an identity both as a woman and a poet. ‘Uncovering Hidden Hands’: female factory workers in the early Victorian Novel Carla Fusco, University of Macerata, Italy Female workers represent a fundamental contribution to workforce to the extent that it's true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a lot. However, despite the unfair exploitation of many women, in factories similar to manslaughter, the latter have been often neglected and reduced to liminal characters by Victorian novelists. Victorian writers prefer to focus their attention on men and children workers considering the female ones as threatening enough to subvert the social order. An interesting exception of the early Victorian period is represented by the writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna whose fiction works as a medium of social criticism. Her most popular novel is entitled Helen Fleetwood, but she is also the author of the semi‐fictional book, The Wrongs of Women. The latter deals with a reform novel which shows a controversial view on female working conditions. On one hand she indeed deplores the inhuman treatment of female labours, but, on the other hand she also argues that female employment provokes the consequent increase of male unemployment! My paper aims to investigate the role of Tonna’s text and her attempt to alleviate working‐ class suffering. 181 Margaret Hale of Gaskell’s North and South Challenging Gender Norms Gillian Alban, Istanbul Aydin University, Istanbul, Turkey The restraints hedging nineteenth century women writers in attempting to express themselves against the expectation of them to be domestic angels, often led to their writing under pseudonym in order for their writing to be objectively evaluated, and when the Brontë sisters’ identity was uncovered, their characters were castigated as outrageously passionate women. In contrast to such trailblazers, Elizabeth Gaskell, still referred to until recent times as Mrs Gaskell, was seen as a ‘dove’ by contemporary patriarchs. But however respectable Gaskell presented herself, as well as Charlotte Brontë, in her biography, Gaskell’s character of the novel North and South, Margaret Hale, powerfully challenges contemporary gender norms. She remains outside female definitions in this novel, in contrast to her cousin Edith, and the mill owner daughter, Fanny, who, grasping a life of marriage and domesticity, are presented as weak foils in relation to her. Margaret remains indifferent to contemporary expectations throughout, returning home to become the mainstay of her effeminate father and her conventional mother. Assuming full responsibility for her own behaviour causes some confusion during the riot and subsequently, but she persists in her independence and is adamant that she will create her own lifestyle after the death of her parental figures, living her life accountable to a higher moral and intellectual order than readily available through contemporary expectations. Cycling Towards Gender Fusion: Women and Bicycles in the Fin‐de‐Siècle Katerina Kitsi‐Mitakou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece If the Victorian period was a time when “the sexes drew further and further apart,” as Virginia Woolf writes in her novel Orlando, these rigid gender‐role divisions between the two sexes were beginning to dissolve as the nineteenth century was drawing to its close. Among the various factors that contributed to bringing the two genders closer again was the cycling boom of the 1890s. Cycling allowed women freedom of physical movement, demanded a new clothing style, and became directly associated with the women’s struggle for suffrage. Soon, bicycles became associated with the image of the New Woman, the “mannish amazon” that was challenging canonical perceptions of masculinities and femininities in the fin‐de‐siècle. The aim of this essay is to explore how the introduction of bicycles revolutionized the fixity of gender roles in Victorian England and how this change is reflected both in written and pictorial representations of the time. Instances of Male Domination in the Poetry of G.M. Hopkins Adrian Radu, Babes‐Bolyai University Cluj‐Napoca, Romania As known, Hopkins was a devout religious spirit, possessed in an obsessive way by the Catholic dogma whose central figure, Jesus Christ, became a pivotal element in very many of his poems, a cherished finality of the poet’s symbolism. The figure of Christ becomes repeatedly crucial, an icon of power having not only cosmic dimensions, but also worldly and human overtones. For Hopkins, the images of God’s power are also images of beauty – of holy things but also of worldly, common or natural things, which are, after all, God’s creation, the object of His will. Many of Hopkins’s representations of God are placed on transcendental coordinates, made to echo his love for Christ. The human side appears as instances of male magnificence in poems such as ‘Harry Ploughman’ or ‘Felix Randall’. ‘Harry Ploughman’ is thus a tormenting celebration of masculine beauty with his muscular torso and limbs and the force that he emanates when ploughing the ground. Felix in ‘Felix Randal’ is totally involved with the material world, depicted as he is in the prime of his 182 energy, nearly innocent even in his sins, physically outstanding in a crowd of other muscular labouring men, an almost unspoiled expression of self‐possession and ultimate felicity. The aim of this essay is to discuss such instances of Hopkins’s mood of adoration, in whose centre is a man who might be either a representation of Jesus Christ the toiler or the human materialisation of Hopkins’s concealed homoeroticism. Subverting Traditional Models while Exploring Women’s Sexuality in Not Wisely but Too Well (1867), by Rhoda Broughton Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy “Man must be pleased, but him to please/ Is woman’s pleasure”: this quotation from Coventry Patmore’s highly praised narrative poem significantly entitled The Angel in the House (1854) perfectly epitomizes the Victorian ideal of womanhood, grounded in modesty, dedicated submissiveness, and untainted innocence. Respectful daughters, virtuous wives, and affectionate mothers, Victorian ladies were apparently content to perform their household duties. Sensation novels, particularly popular among ladies, were considered rather disturbing by Victorian literary critics since they placed the most atrocious crimes in the sacred haven of middle and upper‐class domesticity. Besides, unlike Gothic narratives set in a remote past and in faraway countries, they featured contemporary, realistic settings, alarmingly close to the reader’s experience. What’s more, the conventional lady in distress, threatened by the dark villain of the tales of terror, was frequently replaced by an angel‐like, seemingly harmless creature, who was actually the unexpected executor of savage crimes. This paper sets out to investigate the way Not Wisely but Too Well, a sensation novel by Rhoda Broughton (Sheridan Le Fanu’s niece) successfully undermined the above‐mentioned ideal of womanhood, thus creating a scandal. 183 S35. Dickens Society Seminars at ESSE2016: Reading Dickens Differently Tuesday 23 August, 8:30‐10:30: Reading Dickens Wistfully Gillian Piggott (Portsmouth University) Dickens and Urban Exploration As Benjamin puts it, the work of art is always in a state of becoming, and can never be completed; and, as we know, Dickens’s works since their creation have successfully borne an infinite variety of interpretations, re‐readings and critical models.9 What, in such a context, would it mean to “read Dickens differently”? The most current response to this question is to bring technology and contemporary ideas to Dickens’s text. The Dickens Journal Online Project is a fine example of the former, bringing Dickens’s works up to the minute with digital images of the journals’ editorials and adverts; crowd editing and participation; a serialised reading project with online blogging and discussion; even the option for readers to become writers and actors by taking on a novel’s character and during the unfolding narrative, Tweeting in a character’s “voice”. But while this might at first appear to resemble a case of “prying an oyster from its shell”10 in terms of forcing the work closer towards us in the present, as in all cases of bringing contemporary ideas to bear upon the past, there is always a reciprocity at play ‐ the past at the same time haunts us. After all, serialized reading was at the centre of the DJO project, in that sense the attempt was made to replicate the original experience of Dickens’s audiences in the 19th century. And by improvising and Tweeting Dickens characters, DJO readers replicate the same acting technique Dickens used himself to draw his writing closer to the truth about a character: like the actor he would speak aloud and listen to the character’s dialogue in front of a mirror, make expressions and gesticulations, mould and deliver that character into the world through performance. In terms of viewing Dickens through contemporary experience or ideas, what if Dickens’s walking habits, his relationship to the city and his depiction of it were read through the lens of one of today’s urban practices, such as the phenomenon of Urban Exploration, a project I hope to take up in a forthcoming paper? Does the intensity Dickens craved in his urban walking practices make him a “Professional Infiltrator” whose ‘Night Walks’ and ‘Uncommercial’ adventures are intelligible in the light of concepts such as “Recreational Trespass” , “embodied artistic urban intervention” or even the Surrealist “dérive”? 11 Certainly Dickens, as Pinder suggests of urban exploration, seeks to “open up the “marvellous” … buried within the everyday” and, along with the Situationists, he valorises in the city, “hidden meanings and associations.” (both quotations, Pinder).12 But again, it seems we cannot escape the past. As UrbEx guru Bradley Garrett makes clear: “Urban explorers, despite their declarations of novelty, owe a great deal to urban provocateurs of Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,’ (1920), ‘Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry…The Romantic way of writing is still in the process of becoming; indeed, this is its proper essence – that it is eternally coming to be and can never be completed,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol 1, 166‐200, (152). CHECK THIS PAGE REFERENCE 10 Benjamin uses the phrase ‘prying an object from its shell’ in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, 211‐244 (217). 11 Bradley Garrett, ‘Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration, Transactions, (2013). p. 5. ‘Derive’ etymology and definition. 12 David Pinder, ‘Old Paris no more’: geographies of spectacle and anti‐spectacle,’ Antipode, (2000), 32, 357‐ 86 (379). 9 184 the past.”13 Perhaps the most obvious way of reading Dickens differently, is to see his works through the eyes of another culture. Yet, even Lebanese students, who found ‘sentimentality’ and ‘the melodramatic’ the most legible and convincing aspects of Dickens’s works, determined that I, as their teacher, should revisit my modernist dismissal of these aesthetic modes, with a view to learning how the Victorians might have experienced them. The remainder of the paper will enlarge upon and work through these issues. Peter Orford (University of Buckingham), Speculation and Silence – Recreating Dickens by instalment in online projects There has been a recent spate of online reading projects that have approached Dickens in instalments, either a month or a week at a time, in accordance with the original serial publication of his novels. Such endeavours have tried, in reintroducing the gaps between the plot, to recreate the anticipation and speculation through online discussion; this element of reader engagement between instalments is a vital, yet frequently overlooked, aspect of the original success of these books, in which the enforced silence between instalments generated reader response and discussion to further flesh out the stories and embed them in the public consciousness. In the case of Dickens’s final, unfinished, novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, such speculation remains rife and unstifled without the closure of Dickens’ missing instalments. This paper will go on to show how, far from being a failure, this unintentional openness of Drood affords modern readers the opportunity to appreciate the effect of a Dickens’ novel in progress, rather than the arguably false model of the completed texts. Francesca Orestano (University of Milan) Dickens Today: Icon and Antonomasia The investigation I propose dwells on two modes, distinct and often mixed, of evoking the great Victorian writer. These occur both in the visual domain (videogames especially) and in the verbal domain (guides, fiction). To evoke Dickens as “icon” suggests a visual representation of his features on the one hand powerful and incisive, fully and immediately recognizable, but, on the other hand, lacking detail and accuracy, because of its recourse to a very general and static notion of the writer’s physical aspect. The other way of “reading” Dickens today occurs through the rhetoric device of antonomasia. This figure of speech provides us with a name – the name of a famous person – used as epithet, and ideally containing the whole list of his or her qualities or characteristics. The name “Dickens”, not only in videogames but also in recent fiction, is there to replace, or to carry the weight, of the entire Victorian era, of the capital of the British Empire, its streets, bridges and slums; Victorian ways of life; social issues; divorce; prisons; coaches to and from London. Both as icon and by antonomasia Dickens appears in contexts that profit from his many and varied prerogatives. In the game Assassin Creed Syndicate, Dickens is part of the historical trailer, together with other icons of his age, such as Queen Victoria, and other writers, scientists, inventors, eminent Victorians. While appearing with an immediately recognizable physique du role, against an immediately recognizable background, both obtained from period photographs, daguerreotypes, etchings and maps of London during the 1830s, our writer gets stereotyped and imprisoned within an unchangeable cliché. In “Urban explorers, despite their declarations of novelty, owe a great deal to urban provocateurs of the past; urban exploration and infiltration are intimately connected to canonical critical spatial practices,” (Garrett paraphrasing Rendell, ibid. 13 185 addition to this his name, recurring as a magic mantra or litany, is used to suggest a whole universe of ideas and themes, related to his fiction and journalism, but drastically reduced by the mechanism of the antonomasia. Today neither his many portraits nor his writings are part of the popular culture scenario: like his face on a banknote, his iconic presence adds value to a videogame and his name is enough to tell volumes of stories. • • • • • • • • • • • Roland Barthes, Mythologies Juliet John, Dickens and Mass Culture Tabish Khair, A Thing about Thugs Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: the Victorian Fight against Filth Gustave Doré, London, a Pilgrimage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LSlmIAB1oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RPipiC9jHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgK49NnX41c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ZLLocM8Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8rI8GXI0Y0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84g9‐UQ6C0k John Jordan (University of California, Santa Cruz) Is David Copperfield a Chartist novel? Is David Copperfield a Chartist novel? Although the answer it produces is probably “no,” posing the question in this blunt form has the advantage of shifting attention away from the novel’s familiar autobiographical elements toward its class politics and the broader historical context it evokes. My paper for the ESSE Dickens Society seminar sketches the outlines of an approach to reading Dickens’s “favourite child” differently—as melodrama rather than Bildungsroman and as an historical novel directly in the tradition of Walter Scott. The paper addresses questions of violence, both literal and figurative, and asks why Mr Dick is so obsessed with King Charles’ head. Claire Wood (University of York) Pictures and pop‐ups: narrative play in A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is a wonderfully playful text. Blind‐man’s buff, Yes and No, and forfeits are among the games played in the course of the story; buildings are described as ‘playing at hide‐and‐seek’; and even before his transformation Scrooge enjoys playing on words. This playfulness also operates at an extradiegetic level: in the opening pages the narrator’s jocular digressions and asides invite the reader to reflect upon gaps between language and meaning (is there anything ‘particularly dead about a door‐nail’?) and draw attention to how narrative works (that Marley is dead ‘must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate’). While many adaptations preserve Carol’s playful humour, Dickens’s sportive subversion of literary conventions rarely translates. This paper proposes to examine narrative playfulness in A Christmas Carol by exploring two twenty‐first century adaptations: the Classic Comics graphic novel (2008) and Chuck Fischer’s pop‐up edition (2010). Both retain Dickens’s original text, but seek to engage new audiences by dramatically expanding the visual content. The former replaces John Leech’s eight illustrations with hundreds of full‐colour comic panels, while the latter enables the reader to take control of the story, uncovering scenes from Scrooge’s past by lifting concealed panels. How do these media replicate the novella’s strange narratological effects and what new forms of narrative play do they enable. 186 Tuesday 23 August, 17:00‐19:00: Reading Dickens Earnestly Leon Litvack (Queen’s University Belfast) Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round In July 2015, a momentous event occurred in Ghent, Belgium: an antiquarian bookseller, Jeremy Parrott, revealed to a group of scholars the existence of an annotated set of the First Series of All the Year Round, which featured the names of the authors of the individual pieces. There was a great deal of excitement about this find, and a flurry of sensational media coverage. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Parrot remarked: At first I spotted Percy Fitzgerald, who I knew was a long‐time Dickens collaborator. I thought ‘that’s interesting, I wonder if it was by him’. . . . Then I saw Henry Morley, Wilkie Collins, Mrs Linton. . . then the second or third volume I opened had a Christmas story in it, and looking in the margin of the Christmas story, I thought, hang on, this isn’t just a name, this is Dickens’s signature. And that was the ‘oh my God’ moment, when I thought this isn’t just an annotated set, it is Dickens’s own set. Some months earlier, in May 2015, before the discovery was made public, I (as Principal Editor of the Dickens Letters Project) was contacted to pronounce on whether the entries were genuine, and whether or not the handwriting was Dickens’s own. The reports which appeared in the media in July 2015 claimed that the entries were indeed in Dickens’s hand, and that Parrott had discovered a literary ‘Rosetta Stone’ or ‘Enigma’, which once and for all solved the mystery of who wrote what in Dickens’s journal. The result, it was claimed, would be a large‐scale revision of generations of scholarship to accord with what the ‘facts’ could now tell us about the 300‐400 contributors of some 2500 articles, stories, and poems. A more careful consideration of the facts reveals that the situation is far more complex than what the initial, sensationalist reporting was able to convey. For example, graphological analysis of the marginalia demonstrates that the entries are clearly not in Dickens’s hand. Also, some of the names of the contributors are misspelled, perhaps indicating a second‐hand familiarity with the personalities concerned. This illustrated paper, based in part on my personal scrutiny of the annotated set, will tease out what can be incontestably demonstrated about this case, and will reflect on the issues the find raises for Victorian periodicals research. It will also demonstrate that simply knowing the identity of a particular author does not resolve all the issues; for instance, there were many cases in which Dickens himself, and members of his staff, contributed significantly to the revision and improvement of pieces from the raw state in which they were received from the individual authors. This paper will examine such issues, and will demonstrate that the added information contained in the annotated set (which appears, by all accounts, to be genuine) opens up – rather than closes down – further possibilities for research on All the Year Round. 187 Marginal annotation identifying “Charles Dickens” as the author of “To Be Taken for Life,” chapter 8 of “Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions,” All the Year Round 14 Extra Christmas Number (7 December 1865): 46. By kind permission of Paul Lewis. Authenticated Dickens signatures from letters to W.D. Morgan, dated 188 6 February 1861 (top) and 19 March 1868 (bottom). By kind permission of Robin Morgan Lloyd. David Paroissien (University of Buckingham) Charles Dickens, Thomas Babington Macaulay and the Politics of Reform Macaulay’s speech in the Commons on the evening of 2 March 1831, writes Boyd Hilton, served as “a turning point” in the parliamentary debates about reform. Delivered the day after Lord John Russell had moved leave to bring in a bill to amend the representation of the people in England and Wales, Macaulay rose to address the House about the case put by the opponents of reform. On this and on five subsequent tense occasions between 2 March 1831 and 28 February 1832, he dissected their objections at length with forensic precision. No extant evidence documents Dickens’s attendance in the press gallery on those dates as a reporter for The Mirror of Parliament; nevertheless, I will argue, Dickens owes an indelible debt to Macaulay, whose reform rhetoric, tropes and arguments appear to have influenced the formation of the novelist’s own ideas about the past, the role of history writing and the ability of fiction to add something to the popular understanding of past events. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, read in the context of Macaulay’s essays and speeches, acquire a resonance and validity they are often denied as contributions to historical discourse. By the same token, Macaulay’s 1828 essay “History” and other writings shed light on Dickens’s familiarity with the challenges of historiography, an awareness that surfaces explicitly in Barnaby Rudge and elsewhere in Dickens’s fiction. Chris Louttit (Radboud University) Boz without Phiz: Reading Dickens with Different Illustrations Jane Rabb Cohen, Michael Steig, Robert L. Patten and a great number of other scholars have made us aware that to appreciate Boz fully we must read him alongside Phiz. As a result, as Malcolm Andrews has claimed, Dickens’s ‘novels, more than any of his contemporaries, have come to seem incomplete without their original illustrations’ (97). Critics have been slower, however, to explore the numerous illustrated editions completed after Dickens’s death; as Robert Patten notes there have been no ‘comprehensive assessments of the illustrations ... to reprints or editions published after Dickens’s death’ (47). In this paper, I’ll begin by explaining why we need to recover these neglected ‘posthumous’ illustrated editions, and reflect on how they make us see Dickens differently. More speculatively, I’ll then begin to explore the theoretical benefits and challenges of drawing further attention to this forgotten archive of Dickens illustrations that could arise through the creation of a digital scholarly edition. My suggestions for this hypothetical edition will frame it in relation to the achievements of existing illustration‐focused resources such as Visual Haggard and The Illustration Archive; I will also discuss how a Dickens resource might pose different challenges to those faced by digital editions such as these. Andrews, Malcolm. ‘Illustrations’. A Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. David Paroissien. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 97‐125. Patten, Robert L. ‘Publishing in Parts’. Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies. Eds. John Bowen and Robert L. Patten. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 11‐47. 189 Lillian Nayder (Bates College), A Tale of Two Brothers: Reading Differently Dickens’s French Revolution An account of the French Revolution – of liberté, égalité, fraternité – and of the uncanny twinning of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, A Tale of Two Cities is a story of brotherhood in various forms; it is also a novel written in the wake of the final breakdown of relations between Charles Dickens and his next youngest brother Frederick (1820‐ 1868), eight years his junior. Reading Dickens differently – in the context of the novelist’s own fraternal dynamics – my paper reconceives the meaning of power, rebellion, freedom and self‐sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities, approaching that work in the context of the “insurrection” of the novelist’s brother in the late 1850s. With Fred representing himself as an oppressed figure subject to Dickens’s “lash” in his letters from the time and the novelist depicting Fred as a rebel lacking any respect for authority, this tale of two brothers illuminates the well‐known novel in a new way. Often seen as a double of his famous older brother – so much like him, in fact, that “Earth will not hold us both,” as the novelist comically put it in the 1840s14 – Fred plays the part of Carton to Dickens’s Darnay in the novelist’s reconstruction. Imaginatively recasting their relationship in his fiction, and in a way that allows him to bring Fred’s rebellion to a heroic and ennobling end, Dickens constructs a wish‐fulfillment fantasy that severs his blood tie with Fred – their doubling now an uncanny and unaccountable resemblance – while also redeeming his feckless and insubordinate “twin.” He paradoxically salvages his idea of his brother in disavowing their relation. My paper enables us to read Dickens differently not only by approaching A Tale of Two Cities in an new and illuminating context, drawing on unpublished and little‐known sources in the process, but also by enabling us to consider the famous novelist through the eyes of a younger brother. Wednesday 24 August 14:00‐16:00: Reading Dickens Generously Michael Hollington (University of Kent at Canterbury) Reading Dickens through D.H.Lawrence (with a focus on The Lost Girl) This presentation is the first draft of part of a larger project with the provisional title ‘Dickens among the Modernists’, which aims to document and explain the resurgence of Dickens’s reputation in the early part of the 20th century through the examination of particular readings of his work by significant writers and intellectuals, particularly in its initial stages, those associated with Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire during the First World War and the years immediately following it, D. H. Lawrence is one of these Garsington writers. The role of another in this resurgence, that of his quondam friend and associate Katherine Mansfield, is now quite well established, the pioneering work of Edward Wagenknecht having been reinforced in recent years by Angela Smith, Holly Furneaux and myself. Thus it is appropriate to begin by noticing Lawrence’s perception that her work was inspired by Dickens. According to Frieda Lawrence in a letter to John Middleton Murry, ‘Lawrence said Katherine had a lot in common with Dickens, you know when the kettle is so alive on the fire and things seem to take on such significance.’ The least one can say about this remark is that Lawrence had read Dickens with sufficient attention to be able accurately to identify a cardinal feature of his work and identify its traces in that of a Modernist contemporary. Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, 12 volumes, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon, 196502002), 4:192. 14 190 The extent of Lawrence’s familiarity with Dickens can in fact be documented by numerous references in his letters and elsewhere to which I shall draw attention – Jesse Chambers’s testimony that as young people they read Dickens together and thought David Copperfield pre‐eminent, the reference to Great Expectations in a letter of 1917 or to A Tale of Two Cities in The Lost Girl, etc., etc. Yet the overall picture is riddled with ambivalence. In one characteristic letter of 1913 Lawrence first retracts a previous objection to Dickens’s characters – ‘I am jealous of them,’ he says here ‐ but then goes on to say, ‘but there is something fundamental about him that I dislike.’ The obvious distinction to make here is between ‘jealousy’ of the art and ‘dislike’ of the man, whom he describes disparagingly as a ‘mid‐Victorian.’ Thus the case of Lawrence as a representative Modernist reader of Dickens is particularly instructive because he can be seen to be wrestling with that antipathy towards ‘eminent Victorians’ characteristic of his generation, but also as someone willing to admire some aspects of the writer’s achievements, and (I hope to show) to draw inspiration from them. In this respect Catherine Carswell’s testimony is precious: ‘Nobody who ever heard him describe the scenes and persons of his boyhood, or watched him recreate with uncanny mimicry the talk, the movements and the eccentricities of the men and women among whom he grew up, can doubt but that Lawrence, if he had liked, might have been a new kind of Dickens of the Midlands.’ Following others, and with particular reference to the novel The Lost Girl and the short story ‘The Rocking‐Horse winner’, I shall argue that Lawrence did in many respects choose to become ‘a new kind of Dickens’, a modernist one who ‘did the police in different voices’ ‐ as well as other creatures animate and inanimate, and perhaps above all children. Charlotte Wadoux (University of Kent & Université de Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) Rewriting as rereading Dickens in Lynn Shepherd’s Tom‐All‐Alone’s Dickens seems to be a privileged hypotext for Neo‐Victorian writers who present us with new outlooks on the Dickensian canon, either as counter narratives or as filiations (Thieme, 2001). The case of Lynn Shepherd’s 2012 novel, Tom‐All‐Alone’s, follows from Dickens as it deploys one aspect of Bleak House: the detective genre. This paper studies the hermeneutic strategies developed by Shepherd to impose on her reader a new understanding of Dickens. She magnifies the subgenre of the detective subplot in Dickens, turning her reader into a detective. An equivalence is set between the figure of the detective and that of the reader, the first being detective as reader and the second reader as detective (Naugrette, 2015): Charles Maddox, a young detective, reads the signs that will lead him to the solution of his case, while the reader is looking for intertextual traces (Ginzburg, 1980). As such, the experience of reading becomes a process remindful of Compagnon’s (1979) work on quotation. I show that this work produces a new text, Tom‐All‐Alone’s, which itself produces a new reading of Bleak House in which the theme of containment (represented by Esther) is interpreted as the restriction of female characters to the madhouse. Compagnon, Antoine. La seconde main: Ou le travail de la citation. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Print. Naugrette, Jean‐Pierre. Détections sur Sherlock Holmes. Paris : Le Visage Vert, 2015. Print. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. (1853) Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Signes, Traces, Pistes ‐ Racine D’un Paradigme de L’indice”, Le Débat 1980/6 (n°6) pp. 3–44. Print. 191 ‐‐‐. “Clues: Roots as an Evidential Paradigm” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method. (1986) Tr. By John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Print Shepherd, Lynn. Tom‐All‐Alone’s. London: Corsair, 2012. Print. Thieme, John. Postcolonial Con‐texts: Writing back to the canon. London: Continuum, 2001. Print. Daria Steiner (Justus Liebig University Giessen) Hero or Fraud: An Intertextual Challenge of Dickens from a Neo‐Victorian Perspective ‐‐ A Case Study of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea References and allusions to Charles Dickens as a social figure and a distinguished Victorian writer keep occupying not only a range of contemporary television adaptations and video games, but also remain a leading intertextual phenomena analyzed in the framework of neo‐Victorian studies. This paper is based on the assumption that the overarching tendency to quote and question the Victorian classic roots in a postmodern narrative strategy employed by many contemporary authors of historical fiction which lies in a paradoxical unity of nostalgic and ironic self‐reflexive reconsideration of cultural history labelled as historiographic metafiction (cf. Hutcheon 105‐110). Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002) is a bestselling contemporary historical novel which revolves around the Great Hunger of Ireland of 1847 and the issues of silence around the famine in Victorian fiction. Dickens not only takes appearances in this novel, but is also an alter‐ego of the main narrator, Dixon. Based on a structural intertextual analysis of references to Dickens and his literary heritage, this paper aims to look into the controversial representations of narrator’s functions in contemporary historical fiction as illustrated by a case‐study of Star of the Sea. It will be thus argued that allusions to Dickens stem from an ambivalent objective to, on the one hand, imitate the author’s style and narrative techniques, and, on the other hand, ironically question and challenge these phenomena in contemporary context. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. NY: Routledge, 1988. O’Connor, Joseph. Star of the Sea: Farewell to Old Ireland. London: Vintage, 2003. Melissa McCoul (University of Notre Dame) Playing at Being Dead: Charles Dickens, Child's Play, and Temporality In this paper, I argue that death, like play, is imagined by Victorian authors as ultimately a social experience, inscribed on and through children's bodies. Play and death are not counter‐intuitive, but closely and temporally related. Using Charles Dickens as a case study, I examine the surprisingly rich connections between child's play, embodiment, and death in the Victorian novel. Playing with lifelessness allows Dickens, by means of child characters, to soften the boundaries between some otherwise obdurate dichotomies: adult/child, play/earnest, living/dead. For Jenny Wren, overburdened with the care of her “bad child,” “come up and be dead” is a sort of refrain and and unanswerable riddle, an invitation (often accepted) to step across the magic circle and play at the unimaginable. Little Nell plays at forging incongruous relationships between her own childish innocence and the ghoulish remnants of history which surround her in the Old Curiousity Shop, succeeding so well that her death finally is more sweet than sorrowful, a literalization of Jenny Wren's playing at being dead. Ada Lovelace, in Bleak House, is, of course, very much 192 alive, but while accompanying Mrs. Pardiggle on a charitable mission, she sorrowfully plays with the young mother's dead baby as if it were a doll. Ada's play is respectful, sorrowful, and serious, but it is play, nonetheless. In these three child characters, we see examples of children both playing at being dead, and playing with the dead. In both cases, child characters are granted a playful and temporally flexible relationship to the worlds of the living and the dead which is foreclosed to their adult counterparts. The slow‐witted adult may not understand the game, but for the cottage girl, not only is it perfectly possible to play at being dead, it is perfectly satisfying to play with the dead. Jeremy Tambling (University of Manchester) Dickens and Hypocrisy Do we know what 'hypocrisy' means ‐ as a form of acting, or putting on a mask, as a relation to language and to the self? How does it affect men and women differently? And who is liable to it? And why should it have been such a topic of fascination to Dickens, producing so many examples? And then, how does Dickens' interest in the phenomenon of hypocrisy feed into a history of the subject? ‐ assuming, as I do, that hypocrisy is not simply an historical form of behaviour. This paper attempts to put Dickens' writings into a history of representations and constructions of hypocrisy. It takes Nicholas Nickleby ‐‐ Dickens' most theatrical or melodramatic novel and therefore most interested in masking ‐ ‐ as a prime text for this, and puts hypocrisy into literary and cultural contexts which relate to Dickens' precursors in writing. Wednesday 24 August 16:30‐18:30: Reading Dickens Acutely Dominic Rainsford (Aarhus University) Our Disproportionate Friend There is a revived vigour and urgency, at present, in the question of levels of readerly and scholarly attention: from the stratospheric perspectives of ‘distant reading’ and its analogues within the digital humanities, to the reborn close reading that figures centrally in the massive reforms‐in‐progress in the United States school system (see PMLA, May 2015). Meanwhile, devoted and meticulous work on Dickens’s texts (editions, companions, etc.) continues apace, while students’ capacity to absorb large novels allegedly shrinks. In this talk I shall relate these various features of the current scene to what would seem to be permanent questions of scale and focus within, or for, Dickens scholarship, including the following: the question of what it means to spend far more time reading this particular writer (as many of us do) than all of his contemporaries put together; the paradox of being regarded as an expert on someone only a microscopic fraction of whose writings you can quote from memory; and numbering, measurement, proportion and scale as themes and issues that demonstrably exercised Dickens himself. I shall attempt to pursue this discussion in, around, and at various distances from Our Mutual Friend. Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) Dickens, Things, and the Burden of Interpretation This paper will argue that one method of reading Dickens differently is to acknowledge how the author was, himself, a penetrative reader of his ‘thing’‐filled world; a reader, moreover, who was well aware of the powers and limitations of his interpretative 193 strategies. Where I differ from accounts like Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas of Things (2006), is in my insistence that critical, recuperative strategies are not felt solely by those who have felt the benefits of historicist criticism, but that the hermeneutic, epistemic and philosophical questions attached to the ‘fugitive meanings’ of ‘things’ were asked with equal complexity by the Dickens novel itself. Freedgood argues that ‘the force of history’ will give objects ‘a life of their own […]. The history of pewter in the nineteenth century – its place in early metal recycling, for example – might render the pewter pot in Sketches resonant’ (pp. 16‐17). The problem with this interpretation, for me, is that it misses how ‘things’, in Dickens’s work, were almost always resonant. Drawing on hermeneutic strategies that had been developed through theology and science, Dickens explored his own position as someone observing, then representing, a ‘thing’ with a range of possible interpretations. Questioning, like Freedgood, what ‘things’ reveal about intepretation, I insist that the anxious self‐scrutiny properly associated with reading was as present in the nineteenth‐century novel as it is in twenty‐first century literary criticism. Jonathan Grossman (UCLA) Metric Dickens What could possibly connect the standardization of measurement with that eccentric author, Charles Dickens? In this paper, I argue that standardization in metrology, especially the establishment of the Imperial Yard in 1824 and of the meter during the French Revolution, represented “the creation of universality through the circulation of particulars” (to borrow a description from historian of science Joseph O’Connell). I then look closely at Charles Dickens’s novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In A Tale of Two Cities state executions get standardized during the French Revolution by the guillotine. Surprisingly, in the novel the guillotine turns out not to be all that bad. Or, at least it points to the future, to standardization having clearly become a means of constructing community by 1859 through this radically different means of “creat[ing] universality through the circulation of particulars.” Victor Sage (University of East Anglia) Edges of Discourse: Prolegomena for an edition of Our Mutual Friend Two front‐rank contemporary English novelists have struck me as redolent of Dickens; one is Salman Rushdie ‐ I’m re‐reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories as I write this abstract, and I am struck all over again by Rushdie’s defence of Story in The Satanic Verses and what it owes to Dickens; and the other, is Nicola Barker, who knows very well that she owes the anarchic carnival of her texts to Dickens’s famous love of the ‘streaky bacon’: ie the idea that everything in the act of narration needs to be explicitly and noisily represented in the surface formation and, in her case, even the typography, of the text. Recent work (Peters, Dickens and Race, 2015) has yet again multiplied the contexts and thus stretched the range of Dickens’s discourses and given him a new relevance: his commitment to science in the 1840s, stemming from his review of Hunt’s ‘The Poetry of Science’, leads eventually to his friendship with Owen, and his defence of Richard Owen in Household Words and All The Year Round. This commitment to Science is also the basis of his late satire of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Owen himself has now been rehabilitated among scientists (Padian, 1997) to an extent, and we can see much more clearly how, from the late 1850s onwards, Dickens had a purchase on the notion of progress and 194 development from the point of view of Victorian ethnology and anthropology and Natural Science and that he deliberately invokes in Our Mutual Friend the Gothic idea of degeneration and the nightmare of a society that is actually regressing into the mud and slime while it sees itself as performing at the tip of the spearhead of enlightened civilization. Compare Herbert Spencer’s optimistic hymn to the division of labour in capitalism with Dickens’s absurdist portrayal of the primitive nature of specialist jargons in Bleak House, an irony which has an almost Socratic ring about it. This critique of ‘progress’ is made on several fronts at once beyond his attacks on Utilitarianism: through the defence of the ‘Fancy’ of the Child, and the associated attraction towards exoticism and travel in the Arabian Nights theme; and this leads readers on to the question of savagery and barbarism within civilisation, a theme which is very topical at the present time. (Todorov, 2013). This paper will consider the relation (struggle or dance ?) between these different discourses and their interaction – through Dickens’s texts – with his defence of the Imagination. Georges Letissier (Université de Nantes) The Possibility of a Somatic Experience of Charles Dickens’s Fiction Writing To what extent does the body come into the experience of reading Dickens? Can embodied reading contribute to curing a suffering patient? Conversely, may physical, bodily pain be induced from the experience of going through an extract, short‐circuiting the more rational functions to stimulate sensory ones? Such questions are of course relevant to neuroscientists. Increasingly though, literary specialists too are turning their attention to this field of investigation which somehow renews reception theory: Hans Robert Jauss (1978, 1988), Wolfgang Iser (1976), or Michel Charles (1977). Victorian criticism has shown an interest in the activity of reading by retrieving and re‐ evaluating largely forgotten quasi‐scientific studies that were published at the time (Dames, 2007). This paper purports to adopt another perspective by drawing from the type of criticism that has been used in the case of contemporary American writers: Dennis Cooper, Mark Z. Danielewski; James Frey; Chuck Palahnuik (Patoine, 2015) to see how cogent it may be to Dickens. There is hardly any risk of anachronism because this biocultural approach can only be tested from the receiving end of the act readerly communication, i.e. to what extent today’s reception of Dickens is also mediated by neurophysiological response? The first step, the only one that may be reasonably attempted at this early stage, would be to appraise Dickens’s own awareness of this phenomenon by sampling passages from his fiction writing. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel, Reading, Neural Science & the Form of Victorian Fiction, O.U.P., 2007. Pierre‐Louis Patoine, Corps/texte. Pour une théorie de la lecture empathique, Lyon: ENS éditions, 2015. 195 S36: Desire and the Expressive Eye in Thomas Hardy" Dr Trish Ferguson (Liverpool Hope University) "Machinations versus mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s 'On the Western Circuit" Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy’s reading included articles and reviews published in Mind: a Quarterly Review of Philosophy, a publication that provided a forum for debate on contemporary issues in philosophy and psychology. In the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, these disciplines explored questions related to the role played by evolution in our existence and the nature of human emotions. This paper will contend that in ‘On the Western Circuit’ Hardy examines desire in the context of debates over free will and determinism, positing that desire places humankind in a conundrum that involves both loss of an individual’s volition and also an increased capacity for exerting free will to secure the object of desire. This paper will also contend that in ‘On the Western Circuit’, Hardy explores how regulatory systems, such as the law, can contain and manage desire, ultimately considering the act of writing itself as a tool through which desire can be analysed and controlled. Hakan Yilmaz (Hacettepe University, Ankara/Turkey) "The Gaze and Desire: Appropriation of Freedom in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles" The gaze/look (le regard) is regarded as the most dominant manifestation of the Other’s subjectivity by Sartre. It constitutes the fundamental relation between the self and the Other and enables one to not only experience the Other in his/her subjectivity but also undergo an affective transformation intermediated by the Other. Moreover, the gaze manifests a certain desire to manipulate and appropriate the person to whom it is directed. However, as Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, “it would be wholly inaccurate to say that desire is a desire for ‘physical possession’ of the desired object” (385). In this respect, the gaze harbors a deeper (not physical) desire to get hold of one’s freedom as freedom in such a subtle way to make one willingly give in to the gazer. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the eponymous heroine is exposed to different gazes (mostly male, especially those of Alec and Angel) all of which denote a common fundamental desire to possess Tess – not physically of course because the desire for physical possession (or sexual desire) is a degraded secondary manifestation of a more fundamental desire for others’ freedom. Therefore, this paper will argue that, in Tess, the gaze functions as a powerful medium to expose the fundamental desire of human beings to appropriate others’ freedom. Rosemarie Morgan (Yale University, USA) "Pathways of the Past: Visual Imprinting and Hardy's 'Wonder of Women'" This study takes a brief look at the action of semantic memory as transferred via Hardy’s consciousness/imagination to his portrayals of female characters. Memory transference and imaginative reconstruction, shaped by the critical period of Hardy’s self‐confessed late psychosexual development (circa 26 years old) – awakened, arguably, by his deep sexual attachment to his cousin (Tryphena, aged 16) ‐‐‐ generated a lifelong linkage between sublimating the desire for his “lost prize” in literary form and displacing it (through 196 psychic energy) via the imaginative construct of her incarnation. Taking the cue from Nicholas Hillyard’s comprehensive research into the Tryphena /Hardy relationship (About Tryphena, 2014), this study moves on to examine the complex interaction of memory and imagination and Hardy’s constant reckoning with desire. Émilie Loriaux (Université d'Artois, France) "Hardy’s lesson : mind your desire(s) since creation is ‘Mâyā’ (illusion)" This paper sets out to understand both Hardy’s writing process and his vision of how man’s desires might engender counterfeit impressions. In other words, how man might be misled by his desires. To attempt such a reading, we will mainly focus on the poem ‘The Collector Cleans his Picture’ (CP 617‐618). In this poem, the narrator, a rural parson, collects works of art. One of them he has got from ‘a trader in ancient house‐gear’ (l. 16) with ‘no scent of beauty or soul for brushcraft’ (l. 17). Yet the main character in the poem is not the parson(‐antiquarian) but the painting itself. The latter is the very point of attention which mesmerizes the collector. Gradually, the ‘cleaning’ of the picture, finally ‘rubbed’ (l. 33), will reveal illusive desire(s) in the eyes of the parson. Indeed, there are inner contradictions within the poem between the biblical quote, under the poem’s title, referring to Ezechiel’s ‘desirable oculorum’ (XXIV : 16) and, in the poem’s picture, the goddess Venus (l. 29), who turns out to be a lecherous character. The biblical quote is almost blasphemous as the poem is outside the Judaeo‐Christian world. Venus, alias Astarte and Cotytto (l. 30), is in reality a hag (l. 34). The man’s look on his picture is a reflexion of his own being, made of his own desires, which are mere illusions, a ‘lure’ (l. 32). Hardy teaches his reader that this is not so much the ‘eye’ which is ‘expressive’ but what the collector is closely gazing at, which provides him – or men –, various impressions, if not inconsistencies. Consequently, Hardy’s lesson can be analysed in the context of Vedānta : the creation is ‘Mâyā’ or illusion. Hardy’s eye on his own poem is also interesting to study in terms of re‐writing. The words are meticulously culled and changed by the poet, allowing us to enter Hardy’s own process of writing. For instance, ‘leering’ is not the same as originally ‘gazing’ (cf. l. 33). We will therefore focus on the change of words from the manuscripts to the various editions in order to disclose Hardy’s re‐writing and the impact it may have on the poem. Catherine Lanone (Université Paris III Sorbonne‐Nouvelle) "Feeling yet unseeing: revisiting Eurydice's dancing shades in Thomas Hardy's poetry." This paper deals with one of Thomas Hardy's moments of paradoxical desire, hovering between seeing and unseeing, apparition and dissolution, memory and death. In several of Hardy's poems desire is most intense and acute as the speaker can almost feel a presence that vanishes at the same time, a flickering yet piercing sensation that the past is almost there yet were he to turn around it would vanish. Revisiting the myth of Eurydice, such poems posit desire on the brink, the very threshold between being and non being, as the eye is most intense when searching for what always lies just behind, just out of reach, a fitting metaphor for the elusive and metamorphic nature of desire itself. Anna West (University of St Andrews) "Deflection and Desire: Gazing at Animals in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction" 197 In his essay 'Why Look at Animals?', art critic John Berger talks about the gaze between humans and animals, arguing that while the gaze of animals has the power to surprise humans—who see themselves being seen through the animals' gaze—this look has been 'extinguished' with the marginalization of animals from society. In Hardy's novels, humans who encounter animals face‐to‐face and eye‐to‐eye often find themselves uncomfortable being seen through the gaze of the animal: Mrs Yeobright shudders under the gaze of the adder in The Return of the Native (1878); Arabella reacts by cutting the pig's windpipe when his gaze fixes upon her during the pig‐killing scene in Jude the Obscure (1895). What seems significant here is the refusal of the gaze: the desire not to see oneself being seen through the eyes of another, a desire that extends to interactions between humans in the novels. (Clym, for example, avoids Eustacia's eyes as he helps her with her bonnet strings during their last face‐to‐face encounter in The Return of the Native.) Specifically, this paper looks at the relationship between desire and the refusal of the gaze: why characters look and why they look away, what happens when the gaze flickers, is deflected, or becomes indifference. Jane E. Thomas (The University of Hull, UK) "Thomas Hardy: Writing Desire" ‘In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles’ In ‘The Freudian Unconscious’ Lacan focusses on the ‘stumbling’, the ‘impediment’ the ‘failure’ in language in which he locates the ‘discovery’ or ‘surprise’ wherein the poet seeks to push beyond the apparent limits of language in order to grasp at and perfect a fleeting moment of plenitude. Such stumblings, in Hardy’s poetry, are often indicated by the broken line, the ellipsis, the ejaculation and the symbol. For Lacan, desire inheres in the gap between signifier and signified – it is what cannot be represented in language and yet strives for material form in the only medium available to it (in written texts at least). The urge to move beyond the constraints of language into the pre or ‘post’ linguistic realm carries with it the threat of incoherence, dissolution, silence. This paper seeks to explore the resonance and implications of stumblings, spaces, fissure in some of Hardy’s great poems of loss and desire: the ‘Poems of 1912‐13’. Annie Ramel (Université Lumière‐Lyon 2, France) "The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy's Fiction" The eye in Thomas Hardy's fiction is often felt as a menace, like the "oval pond" in Far from the Madding Crowd, glittering "like a dead man's eye" (p. 33). The unblinking eye can be an "evil eye", full of voracity, endowed with a Medusean power, the power to petrify or to kill. Indeed eyes do kill in Hardy's stories: Mrs Yeobright is killed by the "bad sight" of her daughter‐in‐law looking at her from a window and not opening the door—the "small black eye" of the live adder later regarding her being a duplicate of Eustacia's "ill‐wishing" dark eyes. At what point does the gaze, which normally makes manifest the "positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire" (J. Thomas), turn Medusean? Jacques Lacan's concept of the unspecularizable "object‐gaze" will help us to understand this. A further question is: how does the writer manage to deflect the mortifying gaze of Medusa, and to what extent can a literary work, like a painting, work as a "dompte‐regard" (Lacan, Le Séminaire XI, p. 100)? Phillip Mallett (University of St Andrews, U.K.) 198 "‘A woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes’: Hardy, Darwin, and the blush." Whether or not Hardy knew Darwin’s detailed study of blushing in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), A Pair of Blue Eyes, published a year later, offers a virtual typology of the male and female blush. His three principal characters, Elfride, Stephen and Knight blush, flush or turn pale with pique, triumph, jealousy, perplexity, mortification, vexation, embarrassment, anger, gladness, and shame; their faces become rapid red, vivid scarlet, crimson, vermillion, an angry colour, lively red, lily‐white, pale, livid, cold, heated, and bright. Ten years later, with some justice, Havelock Ellis remarked that Hardy disliked dealing ‘directly with mental phenomena’, and was ‘only willing to recognize the psychical element in its physical correlative’. But that way of expressing it does not resolve the question of how, in terms of my title, a physical response (‘flush’) relates to the psychical one (‘triumph’): whether one causes the other, is a function of the other, or simply ‘is’ the other. This paper seeks to explore what Hardy might have meant by a ‘flush of triumph’. 199 S37. The Finer Threads Group 1 Contemporary Practices Mary Burke, Associate Professor of English, the University of Connecticut, USA ‘Unstitching history: The Irish textiles and lace industries and the selling of mid‐century Irish fashion exports’ Amy D.Wells, Senior Lecturer, Université de Caen‐Normandie, France ‘From Fiction to Video Games: Contemporary Needle Arts Across Genres’ Mário Semião, PhD student in English, University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, Portugal ‘ “We call this the stem stitch”: Embroidered Narrative in Philip Terry’s Tapestry’ Carine Kool, PhD student in English, University of Rennes 2, France ‘Embroidery in Contemporary Visual Arts: “A naturally revolutionary art” or “An art language for the millennium”?’ Group 2 Victorian Tradition Róisín Quinn‐Lautrefin, PhD student in English, University of Paris‐Diderot, France ‘ “[T]hat pincushion made of crimson satin ” : embroidery, discourse and memory in Victorian literature and culture’ Rachel Dickinson, Principal Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK ‘John Ruskin and “the acicular art of nations” ‘ Laurence Roussillon‐Constanty, Professor in English Studies, Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France ‘ “Against the inevitable wear and tear of time”: Weaving and/as designing according to William and May Morris’ Mary Burke, ‘Unstitching history: The Irish textiles and lace industries and the selling of mid‐century Irish fashion exports’ The coming to prominence of the Carrickmacross lace used in successive British royal wedding gowns was part of a broader Famine‐era attempt to expand the lace and related industries and promote industrial schools that taught poor girls those skills. When famine‐ relief infrastructural improvement projects are considered, one might say that modern Ireland was kick‐started by that catastrophe. Of course, this version of history considers male labour only, ignoring the women working at home who laid the foundations for later iterations of the lace, textile and fashion industries in which women played leading roles, and, by extension, aspects of the success of post‐1950 tourism. Newly‐modish traditional lace and textiles were deployed in mid‐century Irish couture, and I will track how the sophisticated marketing ‐ often through Irish state agencies ‐ of 1950s quality ready‐to‐ wear and couture exports to the US (and to American visitors to Ireland), deployed a defanged version of the history of Irish textiles and lace that auto‐exotically exploited the 200 colonial image of Ireland as premodern. A depoliticized juxtaposition of the elite and the peasant suffuses fashion shots of 1950s Irish couture, a denial of the complexity of the lace industry’s colonial‐era pairing of peasant craftswoman and aristocratic patroness. Rachel Dickinson, ‘John Ruskin and “the acicular art of nations” ‘ In a public letter of 1884 , art and social critic John Ruskin reflects on educational reforms needed, not just in Britain but for ‘the inhabitants of every spot of earth’ (Fors Clavigera Letter 95; Works 29.496). He sets out a universal curriculum of sorts, covering such disparate subjects as music, elocution, reading, arithmetic, geography, geometry, drawing, zoology and botany. Throughout, he moves from the individual, to the national, to the global. He draws the curriculum to a close with ‘lastly of needlework […] the acicular art of nations’ (509). Then, he begins to outline plans for a museum; the last lesson becomes ‘our first Museum room’ as he interweaves the broad curriculum already outlined with a discussion of types of needlework (510). Using this letter as a starting point, this paper outlines some of Ruskin’s theories on education and the improvement of society – all as seen through the eye of needlework. Carine Kool, ‘Embroidery in Contemporary Visual Arts: ‘ “A naturally revolutionary art” or “An art language for the millennium”?’ Embroidery can be defined as an addition, through a needle and thread technology, to a ground in order to create an embellishment. But it is as important to differentiate it from other needle and thread‐using techniques with which it is often confused, such as lace‐ making, knitting, crocheting, and tapestry. The differentiation is even more necessary that these techniques have emerged simultaneously with embroidery in the field of contemporary art at the beginning of the 21st century. However, art historian and Chief Curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, David Revere McFadden, clearly made the distinction by exhibiting separately artworks in knitting, crochet and lace (Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting) from embroidered artworks (Pricked: Extreme embroidery) in 2007‐2008. Qualifying them as “the emergence of an artistic language for the Millennium,” he acknowledges that they also document “a shift in the way art functions in our lives.” Indeed, artists, men and women alike, use embroidery in a wide variety of approaches to create artworks to the antipode of our grandmothers’ doilies, attesting in so doing the statement of late art historian Rozsika Parker on embroidery as “A naturally revolutionary art.” Róisín Quinn‐Lautrefin, ‘ “[T]hat pincushion made of crimson satin ”: embroidery, discourse and memory in Victorian literature and culture’ In this paper, I explore how Victorian embroidered artifacts have acted as depositories of memories in literature and culture. If, historically, women had always plied the needle, the nineteenth century saw the spectacular expansion of decorative craft collectively known as fancywork, of which embroidery was a major component. The invention of Berlin wool‐ work, alongside the circulation of paper patterns and the ready availability of modern haberdashery goods made what had once been a skilled activity with elite associations a popular and ubiquitous pastime. A reflection on time seems to transpire through these text‐iles. The practice of embroidery, in the mid‐nineteenth century, staged a tension between historicity and 201 modernity, allowing middle‐class women to engage in modern modes of production while imagining themselves as aristocratic ladies of the past. Circumventing the dominant print culture, it provided women with an alternative locus for expression with which to “write” their own narratives. In this sense, Victorian embroidered artifacts are discursive tools in their own right, providing material memories of women’s history. Because they are intimately linked to the bodies and psyches of the women making them, these objets act, explicitely or implicitely, as souvenirs. By stitching and marking, Victorian women were effectively safeguarding memories of their own selves in history. Laurence Roussillon‐Constanty ‘ “Against the inevitable wear and tear of time”: Weaving and/as designing according to William and May Morris’ In his 1877 conference delivered before the Trades Guild of Learning entitled “The Lesser Arts” William Morris, building on Ruskin’s principles and ideas, encouraged craftsmen to have quiet confidence in truth and beauty and value their craft as much as any form of art. In his own practice and through the development of The Firm Morris repeatedly showed how his aesthetic and social ideals could merge and produce useful and beautiful artefacts and pieces of furniture. Among them, textiles and tapestries particularly illustrated his quest for genuine craftsmanship and authenticity and his wish to enlarge the sphere of needlework which had been hitherto reserved to women. Following on his example his daughter May (Mary) Morris greatly contributed to the development of embroidery within Morris & co not only through her own practice but also in her teaching and writing. This paper will explore William and May Morris’s understanding of embroidery not only as a domestic skill but as a way to reclaim, revisit and reinvent the past, envisaging the work of the needle as a craft as much as a critical response or gesture. Mário Semião, ‘ “We call this the stem stitch”: Embroidered Narrative in Philip Terry’s Tapestry’ Shortlisted for the first edition of the Goldsmith Prize, which aims to reward innovative works of fiction, Tapestry (2013) takes the Bayeux Tapestry as its starting point. While the framing narrative of the text appropriates the historical account of the Norman conquest and the creation of the tapestry by English nuns under the supervision of Bishop Odo, the novel also explores the myriad of images found in the margins of the tapestry and transposes them into stories told by the nuns to each other in the process of stitching. The Bayeux Tapestry informs the very structure of the novel, not only as it mirrors the double depiction of both the historical events and the hidden stories in the marginalia, but also in the way a mixture of invented Middle English, Oulipian techniques and magic realism is able to convey the sense of colour and texture which characterise the famous tapestry. Drawing on this, this paper will thus seek to provide a reading of Terry’s novel, focusing on how the text produces its own version of an embroidered narrative and on how that narrative ultimately paves the way for a reflection on our notions of art and history. Amy D.Wells, ‘From Fiction to Video Games: Contemporary Needle Arts Across Genres’ Cross stitch is enjoying a revival, particularly amongst the hipster generation. Works like Subversive Cross Stitch: 50 F*cking Clever Designs for Your Sassy Side (2015) have moved 202 the historical needle working practice from grandmothers’ dusty shelves to chic, hip wall art. While it is not as easy to find cross stitching characters as it is knitting (“Knit Lit”) or quilting ones (Quilting Mysteries), the retro‐attitude present in contemporary hipster fiction reinvests the importance of crafting and DIY. Furthermore, the visual appeal of ideas organized into grids and lines of “x”s attracts users from a variety of media: cross stitch even appears as the graphic backdrop for the 2013 video game, “Cross Stitch Casper.” In this paper, I will rapidly evoke the tradition of the stitching protagonist and the transfer of this archetype onto the main‐stream craft and hobby fiction genre. From there, I would like to make the distinction between the presence of needle arts in fiction genre and the DIY genre. A final aspect of the paper will examine the popularity of twenty‐first century workbooks, which weave sassy commentary with patterns, going beyond the traditional grid manual. 203 S38. Work and its Discontents in Victorian Literature and Culture Convenors: Federico Bellini and Jan Wilm Tiziana Faitini (Leibniz Institute of European History of Mainz, Germany) ‘The Hierarchy of Professional Occupations in Minor 19th Century Texts on Professionalism’ Attitudes to work in Victorian culture seem to have been polarized: it was both exalted and despised, through a dialectic that manifests in the hierarchisation of the professions, in the context of the economic and social processes of professionalisation that affected 19th century England. During this period, as the practice of professionalism was establishing itself, the various professions jostled for recognition and status, thus leading to a dynamic in which the hierarchy of professional occupations was being continuously rewritten; in particular, some professions came to be associated with liberality and leisure, highlighting the dialectic between work and idleness. This dynamic appears in a number of contemporary literary works, in which the choice of a profession and comparisons between different occupations are often depicted. It also appears in the minor, but meaningful, textual production on professionalism in the 19th century. These works range from explicit discussion of professional ethics (patterned on Thomas Percival’s Medical Ethics [1803]), to discourses on professions by prominent professionals for important occasions, to didactic handbooks addressed to parents and dedicated to the “choice of the profession”. This paper will discuss this textual production, focusing on its hierarchization of occupations, the criteria on which this process is based and the struggle for the status of profession which it reveals. María José Coperías‐Aguilar (Universitat de València, Spain) ‘Work and leisure: implementing ‘experiments’ in nineteenth‐century factories’ The nineteenth century was marked, both in Britain and the United States, by the fights of the working classes to get the conditions at their work places improved. One of the most important struggles was that connected with the reduction of their working hours, and the idea that fewer hours of work could increase efficiency in their employees started to spread among some manufacturers. At the same time, some factory owners (Samuel Greg and Thomas Aston in Britain or the Pacific Mills in the United States) also began to implement some measures to increase the intellectual and physical welfare of their workers. These kinds of actions are reflected in novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, through the ‘experiments’ that Mr Thornton carries out, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner, whose protagonist, Perley Kelso, creates new facilities and introduces some leisure activities for her workers. In this paper we would like to discuss some of these initiatives both in real life and in literature and analyse the extent to which they were successful or not. Although usually well meant, they were not always accepted by those to whom they were addressed or they did not fulfil the expectations of those who put them into practice. Ralf Haekel (Georg August University Göttingen, Germany) ‘Dracula’s Legacy Revisited’ 204 In his 1982 essay ‘Dracula's Legacy’, Friedrich Kittler interprets Bram Stoker's novel as a clash between an aristocratic past represented by Count Dracula and a bureaucratic present and future embodied by the group around Mina and Jonathan Harker. Kittler concludes that Dracula is a novel about a media struggle that those in power of the typewriter and the phonograph cannot but eventually win. So, bourgeois bureaucratic forces represent a re‐structuring of work at the turn of the 20th century, most powerfully represented in the negotiation of the new woman able to use the new storage media of bureaucratic office life in order to battle the representative of ancient political power. Whereas Kittler’s theory looks forward to the 20th century, this paper uses the trope of Dracula's medial struggle representing a fundamental reconfiguration of the public work sphere to look back at its Romantic and Victorian origins: in the wake of the industrial revolution and the differentiation of society and labour, the undead in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, and in penny dreadfuls such as Rymer and Prest’s Varney the Vampyre represent an obsolete form of exploitation and a threat to upcoming bourgeois forms of labour, which may be seen as indicators of the gradual change of the work sphere and its medial representations in the 19th century. Jan Wilm (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) ‘The Work is in the Dying, is in the Living: The Ghost as Figure of Leisure in Victorian Ghost Stories’ “A spectre is haunting Europe,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in late 1840s London, “the spectre of communism.” Around the same time, while labourers were being exploited in inhumane working environments in factories to facilitate the industrial revolution’s upsurge, Victorian Britain and Ireland were haunted by a great number of other spectres, spectres of the dead. This paper examines the dynamics of work and leisure against those of the work of dying and the work of mourning. By drawing on short stories by Oscar Wilde, Sheridan LeFanu, Charles Dickens, and Saki, among others, it will be argued that ghosts are doomed to work at life long after their life has ended, and how it is the Victorian society and its history of ideas and culture which put a politically pointed spin on the image of a ghost haunting those yet corporeally intact. Against this argument will be weighed the idea that the dead are dancing (or shuffling) on the volcano’s lip of death as a form of leisure, at liberty to roam in the world of idleness and freedom, yet always precariously close to tumbling back into the pit of toil and drudgery that Victorian labourers have called life. Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. d'Annunzio University of Chieti‐Pescara, Italy) ‘“The mill will not stop”: Pains and Pleasures of Print Culture Professionalism in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ Novelist, editor, and journalist Mary Elizabeth Braddon made a direct experience of the pains and pleasures of Victorian print culture professionalism. Publicly blamed for her scandalous private life, she raised controversies with unorthodox professional choices, while adhering to a stoic Victorian work ethic that led to her enormous productivity, her full‐time employment in print, and her overt critiques of the acolytes of “idleness and leisure!” A thriving member of the rising professional class, Braddon aligned herself with the ideal of middle‐class industry, which she frequently praised in quasi‐Smilesian tones. Still, there are, in her narratives, traces of a counter discourse worth examining. Through the 205 voices of fictional alter egos employed in the periodical press (writers, editors, journalists), Braddon manifested her worries about some dark sides of the Victorian celebration of labour, especially those emerging in the world of periodical presses. So, she participated in a socio‐cultural and aesthetic debate that involved many of her contemporaries, including Dickens and Collins, who similarly fictionalized their professional experiences and doubts. This paper explores ideological implications raised by the counter discourse woven by Braddon, which is particularly evident in her novel Dead‐Sea Fruit (1867‐8). Her characterization and use of metaphor not only unveil some discontents of labour by exposing the enslaving mechanisms of the Victorian print industry. They also raise questions on the best approach to creative writing – an occupation which, though pursued with zeal, also depends on leisure. Heidi Liedke (University of Freiburg, Germany) ‘“Even Idleness is Eager Now”–Work, Leisure and Idleness in George Eliot’s’ Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda and her Travel Diaries’ At first glance, in Victorian times, the terms ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ were more unambiguously positive terms, while ‘idleness’ was a negative one. Yet sometimes, even within this one historical period, the terms were used interchangeably which necessitates a fine‐tuning. This paper discusses George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda and her personal travel diaries to show how they provide insightful sources for a nuanced assessment of the concepts leisure, idleness, and work, as well as their interrelations. Several passages in Adam Bede, for example, show the development the terms and their meanings underwent, while many aspects of the work particularly dwell on the notion of speed. In fact, the included argument that the steam‐engine did not create leisure for mankind but rather “a vacuum for eager thought to rush in” anticipates the sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of ‘social acceleration’ and makes the ‘temporal turn’ of the 1990s and early 2000s appear less novel. Eliot articulated the paradox of free time bringing about less free time already in the mid‐ nineteenth century. Finally, Eliot herself presented a counter‐idea of how a Victorian woman could enjoy idleness and use it for creative purposes when she traveled Europe with George Henry Lewes. While they sat out to collect material for their books and were indeed busy, efficient travelers, they actively sought moments of inspiring idleness. Eliot’s assessment of idleness, leisure, and work thus presents a multi‐ dimensional depiction of these concepts in the context of the Victorian age. Tiana Fischer (Georg August University Göttingen, Germany) ‘Against the Emergence of the Economized, Working Modern Self: A Foucauldian Analysis of the George Eliot’s Depiction of the ‘Technique of the Self’ in Middlemarch’ Over the course of the nineteenth century, British society saw a radical re‐definition of Dasein. This was directly linked to the industrial revolution, the after‐effects of Enlightenment philosophy, and the secularization and economization of society, science, and the self, thus inducing paradigm shift concerning ‘work’ around 1800. Previously linked with prominently Protestant and Calvinist ethics, ‘work’ received a secular, capitalist frame of reference when it became functional and economized. In one fell swoop, ‘working’ also became a ‘technique of the self’, constituting ‘the subject’ in its subjectivity in this world rather than promising post‐mortem remuneration. This new ideal of a ‘working subject’ – a product of Enlightenment philosophy as well as social Darwinism, paradoxically only constituting itself when incessantly working 206 on its own improvement and that of society at large – was primarily negotiated in literature, which had the strongest focus on Bildung and character (re‐)formation. George Eliot’s Middlemarch, subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life’, yields a meticulous, critical, and philosophical investigation of the Victorian ‘techniques of the self’, which are subject of this paper. Using Foucauldian theorems, it will be argued that Eliot’s depiction of characters and their self‐realisation struggles, such as those of self‐denying Dorothea Brooke, provide a strong case in point of the early repudiation of this emergent ideal of the economized modern self, whose performative constitution became synonymous with ‘working on Dasein’ – evermore in pursuit of progress. Susan Jaret McKinstry (Carleton College Northfield, USA) ‘“My Work is the Embodiment of Dreams”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris Redefine Art and Labor’ The Pre‐Raphaelites believed in the intersection of all arts – verbal, visual, fine, applied, and practical; and their aesthetic theory was matched with social action designed to transform the relationship between art and work in the Victorian period Their work is recognized as a rebellion against the ugliness of Victorian industry, a rejection of the confining aesthetics of the Royal Academy, or a demonstration of artistic ekphrasis, but an examination of the aesthetic and commercial practices of William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre‐Raphaelites artists and writers shows their radical notions of the essential connection between art and work. The unity of work and art is exemplified by Morris’s “palace of art,” Red House, designed and built by Morris and friends in 1859. In his writings, Morris linked art and labour through architecture: architecture transforms the lines of the architect’s vision into the lines of the completed building. Rossetti’s sonnet cycle The House of Life, with its rarely‐published hand‐drawn design for the introductory sonnet, also connects the lines of drawing, writing, and architecture as he works to construct his poetic house. Despite their differences, Morris and Rossetti conceived of art as material and imaginative work combined into consumer product. In Rossetti and Morris’s aesthetic practice, dreams are embodied: work as art and art as work are united. Federico Bellini (Università Cattolica Milano, Italy) ‘Over‐work and Under‐work in Victorian Medicine and Literature’ Going through Victorian medicine manuals one may be surprised at how, especially during the last decades of the nineteenth century, work was considered both a source of health and a potential cause of illness. On the one hand, work was seen as necessary for a healthy lifestyle, and as such was often administered by doctors to their patients. On the other, the acceleration of life produced by industrialization and urbanization fostered the belief that an excess of work, too, could compromise health. In Diseases of Modern Life, for instance, Benjamin Ward Richardson addresses both “induced diseases from physical strain”, and “diseases from sloth and idleness” warning against the “intense precipitation of labour” typical of modern life, as well as against the “mostly female” phenomenon of idleness, which “know[s] nothing of true happiness, for life with inactivity is a physical burden”. This paper intends to make sense of this tension between opposite medical views of work and trace its reflection in several contemporary literary works, focussing in particular on The Nigger of the “Narcissus” by Joseph Conrad, News from Nowhere by William Morris, and The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. 207 S39: Impressions 1860‐1920 Convenors: Bénédicte Coste (University of Bourgogne‐Franche‐Comté, France) Elisa Bizzotto (University of Venice, Italy) Sophie Aymes (University of Bourgogne‐Franche‐Comté, France) Respondent: Francesca Orestano 17:00 Béatrice Laurent (Université des Antilles, France) Catching the Fugitive: Possessive Desire in Impressionist Art and Photography (1860‐1890) In 1856, a writer for the Athenaeum engaged in the debate whether photography should be considered as an art per se, or as “the handmaid” of painting. To this critic the answer was clearly the second option: “Machinery can copy science, ‐ can catch shadows, and keep them when caught, ‐ but it takes a human heart to conceive the Transfiguration, and a human brain to plan the Last Judgment”. This critic suggested a hierarchical segmentation of the human being, locating brain, heart and hand in separate strata, and, assuming that art was concerned with the “upper” two, he rejected the proposition that the “mechanical” pursuit of catching shadows could be considered artistic. This paper purposes to study how mid‐Victorian considerations about painting and photography, reflected in the Athenaeum critic’s assessment, evolved in late‐Victorian Britain. Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monet’s painting that gave its name to the artistic movement, was instrumental in making part of the public aware of certain phenomena of optics. This painting of the Thames, together with subsequent works by the French artist intended, precisely, “to pin down (his) impressions before the most fleeting of effects” (Monet, 1926). It was therefore the “mechanical” impression of the image on the mind via the retina that interested Monet and his fellow Impressionists. This phenomenon was also what fascinated photographers most, what they sought to imitate by means of material devices, and what nurtured many debates at the Royal Photographic Society (founded 1853). In fact, nineteenth‐century photographers and Impressionist painters shared a scientific urge, informed by contemporary culture, to understand the mechanism of image‐making. In response to this desire, they opposed the more traditional way of conceiving art as composition, and proposed instead to split “reality” into a myriad of juxtaposed particles. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, painting and photography had a very close, if unequal, relationship. George Davison (1854‐1930), a proponent of impressionistic photography, reconciled them when he explained in “Impressionism in photography” (1890) that art and photography share the same principles, based on the same physical laws. The purpose of both painter and photographer was, therefore, to capture the fugitive movement, the evanescent light, the residual image, and the fleeting impression. 17:15 Elisa Bizzotto (University of Venice, Italy) Aestheticist Impressions Abroad: Late‐Victorian Little Magazines and their Italian Imitations 208 In my contribution, I intend to focus on such well‐known British ‘little magazines’ of the fin de siècle as The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884‐92), The Yellow Book (1894‐7) and The Savoy (1896) and to draw closer critical attention to their reception in contemporary and early‐twentieth century Italian journals. Following the critical perspectives proposed through the years by Timothy Hilton, Ian Fletcher and Marysa Demoor, my analysis will briefly concentrate on the origins of these magazines in The Germ (1850), the short‐lived journal of the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood that established the model for following ephemeral Aestheticist publications by young artists articulating radical aesthetic and social stances. Like The Germ, these fin‐de‐siècle ‘impressions’ represented ideal sites for artistic experimentation, essentially based on a close dialogue between verbality and visuality which included an enthusiastic rediscovery of the art of printing. After contextualising The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book and The Savoy within British culture, my contribution will consider their seldom – if ever – investigated impact on some Italian periodicals of the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth century characterised by aesthetic experimentalism and radicalism and paying special attention to the printing craft. These were the Cronaca bizantina (1881‐6), which combined word and image in arts‐and‐crafts style, and Il Convito (1895‐6), whose “Proemio”, authored by Gabriele D’Annunzio, evoked the tones of Arthur Symons’s “Introduction” to The Savoy and shared the aesthetically dissident spirit of its programmatic pronouncements. British ‘little magazines’ inspired other Italian publications such as Il Marzocco (1896‐1932), which in its turn‐of‐the‐century season pursued Aestheticist‐Symbolist interart principles, Leonardo (1903‐7), where late‐Pre‐Raphaelite visual preciosity merged with an interest in philosophy and mysticism, and eventually Lacerba (1913‐5), which exalted genius across the arts and art’s autonomy in a final endorsement of Futurism. Through their commitment to cross‐artistic exchanges and aesthetic novelty and unconventionality, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book and The Savoy ultimately paved the way to European avant‐gardes. 17:30 Fausto Ciompi (University of Pisa, Italy) How Impressionistic is Conrad’s Impressionism? Since Brunctier’s 1879 article on Daudet, incidentally one of Joseph Conrad’s favourite authors, the expression ‘literary impressionism’ has been widely used by critics for describing and discussing such different phenomena as the subjective rendering of external reality (the roman phénoménologique, as R‐M Albérès defined it), the fragmentation and fluidification of matter, the erosion of contours and the flou effect, a complete immersion in the ephemeral life of things. As such, literary impressionism has often been associated either with realism or naturalism as opposed to symbolism in that the latter transcends the ephemeral and aspires to the ideal and the absolute (Décaudin). Critics, especially John Peters who has authored several essays on this issue, have often adopted the term ‘impressionism’ in order to identify Conrad’s peculiar treatment of the epistemology of ‘broken time’ as a chain of non chronological events interrupted by sudden holes. Conrad’s multiple‐point‐of‐view technique has also been traditionally interpreted as a symptom of his philosophical relativism. His adoption of ‘the primitive eye’ perspective has been regarded as an impressionistic attempt at the cultural estrangement of colonial history. His radical relativism in political issues has been contradictorily seen both as the product of bourgeois fear of revolution and repressed desire of anarchist subversion. 209 My paper intends to problematize some of these assumptions concerning Conrad’s impressionism by showing how his narrative style as displayed in some of his capital works (Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, ‘The Secret Sharer’ etc.) either verges on expressionism or provides a new kind of impressionism. This new ‘aesthetic mode’, which joins the connotative strength of symbolism and the mimetic (im)precision of a new realism, tends to ‘Modernist Impressionism’. In Conrad’s modernist impressionism the sensual pleasure of mimetic description, typical of Ur‐Impressionism, hardly surfaces, because even the beauty of nature is a lie if it does not reflect by contrast the ugliness and negativity of what Conrad used to call ‘a merely spectacular’, indifferent universe. 18:15 Claire McKeown (Université de Mulhouse, France) “Fleeting Impressions”: The Northern Lights of Early English Modernism Henry James refers frequently to the impression as a mode of reception, although his critical writings initially reject impressionist painting. In the 1902 short story Flickerbridge the narrator, an artist, refers to the “North light of the newest impressionism” when reflecting on modern painting styles. While James could be referring to the relatively Northern (by French terms) light and climate of Ile de France, significant in the development of plein air and impressionist painting, the expression is more obviously an evocation of the Northern light associated with the Nordic countries. While distant from the creative buzz of Paris and Berlin, Scandinavia was increasingly linked with avant‐garde creation in the late 19th century. In the UK, the literary figure most associated with the Scandinavian avant‐garde is Ibsen, whose reputation for modernity was reinforced by writers like Edmund Gosse and George Bernard Shaw. Contemporary critics also compared Ibsen’s particular form of realism, perhaps somewhat approximatively, with impressionist art. James himself also wrote on Ibsen, and his transition from dismissal to praise of the Norwegian writer was rather similar to his changing perspectives on impressionism. This Nordic reputation for modernity is also key to the writings of George Egerton. Norway is the setting for her radical representation of female experience, as well as for aesthetic experimentation through a style heavily focused on sensory and visual impressions. Egerton’s writings interact directly with Scandinavian literature: Keynotes is dedicated to Knut Hamsun, and the story Now Spring Has Come begins with the purchase of a modern Nordic novel. This paper will treat the late 19th century fascination with both impressionism and Nordic culture as part of the shift towards a new aesthetics. Despite their apparent distance, both were part of the contemporary zeitgeist, and a source of interest for writers and critics in Britain. Through contemporary literary and critical perspectives, I will attempt to identify the ways in which these parallel symbols of newness contributed to the development of modernism. 18:30 Sophie Aymes (Université de Bourgogne‐Franche‐Comté) “Working up from the black towards the light”: Modernist wood‐engraving and photography In this paper I propose to examine the revival of autographic wood‐engraving up to the early 1920s as described in contemporary handbooks, reviews and artists’ writings. “Working up from the black towards the light” is a common way to describe the basic process of the craft in wood‐engraving manuals. The tip was given as such by Clare Leighton in Wood‐Engravings and Woodcuts (1932), one of the best examples of such 210 publications in the interwar period. Wood‐engraving as process works through gradual subtraction—as you cut away from the block—in order to produce an image that is printed from a matrix. Each scratch on the surface of the woodblock prints white, which is why you have to develop a negative visual image of the final picture. This accounts for the recurrent use of the trope of revelation and processing (in the photographic sense of the word) in such texts. I will discuss the way autographic wood‐engraving defined itself as against photography. The two forms of art were seen as antithetic by the pioneers of the revival, and yet there is a strong medial affinity between them. I will draw from the works of Edward Gordon Craig and Paul Nash to examine how the trope of the print as imprint gained currency among the Modernist avant‐garde in Britain. My contention is that this aesthetic strategy underscored a medial contest but also revealed that autographic wood‐engraving was photography’s other. 211 S40: The Neo‐Victorian Antipodes Dr Mariadele Boccardi (University of the West of England) ‘Othering Domesticity, Domesticating Otherness: The Neo‐Victorian Antipodes.’ At the height of Victorian migration to Australia, as Janet C. Myers shows, the antipodes were the subject of a discursive domesticating effort, whereby the geographical reversal implied in the very word antipodes was countered by replicas of British customs, laws, building types, social structures, place names on the part of the emigrants. Neo‐Victorian constructions of the antipodes along the axis of sameness and otherness refract the conceptual self‐definition of settler societies by a double movement of identification and difference, which is in turn metonymically rendered in plots where domesticating the alien environment (whether discursively by means of exploration and mapping or practically by agriculture and pastoralism) is central to fulfilling the characters’ identities. My paper examines the consistencies in the treatment of domesticity and otherness in Neo‐Victorian works by both Antipodean and British writers from Patrick White’s Voss to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda to Kate Grenville’s The Secret River; from Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers to Jem Poster’s Rifling Paradise. I argue that contemporary narrative constructions of the antipodes attempt, with postcolonial self‐awareness, to recover the otherness of the antipodes and place it at the centre of their representational efforts. Paradoxically, however, in so doing the novels satisfy the desire for exotic yet familiar novelistic elements that result in their being co‐opted into the domesticating environment of British literary prizes. Dr. Therese‐M. Meyer (Martin Luther University, Halle‐Wittenberg) ‘Gender and the Neo‐Victorian Antipodes: Two Novels by Catherine Jinks.’ A focus on the binary of “Home” as a place of inclusion and exclusion, of domestic suppression and comforts, is typical of Neo‐Victorian postcolonial novels, as Elizabeth Ho (2012), following Rosemary Marangoly George (1999), has shown in her analysis of Carey’s Jack Maggs. Novels that centre on the domestic life of female protagonists can then be expected to tap even more into the rich seams of the Antipodean Neo‐Victorian. The questions of place and community in the face of invasion and dispossession (cf. Hodge and Mishra 1991), the threat and loss of children (cf. Pierce 1999), and the critique of the systemic abuse of women unites to recalibrate representations of the Victorian colonial female subject from a distinctly Antipodean point of view. I propose the inclusion of two contemporary Australian novels in this canon which have so far eluded critical notice but which represent strikingly different examples of this Antipodean Neo‐Victorian emphasis on gender. Catherine Jinks’s two Neo‐Victorian novels, The Gentleman’s Garden (2002) and The Dark Mountain (2008), use well‐researched nineteenth‐century historical protagonists to narrate strong women that emerge from Neo‐Victorian sexual trauma and betrayal to agency and self‐determination. Not contained either by the conventions of romance or the trope of liberation through solitariness, Jinks’s protagonists are set to reclaim the domestic space from its unheimlich Victorian past. Nina Juergens (University of Stuttgart) ‘Skulls, Fish and a Red Dress: Objecting Materialities in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish and Wanting.’ In the wake of the so‐called ‘material turn’, the importance of materiality and material culture in the interpretation of postcolonial issues has received heightened awareness, and not only in museums and other traditional loci of material accumulation. In my talk I will focus on the role of material objects in Richard Flanagan’s historiographic metafictional 212 accounts of 19th century colonial Tasmania, the novels Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) and Wanting (2008). Both works negotiate Victorian material cultural practices connected to scientific discourses of appropriation such as collecting, classifying and cataloging. They construct an antipodean otherness whose underlying binaries between ‘other’ and ‘self’, object and subject are rendered precariously brittle, as they are perpetually contested by human desires that threaten to cross dividing lines. The results are narratives that foreground the brutal effects of the supposed disinterestedness of scientific practices by denying individuals agency and humanity. It is through the narrativisation of material objects, however, that those patterns of subjugation and objectification are transcended and agency is partially reinstalled. The skulls collected by the Surgeon and Lady Franklin, the fish painted by Gould or the red dress of Mathinna: these objects receive a presence that continue to challenge antipodean (re‐)writings of past and present. Dr Ruta Slapkauskaite (Vilnius University) ‘“Through a Glass, Darkly”: Object Memory in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda.’ Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda has been generously praised for how its marked fascination with the eccentric, the exquisite, and the fabulous is conveyed through the metafictional as well as magic realist aspects of the narrative as a (post)colonial parable. Taking its cue from the analytical concerns for the issues of cultural transplantation and legitimisation of British colonial presence in Australia, this paper examines the novel’s visual saturation and its alignment with material culture as facets of memory work inscribed in the narrative. To the extent that the story is organised around the figure of the glass church, the house of prayer has both material and metaphorical significance for the refraction of memory that unfolds in Carey’s novel. Read within the conceptual framework of Thing Theory, representations of Victorian engagement with material culture may reveal new implications for how cultural continuity sought legitimation in the colonial economy. Above all, our reading of the narrative as a way of thinking through things may shed new light on the central dichotomy of the physical vs. the metaphysical, wherein the memories the characters invest in things are reaffirmed, questioned or even discounted by what things remember themselves. 213 S41. Tracing the Victorians: Material Uses of the Past in Neo‐Victorianism Convenors: Dr. Rosario Arias (University of Málaga, Spain) Dr. Patricia Pulham (University of Portsmouth, UK) Dr. Elodie Rousselot (University of Portsmouth, UK) This seminar addresses the notion of the ‘trace’, delineated by Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur, to engage with the tangibility of the Victorian past in contemporary culture. The ‘trace’ has attracted renewed critical interest in the last few years, particularly in connection with the interplay of past and present in today’s cultural production. However, the potential of the material object (the trace) to reanimate the past has received scant attention in neo‐Victorianism. Papers dealing with the presence and (in)visibility of the Victorian past in contemporary literature and culture, materiality and ‘the sensory turn’, as well as museum studies and thing theory in relation to the Victorian ‘trace’, are particularly encouraged. Haunting Houses and Eloquent Objects in American Neo‐Victorian Fiction Dr. Dara Downey Ridley Pearson’s The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2001) (written under the pseudonym of fictional academic Dr. Joyce Reardon, as part of the publishing campaign for Stephen King’s miniseries Rose Red), focuses on the eponymous Ellen Rimbauer, and on the apparently murderous nature of the vast house her husband has had built for. Partly on the urging of her African maid Sukeena, Rimbauer ultimately undertakes to appease Rose Red’s malevolence by continually adding to and remodelling it. The result is a labyrinthine muddle of different styles and floorplans, in which doors and staircases lead to blank walls or sudden drops, and corridors lead the uninitiated along strange and unpredictable journeys through its supernaturally extended interior. Through these corridors may or may not drift the ghosts of those who have gone missing there, ghosts that continue to make their presence felt well into the “present day” in which the book and miniseries are set. Mirroring the real‐life Winchester Mystery House in California, the book’s late‐ Victorian pile can therefore be read as kind of Foucauldian heterotopia, occupying multiple clashing temporal and ontological registers. This paper argues that, along with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Karen Joy Fowler’s Sister Noon, and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, this complex attitude to time makes possible an equally complex negotiation of historical race and gender roles. In particular, it allows for a nuanced exploration of African‐American ritual and belief, including voodoo and obeah, depicted in these texts as both frightening and liberating, and, specifically, as operating directly through material objects, and through houses themselves. Dara Downey lectures in literature in University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave, 2014), and a number of articles on American Gothic fiction, including the work of Charles Brockden Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Mark Z. Danielewski. She is currently working on a monograph about servant figures in American uncanny fiction, which is part of a larger project on race and religion in American supernatural texts and popular culture. She co‐edits The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and is the 214 Treasurer of The National Association for English Studies and The Irish Association for American Studies. Painted Traces: art, madness and talismanic returns in the neo‐Victorian novel Kate Mitchell (The Australian National University) ‘Have you ever had this feeling that the lives people lived in the past are still real?’ (Kostova, 2010: 437). Nineteenth‐century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present? A number of neo‐Victorian novels explore these questions by depicting art work in their narratives. Here, the work of art is often talismanic; it provides (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction, if only partially. As vestigial remains, these traces manifest a past that is at once absent and present. They exist within complex relationships: to the narrative in which they are embedded, which can only tell, and not show the painting’s power; to the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds them, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and to the past, whose relationship to the present they both manifest and construct. This paper explores these depictions of artwork as historical traces in neo‐Victorian fiction, with close reference to Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves (2010). In this novel, which depicts a contemporary artist driven mad by a historical painting, the artwork is truly material trace; its activity – in this case the paradoxical concealment and revelation of a dark secret – continues into the present, even as the present relentlessly, madly, pursues the trace, with its promise of the presence and preservation of the past. Kate Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her research is focused on nineteenth‐ and twentieth ‐ century literary and cultural history, neo‐Victorian fiction and the historical novel. She is author of History and Cultural Memory in Neo‐Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Palgrave 2010) and, with Dr Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney), co‐editor of a collection of essays entitled Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Palgrave 2013). Her articles on historical fiction and memory have appeared in Neo‐Victorian Studies and in a number of edited collections and journals. Ghosting Oscar: Tracing Wildean Celebrity in Contemporary Fiction and Theatre Dr Patricia Pulham (University of Portsmouth) In the late‐twentieth and early twenty‐first century, the enduring interest in Oscar Wilde appears to have reached new heights, expressed in biography, fiction, drama, film and even music. The ubiquity of Wilde’s personality and production in contemporary media may be understood in terms of the rise of celebrity culture. As critics including Elana Gomel and Lindsay Livingston have argued, the rise of ‘the artist as celebrity’ is ‘epitomized by Wilde’s own career’ and by the time of his first trial in 1895, Wilde was already a celebrity.15 Furthermore, it is worth noting that the fictionalisation of Wilde Elana Gomel, ‘Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the (Un)Death of the Author’, Narrative 12:1 (January 2004): 74‐92, p. 78; Lindsay Adamson Livingston, ‘ “To be said to have done it is everything”: The 15 215 began in his own lifetime. In her 2007 monograph, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction, Angela Kingston demonstrates that between 1887 and 1899, Wilde appeared in the works of 32 of his contemporaries.16 Given this early coalescence between life and art, it is unsurprising that, as Gomel argues, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray may be read as Wilde’s prescient commentary on his own posthumous transformation into cultural icon’ (p. 79). Considering himself in relation to the characters in his novel, Wilde famously commented, ‘Basil is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps’. In Dorian: An Imitation (2002), Will Self in one sense fulfils Wilde’s desire. In this paper I’d like to consider the ‘ghosting’ of Wilde in Self’s novel and Craig Willman’s recent play, The Picture of John Gray (2014), focusing primarily on the beautiful boy to explore the importance of celebrity in neo‐Victorian writing. Dr Patricia Pulham is Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Her research interests centre on nineteenth and twentieth‐century literature, art and culture, with a particular focus on decadent writing and aestheticism, queer studies, late‐Victorian Gothic fiction, and the neo‐Victorian novel. She is author of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Ashgate Press, 2008), and has published on a range of other nineteenth‐century writers including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance in academic journals such as the Yearbook of English Studies and the Victorian Review. She has also co‐edited several collections of essays including Haunting and Spectrality in Neo‐Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum, 2011). Most recently, with Páraic Finnerty, she co‐edited ‘Decadent Crossings’, a Special Issue of Symbiosis, 16.2. (October, 2012), and was lead editor of a four‐volume facsimile collection: Spiritualism, 1840‐1930, published by Routledge in January 2014. She is currently writing a monograph on the Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature, which is contracted to Edinburgh University Press. Theatrical Oscar Wilde and the Possibilities for the (Re)Construction of Biography’, Auto/Biography Studies 24:1 (Summer 2009): 15‐33, pp. 17‐18. 16 Angela Kingston, Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 216 S42 Reinterpreting Victorian Serial Murderers in Literature, Film, TV Series and Graphic Novels Convenors Mariaconcetta Costantini (G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti‐Pescara, Italy) and Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poitiers, France) Rosario Arias Doubling and Reinterpreting (Victorian) Serial Murderers in Margaret Drabble’s Fiction In this paper I aim to analyse the cyclical pattern of serial murders that took place in Britain between 1975 and 1981, fictionalised in Margaret Drabble’s trilogy, The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991), which, arguably, doubled and repeated Jack the Ripper’s Victorian serial murders. Even though the idea of serial killing seems to have gained new relevance in contemporary culture, I would like to focus on Drabble’s trilogy (also regarded as neo‐sensation, following Kelly Marsh), which stands in a liminal position since it clearly looks back to the nineteenth‐century past, as well as to the postmodern emphasis on deviance and criminality. Drabble’s novels fictionalise the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ (named as the ‘Horror of Harrow Road’), “the English mass murderer whom the media between 1975 and 1981 represented as the son of Jack the Ripper” (Onega 293). In December 2015 there was a controversy about the possibility that the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ should be transferred from a mental hospital to prison. It remains clear that this case still feeds on today’s curious morbidity for serial killers. Pierpaolo Martino Oscar Wilde, Gyles Brandreth and the Murders at Reading Gaol In an essay entitled "Pen, Pencil and Poison" (1889) Oscar Wilde focuses on the notorious writer, serial murderer and forger Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794‐1847), whose criminal activities reveal, according to Wilde, the soul of the true artist; as it is well known, for the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, art must exceed any moral or ethical judgment. Interestingly, Wilde recently turned into the protagonist of Gyles Brandreth's series "Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries" (2008‐2012), a postmodern rewriting of Wilde's epopee, in which the Anglo‐Irish writer becomes a detective working with celebrities such as Conan Doyle in order to solve complex murder cases, showing how the theme of serial killing has turned into a central concern of Neo‐Victorian literature and culture. In the last volume of the series, entitled Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (2012) Wilde is portrayed as both a 'criminal' – sentenced to two years of hard labour for gross indecency – and detective who tries to uncover the serial killer responsible for the deaths of two prison wardens. In short, in Brandreth's narrative Wilde seems to inhabit a liminal space, which can be accessed by the contemporary reader herself in order to activate a process of re‐definition of such ideas as deviance, guiltiness and 'outsideness'. Vera Shamina Metaphors of Postmodernism in Neo‐Victorian Fiction: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd and The Decorator by Boris Akunin Postmodern fiction is marked by an intense interest in Victorian period, especially so in its sensational aspects connected with crime, violence and mystery. Therefore we have a revival of Victorian crime novel in a new image. On the one hand the authors try to recreate the atmosphere of the period, introduce a lot of intertextual allusions and references to the well‐known Victorian novels, exploiting most popular subjects of the 19th century literature, but on the other, as I’ll try to show in my presentation, they use these 217 plots as implicit metaphors of postmodernist art as such. It will be shown on the example of two Neo‐Victorian novels ‐ Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd (1994) and The Decorator by Boris Akunin. The latter has been greatly influenced by English literature at large and Ackroyd in particular, which can be clearly seen from the comparative analysis of the aforementioned novels. Both novels give their versions of the story of Jack the Ripper but what is more important in our case, they employ akin plot structures, images and artistic devices, which in fact become metaphoric actualization of postmodern techniques – such as collecting, cataloging, imitation, creating simulacra, dismemberment, aestheticizing of mutilation and deformation. At the same time the very choice of a disgusting maniac as the central character, his/her punishment by death may on the one hand suggest certain self‐irony and implicit criticism of postmodernism, and on the other, the assumption that by “dismembering” old texts a writer is able to create a new fine piece of art. Carolina Abello Onofre and Christophe Chambost Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015) and The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012), or How Serial Murderesses Reinvigorate the Ghost Story in Past‐Ridden Victorian Great Britain The Woman in Black and Crimson Peak are both rooted in the literary gothic tradition. On the one hand, TWIB revisits traditional ghost story elements by bringing up a vengeful murderess ghost. On the other hand, CP reimagines the dramatic stories set up in the mid‐ Victorian times and reshapes the usurper villain from the eighteenth century romance by empowering the female figure. This presentation will show how Guillermo Del Toro uses the idea of “the mad woman in the castle” so as to explore one of his favorite themes: life beyond death. Crimson Peak (2015) can indeed be seen as the continuation of the director’s thoughts in The Devil’ s Backbone (2001) in which the exchanges between the living and the dead were already in the foreground. It is interesting however to note the specificities of the quite rich historical context in Crimson Peak, with the representation of the conflicting relationship between the energetic 19th century American society and its former mother country in which the entropic Victorian codes have a hard time hiding the deterioration of social and family values. But the film is far from being merely some historical account of the development of the Western World. Indeed, Crimson Peak also (and mainly) enables Del Toro to scrutinize the relationship between (weak) men and (strong) women, the latter not hesitating to resort to serial murders so as to both protect their (decaying) social rank and (degraded) family values. This stress on female serial killers will also allow us to consider other Victorian ghosts and murderesses in the 21th century British cinema with The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2012), in which mad women no longer hesitate to leave their attics and come back from the dead to kill innocent young victims so as reclaim what they think is their due. Anne‐Marie Paquet‐Deyris Whitechapel's Eery Strain of Police Procedural: a Mythology of Violence with Complex Connections to the Past In Whitechapel, showrunners Ben Court and Caroline Ip focus on the impossible ties between a string of bloody murders committed in contemporary East London and the city’s criminal history. The first series directed by the British film and television director S. J. Clarkson most specifically focuses on the gruesome legacy of serial killer Jack the Ripper. It unfolds as a metafictional Jack the Ripper story filmed on location where the original 218 killer operated and shaped by an intradiegetic Ripperologist (Steve Pemberton starring as Ed Buchan) who uses the Past as a map just like the detectives and the viewers. In this eery type of police procedural, the showrunners Court and Ip show how the figure of the serial murderer, an inescapable trope in today’s cinema and TV shows, brings back to the surface some of the characters and society's submerged tensions. They question the figure’s troubling contiguity with its environment and the disturbing way in which it is somehow created by it. The fear factor is deliberately amplified thanks to a horror movie aesthetic grafted onto a cop show structure. The fascination for the evil deeds of the Past is fully exposed as the historical precedents are explored according to the rules of modern criminal profiling. Tapping into a rich criminal stories reservoir, Court and Ip literally create a new form/ula spanning the gap between the (pre‐)Victorian era and today. As the Past helps shed light on the present, there is also a great deal of speculation as to how modern forensics and serial killer profiling could have helped solve the cases. The third series features six episodes where the detectives also use murders from the Past to solve current crimes such as the Ratcliffe Murders by John Williams (1811), Dr Crippen’s (1910) and Mary Ann Cotton’s murders (1852‐1873). All are used as case studies in the appeal of perversity and engineering what Janet Staiger calls « perverse spectators » in her eponymous 2000 book. Deborah Bridle‐Surprenant Resuscitating criminals, monsters, witches and detectives in Penny Dreadful (Showtime) For a few decades now television has emerged as a solid contender to the cinema as a quality medium for fiction. TV series have flourished and become a multi‐faceted tool in which screenwriters and show creators explore a very wide range of genres and topics. The newfound popularity of the Victorian era has of course found its way into television as well. It is particularly interesting to note that the popular culture and intellectual mindset of the Victorian era were pervaded by a taste for sensationalism and a morbid curiosity for crime and criminals, features that are also prominent in today’s fiction set in or inspired by Victorian times. The TV series Penny Dreadful is named after the popular Victorian cheap and low‐quality stories involving sensational murders, supernatural entities and clever detectives. It stages a set of characters coming straight from nineteenth‐century fantasy literature – Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – while also exploring the themes of lycanthropy, witchcraft, spiritualism and demonic possession. I will seek to explain how Penny Dreadful can be seen as the perfect embodiment of today’s fascination with the Victorian era and more particularly with its killers, monsters and detectives. The serial quality of the format is reflected in the motif of the serial murderer, and the plot moves forward with the murders accomplished by the characters and the investigation that they launch. The series works as a blood‐drenched palimpsest whose every page – or episode – brings us viewers face to face with well‐known figures and demons that we love to fear. The title itself works as an homage and as an admission of our fascination for the macabre and the lurid. At the same time, it reminds the viewers of the original penny dreadfuls, which were often rewrites of Gothic thrillers and adaptations of existing stories. We are therefore faced with an object of popular culture conceived as a mille feuille of references raising questions regarding its reception: how does the story work and progress as an independent self in spite of its heavy network of referentiality? What keeps us viewers intrigued and makes us eager for the next episode, just like readers of Victorian penny dreadfuls? How does the series play into the contemporary audience’s 219 taste for thrills of the past in the modern setting of today’s television? As TV reviewer and critic Jeff Hensen writes about the second season: “All the characters are walking, talking literary references, yet the scenarios speak to the nostalgia‐ swamped Franken‐Pop of today”. Sophie Mantrant Hiding Hyde in Penny Dreadful, Season 1 When the first season of Penny Dreadful was released, director John Logan was sometimes accused of plagiarizing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the most obvious similarity being that both are literary mash‐ups that re‐interpret famous characters of Victorian fiction. What hasn’t been mentioned so far (I think) is that John Logan may have found in another Alan Moore book, From Hell, the hypothesis of the non‐Englishness of Jack the Ripper: “Some people reckon a red Indian must have done it. Is Buffalo Bill still staying in England, incidentally?” (From Hell). The first season of Penny Dreadful stages a Wild West showman and contains several comments on the genocide of Indians. I hope to be able to account for these elements in my analysis of the partially hidden Jekyll‐and‐ Hyde figure in the first season. My presentation will centre on the character of Ethan Chandler, who is a combination of Quincey Morris (the American character in Dracula) and Jack the Ripper, within a series that repeatedly echoes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in its emphasis that “the devil is in all of us”. While the series clearly indicates which main fictional stories it appropriates (Dracula, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray), Ethan Chandler is not explicitly presented as the Jekyll/Hyde character, and only in the last episode is he shown transforming into a beast. He is, however, the character who carries the theme of play‐ acting, as he first appears in his role as sharpshooter in a Wild West show and is subsequently often referred to as “an actor”. The theme of play‐acting and re‐presentation is brought to the fore in the self‐reflexive Grand‐Guignol theatre. Ethan Chandler and his “lady friend” (a prostitute) are among the spectators watching a play entitled The Transformed Beast, in which a young woman is murdered by her werewolf suitor. The title of the play seems to refer to Ethan Chandler rather than to what is shown on stage: he is the beast transformed into an American actor watching an actor transforming into a beast. It is important to bear in mind that, before he became an actor, Ethan Chandler served in the Indian Wars [ideological perspective to be explored]. Stella Louis Nurses, Witches and Vampires in Penny Dreadful TV Series: Women as Victims of the Victorian Murderess Society When the first episodes of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful TV series begin, situating the supernatural drama in the Victorian society at the time of Jack the Ripper, crimes have just taken place. We learn that we will see the events through the eyes of Vanessa Ives, a witch woman who has just lost her best friend and will get involved in an extraordinary “gentlemen’s league”, becoming (despite herself) the (side)show of a men governed society. The main message emerging from the plot which focuses on vampires, werewolves, and other Frankenstein’s monsters is the image of the woman completely destroyed by society: women prostitutes murdered by a “new” Jack the Ripper; the bride of Frankenstein created to be “a good wife”, the witch nurse called the “Cut‐Wife” of Ballantrie, a kidnapped Dracula’s Mina Harker, and the powerful and abusing Mrs Poole. Reflecting Victorian serial murders of both Jack the Ripper and Amelia Dyer the “Ogress of Reading” (Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1986) – of who some people thought 220 they were the same person –, the series is about the murder of women and the image of woman in the Victorian society which becomes the true murderer. Behind, we have women victims: Jack the Ripper who killed female misery, Amelia Dyer who killed young products of female misery, and witch nurses symbolized by the aesthetics of the “possession show” who represent “the decline of a society and the religious morality” (Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, 1973). Through the eyes of Vanessa Ives we have an aesthetic focus on a mise en abyme of the penny dreadful stories reflecting the morbid aspects of a decadent England by means of the supernatural which highlights the question of the body. We thus also propose to analyse the modes of representation of the female body and particularly the recurrent exhibiting of those suffering, tortured female bodies, turned into an extremely violent spectacle. 221 S43 “Victorian and Neo‐Victorian Screen Adaptations” Ela İpek Gündüz, “The Piano: Neo‐Victorian Sexuality” It is commonly known that the Victorian era marked a stark opposition between the two genders: men were seemingly prudish and women were repressed. Although there was a rigid gender role model which required that men be emotionless and strong while women remain sexless and chaste, the neo‐Victorian domain imagines and represents the opposite case. One film in particular, Jane Campion’s The Piano, depicts this alternate reality via representation of its heroine’s buried experience of sexuality. For Ada, the heroine, sex symbolizes women's desirability and emotional satisfaction by men. In addition to depicting this reversed gender model, the film also portrays the subaltern’s position by projecting in its background the unheard voices of the Maori people. Thus, with Ada's awakened sexuality, Campion both re‐presents life in the colonies and reverses the feminine prudence of Victorian sexuality. In displaying the impact of invisible Victorian tropes on the present, Campion’s film is neo‐Victorian. The aim of this presentation is to analyse those ambiguous inclinations of the film that are presented from a neo‐Victorian outlook. For example, the famous scene of Ada and her piano floating above the water signifies the resulting confusion regarding Ada’s identity as a Victorian woman who buries her conventional gender role in the Victorian past. By inducing for spectators unresolved questions pertaining the heroine’s ambiguous gender identity, The Piano contributes a neo‐Victorian dimension to traditional Victorian gender perception. Punking the Machine: Reengineering Victorian Literature in Steampunk Cinema Dr. Robbie McAllister Staffordshire University In this paper I will evaluate a wave of twenty‐first‐century blockbusters that, whilst often defined via different terminology, adapt previously existing texts into discernible ‘steampunk’ identities. The topic of discussion will not only be ‘adaptations’, but the acts of adaptation and appropriation that allow millennial anxieties to be reimagined through the industrial smog of nineteenth‐century innovation. Shaped and defined through countless re‐imaginings, the popularised imagery of Frankenstein’s laboratory has become a staple not only of the cinematic imagination, but also the thematic and aesthetic signifiers that can be drawn through literary fiction into modern day steampunk. However, it may be Frankenstein’s nameless monster itself that offers the most appropriate analogy to steampunk’s construction within film. Reanimated via the allotransplantation of alternative sources, the genre is made up of convoluted ‐ yet unmistakable ‐ patchwork hybrids. In steampunk’s literary antecedent, the life with which inanimate flesh is repurposed is met with revulsion; with steampunk itself, the reconstitution of revered texts into new forms is met with similar scorn. I will begin by questioning the low cultural and critically reviled position of the steampunk adaptation, and consider how it is not only textual content that Hollywood steampunk has adapted, but troublingly for some, subcultural identities too. Placing steampunk within the contexts of adaptation theory, I will consider how these productions, like the steampunk ‘gizmo’ itself, encourage renewed archaeological agency, making the past re‐present through industrialized acts of recycling, borrowing and the (potential) robbery of historical artefacts that have come before. By focusing on texts such as The Time Machine (2002), Around the World in 80 Days (2004), Sherlock Holmes (2009) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), I shall argue that cinema’s contemporary identity is as deeply rooted in the industrial reengineering of 222 literary works as it was in its own nineteenth‐century formation. Transformed into high‐ octane blockbuster texts, my conclusions will query how Neo‐Victorianism has afforded a mass‐cultural means for society to mythologize a past century as an era of incredible technological upheaval that acts as an analogue to our own fin de siècle hopes and fears. My completed doctoral thesis and continued research focuses on a growing number of steampunk films that have recast the nineteenth‐century into a realm where past, present and future collide. I am an active academic specialising in neo‐Victorian film, and occupy the post of Module Coordinator and Lead Lecturer for Film History and Film Theory at Staffordshire University. The ‘Grand Guignol’ Approach to Adapting the Victorians: Penny Dreadful and the Multiple Adaptations of Globalised Popular Neo‐Victorianism Dietmar Böhnke (University of Leipzig) Before 15 minutes of the first episode of the Showtime TV series Penny Dreadful (2014ff., 3rd series 2016) are over, we have been treated to a monstrous attack on a slum‐dweller in London (by a werewolf, we are led to believe), have witnessed a woman obviously possessed by some supernatural force which is speaking through her, seen parts of a Wild West show followed by an open‐air sex scene between the main protagonist and one of the female spectators, as well as a prolonged underground fight in which several vampire‐like creatures are killed. As this brief summary suggests, this is clearly not your average ‘heritage take’ on the Victorians, despite the 1891 London setting and the appearance of characters like Mina Murray, Dorian Gray and Victor Frankenstein (who is effortlessly transported to this period). Instead, it is what you might term the ‘Grand Guignol’ approach to Victorian literature and culture: a lot of blood and gore mixed with a little sex and a veritable ‘mash‐up’ of various (Gothic) elements from nineteenth‐century culture is served up in the guise of a sensational mystery thriller (it’s pretty well done, actually, and also great fun). It is certainly no coincidence that part of the first series including its final scenes is set in a London theatre of the same name (i.e. Grand Guignol, modelled on the famous Paris establishment), signaling a self‐awareness by the makers of the programme about contemporary popular culture’s indebtedness to its Victorian forebears, which the very title of the series already highlights. Incidentally, this also emphasizes the ineluctably multinational or globalized character of a lot of recent neo‐Victorian media products (the US‐ produced series with its British‐American cast was mainly shot in Ireland), as well as their ‘impure’ and multiply adapted character (mixing various genres and elements from both Victorian and contemporary popular culture). In this paper, I will analyse the first series of Penny Dreadful (aspects of the second and third series may be included) from these interconnected perspectives: as a (meta‐ )theatrical multinational adaptation of elements of (neo‐)Victorian (Gothic) popular culture. I will be particularly interested in how the series reflects on the process of mediatisation and adaptation itself, e.g. with reference to theatre, photography, painting, séances/possession etc., which will be related to the more general context of neo‐Victorian and adaptation studies. Time permitting, I may draw comparisons to other TV series such as Ripper Street (2012ff.) or blockbusters such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) or Van Helsing (2004). Picturing Dorian Gray: portrait of an adaptation Shannon Wells‐Lassagne Université de Bretagne Sud 223 Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is tempting subject matter for filmmakers for good reason: it is a gripping morality tale, filled with beauty, love, and action, while as a prominent example of Victoriana with a slight Gothic bent, it ranks with Jekyll and Hyde as the intersection of two domains that have inspired generations of filmmakers. However, the novel poses unique challenges to filmmakers, one of which is present in its very title: how can the extraordinary portrait of Dorian Gray be depicted onscreen, either in its beauty or in its decadence? It is well‐known that the novel, like all of Wilde’s work, thrives on the tension between paradox and self‐contradiction, where the reader spends much of his or her time trying to discern the narrator’s perspective between the florid speeches of Lord Henry and the strong morality implicit in Dorian’s downfall. But the adaptor’s paradox resides in the fact that the very visual nature of the source text makes its transfer to the screen difficult. The imagery in the novel is evocative rather than descriptive; the portrait is not described until after Dorian Gray’s disappointment in Sybil Vane in Chapter 7, once it has already begun to change, though the change is more easily described than viewed: “In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream‐coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth.” (74) Whether painter or filmmaker, one would be hard‐pressed to recreate these lines of cruelty about the mouth in a way that would be easily understood by the public – and so reinterpretation of the portrait in particular remains one of the major difficulties of adapting the story to the screen. If we are to believe that “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim,” as Wilde contends in his preface to the novel (17), it may be that the different adaptations of the fiction ultimately fail in their aim (or that the adaptor’s aim is different from this artist’s). Instead, these adaptors seem to agree with Basil Hallward, that "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself." (20) Each of these different adaptations seems to view the portrait as a means of showcasing the possibilities of fiction in an audiovisual context, and of their own individual aspirations for the works being made in reaction to Wilde’s novel. As such, the adaptations seem to make of the portrait what Hallward made of its subject: “in some curious way […] his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style.” (23) Victorian Fiction on the Global Screen: The Case of Thomas Hardy Margarida Esteves Pereira (Universidade do Minho, Portugal) This paper aims to look at screen adaptations of two Victorian novels by Thomas Hardy, namely, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge. These two novels have been adapted by English director Michael Winterbottom, the first under the title Trishna (2011) and the second with the title The Claim (2000). Interestingly, the two adaptations reconfigure the stories into completely different geographical, historical and cultural contexts. Winterbottom’s adaptations of Hardy’s stories seem to be apt examples of narratives that, as Linda Hutcheon appropriate metaphor of biological adaptation suggests, adapt to “new environments by virtue of mutation” (Hutcheon, 2006: 32). The fact that these stories seem to fit well locations as different from Hardy’s Wessex as Northern California in the nineteenth century, in one case, and twenty‐first‐century India, 224 in another, draws our attention to their transnational and trans‐historical quality. We aim to look at these adaptations from this perspective, in order to assess the way Hardy’s late Victorian narratives adapt to new historical and geographical contexts. “Gender, sexuality and social power” in Thomas Vinterberg and David Nicholls’ 2015 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd Elżbieta Rokosz‐Piejko, University of Rzeszów, Poland In Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his first Wessex novel, Thomas Hardy created a female protagonist surprisingly unVictorian in her ambitions and temper. Similarly to Hardy’s other major novels, that one, too, has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. The most recent cinematic adaptation, which my presentation will be devoted to, was directed by Danish former Dogme director, Thomas Vinterberg, with the screenplay written by David Nicholls, and released in 2015. The shooting plans revealed two years earlier suggested that the new adaptation was to be “‘raw and revolutionary”. It turned out to be far from either, which does not mean that it is not worth critical attention. Since Margaret Higonnet in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (1993) suggests that the “state of disequilibrium” in Far from the Madding Crowd “has much to do with gender, sexuality and social power” (52), I would like to examine the way in which the 2015 film adaptation renders that. My paper will focus on the way in which the film handles the issue of gender roles and sexuality, analysing the extent to which Hardy’s characters required – in the adaptors’ understanding – modification to become appealing to the 2015 audience, and defining the degree to which the new production fits into the neo‐Victorian vogue. Elżbieta Rokosz‐Piejko is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of English Studies of the University of Rzeszów, Poland. Her main academic interests have been in ethnic American autobiographical texts and in adaptations of literary texts into audio‐visual media. She has been teaching American literature survey courses, a course on literature and film, and supervised numerous B.A. and M.A. diploma theses on American literature and culture. She is a member of Polish Association for American Studies and Association of Adaptation Studies. Her book publications so far include Hyphenated Identities: The Issue of Cultural Identity in Selected Ethnic American Autobiographical Texts (2011), The Highlights of American Literature (2012, co‐authored with Barbara Niedziela) and published last year Televised Classics. The British Classic Serial as a Distinctive Form of Literary Adaptation. From a Neo‐Victorian novel to a ‘Victorian’ film? Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda Antonija Primorac, University of Split In line with the most frequently used, and recently debated (Boehm‐Schnitker and Gruss, 2014; Kohlke 2014), definition of neo‐Victorianism proposed by Heilmann and Llewellyn in 2010, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) self‐consciously throws light on little known aspects of the Victorian past in Australia. It tells, among other things, the tale of an unconventional mother and her daughter who wore bloomers – garments favoured by Victorian proponents of women’s rights and dress reform – and who shared a passion for factories. In the final lines the novel, we learn that the daughter is ‘known for more important things than her passion for a nervous clergyman. She was famous, or famous at least among students of the Australian labour movement.’ (515) However, Gillian 225 Armstrong’s 1997 film adaptation chooses to foreground exactly the characteristic of Lucinda that Carey deems unimportant, as it highlights the romance and downplays the feminism. This paper analyses the effects of this change by focusing on the role that clothes play in the portrayal of Victorian gender roles and social rules in the novel and its adaptation. The Prestige, From Text to Screen (Christopher Priest, Christopher Nolan) Gilles Menegaldo, University of Poitiers The Prestige (1995), a novel by Christopher Priest, was adapted by Christopher Nolan, in 2006. The novel tells the story of a long‐standing feud between two stage magicians in the late 19th century and its tragic consequences for the protagonists and their descendants. Priest uses a complex narrative structure, mostly based on the diaries of the two rivals, with a consistent use of flashbacks and the interweaving of a contemporary frame narrative. The novel deals with obsession, paranoïa, spectacular magic tricks and secrecy but it also foregrounds the role of science or pseudo science with the part played by the famous and controversial Nikola Tesla. Nolan’s adaptation dispenses with the frame narrative and changes many elements of the plot while keeping the main thematic aspects of the novel and the same mood. The film uses indeed a strategy of suspense and secrecy and disseminates significant signs, both verbal and visual, which may help the spectator to unravel some enigmas, but these signs are generally overlooked on first seeing the film. Nolan manages to convey the mood of the period and the fascination exercised by these magic tricks on the attending audiences, also pointing to the potential dangers involved, but he also offers a meta‐textual reflexion on the powers of the filmic medium which enables him to manipulate the filmic spectator. We shall examine first the main transformations (suppression, addition, displacement, amplification) carried out by Nolan on the literary source, then the narrative and formal devices (especially lighting, sound, editing) by means of which Nolan manages to convey some of the magic of the original work while extolling the cinematic art. Benjamin Poore When the Sleeper Wakes: The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells and Neo‐Victorian Pulp Fictions The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells, screened by Sky Arts in January and February 2016, is an unusual adaptation of lesser‐known late‐Victorian fiction. Its four half‐hour episodes each offer stylistically distinct transmediations of H.G. Wells short stories first published in 1895 and 1896. But unlike the sprawling story worlds of Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky Atlantic) and Dickensian (BBC) – which are mashups of characters from different fictional works – Wells’s tales remain distinct from one another, and indeed are framed as stories. Episodes are opened, narrated, and concluded by Ray Winstone playing a seedy Wells in late middle age. The format calls to mind a much older televisual tradition, as reviews have been quick to point out: such anthology shows as Tales of the Unexpected, The Twilight Zone, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. While its format puts The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells in frequent danger of lapsing into cliché (Tim Martin in the Telegraph called it ‘a honking bit of period cheese’), it might usefully lead us to question the prevailing assumptions about seriality and genre in television adaptation, including neo‐Victorian drama (The Paradise, Penny Dreadful, Lark Rise to Candleford, Dickensian, Sherlock). In this paper, I will revisit Whelehan and Cartmell’s observations on pulp, genre and audiences in their introduction to Pulping Fictions (Pluto, 1996) to examine the cultural status of NIghtmare Worlds. I argue that the 226 series sits suspended between art and commerce, and between its Victorian forebears and its televisual descendants. Benjamin Poore is Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York, UK. His books include Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians (Palgrave, 2012) and Theatre & Empire (Palgrave, 2016). Ben has published widely on the afterlives of Victorian novels and characters on stage, screen and in popular culture. His current projects include preparing a monograph on the post‐ millennial Sherlock Holmes, and editing the collection Neo‐Victorian Villains. Victorian and Neo‐Victorian Screen Adaptations Between Darcy and Victoria: Screening North & South Ana Daniela Coelho, University of Lisbon, FCT This paper will take into consideration BBC’s 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1954‐5). Although categorised as a classical Victorian adaptation, respectful of period detail and historical accuracy, this serial strives to offer a vision appealing to a contemporary audience. In doing so, it reflects the blurred boundaries between Victorian and Neo‐Victorian objects as well as our own expectations of that past era. My aim is to explore specific sequences representative of the 21st century portrayal of the 19th century industrial England, so as to assert the balance between the social and the romantic dimensions of the novel and its television adaptation, with a special interest in markers of contemporaneity. This analysis will also try to contribute to the discussion of new trends in 21st century period drama, more attentive to aesthetical concerns and cinematic influences. It will also take into consideration the dialogical relation with previous adaptations, namely the 1975 BBC miniseries adaptation of the same novel. Given the known literary influences of Gaskell and also the fact that this adaptation has been promoted as “Pride and Prejudice with a social conscience”, other pivotal examples, such as the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Austen’s best‐known novel, will also be taken into account. Ana Daniela Coelho is a PhD candidate with a FCT (national agency for science and technology) funded project on Austen adaptations in the new millennium, under the supervision of Professors Deborah Cartmell (DeMonfort University, Leicester) and Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa (University of Lisbon). She is a researcher at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES), holds a degree in Modern Literatures and Languages, and concluded her MA in 2013, with a dissertation on initial sequences of film and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She is also a member of the research group “Messengers from the Stars”, devoted to the study of Fantasy and Sci‐Fi. Andrea Kirchknopf “Mary Morstan: a Cure to the Antifeminist Bias of the BBC Sherlock (2010‐)?” Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss have received persistent criticism for their portrayals of female characters in their British television adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. And justly so, since most figures are flat realisations of conventional female stereotypes: Mrs. Hudson is typical mother‐like figure, embodying Victorian domesticity; Watson’s girlfriends and Sherlock’s admirer, Molly Hooper represent neglected (would‐be) partners to the male protagonists; and Irene Adler runs a strongly humiliating course from a dominatrix to a damsel in distress. The introduction of Mary 227 Morstan in the third series as Watson’s wife into this truly male chauvinistic lineup, and her retainment in the latest 2016 teaser episode, is a reason for hope. On top of showing more complexity of character than the above‐described female characters, she also seems to function as an empty signifier, offering ample room for the interpretation of power structures and gender roles in the series. I explore some of these possibilities in my paper: Is Mary Sherlock’s female double reinscribing the detective and the doctor’s homoerotic relationship? Does she portray an updated Irene Adler working for Mycroft (and/or Moriarty) but this time without losing her independence and integrity as a woman? Or is she the disguised Moriarty himself gender bending? Andrea Kirchknopf is a lecturer at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests are neo‐Victorian fiction, postcolonial and postimperial literature in English, literary and filmic adaptation of the long nineteenth century, postmodernism and cultural memory. Her most important publications include the article “(Re)workings of Nineteenth‐Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts.” Neo‐Victorian Studies 1.1 (2008): 53‐80, http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/ and the monograph Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the Nineteenth Century, Jefferson (NC): McFarland & Co Inc, 2013. Andrea's book won the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) book award for first books in the area "Literatures in the English language" in 2014. Juan‐Jose Martin‐Gonzalez. Universidad de Málaga (Spain) “Adapting Victorian Gypsies for the Screen: Ethnicity, Otherness and (In)visibility in Neo‐Victorian Popular Film” This paper aims at analysing the presence of gypsy characters in two neo‐Victorian popular films, namely Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman (2010) and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011). The cultural construction of nineteenth‐century gypsies, those “Others within Europe” (Boyarin 433) whose presence in Victorian fiction was peripheral, spectral and at times invisible (Nord 3‐4), is simultaneously exploited and contested by these two neo‐Victorian screen narratives to raise issues of otherness and invisibility on the screen. Setting off from the premise that screen texts, just like print texts, can also be participant in the neo‐Victorian project of reimagining the underside of Victorian culture for contemporary audiences (Whelehan 273), this paper traces how the adaptation of Victorian gypsies for the screen, true to the palimpsestuous potential inherent to the process of adaptation (Hutcheon 6) and sharing the double drive between past and present which characterises the neo‐Victorian genre (Arias and Pulham xiii; Shiller 539), hybridises our cultural memory of the Victorian Age on the screen while concurrently raises concerns over the persistent liminal status of gypsies in contemporary European culture. In particular, this paper illustrates how the tropes prototypically associated to gypsies (namely their nomadic lifestyle, mysticism, alienated existence or their perceived association to criminality) which can be traced back to Victorian culture are deployed on the neo‐Victorian popular screen (with varyingly succesful outcomes) to comment on their (in)visibility in the European popular imagination. 228 S44. Modernist Non‐fictional Narratives of Modernism Convened by Adrian Paterson and Christine Reynier Anna Budziak, University of Wroclaw, Poland A Deferred Polish Echo of T. S. Eliot’s Classicist Modernism For T. S. Eliot, the significance of Modernism was predominantly theological. When he asked Brian Coffey about the meaning of the term, Coffey answered, “’that which is obviously the product of its age.’” Eliot described Modernism, dismissively, as “sloppy” or “muddy” reasoning. He proposed to correct this type of sensibility and thought with his classicism, hardened in the impassioned debate with John Middleton Murry. The reflection of his classicism in Poland was deferred for 40 years. In the 1960s, poets clashed over its meaning and tenets. While in Eliot’s classicism an earthly Arcadia was non‐existent, to the poets of the nation that suddenly migrated westwards, a literary Arcadia offered an imaginary homeland. While Eliot struggled to sustain a sense of the miraculous in the daily, his Polish followers emphasized the ordinary. Eliot’s classicism, in the 20s and 30s, was a warning against moral degradation, whereas in the post‐WWII period, poetry was not meant to be a warning but, as for Miłosz, a consolation. A question arises, then, whether this Polish classicism, though ostensibly Eliotean, was not closer to the much sunnier classicism of J. M. Murry; whether it actually did not confirm Coffey’s apparently facetious definition; and whether, to Eliot, it would not appear a modernist muddle. T.S. Eliot as the reconciler of the Past, Present and Future Zekiye Antakyalioglu, Gaziantep University, Turkey T.S. Eliot as literary critic wrote many essays of generalizations and appreciations of individual authors. In these essays we can find his hypotheses about what art is and what ideal poetry must be like. Although Eliot was a prominent poet-critic of the modernist period, his theories of tradition, time, memory, individual/society and history have still a penetrating influence on contemporary thinking. Although his personal views on religion, morality and politics are contestable and even obsolete in today’s thinking, we should admit that Eliot had an oxymoronic relation with them by virtue of being a “classicist modernist”, a “royalist American” and a “catholic Buddhist”. This very intriguing position can be taken as a prototype of poststructuralist way of handling the binaries as identical and deconstruction in general. Eliot, for those who study postmodern/poststructuralist theories can be taken as an echo from the past. By being the poet-critic of the present perfect tense, his analyses of history can be aligned with the contemporary approaches to history as anachronistic. His concepts of “objective correlative” and “impersonal voice” can be the echoes of the Deleuzean concept of art as the producer of “affects and percepts” rather than the individual perceptions and sensations. His pessimism about “the dissolution of sensibilities” can be taken as a critique echoing Jameson’s views of late capitalism whose result is “the waning of affects”. His cyclical view of time can be related to the end of dialectical thinking in the contemporary studies. Finally, his negative attitude to lyrical poetry and romanticism and his defense of epic distancing and collective voice in poetry may allude a lot to the concepts like the death of the author and textuality. This paper will be a revisiting of T.S. Eliot’s non-fictional prose and theory of art to analyze their validity and relevance for us today. Paolo Bugliani, University of Pisa, Italy “Facing the Monolith”: Virginia Woolf’s Alternative to Impersonality 229 Modernism is far from being a monolithically conceivable theoretical entity, as its various popularisations and canonizations may lead us to think. As a matter of fact, having been constructed and negotiated by the most heterogeneous literary personalities of world culture, it is highly predictable that many of its ‘canonical’ features might substantially vary according to the author analysed. A category in particular, that of impersonality, might appear as the most universally applicable: T. S. Eliot envisioned a “continuous extinction of personality”; Ezra Pound had his personae and “absolute rhythm”; Joyce himself purported that “The artist […] remains within or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, […] indifferent, paring his fingernails”. And many other examples might be added to this nuclear catalogue. Yet, when the magnifying glass is pointed at Virginia Woolf, and in particular at her non‐fiction (the literary space in which she is allowed to reflect more freely on literature), we immediately recognize that, in her opinion, an artist is never entirely allowed to step out of his/her creation. Even if in A Room of One’s Own she affirms that: “One must strain off what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential oil of truth”, many other pronouncements maintain a diametrically opposed position, for instance, the concept of “presence” she sketches while speaking of the essay as a genre. With a comparative point of view, my contribution aims at retracing and commenting some of these non‐fictional remarks to reassess the impact of authorial idiosyncrasy in the wider scope of Woolf’s aesthetics, in relation with the more general “Modernist Manifesto of impersonality”. Annalisa Federici, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy “This loose, drifting material of life”: Virginia Woolf’s Private Epitexts Virginia Woolf’s vast literary output is characterised by remarkable homogeneity and coherence between aesthetic principles on the one hand and formal aspects on the other, some qualities which her readers and critics have long recognised also thanks to the paratextual genres (diaries, letters, memoirs) that she mastered along with criticism and fiction. A thorough analysis of these texts, which Genette labels “private epitext”, shows that they can be considered as a creative current parallel to, and no less important than, her mainstream genre; furthermore, they also reveal the image of an author for whom life and art were so inextricably interwoven that the creative process enacted in fiction is the object of constant reflection amid the recording of memories, states of mind and daily incidents. The public appearance of such private epitexts has aroused great interest for the insights they afford into Woolf’s life and works, but has also determined a reductive interpretation of them as a mere adjunct to her fiction and essays. In fact, Woolf’s private epitexts illustrate the dichotomous vision informing her fiction and aesthetics; as works embodying the Modernist tension between subjectivity and objectivity, between the private and the public, they should be considered as originative documents, a workshop space where her aesthetic principles were originally ideated, elaborated and sometimes shared with acquaintances. Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University, Finland ‘Inside His Idiom’: Forster and Eliot Reappraised This paper offers a reassessment of Eliot and Forster’s interconnectedness in the current climate of research into modernism. When Forster looks at Eliot and speaks of the 230 generation of 1929 as ‘inside his idiom’, there is no –ism. For Forster, it is just another generation, like his own with George Meredith in 1900 (inside whose idiom, Forster claims, he and his university contemporaries were). The contention here is that modernism needs to be reconceptualized bearing this sort of generational thinking in mind. The paper proceeds by examining the history of Forster and Eliot’s relations. Forster’s 1937 essay ‘E.M. Forster Looks at London’, republished in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951) as ‘London Is a Muddle’, draws its choice of sites to visit and examine as representative of London quite specifically from Eliot’s The Waste Land, as has not so far been recognized. The essay thus moves from the environs of London Bridge around the church of St Magnus the Martyr to a canalside setting off the Caledonian Road in a then‐plebeian portion of North London in a way that seems specifically derived from Eliot. Read this way Forster’s relations with Eliot look different from in P. N. Furbank’s officially‐sanctioned biography, which sees them as prickly and generally unimportant to the writing career of either man. Forster included an essay on Eliot in both of the collections of essays he published, one before and one after the Second World War, suggesting that for him Eliot was at the centre of contemporary culture. And, while Forster’s London relies on Eliot’s, so The Waste Land perhaps draws its portrait of London to a greater extent than has so far been appreciated on the one found in Forster’s Howards End, published twelve years before it. Leila Haghshenas, University Paul‐Valéry Montpellier, France The Everyday in Leonard Woolf’s ‘The Pageant of History’ The modernist period is no doubt marked by a tendency towards the ordinary and the everyday. Recent studies reveal the influence of the everyday in the fiction of such modernist writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens (Randall 2007). It should however be noted that despite the recent interest taken in modernist fiction and its relation to the everyday, the link between the nonfictional works of modernist writers and the everyday remains unexplored. This paper aims to explore the influence of the everyday and the ordinary in one of Leonard Woolf’s essays entitled ‘The Pageant of History’. Though not considered as a modernist writer, Leonard Woolf seems to have shared the modernists’ interest in the everyday and the ordinary. A prolific writer, Leonard Woolf is the author of a great mass of literary and political journalism, several essays, two novels, a volume of short stories, five volumes of autobiography, a play and poetry. In ‘The pageant of History’, Leonard Woolf points to the extraordinary power of the everyday in revealing the history of civilisation and thus illuminates the role of the everyday in modern times. Adrian Paterson, National University of Ireland, Galway ‘Fixing the pitch’: Yeats’s Letters Constructing Modernisms R.F. Foster’s biography of W.B. Yeats vows to concentrate not on what he wrote, but ‘principally on what he did’. Yeats’s letters however stand precisely at the intersection of these two impulses. They are writings, potentially, that stand alone, that serve to illuminate his own writing practices, and that elucidate his position as a newly professionalized principal actor in several coterminous literary marketplaces. Possessing an ‘extraordinary sense of the way things would look to people later on’, as his wife claimed, Yeats left Autobiographies and published diary fragments that would influence 231 the close of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But whether written, typed, or dictated, always considered, tested, never at white heat, Yeats’s letters lay the foundations of such constructions. Nowhere, perhaps, is an ongoing self‐conscious construction of modernism more evident – but nowhere, equally, is this process more contradictory, more compelling in its competing narratives. Nominally non‐fictional, these letters try out many fictions. This paper concentrates on two strands. First the exchange of books and letters with the lawyer John Quinn which take us from a defining ‘event’ in the west of Ireland to London to New York, and which, beginning in excited correspondence about Friedrich Nietzsche, came to define the terms of modernism’s cultural and capital exchanges, with Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and others. The second, correspondence with literary agents (such as A.P. Watt), musical agents, and musicians concerning the copyrights and musical settings of poems and plays pitched, presented, represented, reframed at different audiences, culminating in the adaptation of nineties’ sensibilities to new broadcasting technologies. In multiple narratives and retellings these correspondences construct new writing and acting selves; they put on and take off different masks; they practice, rehearse those makings and remakings of the self on which Yeats’s idiosyncratic versions of modernism depend. Yet at the same time they face outwards to a new milieu of cultural production and reception, causing us to question critical approaches that stop at the finished, printed, unheard (even genetic) text, and consider the dated, correspondent, unpunctuated, unfinished, oral and aural dimensions of modernist constructions. Constructing Modernism as Intermedial: Virginia Woolf’s Essays in Good Housekeeping Magazine. Christine Reynier, University Paul‐Valéry Montpellier 3 – EMMA, France In 1931‐1932, at the height of her career, Virginia Woolf wrote six essays on London for Good Housekeeping magazine, a magazine she is rarely associated with. The essays, apparently written for financial reasons, were dismissed by Woolf as ‘pure brilliant description’ (Letters IV, 22 March 1931). However, such a dismissive attitude was also adopted by Woolf when she was writing her short stories, now regarded as literary masterpieces. This situation should encourage us to read the Good Housekeeping essays, known as The London Scene, for their own sake. Apart from providing an original guided tour of London and conveying the throbbing modernity of the metropolis, I will argue that these lively essays further offer reflections on several art forms while they are themselves informed by them. Their intermedial nature will be explored briefly, within the space allotted by the seminar. On the whole, the six essays will appear to shed an original light on Woolf’s own (essay‐ )writing and help to construct her own brand of modernism differently, as connecting various media and spheres. 232 S45 “Technology and Modernist Fiction” Co‐convenors: Dr Eoghan Smith (Carlow College, Ireland) and Dr Armela Panajoti (University of Vlora, Albania). Tamara Radak, University of Vienna, Austria “SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS” (Joyce, Ulysses 7.1022): Modernism and Machines In The Senses of Modernism (2003), Sara Danius speaks of the ‘myth of the antitechnological bias’ in modernism, rightly calling for a re‐evaluation of the long‐held idea that technology can be seen as the ‘other’ of modernist art at the beginning of the 20th century (except for the specific case of Futurism and its politically‐charged ‘cult of speed’). This paper will explore the significance of specific technical devices and machines (the printing press, the tram, and the automobile) in two texts from the high modernist and late modernist period. Leopold Bloom’s ambivalent relationship towards new technologies in Joyce’s Ulysses (he is at the same time fascinated with the possibilities of technological inventions like the gramophone or the printing press and—somewhat pragmatically— annoyed when a tram blocks his view of a woman’s stocking) will be juxtaposed with a more positive attitude towards technology that the characters in Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) display. In this later text, the incessant buzz and rush of London traffic, as a metaphor for fast‐paced metropolitan life rooted in the present acts as a counterbalance to the Pargiters’ oppressive perpetuation of tradition and as a temporary alleviation of the burden of the past. On a larger scale, this paper demonstrates that technology not only plays an important role as a plot device in these texts, but also contributes to the “dispersal, interruption and fragmentation” (Peach, ed. The Years xiv) of their narrative. Dr. Artur Jaupaj, Canadian Institute of Technology, Albania Technology and Modernist Fiction: Defying Totalitarianism Modernism is central to any discussion of twentieth century art and literature. It has often been labeled the “tradition of the new” or an attempt to reject old habits of thought, mainly the “positivist” attitude of the nineteenth century, by depicting the contemporary situation as chaotic and amidst fluid change due, in part, to technologically driven reality. As such, modernist writers explore fresh ways of exploring human experience and reworking traditional ways of expression towards radically new and innovative models of writing oriented towards the future. Whether their style is elaborate or spare, wordy or elliptical, abstract or concrete, they display a highly self‐conscious use of language and aim at transforming the way we see the world. Along these lines, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, to name a few, question the excessive faith in the power of science and rational inquiry by highlighting the dangers of such fallible attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to present the above‐mentioned novels as exemplary models of defying technological advances of the first half of the twentieth century with regard to rise of totalitarianism, the elimination of high culture, nature of labour, sexuality and deprivation of human freedoms, to name a few. 233 Dr. Daniel Vogel, PWSZ Raciborz (College of Professional Studies in Raciborz), Poland Modernism and the Beginnings of Science Fiction: Herbert George Wells and his Visions of Future Societies Despite the fact that most of the contemporary readers associate Herbert George Wells with the beginnings of science fiction, in fact his literary ouput proves that he was one of the most varied writers of the early 20th century. Easily crossing genres, he produced works whose themes stretch from science fiction to political treaties, from Edwardian satires to Utopian novels, from socialist idealism to gender issues and sexual freedom. More a literary prophet than political activist, Herbert George Wells seemed to foresee at least some of the radical changes in society that were to take place after the outbreak of the First World War. However, his naive utopianism and belief in “the war to end wars” is revised in his more mature fiction, such as The Bulpington Bulp, even if in a typically satirical, Wellsian way. Such a change was the result of atrocities committed during the war, difficult to conceal, but also by the earlier, rather pessimistic predictions concerning possible war in Europe advocated by such writers as Joseph Conrad (i.e. in “Autocracy and War”). This paper traces the beginnings of H.G.Wells’s literary career, with particular emphasis put on the best known works that are classified as science fiction (The Time Machine, War of the Worlds), but also on other futuristic writings of this great, yet controversial artist. In addition to that, am going to examine the influence other artists of that period had on Herbert George Wells, even though he often parodied or criticized them (such as Ford Madox Ford or the aforementioned Joseph Conrad). Wells’s scientific writing left a legacy that reverberates to the present day, yet how his initial ideas developed and changed in the course of time bear analysis, as does how at the end of his life he himself assessed the books he wrote at the turn of the century. Dr. Emine Şentürk, Atılım University, Turkey Auto‐Updated Human Beings in Mike Lancaster’s 0.4 and 1.4 In his short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), E. M. Forster’s main character Kuno criticises the Machine by stating, “We created the Machine to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now” (15). A century has now passed since Forster's story and the Machine has been re‐formed by Mike Lancaster in his novels 0.4 and 1.4. The front cover of 0.4 states “It’s a brave new world.” Having woken up from a state of hypnosis, Kyle and the other three volunteers realise that life has changed. There is no internet or phone connection, and furthermore all the people living in the village appear to be mesmerised: they are "updated". In the sequel 1.4, Lancaster exaggerates the concept of wireless connection, as people are connected to each other via The Link (which is in their heads). The critical portrayal of technology in Lancaster’s series will be the main concern of this paper. What are the limits of integrating technology to our lives? Is technological singularity the inevitable destination of today’s journey? This paper aims to find an answer to these questions, and also the alternatives of asking “What if...?” 234 S46. REPORTAGE AND CIVIL WARS THROUGH THE AGES Convenors John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine, France Alberto Lázaro, University of Alcalá, Spain “The American Civil War and the Irish Press” Paweł Hamera Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland The American Civil War was one of the most defining moments in American history. Moreover, due to the fact that thousands of Irishmen fought on both sides of the conflict, the Civil War played a pivotal role in the shaping of Irish‐American identity. Historians, by and large, have focused on the military aspects of the involvement of the Irish in the war and there are many publications on the Irish brigades which fought on the battlefields of this bloody struggle. Not much, however, has been written on how the conflict was perceived in Ireland. In addition, not enough attention has been paid to how the Civil War was depicted in the Irish press. Analyzing the contents of Irish journals can provide us with some new and interesting insight into this complex confrontation, especially because of the position of Ireland within the British Empire and the presence of the Irish diaspora in the United States. The aim of this paper is to attempt to show how the American Civil War was depicted in the Irish press and contrast the coverage and opinions provided by the Irish newspapers with the way the conflict was portrayed by the British press. “The Real War That Never Gets in the Books: Civil Wars in Whitman and Yeats” Bojana Aćamović University of Belgrade, Serbia Works of poetry contain some of the most powerful accounts of wars, often exposing what the newspapers and history books neglect. For the poets who consider themselves national bards, particularly trying are civil wars, sparked off by internal divisions these poets attempt to surpass. Walt Whitman, who proclaimed himself the American bard just a few years before the Civil War, witnessed the horrors of this national catastrophe as a nurse, taking care of the wounded and the dying. This experience furnished Whitman with the material for the new collections of poems (Drum‐Taps & Sequel to Drum‐Taps) and of prose pieces (Memoranda During the War). Whitman’s war poetry is not the poetry celebrating victories and brave generals, but rather the poetry of ordinary soldiers and of despair. Some decades later, William Butler Yeats, another national bard, found himself in a similar situation, with the outbreak of the Irish civil war. Although perhaps not as prolific on this subject as Whitman, Yeats incorporated the national conflict in his next works (for instance in “Meditations in Time of Civil War”). This paper examines and compares the works of the two poets in aspects related to the civil war years, focusing on overt or covert changes in poetics prompted by the changed circumstances. “Spanish Civil War Books in Estado Novo Portugal and Socialist Hungary between 1945 and 1974” Zsófia Gombár University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES), Portugal 235 António de Oliveira Salazar’s sympathies with General Francisco Franco were an open secret right from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, since Salazar was perfectly aware that the survival of his recently created Estado Novo greatly depended on the Nationalist victory in Spain. Besides direct and indirect military help, the Estado Novo also backed the rebels by manipulation of mass public opinion at home as well as in Spain through pro‐ Nationalist propaganda and information control. Accordingly, all reportage books on the Spanish Civil War that were assumed to have a pro‐Republican bias or described the horrors committed by the Nationalist army were strictly banned such as Searchlight on Spain by the “Red” Duchess of Atholl. The official Hungarian viewpoint on the Spanish Civil War is of course divergently different, especially, in view of the fact that several leading Communist politicians including Ernő Gerő, László Rajk, and Ferenc Münnich fought as volunteers in the International Brigades during the Civil War. The paper thus aims to compare the translation productions of the two countries with reference to the Spanish Civil War. Besides historiographies in translation, Civil War fictions and personal narratives will be investigated in order to shed light on the conspicuous popularity (e.g.: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bells Toll in Hungary) or absence of certain novels (Koestler’s Spanish Testament and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia in both countries). The study draws heavily on the new findings of the Hungarian research project English‐Language Literature and Censorship, 1945—1989 along with the book censorship reports stored at the National Archives of Lisbon. “Spain 1937: Auden, Orwell and Spender in a Moment of (Civil) War” Miquel Berga Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Orwell, Auden and Spender spent time in Spain in the spring of 1937 when the antagonisms between the political forces within the Republican side emerged brutally. After May 1937, the die was cast and the outcome of the Spanish Civil War could be fatally anticipated. Taking Auden’s famous long poem Spain and its significant reverberations in In Memory of WB Yeats as a case study, the paper explores how the diverse experiences of the three writers in the Spain of the civil war produced relevant fissures between their public and private voices and how the very awareness of this disharmony was to shape the personal relationship between them and, what is more important, was to resonate in their ulterior literary output. Their individual responses to the strains of experiencing the Spanish war and its politics gave a new and clear sense to their views on the function of literature and became pivotal in the defining and refining of their political stand. “From Reporting to Reportage: Nationalist and Republican Oral Recollections of the Spanish Civil War, A Case Study of Murcia” Margarita Navarro Pérez Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, Spain The Spanish Civil War, as we Spanish see it, was a war between brothers, between individuals who knew each other, neighbours and relatives who suddenly were involved in a conflict many wished they could avoid. Today, almost 80 years after, (re)‐constructing our collective memory/ies of such an event is no easy task, history books, film and media, together with people’s testimonies offer a way of trying to understand how it is perceived and understood today. This presentation proposes an alternative way of looking into the 236 Spanish Civil War, exploring the collective memories of those who lived to tell their stories and were willing to do so. In this talk, I will present the preliminary sketch of what will become a more extensive study of different perceptions and representations of the war in Spain. I will, therefore, consider both eyewitness accounts and those passed on to later generations by both Republicans and Nationalists, looking into how these recollections combine with contemporary representations to form a collective memory of this historical moment. Based on personal interviews with several surviving eyewitnesses and their recollections of what they read in the press per what they actually experienced, this talk argues that reportage, in particular during times of war, can also be created by those who are not actively involved in the act of reporting. Juxtaposing personal accounts of the war that have not yet been recorded against those accounts that were documented help to demonstrate how a country’s understanding and view on such a nation changing event as the Civil War was in Spain, changes and evolves as time goes by, proving that reportage is much more than the recording of events – it is also a lived experience shared between people and generations and thus recoverable only through oral documentation. Moreover, these testimonies combine with media representations (films and documentaries) to fuel the constructions of collective memory/ies of contemporary Spain. “Two Conflicting Irish Views of the Spanish Civil War” Alberto Lázaro University of Alcalá, Spain The Spanish Civil War sparked a heated debate in the recently created Irish Free State, as the Republic of Ireland was then called. A country that had also gone through an eleven‐ month civil war over the Anglo‐Irish Treaty of 1921 was again divided between those who supported the left‐wing democratic Spanish Republican government and those who favoured Franco’s “crusade” against atheists and Marxists. In fact, some Irish volunteers joined the International Brigades to confront Fascism together with the Spanish Republican forces, while other more conservative Irish Catholics were mobilised to fight with Franco’s army against those Reds that the media claim to be responsible for killing priests and burning churches. Both sections were often moved by the news, accounts and interpretations of the Spanish war that emerged at that time. This paper aims to discuss the war reportage of two Irish writers who describe the war from the two opposite sides: Peadar O'Donnell (1893‐1986), a prominent Irish socialist activist and novelist who wrote Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937), and Eoin O’Duffy (1892‐1944), a soldier, anti‐ communist activist and police commissioner who raised the Irish Brigade to fight with Franco’s army and wrote The Crusade in Spain (1938). Both contributed to the dissemination of information and ideas about the Spanish conflict with their eyewitness accounts, and both raise obvious questions about the relations between fact, fiction and the truth, using similar narrative strategies and rhetorical devices to portray different versions of the same war. 237 S47: The paradoxical quest of the wounded hero in contemporary narrative fiction. Convenors: Jean‐Michel Ganteau (U. of Montpellier 3) and Susana Onega (U. of Zaragoza) Susana Onega Learning to love: The paradoxical Quest of the Male Protagonists in Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time Jeanette Winterson’s rewriting of Shakespeare’ The Winter’s Tale is a good example of creative misreading in Harold Bloom sense of the term. In Winterson’s “cover version” the Shakespearian topos of philia as a necessary stage in the maturation process of the male characters before matrimony and reproduction is given an overtly sexual component that complicates this progress and brings to the fore the matrophobic and even matricidal elements underlying the patriarchal configuration of the nuclear family. Leo and Xeno, themselves the victims of inadequate nuclear families, enjoy a complex male friendship that is disrupted by Leo’s incapacity to share Mimi’s love with Xeno. This triggers what Wilson Knight famously called the Shakespearean “hate‐theme” (The Wheel of Fire, passim) whose obvious target is the heavily pregnant MiMi and whose tragic consequences are the death of Leo and MiMi’s son Milo and the disappearance of their newly born daughter, Perdita. While MiMi and Perdita are clear examples of the vulnerability of women in patriarchy, it is the two men, Leo and Xeno, who must learn from their mistakes, if they are to mature and heal their self‐inflicted wounds. The paper argues that the “happy” ending of the novel is achieved when, abandoning their narcissistic positions, Leo and Xeno understand the importance of the family and of responsible fatherhood through the example of Perdita’s foster‐father Shep and the influence of Leo’s secretary, Pauline, a middle‐aged Jewish woman embodying the ethics of love attributed by Emmanuel Levinas to biblical Rebecca. Eileen Williams‐Wanquet Title: Anita Brookner’s wounded heroine Anita Brookner’s 24 novels (1981‐2009) have as central consciousness a single protagonist, who is usually female, and the successive heroines can be considered as multiples of one another. This highly egocentric yet deeply wounded heroine is self‐ defined by invisibility, which belies her calm and rational appearance and is expressed through obsessive themes and images of sadness, loneliness, exclusion and anguish. The unhappiness that defines her, far from being the result of a willed and Romantic form of rebellious self‐definition, stems from a failure to control her life and fulfil her quest for love and inclusion, which encompasses the relation to and responsibility for the other. Her quest for happiness is a traditional one founded upon a humanist ethics based on the centrality of the subject and on Christian rationality, but she ironically obtains the opposite of what she expects. The victim of familial and historical forces that she does not control, and especially of the deceitful moral codes transmitted by the “classic realist texts” that have fashioned her, incapable of controlling her life, Brookner’s heroine finally resigns herself to a form of death‐in‐life. Her wounds are not willingly self‐inflicted, but passively undergone and finally embraced as a defining characteristic. She explains her vulnerability by her misguided belief in humanist ethics, the very failure of which seems to point towards an ethics of alterity. 238 Chiara Battisti “Am I Still Alice?”: the quest for “a sense of the self” and Alzheimer's disease in the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova “She was Alice Howland, brave and remarkable hero”; “she was Alice Howland, Alzheimer’s victim”. These quotations, taken from the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova (2007), highlight and describe the main character, Alice, as an emblematic wounded hero. Alice, a 50‐year‐old woman, is a cognitive psychology Professor at the University of Harvard and a prominent expert in psycholinguistics. She is married to an equally successful husband, and they have three grown‐up children. Her life suddenly changes when she is diagnosed early‐onset Alzheimer's disease. My paper aims, therefore, at offering a reflection on Alice’s quest and struggle with the loss of herself, including her career, individuality, cognition, and connection to the world around her. I will analyse the way in which Alzheimer's literary representation, as offered by Lisa Genova, negotiates contemporary biomedical and disability studies discourses. Alice’s growing vulnerability allows us to consider the ethical issue of representing vulnerable subjects. According to Thomas Couser, the main ethical principles of biomedicine should be applied to forms of life writing dealing with vulnerable subjects so that their subjects "have the opportunity to exercise some degree of control [at least till it is possible for them] over what happens to their stories."(T. Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, 19). In the specific case of Alzheimer’s, the responsibility of speaking for the vulnerable person at a certain moment shifts to other people. The caregivers (family network and friend) are “credited with the power/responsibility to [… reinterpret] the language of Alzheimer's […giving] new meanings to the actions and inaction of the victims of Alzheimer's" (C. Gilleard and P. Higgs, Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature, 186.)The idea of selfhood which emerges from these considerations allow us to use the concept of “second Personhood” to describe Alice’s quest. This concept, as outlined by Mieke Bal, indicates, in fact, the derivative status of personhood in which the self is described in relation to other persons. In the essay, I will also focus my critical attention on the role of the caregivers, defined by Richard Glatzer‐ who co‐directed the cinematic transposition of this novel‐“the real unsung heroes”. I think that the novel stresses the impact of Alzheimer’s on those around Alice, in particular on her husband and on her three grown‐up children, and thus evokes the issues of the “ethics of care” and empathy on which I will extensively reflect. Laura Colombino Bodies and Landscapes in Pain: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Entrapped in the dominant discourse of their models, the clones of Never Let Me Go embrace a biopolitics of suffering. In the novel, the concept of a universal human nature, presented through the perspective of a marginal wounded other, intersects with both postmodern concerns for the simulacral and a neo‐modernist interest in the depths of consciousness — a combination quite common in recent British fiction. The fictitious quality of imagined essences (Hailsham which stands for the country house; actors in an advert who stand for happy and fulfilled real people; the map of England for the country itself) combines with the sense that they are the loci of unspeakable traumas and ontological crises, in order to foreground an ethical seriousness beyond postmodern irony. Similarly, the clones’ corporeality (their only recognised essence) remains itself the traumatic real at the margin of their consciousness: their insides are linguistically repressed and understated, hidden just below the surface of ‘good manners’. The paper analyses the interplay between neo‐humanist empathy, postmodern simulacra and the 239 traumatic real through the relationship between the corporeality of the clones and the physical environments they inhabit. It shows how, through its imaginative association with the suffering body, a simulacral country is turned into a landscape of pain. Roberto del Valle Alcalá Wounds of Precariousness, Paradoxes of Capital: Subjectivity and Servile Life in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go My aim in this paper is to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) through a theoretical reassessment of neoliberal forms of subjectivity and labour. I will suggest that this novel’s examination of the notion of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998) through a dystopian re‐imagination of recent biopolitical history has to be understood in relation to operative disjunctions and discontinuities at the heart of neoliberalism’s project of subject formation. Beyond the figures of ‘human capital’ and ‘entrepreneurship of the self’ stressed by Foucault’s well‐known analyses (2008), neoliberalism remains a project of decomposition and recomposition at the level of ‘dividuals’, a process of functional and affective enlistment, or, as Deleuze and Guattari say, of ‘machinic enslavement’ (2011), through which the body of the workforce (living labour or human capital, indeed, but reconsidered in less essentialising ways) assumes many of the specific traits of fixed capital. Following Marx’s definition of the latter as the depository of accumulated knowledge or ‘general intellect’ (1973), I will argue that the tasks of memory and narration in this novel become detached from humanistic determinations of the subjective and are rediscovered in machinic assemblages or arrangements that subvert the ethical and epistemological hierarchies of labour and agency in contemporary capitalism. With its recreation of the constitutively wounded and precarious existence of a group of clones who willingly partake in their own slow destruction, Ishiguro’s novel emerges as a fictional gloss on the post‐humanist aspects of contemporary capitalist life, shedding new light on the paradoxical complicity rehearsed by neoliberal subjects in their own exploitation and suffering. This paper will attempt to explicate and ultimately overcome this fundamental paradox in contemporary biopolitics by moving beyond the notion of bare life through which the novel has been read (De Boever 2013) and proposing instead the concept of ‘servile life’. Jean‐Michel Ganteau Espousing the Wound: Dispossession as Practice in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin (2006) evokes, in contemporary Bildungsroman fashion, the life of David Carter, a museum curator with a special interest in hoarding mundane, ordinary treasures. Each chapter begins with the description of an exhibit, taken from the protagonist’s or a citizen’s past, making the narrative veer towards the exhibition catalogue. Contemporary history looms large in David’s life, as we follow him from his childhood years in war‐time London to the present. As is the case with McGregor’s three novels, So Many Ways to Begin is a trauma story, making individual and collective traumas meet. Openness to one’s own wound is what characterises this story in which vulnerability looms large, i.e. not only the protagonist’s vulnerability but his exposure to the other’s pain, as made clear through the story of his couple and his consistent support of his depressed, equally traumatised wife. Espousing the wound is one of the main themes of the novel, and certainly the central mode of individuation for the protagonist who 240 becomes the picture of attention to his own and the other’s historical, anthropological and more personal frailty. Heteronomy to the wound appears as the main mode of self‐ definition, and provides the ground for a praxis that makes exposure to the other not only a theoretical option but also a practice of care. In So Many Ways to Begin, dependence on (one’s or the others’) wounds may thus be seen in terms of dispossession, in Athanasiou and Butler’s dual meaning of the term. By espousing the values and dynamics of vulnerability, the novel promotes an ethical model that goes beyond the Levinasian template and favours a Ricoeurian version, very much predicated on a practice of openness to the other. Pascale Tollance Barely Alive: Rewriting Sacrificial Passion in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1983) Coetzee’s Michael K can be seen in many respects as the ultimate vulnerable man: coloured (in the context of apartheid South‐Africa), hare‐lipped and “simple”, he is “a wandering monad” (Leblanc) who manages to survive on barely nothing and refuses to take the food he is given (a reminder of Kafka’s hunger artist). As Nadine Gordimer’s famous review of the novel makes clear, it is not so much the fact that Michal K should remain on the margins of the country’s political strife which has caused some to voice reservations; more provoking is the sense that the character becomes, in the most paradoxical way, a hero of some kind (hence Gordimer’s stark judgement: “Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it”). Michael K’s power lies in a form of “recalcitrance” (Leblanc) that could be likened to the resistance of “non‐resistance”, as analysed by Derrida in Résistances – which leads the medical officer who is haunted by Michael to comment on “the originality of the resistance [he] offer[s]”: “You were not even a hero and did not pretend to be, not even a hero of fasting. In fact you did not resist at all”. Rather than someone living outside his “times”, Michael K can be considered to belong to a “heterotopic space” or a “counter‐space” anchored in “the pitiless topia of the body” (Foucault). The description of his stay in the camp as “an allegory […] of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” also carries strong echoes of Agamben’s “inclusive exclusion” and of the power of “bare life”. Whilst being “on the verge of extinction” (Leblanc), a figure “of being rather than of becoming” (Coetzee), Michael K stands out for his drive and determination to go back to the land, first with his sick mother, then with his mother’s ashes, and finally with the seeds he has collected. When all heroic schemes have been undermined, when the paternal function of insemination has been replaced by that of dissemination (Atwell), one can still look at Michael K’s life and its multiple journeys and ordeals as a passion of sorts – a passion without transcendence or redemption. Maria Grazia Nicolosi “... the excellent pain that was wanting and needing, that was love” Willed Wounds: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Masochism in A. L. Kennedy’s Fiction Inspired by that line of the French intellectual tradition wherein ‘perverse’ configurations in the interplay of self and other sustain politically, ethically and aesthetically radical registers, recent critical‐theoretical work and literary‐visual representations have turned to masochism as an imaginative mode articulating resistant accounts of subjectivity well beyond the sexual‐psychical dimension. Masochism has been described as a paradoxical 241 ascesis through which the self works to dismantle its own protection by practising “forms of self‐divesture not grounded in a teleology (or a theology) of the suppression of the ego” (Bersani, 2008: 55). The masochist aspires – however pathologically – to remedy the perceived insignificance of the self in the world and to overcome alienation by renouncing his/her own alienated freedom for a rebellious kind of pleasure experienced through subjection to somebody/something wilfully aggrandised (Butler, 35‐53). It is this metaphysical aspiration to “binding the void” via the assumed proximity of power and powerlessness, violence and desire, trust and vulnerability that allows the non‐ coincidence of the self with itself to be envisaged as the constituted excess by which (sado‐ )masochistic cruelty consumes its ontological borders and opens onto subversive possibilities. As a form of pedagogy resisting to and evacuating the paternal law (Deleuze, 1991: 93‐112), masochism is re‐positioned as conducive to personal ‘conversion’ and large‐scale transformation. These claims will assist my reading of select fiction by A. L. Kennedy. Her obsessive journeying through places of brokenness and pain, her fascination with ‘perverse’ economies of desire, her imaginative concern for the socially invisible confined to psychic and material conditions of “lessness” would corroborate the idea of masochism as a wound to both the body and the self‐contained subject. But if “the violation of the body […] breaks through our discontinuity from the other” (Benjamin, 1988: 63), then, Kennedy’s fiction appears to promote new modes of relationality that, in embracing risk‐taking encounters with alterity, cut across secure aesthetic ground via formal experimentation and establish the ethical and emotional configuration of her work to be a derelict version of the Grail quest myth (Summers‐Bremner, 2004: 134). Merve Sarikaya‐Sen Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life: The Wounded Hero’s Anti‐Quest in a Chaos Narrative Hanya Yanagihara’s Booker‐shortlisted A Little Life (2015) is a wound narrative which documents the limits of pain and suffering one can endure and embrace. The novel begins as a Bildungsroman which chronicles the lives of four friends, Malcolm, Willem, JB, and Jude, moving to New York after graduation. The focus gradually shifts to lame Jude who wallows in his traumatic past because of his ghastly childhood and adulthood experiences including sexual and physical abuse. Far from the conventions of a Bildungsroman which usually revolves around a quest for personal development, A Little Life pursues a relentless quest for embracing suffering as a form of self‐definition by delving into Jude’s harrowing life crystallized in his physical and psychical wounds. Jude’s traumatic past drags him from disgrace towards self‐hatred as evidenced in his masochistic relationships, addiction to self‐harm, and eventually suicide. Rather than trying to heal his wounds, Jude chooses to live with them. In doing so, the novel tends towards chaos narratives in which suffering is overwhelming and wounds never heal (Arthur W. Frank). Evidently, the novel gainsays the romantic struggle to overcome one’s sufferings and instead privileges the agency of extreme sufferings and vulnerability which act as self‐definition mechanisms (Martha Nussbaum). Aristi Trendell The Portrait of the Artist as a Wounded Hero in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys In his 1995 novel, Wonder Boys, which associates elements of the Kunstler Roman and the Campus novel, signature genres of what Mark McGurl calls “the Prograrm Era” (the period marked by the postwar rise of creative writing programs in American Universities) in his 242 eponymous study, Michael Chabon, focuses on the dislocation, disorientation and self‐ destructiveness that characterise the modern hero in search for self‐definition. Chabon's wounded hero, Graddy Tripp, in perpetual trouble of his own making, is put into perspective through a mirror of mentorships that highlight “the midnight disease,” the artist's compulsive confrontation with the black hole of existence, which eats his life away. Is the institutionalisation of the creative writer in the Program Era a blight or a blessing for the wounded hero, traditionally represented by the figure of the artist? Chabon seems to have his cake and eat it too. Indeed, while he preserves the romantic aura of the wounded hero at the mercy of his midnight disease, he puts up for consideration an additional role a creative writer can take on, that of the institutionalized Master, which could enhance the artist's social function and balance the woes and setbacks of the writer. Angelo Monaco Self‐definition through Melancholia in William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault Against the backdrop of the debate on the ethic turn in contemporary Anglophone narrative, my paper intends to reflect on the exilic identity of the eponymous protagonist in William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), the third and last volume of his Big House trilogy. Trevor’s tale, which hinges on secrets and silences, articulates a melancholia of resistance and consolation that illuminates vulnerability as a way of self‐definition. Lucy’s self‐imposed exile from the world is marked by guilt and abnegation: the lonely child of a Protestant family in danger, she refuses to leave Lahardane. In search of an identity of her own, Lucy becomes increasingly concerned with the preservation of the cultural and historical memory of Lahardane, which grows into a healing and contemplative place tangential to the 1921 Irish Troubles and World War II. Trevor, therefore, views loss as a source of strength rather than weakness and his heroine’s vulnerability engenders consolation rather destruction. Like a modern Saint Cecilia, Lucy endures her wounds behind Lahardane’s walls. The journey towards her self‐ definition, in conclusion, takes place along a road of vulnerability marked by a Levinasian‐ inspired ethical care which opens up to the suffering of the “other”, even when the “other” is the very source of loss. 243 S48. Spaces of erasure, spaces of silence: Re‐voicing the silenced stories of Indian Partition The present seminar tries to focus on the voices and narratives generally overlooked by historical mainstream discourses, in the attempt to nuance and deepen the traumatic experience of Indian Partition as depicted in the Indian English novel. Starting from the idea of spatial disruption and its devastating consequences on national and individual identity triggered by Partition, the seminar welcomes proposals on the reconfigurations of domestic spaces, on women’s and children’s untold stories and their alternative narrative spaces, on spaces of gendered violence, on various strategies of recuperation, re‐voicing and re‐membering the Partition. Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, ITALY Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, ROMANIA WOMEN AUTHORS ON INDIAN PARTITION: THE MOTIF OF HOME WITHIN PARTITION NARRATIVES Arunima Dey, Ph.D Student, University of Salamanca, Spain It is common knowledge that the partition of the Indian subcontinent witnessed one of the largest migrations in recent history. For the first few decades, the gory details of the partition were brushed aside and attention was diverted towards the euphoria of independence from the British Raj after two hundred years. However, various historians, socio‐feminists and cultural theorists started to investigate the partition through various lenses and several alternate histories of partition began to emerge. The focus was moved from political parties and leaders to the consequences of the partition on the masses. Literature, too, began to make its contribution to the now ever‐growing archive of partition. My focus here is on partition literature by women and their focus on the private space of home as suppose to the public space. The gendered division of the public and the private has ascribed home as the feminine space, which is bereft of history. My paper will argue how this idea is contested by women authors who demonstrate the significance of private spaces and personal narratives that chronicle the trauma of partition on lives of women. The novels I will primary focus on will be Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980). I will argue that Desai and Hosain deliberately do not engage directly with partition violence and politics of the state, but rather focus on the domestic space and the ruptures within its family members that symbolise the breaking of the nation. In a nutshell, the paper will focus on the varied methods through which Desai and Hosain, through their novels, paint silenced and hidden stories on the partition. ELOQUENT SILENCES: A GENDERED RETELLING OF PARTITION NARRATIVES Sarvani Ravula, Ph.D. Scholar, Osmania University, Hyderabad. India The partition of the Indian subcontinent is not a “closed chapter of history” and it cannot be “put away inside the covers of history books” (Butalia 5) as the painful memories and the traumatic experiences “continue to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future” (Jalal 3). Seen as symbols of the “honour” (Butalia 143), women bore the brunt of the savage violence of the 244 partition. “Some seventy‐five thousand women were raped, and many disfigured or dismembered” (Dalrymple). There is a need, therefore, to re‐view the partition and its legacy from the perspectives of sexuality and gender, the two “critical axes … [that] provide an understanding that does not simply supplement the orthodox historiography but interrogates, and rewrites its narratives” (Kaul 10). This paper, thus, makes an attempt at ‘a gendered retelling of the partition’ through a study of short stories such as “Roots” by Ismat Chutgai, “A Leaf in the Storm” by Lalithambika Antharjanam, “Family Ties” by Shauna Singh Baldwin, and “Exile” by Jamila Hashmi which will help us “to listen to the hidden nuance, the half‐said thing, the silences which are sometimes more eloquent than speech” (Butalia 11). STATE‐MAKING, VIOLENCE AND THE OTHER IN TABISH KHAIR'S FILMING Om Prakash Dwivedi, Assistant Professor in English, Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University, India Tabish Khair's Filming contains the covert theme of the cleaving of united Hindustan into two segregated parts‐ India and Pakistan, and the ensuing tragedies that enveloped people on both sides of the barbed wires. In the present paper, I will be exploring how self‐ centred or community‐centred political aspirations can propagate a cycle of violence and concomitantly (un)settle a large number of people and incite genocide. Such a result always underpins forced demarcations of barbed wires, and quite rightly, Khair questions the partition history of India which has surprisingly gone unregistered at official levels. The present paper will also engage with the notion of ‘Otherness’ or difference as witnessed in Filming. It will show how it has become increasingly important in the present world, poised on the axis of deep‐hatred to treat the Other in an inhuman and beastly manner. The aim of examining this communal violence in the novel is to project the suffering and chaos that it brings to human society, and to offer a viable alternative, by investigating some other theorists, in order to overcome this suffering. RELIVING PARTITION IN EASTERN INDIA: MEMORIES OF AND MEMOIRS BY WOMEN ACROSS THE BORDERS Dr. Sharmistha Chatterjee Sriwastav, Aliah University, Kolkata, India Genocide in Bangladesh: 1971 (2015), edited by A.K.M Nasimul Kamal is a well‐ documented, organised and factual record of newspaper clippings from all over the world. A collective effort, it is an objective, yet horrific account of the brutal atrocities of West Pakistanis on the Bengalis in East Pakistan, carefully interspersed with the international politics behind it. Compared to this unparalleled book and many others like this, memoirs by individual women recording the carnage during the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle are pale, unreliable and flickering comments on the events and the real politick behind the bloodbath. Yet as the paper argues, these memoirs and interviews by various women, from all walks of life, do create an alternative history‐ a history characterised and problematized by doubts, gaps, lapses, silences, turbulences and half realized truths. Autobiographical accounts by Begum Mushtari Shafi ( translated,2006),and Farida Huq (2008), former a social activist and latter an educationist coupled with interviews given by several ordinary, poor women across the borders ( recorded in 2009) demand closer attention to themselves by recreating the gruesome days. Falling back on their personal 245 repertoire which oscillates between the home and the world, these largely anecdotal narratives fill in the void of homogeneous official records. These memoirs do retrieve how women acted or were acted upon in the devastation which changed their lives permanently. WHEN SILENCE BREAKS INTO COLOURS: SPACES OF REMEMBRANCE IN SORAYYA KHAN’S NOOR Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, Romania This paper focuses upon the various strategies Sorayya Khan uses in her 2006 novel Noor in order to evoke the tragic events that led to the creation of Bangladesh. Considered to be the first Pakistani novel to deal with the events in the East Pakistan and thus break the silence that generally envelops the subject, Noor (2006) gradually recreates the horrors and absurdity of the war, metaphorically bringing together, by virtue of the immense suffering they brought, the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 conflict between East and West Pakistan. While analysing the dialectical workings of silence and remembering, Khan builds her novel as a metaphorical site where forgetfulness and remembrance create their own spaces that vie for supremacy. The past, and all its cathartic memories, is slowly brought to life out of this conflict that opposes spaces, generations, individuals and communities. The element that provides the connection between a past safely insulated in the willed amnesia of a cosy household and a future that does no longer accept the secrets and silences of unhealed wounds, is the ekphrastic introduction of a collection of paintings achieved by Noor that preserves intertextual echoes of many Bangladeshi artistic representations of the 1971 war. 246 S49. THE POSTCOLONIAL SLUM: INDIA IN THE GLOBAL LITERARY IMAGINARY In the global literary imaginary, the slum life in India is most often stereotypically pictured as a source of fear, abjection, poverty, hunger, overpopulation, dirt and disorder. These fictional representations of marginal spaces maintain, proliferate, and legitimize cultural polarizations, projecting a discrediting light upon the entire Indian space and the South Asian city in general. Starting from diverse depictions of the slum in Indian English novels the present panel seeks to analyze the recent reconfigurations in the biopolitics of slums in the context of capitalist based globalization, and the way they encapsulate Indian reality in the global literary imaginary, questioning its postcoloniality. Dr. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow‐Deva Road, INDIA. Dr. Daniela Rogobete, University of Craiova, ROMANIA Wednesday 8.30 – 10.30 1. Syed Haider, Living with Ambivalence: Slums and Modernisation in 8.30 – 8.50 India 2. Cristina M. Gámez‐Fernández, A Safe Journey in Mumbai’s Slums: the Journalistic Literary Genre in Sonia Faleiro and Katherine Boo 3. Chun Fu, “In the Name of Progress”: A Critique of Capitalist 9.10‐ 9.30 Development in The Last Man in Tower 4. Jagdish Batra, India: A Postmodern Melange 9.30‐9.50 5. Discussions 9.50‐ 10.30 8.50‐ 9.10 LIVING WITH AMBIVALENCE: SLUMS AND MODERNISATION IN INDIA Dr. Syed Haider, Director of Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK In a three part documentary produced by the BBC and aired in 2012, the viewer is taken on a journey through the slums of India – from Mumbai to Kolkata – encountering the poverty that was depicted in iconic fashion by Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), as well as the ingenuity and tenacity of those living in the slums. These two frames, the filth and danger of the slums, with its gangs, substance abuse and exploitation, and the remarkable resourcefulness of its inhabitants, exist simultaneously in the popular imagination and depictions of slums inside and outside India. What this paper seeks to explore is the reasons why ‘the slum’ as space and metaphor captures the cultural and literary imagination, as well as interpreting the contested iconicity that slums like Dharvi in particular have acquired. Surveying a wide range of texts, from fictional works like Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger to films and documentaries that portray slum‐life, ‘Living with ambivalence’ argues that the discordance such cultural texts express about ‘the slum’ 247 is in fact an ambivalence that surrounds India’s rapid modernisation and integration into a capitalist world order. A SAFE JOURNEY IN MUMBAI’S SLUMS: THE JOURNALISTIC LITERARY GENRE IN SONIA FALEIRO AND KATHERINE BOO Dr. Cristina M. Gámez‐Fernández, Cordoba University, Spain This paper seeks to analyze slum journalistic depictions and character literary explorations in Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (2011) in contrast with Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012). Exceptional converging characteristics between both productions deserve critical attention. First, none of the books is described as fiction, but as literary journalism. Their authors have documented their narratives out of journalistic research. Second, both publications are based on Mumbai’s darkest underworld of dance bars and Annawadi’s garbage pickers respectively. Third, their titles offer to disclose the beauty hidden in unexpected loci and attempt to provide a deeper reading of Bombayite reality. However, half way between journalism and literary fiction, this phenomenon features a narrative mode recently fostered by global literary markets which secures true stories for Western readers’ curiosity amalgamated with literary style. These journalistic literary portraits will be explored particularly through notions looked into by sociologist and historian Mike Davis (Planet of Slums, 2006) and Mrinalini Chakravorti (In Stereotype, 2014). Both develop complementing perspectives from urban theory and power and from literary investigation in stereotypes which generates fresh responses to the issues affecting globalization. “IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS”: A CRITIQUE OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT IN THE LAST MAN IN TOWER Dr. Chun Fu, National IIan University, Taiwan Arundhati Roy notes that Indian poverty has become a consumable and marketable spectacle that increasingly boosts up slum tourism, further widens the gap between the haves and the have‐nots, and downgrades humanity, since equality never figures in the market economy. By extension, the world is never as flat as it was. “Behind the beautiful forevers,” a la Katherine Boo, the price the land and its people paid for this “shining” accomplishment is not disclosed at all. Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower gives us a drama between the ruthless developer Shah and the unrelenting Masterji, challenges humanity how to face the seduction of money and withhold moral integrity at a time globalization breaks down all borders and barriers in the name of progress. Karl Marx is indeed prophetic in Communist Manifesto that “capitalism has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells” (17). In this vein, capitalist development in India is like a train running at full speed, heading toward the unknown under the command of a neoliberalist driver, at the expense of the good for the millions. INDIA: A POSTMODERN MELANGE Dr. Jagdish Batra, Jt. Director, English Language Centre, O.P. Jindal Global University 248 It is not a happy scenario when just as ordinary and uninformed people belonging to the western hemisphere view India as a backward and slum‐like state, most literary writers too think of India in similar vein – something unexpected of enlightened people with wide access to valid knowledge databases. Unfortunately, Indian authors depict sordid scenes in their fiction, more to drum up their socialist/humanist credentials for domestic consumption than to seriously scrutinize the politics behind the establishment of these settlements in our times when economic graph is going up. And then catering to the western audiences craving for exotic narratives – an instance of ‘Re‐Orientalism’ ensures huge sales of their books. My paper examines the works of some such authors like Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Nagarkar, Aravind Adiga, Indra Sinha, et al to underline the imbalance in their representation of socio‐political problems and the way this imbalance is capitalized on in global literature. I argue that with all its inequities and infirmities, India is a ‘postmodern melange’ rather than a ‘postcolonial slum’. 249 S50: “Globalisation and Violence” Conveners: Pilar Cuder‐Domínguez (University of Huelva, Spain) and Cinta Ramblado‐ Minero (University of Limerick, Ireland) Wang, Ginger (National Taipei University, Taiwan): “A Network of Deceptions: Re‐ membering Violence in Garden of Evening Mists” This paper reads Tan Twan Eng’s Garden of Evening Mists (2012) to examine the psychosocial impact of war memories and the network of deceptions Teoh Yun Ling, the narrator and also a Girton‐educated retired judge in independent Malaysia, builds up when remembering the unspeakable hardships as a “Guest of the Emperor” in a secret Japanese prison camp. In the confinement, her sister is repeatedly raped as a comfort woman while she is assigned as the camp’s interpreter and becomes the sole survivor of war atrocities. Yun Ling and her sister distance themselves from the wartime ordeal as slaves by dreaming to plant a classical Japanese garden with mesmerizing allure. To make a Japanese garden, therefore, opens up a crack for judge Teoh to reconcile with a violent past when she suffers from a degenerative neurological condition that will inevitably lead to aphasic dementia. To imagine as well as remember the allurements of a “garden of evening mists” becomes their last resort to dissociate from catastrophic adversities. Yet, “every aspect of gardening is a form of deception,” says Aritomo, the self‐exiled former gardener to the Emperor of Japan and master of shakkei (borrowed scenery). He teaches Yun Ling the tactics to play with light and shadow, namely, the skills of deceptive trompe l’oeil vistas. To re‐member, succinctly put, to start afresh the mobilization of the traumatized people and to conjure up the war ferocities before she forgets, Yun Ling borrows from South African, Chinese, Japanese and Malaysian characters and cultures to weave a network of deceptions to reveal her traumatic memory of violence incurred by the Japanese imperialists. When she comes to realize that a garden is not a garden but trauma in disguise, it will not take her long to see beyond deceptions. BIO: Ginger Wang is Associate Professor at the Dept. of Foreign Languages and Applied Linguistics, National Taipei University (Taiwan). Her research interests are contemporary English novels, postcolonial studies and literary theories. She is the author of Homeless Strangers in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro: Floating Characters in a Floating World (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008) and guest editor of the special issue: Fear and Chaos in Contemporary British Literature for Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (2012). She has also published articles on Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Mitchell. Ruthven, Andrea (U of Vigo, Spain): “‘Killing is easy when you can feel nothing’: Posthuman Transnational Violence in Sense8” In her work on the posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti has affirmed the need to move past the model of Humanism to question both the anthropocentric bias and to introduce “a new brand of materialism, of the embodied and embedded kind” (22). In this respect, she sees within the concept of posthumanity an “attempt to devise renewed claims to community and belonging by singular subjects who have taken critical distance from humanist individualism” (39). The Wachowskis’s 2015 Netflix series Sense8 imagines posthuman connectivities that enable those with a certain genetic mutation to be mentally linked to seven other bodies and to experience an increased connection to others with the same mutation. Including a cast and setting that spans eight countries and a variety of racial, sexual and gender 250 orientations, at first glance the series appears to offer an innovative and inclusive configuration of what posthumanity can look like. Those in each ‘cluster’, that is each group of eight, have access to each others’ emotions, experiences, language and thoughts. By sharing the skills and feelings of seven other people, spread across the globe, the potential for imagining affective communities that cross national, economic, sexual and racial boundaries, and privilege the sensorial and corporeal affects is raised. Troublingly, however, the twelve episodes comprising the first (and to date only) season of the series are predicated on the violence that results when an us‐versus‐them divide between the humans and the posthumans is defended. If the contemporary affective turn theorises the way in which supposedly good and bad affects circulate between bodies, the Wachowskis’s series appears to suggest that ability to engage in physical violence is a necessary attribute for the posthuman experience. This paper will explore the way in which violence is used as more than just a plot device within the television drama, questioning the way in which it becomes the defining trait of the sense8 –in this case the posthuman– experience. Though one of the characters points out that for humans to kill each other is easy, given that they can feel nothing of the other person’s pain, it is the posthumans who more often than not share their potential and capacity for violence between themselves, thereby raising questions about the intrinsic nature of violence in both human and posthuman experiences. BIO: Andrea Ruthven is a researcher with the Bodies in Transit/Cuerpos en Tránsito research project at the University of Vigo. Her doctoral thesis at the University of Barcelona (2015) interrogated the ways in which violent women, especially action heroines, are represented in contemporary literatures. She has published the essays “La Violencia Sexuada en los Cómics: ¿Quién Salvará el Mundo?” and “The Woman Warrior: Rejecting Utopia”, among others. Molares Pascual, Selene (University of Vigo): “In a violent world: institutional violence against women in Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness.” While its presence in the book market is as significant as ever, Young Adult (YA) fiction has been accused of being increasingly dark and aggressive, especially after the publication of novels that depict the cruellest parts of the lives of many adolescents around the world. These depictions of real life (which may be conveyed either through realistic fiction or through other genres such as fantasy or science fiction) contain explicit acts of violence performed by and against teenagers. However, violence can take many forms, and while the complaints have only been issued over signs of physical harm, YA literature has also shown and denounced types of institutional violence in which social and cultural organisations threaten the freedom and well‐being of individuals. These signs of violence have been overseen both in many analysis of YA literature and in real life. The aim of this paper is to analyse the forms of physical and psychological violence inflicted by social and political institutions against women as presented in Tamora Pierce’s quartet The Song of the Lioness. This YA series, which has been translated into several languages and sold copies all over the world, was first published in the decade of the eighties (1983‐1988), but its values and critiques towards society and its conventions are still up to date. From the banning of women from certain spaces and professions to the witch‐hunt and the displacement of refugees, the topics of the quartet can be read not only as a recapitulation of historical acts of violence towards women, but also as a representation of current situations of injustice in our globalised civilisation. 251 Bio: Selene Molares Pascual holds a BA in English Philology by the University of Vigo with a specialisation in English Literature and a MA in Documentation Management, Libraries and Archives by the Complutense University of Madrid with a specialisation in Bibliographic Heritage. At the moment she is working on her PhD dissertation about cross‐ dressing girls as heroines in Young Adult fantasy and science fiction novels in English under the supervision of Dr. Belén Martín Lucas (University of Vigo). Apart from her academic work, she is also the co‐author of several Young Adult fantasy novels in Spanish. Mendis, Ranjini Kwantlen University, British Columbia “A Global Gaze: Sri Lanka’s Civil and Ethnic Strife in Two Recent Diasporic Novels” During the 1980’s ‐ the decade preceding the Tamil‐Sinhalese ethnic war ‐ there were two violent uprisings in the majority Sinhalese areas led by radical factions in Sri Lanka’s southern province, spurred by economic and class differences. Sri Lankan‐born British writer Minoli Salgado reveals such underlying discontents in the social and political fabric of postcolonial Sri Lanka in her novel A Little Dust on The Eyes (2012). The more widely‐ known Tamil‐Sinhalese ethnic war is the context of Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera (2014), also a Sri Lankan diasporic writer, resident in the U.S. It records atrocities committed by both factions, as well as suicide bombings that were the hallmark of the terror group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). These novels highlight how globalization may have influenced the uprisings among educated Sinhalese youth through a neo‐liberal ideology that challenged deeply entrenched social hierarchies and political status quo, and how global influences played significantly in the ethnic war through funding for the LTTE by the Tamil diaspora and intervention by countries with their own political interests. This presentation will focus on how the two novels not only bear witness to Sri Lanka’s violent history but push beyond simplistic binaries in which such conflicts are most often conveyed in media and political reports. BIO: Ranjini Mendis is the co‐founder with John Willinsky of the born‐digital open access journal Postcolonial Text, of which she was Managing Editor/Associate Editor from 2003‐ 2013. She served as Chair of both the Canadian and international Associations for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS and ACLALS), and is one of the editors of Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty‐First Century (Rodopi, 2012). Ranjini is originally from Sri Lanka, resident in British Columbia, Canada. Kiczkowski, Adriana (UNED Madrid, Spain): “Fiction, Global Markets, and Terrorism” In opposition to the official discourse about 9/11 and the War on Terror, centred almost exclusively on the confrontation of civilizations – S. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" – criticized, among others, by the current trend in Critical Studies of Terrorism (Jackson 2009), in recent times political proposals and narratives have appeared that emphasize the multiple causes that could be connected to the presence on U.S. soil of global terrorism and its consequences, aimed at the nerve centre of the economy and global finances. Novels as Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne (2010), Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (2008) or The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid, considers the relationship between a capitalist dynamic based on financial speculation, and the links to global terrorism proposing a new look at the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that is firmly set in the heart of 252 capitalist society, which has one of its principal expansive driving forces in global financial speculation. But at the same time, and as an unavoidable reference, appear the local processes where the immediate effects of terrorism are produced. The society that experiences the processes of globalization is also a society linked to local processes that can reach global repercussions because our acts don't only have an effect on our immediate environment, but also have effects far beyond what we could have imagined. BIO: Adriana Kiczkowski is Professor‐Tutor of American Literature at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain. She received her PhD in 2014 with the thesis “The novels of glocalization in the post‐9/11 literature”. Some recent papers are “El tejido narrativo del terrorismo global en Falling Man”, Epos (2012); “New York, Madrid, Londres: Représentations littéraires du terrorisme global” Poétisation de l’Histoire (2013); and “Global Terrorism shatters New York and Madrid: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Adolfo García Ortega’s El mapa de la vida” (2014). López Ropero, Lourdes (U of Alicante, Spain): “Economies of Violence: Portrayals of Human Trafficking in a Selection of Contemporary Fiction” Human trafficking is considered to be the world’s fastest growing criminal enterprise, one which has global proportions and is fueled by the global economy. This form of modern slavery follows the market logic of supply and demand, turning trafficked people into commodities made available for exploitation in different destinations, and for a wide array of economic activities such as prostitution or other forms of illegal and precarious labour. The relationship established between the victims of human trafficking and their perpetrators is characteristically marked by violence, understood as physical harm, which is used as an instrument of coercion, control and exploitation. At the same time, because human trafficking is embedded in a complex socio‐economic dynamics, scholar Jennifer Suchland (2015) draws our attention to the existence of a less visible and more systemic kind of violence, which she refers to as “the economics of violence” that sustain the trade. A similar distinction, although in a different context, is made by Slavoj Zizek (2008), who distinguishes between subjective and objective violence, the latter being systemic, a driving force in the ordinary world, and complicit with privilege. Drawing on the insights of these scholars, I will address the interplay among globalization, violence and human trafficking through an exploration of a selection of contemporary novels, namely Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006). These texts showcase experiences of immigrant traffic, sexual traffic, or outsourcing in twenty‐first century London —allegedly one of the capitals of globalization—which often involve different forms of violence against women and other individuals. BIO: Lourdes López‐Ropero is currently Associate Professor at the English Department of the University of Alicante, where she teaches Contemporary Literature in English. Before joining the University of Alicante to occupy a tenure‐track position in 2001, she obtained her Master Degree in English from the University of Kansas, and her PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her primary research focus has been in the field of Postcolonial Studies and she has been engaged in issues of genre, gender, intertextuality and space, her articles appearing in journals such as Commonwealth, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, or Children’s Literature in Education. She has participated in several research projects, including Gender and Citizenship in Europe, part of the Athena 3 Advanced Thematic Network in European Women’s Studies; and Mujer y Espacio Urbano, led by Professor Teresa Gomez Reus. As a result of these projects, she has contributed, 253 respectively, to a special issue of the journal Social Identities, and to the volume Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space (Rodopi). Coates, Donna (University of Calgary, Canada): “The New Anzacs: Wench Warriors Down Under” The fiction that emerged from both women and men writers in Australia during the First World War was essentially a form of “writing back” to the Empire, where the myth of the Anzac legend decreed that Australian soldiers had, despite their inauspicious beginnings, acquired cultural and physical superiority. The Anzacs’ fighting prowess and fighting capacity for combat (especially at Gallipoli) was said to have achieved nationhood history for a new nation and international acclaim. Writers of Second World War literature were under intense pressure to prove that the Anzac legend had not been a mere “fluke” of history, or that the Sons of Anzacs were neither second‐rate nor second best, but as worthy of hero worship as their forefathers. Women writers once again unequivocally supported the legend, which continued to assign women a subordinate place in Australian society. Recently, two contemporary writers, Mandy Sayer and Sara Knox, have imaginatively reconstructed events of World War Two from a temporal distance. In Love in the Years of Lunacy (2013) and The Orphan Gunner (2007) respectively, they examine the phenomenon of women dressing as men to impersonate soldiers. In their texts, their central characters long for male privilege and to escape domestic confinement and powerlessness. These women warriors, who journey away from the feminine ideals of Australian society to the battlefields of New Guinea and bomber command in England, become exemplary soldiers/gunners/pilots who earn the respect and admiration of their fellow (male) soldiers, thereby proving that if women can “perform” masculinity without being detected, then both masculinity and femininity are social constructs, not biographical fact. Both novels shatter the notion of the brave invincible Australian soldier fighting (and dying) gallantly for the imperial ideal, as both women dress as their brothers who are timid and terrified n battle. In these texts, women are the new Anzacs who step readily and easily into their military roles as defenders of the nation, but when their gender identities are exposed, their superior officers recognize that the truth must never become public knowledge, as the reputation of the military depends upon the stability of its codes, rules, and skill of its men. But in the act of assuming men’s identities, these characters signal their discontent with the restrictive norms of both femininity and masculinity. BIO: Donna Coates teaches war fiction and drama in the English Department at the University of Calgary. She has published dozens of book chapters and articles on Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand women’s fictional responses to the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and contemporary warfare in fiction and drama. With Sherrill Grace, she has edited two volumes of Canadian war drama (2008. 2010); with George Melnyk, she has edited a collection of essays on Alberta writing (2009); a second volume of essays co‐edited with Melnyk on Alberta writing will appear in 2016. In 2015, a collection of essays titled Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre, was published. She is currently editing a series of eight volumes on women and war for Routledge’s History of Feminism series and intends to complete a manuscript on Australian women’s twentieth‐century war fiction in 2016. 254 S51. “Perpetrator Trauma in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures and Cultures” From Victim to Perpetrator: Jews in Irena Klepfisz’s Poetry Michaela Weiss, Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic The paper analyzes the shift from the victim to the perpetrator in the poetry and essays of contemporary American Jewish poet and essayist Irena Klepfisz. As a Holocaust survivor and a lesbian, she often felt as an outsider, the one who does not belong either to the Jewish or feminist community. Struggling to reconcile her social, ethnic and gender identities, she became an active advocator of Jewish feminism especially in connection with Yiddish culture. Her viewpoint was radically altered after her visit to Palestine where she had to face the effects of Israeli occupation. In her poems she started to create analogies between the Holocaust and the suffering of the Palestinians, especially in “East Jerusalem, 1987”, where she gives voice to the Palestinian women who depict the loss and destruction inflicted by the Jews. For Klepfisz’s poetry, such comparisons and translations, as she often calls them, became an integral part of her activism. She often interlinks past and present and social and personal histories to document the effects of atrocities. Her poetry discusses the changes in the Jewish history and thinking especially in connection to their loss of innocence and rise in power, which she considers illusionary and dangerous. She challenges the role of memory and forgetting, and questions the false sense of security created both in Israel and America via oppression and dislocation of minorities, with whose experience many Jews, including Kepfisz, can identify. Ordinary Stories in Extraordinary Times: Marcie Hershman’s Tales of the Master Race Stanislav Kolář, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic In many books and films about the Holocaust, perpetrators are portrayed as ardent, bloodthirsty killers and their image only widens the gulf between them and common people (read us). Historian Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, however, records perpetrators from a different perspective. Browning focuses on the social and psychological mechanisms of the transformation of average people into murderers who do evil under the pressure of obedience and conformity. Banality of evil, to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase, comes to the fore of Marcie Hershman’s short‐story cycle (or a novel‐in‐stories) Tales of the Master Race (1991), which exposes the everyday ordinary lives of perpetrators and bystanders (and occasionally victims) in an imaginary German small town called Kreiswald during the period of the Third Reich. Its citizens, be it “desk murderers” or just ordinary bystanders, indoctrinated by Nazi ideology and instilled by historical anti‐Semitism, follow orders; however, for some of them, as the author in her interlocked stories shows, the routine tasks have stressful effects. Is it trauma or just the feeling of guilt that afflicts Hirshman’s perpetrators and bystanders? This is one of the questions that this paper attempts to resolve. Writing History from the "Other Side": Holocaust Perpetrator Faction Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth, UK Almost 70 years on from the end of the Second World War the Holocaust still holds considerable cultural capital. Even though the numbers of actual survivors of the atrocities are now inexorably diminishing, new publications on the Holocaust appear almost every month. In lieu of survivor accounts, the ethically troublesome genre of Holocaust Fiction is gaining ever more ground. Occupying the grey zone between memoir and fiction, Holocaust faction is also getting increasingly popular. As such we have seen the 255 appearance of works of fiction enhanced by factual research on the one hand, and works of factual research more problematically manipulated by fiction on the other as writers try to engage with the Holocaust from ever changing and challenging perspectives. One of these perspectives is that of the perpetrator – a topic long shunned but now increasingly coming to the fore. Apart from the biographical accounts of children and grandchildren of the real perpetrators, there is now fiction about imagined perpetrators (Jonathan Littell’s vastly influential though no less troublingThe Kindly Ones, for example) as well as imagined narratives about ‘real’ perpetrators. This paper will offer a critical discussion of the narrative strategies employed by Laurent Binet’s HHhH of 2013. In this highly original account, Binet focuses on the Czechoslovakian assassins of Reinhard Heydrich whose story, however, is constantly overshadowed by that of their ‘victim’, Heydrich himself. A story about resistance heroes is thus turned, problematically, into a story foregrounding the perpetrator. Through his postmodern historical and fictional detective work of piecing together fact and fiction, Binet problematises the very act of writing historical narratives, the reliability of ‘history’ as well as turning traditional notions of ‘victimhood’ on their head. Resisting (Neo‐)Colonialism with Ngugi wa Thiong’o Radek Glabazňa, Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic The work of the leading Kenyan novelist, playwright and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o is arguably best described in terms of his life‐long commitment to anti‐colonial struggle – a struggle that goes well beyond Kenya’s independence and into the present times. The paper is going to address ways in which the resistant tone of Ngugi’s early work, represented here by his novels Weep Not, Child and The River Between, was distilled into the political vitriol of his more recent texts, such as Petals of Blood and Matigari. While the former pair of novels fictionally capture the displacements and dilemmas of characters living in colonial Kenya and Kenya during the Emergency, the latter pair emphasize the disillusionment faced by characters trapped in what Ngugi clearly sees as a crudely capitalist, neo‐colonial set‐up of post‐independence Kenya. This being the case, the paper is going to examine the trajectory of Ngugi’s conceptual, ideological and stylistic strategies deployed in the name of ultimate liberation from both forms 256 S52.“Leadership politics in the United Kingdom’s local government” Stéphanie BORY, Université de Lyon 3 Nicholas PARSONS, University of Cardiff Timothy WHITTON, Université de Clermont‐Ferrand II 2016 will be an important election year for Wales, Ireland, Scotland and London. In the first three cases, elections were postponed because of the General Elections in Britain whereas in London, the current mayor, will have finished his second four year mandate. This seminar will focus particularly on the importance of leaders and their particular brand of politics in these elections. To what extent have leaders’ attitudes changed recently in the realm of local and devolved politics to enable them to keep abreast with the challenges of modern leadership? How has “mediated leadership”[1] trickled down from national to local and devolved politics? What role have the social networks such as Facebook and Twitter played in shaping new leadership politics? We seek papers that deal specifically with the personalisation of politics within local and devolved government in the UK. Nevertheless, contributions on leadership issues that highlight the complex relationship between local/devolved and national politics will also be welcomed. [1] Ana LANGER, The Personalisation of Politics in the UK. Mediated Leadership from Attlee to Cameron, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012. Gilles LEYDIER, University of Sud Toulon Var/“The leadership of Scottish First Ministers” This contribution will focus on the personalisation of Scottish politics by studying the leadership of the successive First Ministers since the implementation of the devolution settlement. Although a great deal of research has been devoted to the functioning and achievements of the Scottish Parliament, very few political comments have focused upon the executive power. More strikingly, the coverage and analysis of the power and role of the Scottish First Ministers since 1999 has been extremely limited. This paper intends to provide a reflexion on the way the successive Scottish First Ministers have struggled to put their stamp on Scottish politics within the framework of the devolved institutions. Outlining their backgrounds, profiles and legitimacy, exploring their political environment, institutional limits and constraints upon them, assessing their political initiatives, record and legacy in office, the paper will analyse the way the successive incumbents have embraced their function to establish a political and personal leadership upon the Scottish stage. The paper will particularly explore the recent period in order to discuss whether the arrival of SNP First Ministers has had any impact on the style of leadership and personalisation of the Scottish stage. It will analyse the ‘charismatic’ leadership demonstrated by Alex Salmond during his Premiership in the context of the ‘national conversation’ and ‘Indy ref’ debate, and discuss to what extent it has been continued by the current First Minister Nicola Sturgeon since the referendum on independence and during the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections campaign. Fiona SIMPKINS, University of Lyon 2/Triangle, “The SNP and the independence movement in Scotland: new challenges, new leadership” In his resignation speech as leader of the SNP following the results of the September 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Alex Salmond accepted that a majority of Scots had 257 voted for Scotland to remain part of the UK yet stressed the profound impact of the referendum campaign on Scottish politics. Not only was the referendum "a triumph for democracy" with a record 84.6% turnout, but the campaign had empowered hundreds of thousands of Scots who had previously felt excluded from mainstream politics. He called for this renewed political debate and mobilisation in Scotland "to be cherished, preserved and built upon", concluding that "the campaign continues and the dream shall never die". The 2015 general election results in Scotland would appear to confirm that his calls were heard. The SNP snatched 56 out of the 59 contested seats in Scotland and sent a wave of new SNP MPs to Westminster. Far from having subsided after the September 2014 independence referendum, the broad pro‐independence social movement which emerged during the campaign continued to grow and mobilise Scottish public opinion around a new Scottish political project at odds with traditional Westminster politics. If former SNP leader Alex Salmond had managed to turn the SNP into a party of government through strong leadership and centralized decision‐making, the Yes campaign encouraged grassroots initiatives and attempted to build momentum behind the independence project by adopting a loose organization, inclusive of other political parties and autonomous organisations like National Collective, Women for Independence or Radical Independence. The multiplicity of voices through which the independence message was conveyed thanks to the use of social networks, original initiatives led by local groups as well as its own crowd‐funded media of bloggers and news websites, was able to reach voters directly rather than through (generally unsympathetic) traditional media channels and engage the public in a vibrant political debate. Indeed, the referendum campaign has spurred a momentous change in the independence movement, which no longer focuses solely on the strong leadership of the SNP leader but also rests on a powerful new social movement. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon enjoys an unprecedented Scottish majority in Westminster as well as an SNP majority in Holyrood, soaring popularity rates and the confidence that the pro‐independence movement is growing in Scotland today. The convergence of interests brought by this new independence movement combined to the strong leadership of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon appears more than likely to bring another SNP majority at the May 2016 Scottish Parliament elections. Yet, if another sweeping nationalist victory will inevitably bring more uncertainties on Scotland’s constitutional future, it will also question the break‐ down of the traditional top‐down approach used by political parties in Scotland and in the rest of the UK. To what extent have leadership and personalization of power within UK political parties overstretched the limits of the political message they wish to bring? Susan FINDING, University of Poitiers/MIMMOC, “Bristol Fashion? Local politics in England and the power of democratically‐elected mayors: an epiphenomenon or a national trend?” In 2012 Bristol, one of the top dozen major English cities, elected its first democratically‐ elected mayor following the 2011 Localism Act. To lead its council, Bristol elected not a member of one of the traditional political parties, but George Ferguson, local businessman and political novice, leader & sole member of Bristol 1st, the localist party he founded. This paper will examine how local politics in Bristol have been influenced by the introduction of direct democracy in mayoral elections in England and whether the Bristol case is a blueprint demonstrating how local politics are independent from the national level and new leadership styles and issues or whether Bristol merely reflects the general trend in the eighteen directly‐elected city mayoralties (the five elected combined authority mayors excluded). 258 Timothy WHITTON, University of Clermont‐Ferrand II/EHIC, “It’s just not Boris versus Ken” London politics have been dominated for the last sixteen years by two main figures, Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone. After crossing swords with both Thatcher and Blair, the latter set the trend for electing maverick leaders to head the capital city rather than run‐ of‐the‐mill politicians. It took the Conservatives another mandate to come to terms with the fact that the leadership of London was a question of people rather than policies. For 2008, they plucked Boris Johnson out of their top hats, away from Have I Got News for You and surrounded him with a well heeled team of advisors while hiring the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby to optimise his chances of beating Livingstone on his own turf. They succeeded and the duel was repeated in 2012 even though Livingstone very nearly pipped Johnson to the post this time round having run a very slick campaign with intense use of the internet and the social networks. For 2016 both Johnson and Livingstone decided not to run again. This has left the field wide open and all the major parties organised primaries from which Zac Goldsmith emerged victorious for the Conservatives and Sadiq Khan for the Labour Party, the only two candidates who stand a real chance of being elected. Turnout for the 2008 election had reached an unprecedented high with Londoners having the choice between celebrity Boris and municipal Ken. Turnout in 2012 was slightly lower but still very respectable for a local election. Odds on that in 2016 Londoners will not flock to the polling stations because despite the healthy rivalry between the two very different main candidates, “Zac versus Sadiq” is likely to be a very pale version of what the capital has become used to. This is due to the very particular brand of leadership politics that London has somewhat unwittingly fostered and what this paper will attempt to identify. Stéphanie BORY, University of Lyon 3/IETT, “From Rhodri Morgan to Carwyn Jones, two different styles of leadership” In 1998, the British Parliament voted the Government of Wales Act, thereby granting executive devolution to Wales with the creation of the National Assembly for Wales. The devolution of powers to Wales allowed some local politicians to make careers on the political stage in Cardiff, thus to become prominent leaders whereas they were often regarded as second‐rank ones in London. This paper proposes to particularly study the premiership of the two main First Ministers Wales has had so far, Rhodri Morgan and Carwyn Jones, both of them members of the Labour Party, considering the different political contexts they had to face. When Rhodri Morgan became the First Minister in February 2000, he clearly insisted on setting up a specific political model for Wales, as in the speech he delivered during the annual conference of the Institute of Welsh Politics: “Although Westminster is the mother of parliaments, it doesn’t mean that it’s the last word on parliaments. It doesn’t mean that the perfections of the unwritten British Constitution are so hugely admired that we must fall into the Westminster model. We need to develop our own political culture and processes17”. He thus started by devising a different strategy from the Labour Party in London and adopting a new leadership style, what came to be called “Clear Red Water”, following a speech he made in November 2002 at the National Centre for Public Policy at Rhodri Morgan, “Check Against Delivery”, speech delivered during the Institute of Welsh Politics annual conference and published in 2001, Aberystwyth, Institute of Welsh Politics, 2001, p. 7. 17 259 Swansea University. Morgan distinguished between the Welsh Labour Party in Cardiff and New Labour in London. Rhodri Morgan stepped down in December 2009 and was replaced by Carwyn Jones, who immediately published his leadership manifesto entitled Time to Lead, and, as underlined by David Williamson, a Welsh political journalist: “The Carwyn era has begun, and a new chapter in Welsh devolution is underway18”. After only a few months in office, he became the most senior elected Labour representative and government minister in the UK. It will finally also be interesting to analyse the leadership strategy displayed by Carwyn Jones in the campaign for the May 2016 elections in Wales. David Williamson, “The man who will lead Wales”, 02‐12‐2009, www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales‐ news/man‐who‐will‐lead‐wales, accessed in February 2016. 18 260 S53. The Politics of Language in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Drama Co‐convenors : Ian Brown, University of Kingston, UK Daniele Berton‐Charrière, Université Blaise Pascal, France In 1980, Brian Friel's Translations had its first production, its themes highlighting the importance of language politics in an imperialist setting. In both Scottish and Irish contemporary drama since then, language forms and usage have been a prime issue, either in forms of theatrical dialogue as in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996) or in the varieties of language used in recent Scottish theatre. Papers are invited which explore aspects of the politics of language in contemporary Irish or Scottish drama. Monday 22 August 1630‐1830 Sub‐theme : The Politics of Language Fighting the ‘One Land, One Nation, One Language’ Policy in Irish and Scottish Drama Danièle Berton‐Charrière, Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont‐Ferrand II To Brazilian Professor Kanavillil Rajagopalan ‘Linguistic identity is largely a political matter and languages are flags of allegiance.’ History has given evidence of language plannings, including the ‘One nation, one people, one [exoglossic or endoglossic] language’ policy, as liberticide, culturally impoverishing and destructive. Orwell’s 1984 shows that when a language is prohibited and its meaningful communication bereft of any development (cf. Paul Garvin), its signifiers, signified and referents fade away, then die out, along with the customs and ideologies they conveyed. Brian Friel’s Translations points out what is lost in translation in exoglossic processes. A contrario, polyglossy preserves hybrid nations’ traditions, roots and future. Its (often post‐colonial) growth and progress enrich their expression and identity. Scottish and Irish playwrights often combine standard and non‐standard languages used as local linguistic decors and idiosyncrasies, as well as political statements, artistic and political commitments. They complete and/or compete with one another. Semiotic devices join in as the latest ceilidh‐plays expose through their meta‐dramatic and meta‐theatrical dimensions. These notions will be tackled with a few illustrative examples, and questions related to ‘standard languages’ and to the dialogical links born of dramatic polyglossy raised. Symphonies of Loss and Isolation: The Politics of Language and the Representation of Space in Tom Murphy´s A Whistle in the Dark Anikó Bach, University of Pécs In an interview with Colm Tóibín Tom Murphy stated that for him speech patterns of individual characters have a way of conveying character on stage and his aim is to make a symphony out of language. However, the symphonies Tom Murphy orchestrates in some of his plays are not always the result of harmonious interplay of speech patterns between his characters, but often question the possibility of dialogue on the stage in contemporary society. Murphy frequently portrays his characters as outsiders, trapped both in space and time. The protagonists of A Whistle in the Dark (1961) are no exception. The imprisoning 261 social and cultural milieu the Carney family finds expression in linguistic and spatial terms. The play is set in the rather liminal space of the domestic world, namely Michael´s living room. In this in‐between space the characters try to express feelings of loss and longing while language constantly fails them. My paper´s aim is to offer a reading of Murphy´s play drawing on Edward W. Soja´s notion of Thirdspace to explore issues of race, class and gender that are apparent in the power relations, the constant speech makings, the stammering and the silences of Carney family members. The Language of Resistance and the Power of the Female Voice in Sue Glover’s Bondagers (1991) Gioia Angeletti, University of Parma This paper intends to show how Sue Glover’s 1991 play Bondagers engages with the issues of social change and cultural nostalgia in a country like Scotland, whose national and political identity is still so strictly linked with the very nature of its landscape, traditions and language(s). The expedients Glover deploys in order to foreground the intricate relationship between the enduring force of tradition and the inevitability of change are essentially two. Firstly, she has her main characters speak a ‘rural Lallans language’ (Horvat 2005) evoking an oral culture and mythical dimension with implied socio‐political connotations. With its many references to folk music and dance, the play is almost a dramatic translation of the Scottish bothy ballad tradition, as it is also haunted by echoes of Robert Burns, Allan Ramsay and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Secondly, by staging mainly female outcast figures, Glover gives centrality to a communal female voice, subaltern yet also authoritative. The final melancholy tone and the ambivalent meaning of bondage suggest the effort of preserving Scottish values in a world seemingly developing along different lines. Does Bondagers stage a backward look at the roots of Scottish culture while ignoring the routes it has trodden or it may tread? Ideological language and community identity in recent Scots‐language drama Ian Brown, Kingston University, London This paper contends, following A J Greimas, that theatrical ‘mythological’ and ‘ideological’ languages often ‘invisibly’ serve ‘to cement and to unify’ social blocs. For twentieth‐ century writers in Scots, language use has been important in addressing the history and ideology of Scottish experience and the nature of ‘Scotland’ and Scottish history. Recognising that language is a profoundly cultural artefact and its definition profoundly political and that the playtext’s language embodies, visibly or invisibly, its ideology, the paper argues that playwriting in the languages of Scotland very often visibly – that is to say, explicitly or by clear implication – expresses through language choice ideological attitudes to community identity or identities. Part of the fascination of late twentieth‐ century Scottish playwrights’ use of Scots for their characters lies in the tension between use of Scots to mark the ‘tradition‐bound’, in a sense the backward‐looking, and the ‘prospective’, its use as a flexible forward‐looking modern language. That language is a key means by which community may, in Benedict Anderson’s term, be ‘imagined’, assigns it a key role in identifying communities. Playwright language choice is often fundamental to her/his imagination and to the versions of Scotlands, the nature or form of the ‘Scottish nation’ imagined. 262 Tuesday 23 August 1100‐1300 Sub‐theme: Translation, politics and 'classic' texts, The Politics of Translating the Classics into Contemporary Ireland Aidan O’Malley, University of Rijeka, Croatia Murmurs of discontent were audible in 1981 about Brian Friel’s ‘Irish‐ing’ of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Last year, however, almost every single obituary dubbed Friel ‘the Irish Chekhov’. Focusing on the period demarcated by these two points and, in particular, on Friel’s diverse versions of Russian texts and Seamus Heaney’s renderings of Sophocles, The Cure at Troy (1990) and The Burial at Thebes (2004), this paper explores the evolving politics of translating classic dramas into Ireland and Hiberno‐English. Considering that translating the classics has long been a method of elevating the status of one’s language, the paper examines the modes of translation employed by Friel and Heaney, and probes the ways these speak to the different political contexts in which the plays were produced. Following from this, it argues that the production and reception of these dramas reflect not just the globalisation of Irish theatre, but also the changing relationship of Irish literature and Hiberno‐English to the Anglosphere, the hegemonic force in world literature. Translating Silence: Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and Scotland in Motion András Beck, School of Diplomacy – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Madrid This paper intends to contrast two translations of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba into English, both specifically commissioned for Scottish audiences. The 1989 version, staged in late Thatcherite Edinburgh, is a faithful rewriting of Lorca’s classic by playwright Jo Clifford, whose prolific engagement with Iberian literatures would mark her oeuvre spanning over decades. Thirty years later, under the country’s first government with independence on its political agenda, Rona Munro’s version for the National Theatre of Scotland reimagines the plot in contemporary Glasgow and restructures both form and content in an attempt to achieve the same dramatic effects in the updated, recognisable context she proposes. An analysis of the politics of language in Clifford’s and Munro’s translations reveal how Lorca’s universal themes of passion, oppression and revolution, together with his play with silence, receive a radically different interpretation in the historical periods that saw these two Scottish versions staged. The Hermeneutics of Beyond the Grave Casualties of Language in Brian Friel’s Theatre Virginie Roche‐Tiengo, University of Paris XIII In On The Way to Language, Martin Heidegger states that the Greek words for interpreting and interpretation – hermeneuein, hermeneia – can be traced to the god Hermes. Hermes, son of Zeus and the Nymph Maia, is the god of language, a cunning and subversive trickster, messenger of Olympic Gods, and a guide across boundaries including those between the underworld and mortals, between life and death. From The Freedom of the City (1973), Volunteers (1975), Living Quarters (1977), Faith Healer (1980), Translations (1980), to Performances (2003), voices from beyond the grave people Brian Friel’s theatre. The term ‘hermeneutics’ suggests an interpretation, disclosing something hidden from 263 ordinary understanding and mysterious. The voice from beyond the grave in Friel’s theatre is to some extent Hermes, the message‐bearer, because it has first and foremost opened itself to a process of ‘un‐concealment’. Friel dug into ‘what is beyond language, the inexpressible’. Hence, we will first explore how language itself is inescapably political with the Frielian beyond the grave casualties of language in The Freedom of the City, Volunteers and Translations. Then we will focus on the notion of language as a perception of identity and differences in Faith Healer and Living Quarters. Respondent Professor Jean Berton, Professor of Scottish Studies at Université Jean Jaures, Toulouse, President of the French Society for Scottish Studies 264 S54 “The Inner Seas connecting and dividing Scotland and Ireland” • Philippe Laplace "Death of an island: madness and death on St Kilda in Karin Altenberg's Island of Wings" • Céline Savatier Lahondes, “The Inner Seas in John Millington Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows” • Emilie Berthillot , “Smuggling Weapons, Republicans and Spies across the North Channel (1880‐1923): Gaelic friends or foes?” • Jean Berton, “Rescuing Lewis and Harris after the sinking of the Iolaire” 265 S55 “I hear it in the deep heart’s core”: political emotions in Irish and Scottish poetry Co‐conveners: Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK and Carla Sassi, Università di Verona, Italy Stephen Regan, Durham University, UK The Politics of Bewilderment: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney Among the resounding rhetorical questions with which W. B. Yeats closes ‘Easter 1916’, there is one that has a peculiar relevance for studies of political emotion and how it operates in poetry. Yeats asks of the rebels, ‘And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?’. The etymological origins of bewilderment are uncertain, but the word probably derives from wilder (to lead or go astray), and its modern usage carries connotations of confusion, mystification, and bafflement. As a term that neatly conflates political and aesthetic experience, bewilderment belongs to Edmund Burke’s philosophical category of the sublime, and it serves to reinforce the perception of a ‘terrible beauty’ in ‘Easter 1916’. The word appears much later in Seamus Heaney’s elegy, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’, a more intimate poem of mourning that nevertheless carries echoes of ‘Easter 1916’. This paper will explore the politics of bewilderment, looking at examples of modern poetry in which confusion and mystification are part of a complex imaginative response to violence. Scott Lyall, Edinburgh Napier University, UK ‘Fiery Speech’: Vision and Violence in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse This paper examines the work of two of the main protagonists behind the cultural and political revival of Ireland in the early twentieth century, W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse, looking particularly at some of the religious and spiritual ideas and emotions forming the foundation to their poetry. While Yeats memorialises Pearse, and other 1916 martyrs, in ‘Easter, 1916’, a poem that is in many ways a reply to Pearse’s ‘The Fool’, their respective visions of what the new Ireland should look like – Pearse’s traditional ‘peasant’ Catholicism and Yeats’s heterodox elite Protestantism − were very different. Yet in many of their poems Yeats and Pearse inhabit the persona of prophet or visionary, with what Pearse in ‘The Rebel’ calls ‘the gift of fiery speech’. Their poems, especially those on Ireland, often display a violent anger and outrage that, even so, shares the ultimate aim of resacralising Ireland. Hitomi Nakamura, International Pacific University (Okayama), Japan “Nearly a mile from home yet foreign country”: Patrick Kavanagh and Ulster Politics Although the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (1904‐1967) is usually known for its treatment of life and nature in rural Ireland, Seamus Heaney (1939‐2013) once remarked that, “Without being in the slightest way political in his intentions, Kavanagh’s poetry did have political effect.” While not as politically active as William Butler Yeats (1865‐1939), who became a Senator, Kavanagh worked for much of his life as a journalist and critic, and named his own short‐lived periodical Kavanagh's Weekly: A Journal of Literature and Politics (1952, emphasis mine). As this paper shows, Kavanagh’s background as the son of a Monaghan farmer is a significant aspect of his life and work, to which insufficient critical attention has been paid. One of the most consequential moments in his early life was the partition of Ireland in 1920, which made him a borderer. As I argue, Kavanagh nurtured a political awareness, and this is reflected in poems involving local territorial disputes. 266 Drawing mostly upon primary sources including poems and other writings, this paper explores the political inflections of Kavanagh’s poetry, and shows how his writings could be unintentionally political. Katrin Berndt, University of Bremen, Germany ‘How Refrain from Love?’: The Inclusive Idea of Scottish Citizenship in Twentieth‐ Century Scottish Poetry My paper argues that twentieth‐century Scottish poetry imagined a model of Scottish citizenship that is independent of national sovereignty, and connects political emotions such as love for and loyalty to the land with civic values like liberty and social justice. The concept of citizenship is often tied to the nation state, but in the absence of full national sovereignty, it also defines who belongs to a community, and on what grounds. My paper demonstrates that Scottish poetry has contributed to developing an inclusive Scottish citizenship that combines emotional attachment to place with commitment to the well‐being of the nation. Discussing poems by Naomi Mitchison, Edwin Morgan, and Jackie Kay, it explores how they identify cultural diversity, the critical re‐evaluation of Scottish history, and loyalty to one’s community as core features of Scottish citizens who cannot ‘refrain from [their] love’ for ‘the difficult land’ (Edwin Muir). The paper argues that the inclusive idea of Scottish citizenship, which conjoins democratic principles with emotional commitment to the land, understands the nation as a commonly – and passionately – imagined site of belonging distinguished by shared values such as liberty, equality, and social responsibility. Glenda Norquay, Liverpool John Moores University, UK The negative as political trope in Scottish women’s poetry This paper examines the trope of the negative – saying ‘no’, ‘never, ‘not’ or ‘neither’ ‐ as a means of articulating and situating national and gendered identities in Scottish women’s poetry since 1979. Focusing on poems in English and Scots, by Liz Lochhead, Alison Flett, Ellie McDonald, Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie and Claire Askew, it explores the negative as a literary manoeuvre which can encompass complicated relationships with past, with country, with language and self. Negatives may be deployed as positive assertions of identity but through the emotions of distance, disappointment, defeat can also speak to contradictory dynamics with national pasts, national literatures and national voices. This paper opens up questions of what it means to assert yes through saying no, asks why it is such a dominant mode in Scottish women’s poetry and explores how we might understand these articulations in the current political climate. It invites discussion of similar deployments of the negative in a wider range of Irish and Scottish poetry. What are the emotional implications of the negative and how might it carry political reverberations? Corey Gibson, University of Groningen, Netherlands Extremism in Defence of Liberty: Hugh MacDiarmid, Malcolm X, Barry Goldwater, and William Shakespeare at the Oxford Union 1964 In early December, 1964, the communist and Scottish nationalist poet, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892‐1978), and the human rights activist and former black nationalist, Malcolm X (1925‐ 1965), took part in a raucous Oxford Union Debate. They spoke in favour of the motion, provided by the firebrand conservative and libertarian demagogue, Barry Goldwater (1909‐1998): ‘extremism in the defence of Liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.’ This paper will examine how these exchanges, after the back‐and‐forth of historical events and current affairs, and witty aphorisms, fell back on poetry to reveal 267 the debate’s central tenets. Poetry allows these speakers to assume an absolutist stance whilst embracing nuance that is otherwise elided in public discourse. With reference to Malcolm X’s idiosyncratic reading of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, and to MacDiarmid’s lengthy citation from his own ‘To the Young Poets of the World Today’, I posit that poetry allows these figures to present a more equivocal, less dogmatic, case for ‘extremism’ than that their opponents were able to for ‘moderation’. The reason, I suggest, is precisely the sort of poetic ‘political emotion’ that gives shape to the impulse for revolutionary action and to knowledge of the suffering that follows. Ronald Schleifer, University of Oklahoma, US Late Symboliste Poetry: Violence Beyond Politics in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats Representations of violence, especially as he grew older, proliferates in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, but that violence – while often apocalyptic – is rarely associated with political action. (In this, he is far different from the notable representations of violence – even “intellectual violence” – in his precursor, William Blake.) Most often in Yeats’s late poetry the representation of violence is either graphic, to the point of breaking up his lines and garbling syntax or, more strikingly, a reversion to the symboliste poetic strategies of his early poetry. Nineteenth‐century symboliste poetry, however, as Yeats described his early poetry, pursued the “subtlety, obscurity, and intricate utterance . . . . of our moods and feelings [which] are too fine, too subjective, too impalpable to find any clear expression in action or in speech tending towards action.” This is clearly an apolitical project, and in the late poetry – e.g., “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War” – Yeats takes it up in order to circumscribe, not impalpable “moods and feelings,” but gross and all too palpable political violence as seemingly simply apocalyptic violence. Irina Popova, Moscow State University, Russia Historical Feeling – Political Feeling in Seamus Heaney and Michael Hartnett. The poetry of world‐wide known Seamus Heaney and that of less known outside Ireland Michael Hartnett have some common central features. One of them is the way they voice their political emotions. Unlike many Northern Irish poets, Heaney and Hartnett refrain from direct response to politics but express their attitudes obliquely or by means of other subjects and voices. Alongside the subject of Language and linguistic commentaries they employ History as both important material and a conspicuous theme running throughout their works. The major aim of this paper is to trace and comment upon the two poets’ treatment of history as a mode of making a certain political stand. It will certainly touch upon the questions of nation and identity. The research is going to involve 1) short poems dealing with historic(al) events (like Heaney’s Requiem for the Croppies et al.); 2) longer poems which may be called parables (like, e.g., Station Island by Heaney and Sibelius in Silence by Hartnett); 3) translations of three 17th‐18th century Gaelic poets by Hartnett, the work and material obviously bearing on the explored subject. Carla Sassi, Università di Verona, Italy “And in a new dimension [we] turned and spoke”: the renewal of communal bonds in Nan Shepherd’s poetry The purport of my paper is to investigate, in M. Nussbaum’s words, the “ways in which emotions can support the basic principles of the political culture of an aspiring yet imperfect society”, with reference to early 20th‐century ‘Scottish Renaissance’ poetry. I will contend this is a poetry that does not engage with issues of national (cultural) independence in any simplistic way, but rather foregrounds a wider rethinking of 268 communal politics and individual agency. My investigation will mainly focus on Nan Shepherd’s collection In the Cairngorms (1934), as a particularly original and interesting example of this. Shepherd’s largely forgotten collection foregrounds the poet’s relation of ‘love’ with the mountains – a love that is both mystical/sacred and sensuous/erotic. Her complex relationship with the mountain, however, also opens the way to a wider sense of community and to a desire for a renewal of communal bonds, grounded on the same feeling of ‘love’ as well as on a family of interrelated emotions. I will then investigate how Nussbaum’s idea that “the core emotions that sustain a decent society have their roots in, or are forms of, love”, that is in forms of “intense attachments to things outside the control of our will, ” reverberates in Shepherd’s vision. 269 S57: "Celtic Fictions‐Scottish and Irish Speculative Fiction" Convenors: - Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen. Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza (Spain). - Colin Clark. Charles University Prague (Czech Republic). Description: The thesis of much modern Speculative Fiction in Ireland and Scotland is the generation of a creative space in which, imaginatively, solutions are sought and simulated for real political, social and metaphysical problems. Often the result of impasses and failed channels for expression in society, speculative writing may be ludic, genre‐hopping and heteroglossic offering refreshing and innovative discursive space .This panel seeks to expose and explore deliberately transgressive texts and engage with authors concerned with negotiating topoi neglected by conventional, institutionalized institutions and to bring together practitioners from various literatures and genres to discuss the potentialities of the speculative mode. Valentina Adami, University of Verona, Italy “And the New World’s not a myth”: The Survival Struggle of Environmental Migrants in Exodus by Julie Bertagna The environmental crisis is one of the most pressing societal concerns today. Speculative fiction frequently questions current political, legal and cultural attitudes by portraying future scenarios in which some ecological disaster has changed the world order. In recent years, women writers have been particularly active in this sense: let us think, for instance, of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003‐2009‐2013), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), or Starhawk’s 2015 City of Refuge (which is also the completion of a trilogy started in 1993 with The Fifth Sacred Thing). Scottish children’s author Julie Bertagna has given her contribution to these speculations on the consequences of letting current trends in environmental behaviour continue unchallenged with her young‐adult novel Exodus (2002), also part of a trilogy continued in 2007 with Zenith and completed in 2011 with Aurora. This paper will examine Bertagna’s survival narrative as a questioning of environmental justice and human rights, in the light of contemporary theories on myth, trauma Ken MacLeod’s Descent or a Way for Passive Revolution Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen Centro Universitario de la Defensa Zaragoza (Spain) Many works of speculative fiction seek to create a space in which possible solutions are sought and simulated for real political, social and metaphysical problems. This is clearly the case of Scottish writer Ken MacLeod, popular for his science fiction novels, which creatively combine cutting‐edge scientific speculation and a deep humanistic preoccupation. In these novels, the author develops his social vision about the future, analysing left‐wing models such as utopian socialism, Trotskyism, or anarchism, in a context where it has become obvious that we are not alone in the universe and where aliens seem to have started to interact with human beings. For analysing this, I will focus on MacLeod’s Descent (2014), a novel set in Scotland in the mid of the 21st century, as well as on the novella The Human Front (2013), set in Scotland in the second half of the 20th century. As we shall see, the concept of “passive revolution” —coined by Antonio Gramsci to refer the transformation of the political and social structures without disruptive social processes of struggle— underlays MacLeod’s narrations on UFOs abductions, local secrecy and global military conspiracy in rural and urban Scotland. It is my intention to analyse 270 these aspects in MacLeod’s works and try to answer the final question: is it possible for these Scottish citizens to be happy and to have some real agency in the construction of a free and equal society? Jack Fennell, “Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, but with Precedent: Absurdity in Transition in Ireland, 1890‐1923.” In this paper, I propose to compare and contrast three texts presented by their authors as reprises of earlier works. Each text takes the grotesque and the absurd for its subject matter, and openly invites comparison with an earlier work from which its author drew inspiration. I wish to investigate why these three Irish authors revisited these older stories, how they adapted or pastiched these texts for nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐ century Irish audiences. First, there is Edward Joseph Martyn’s Morgante the Lesser (1890), which depicts the exploits of a monstrous character who is named after the protagonist of Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore [‘the Greater Morgante’] (1483), but also references Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532‐1564). Martyn’s Morgante, a self‐absorbed materialist with an insatiable appetite, is sneezed out of his mother’s nose and subsequently grows into a violent, stupid (but curiously erudite) giant. Second, there is History of a World of Immortals Without a God (1891), by ‘Antares Skorpios’ (Jane Barlow), in which the misanthropic main character repeatedly describes the human race as ‘Yahoos,’ states that Gulliver’s Travels is his favourite work of fiction, and shares Lemuel Gulliver’s desire to become something other than a human being. His convictions about the meaninglessness of life and the intolerable inanity of human existence cause untold damage when he arrives (via magical means) in a utopian world of immortals who have been awaiting a messenger from the ‘Unseen God’ who created them. Thirdly, I want to look at Mícheál Mac Craith’s “Cuairt ar an nGealaigh” [‘a visit to the Moon’] and “Eachtraí Fuirne” [‘the adventures of a group of people’], both published in 1923, both of which revisit Lucian’s True History. Sidia Fiorato – University of Verona The private eye turns inward: Paul Johnston’s speculative crime fiction Dystopias are speculative fictions with a close connection with the present condition and focus on the transformative potential of human agency. Paul Johnston’s futuristic crime fiction Body Politic (1997) presents a dystopian government set in 2020 Edinburgh, where the murder investigation soon transforms itself into the investigation of the whole society. The space of the city opens up to reveal a dysfunctional landscape of dissimulation and becomes the creative space both for the author and the detective character to engage with multifarious aspects. Johnston’s narrative addresses geopolitical issues, bioethical issues related to medicine advancement, society’s institutions and power relations. The private eye turns inward and presents an introspective analysis both of the individual and of society; if the purpose of dystopia and speculative fiction is a defamiliarization of the present in order to critically engage with it, Johnston brings the genre a step further as he establishes an uncanny experience of the present itself which leads to a critical engament of the individual with the deeper aspects of his personality. Colin Clark, The “Interesting Times Gang”: Politics and Potential in Modern Scottish Speculative Fiction In a recent article in The Scotsman(10th March 2016), novelist Kirsty Gunn complains about “Scottification” representing a grave threat to Scottish literature .She claims that it 271 constitutes part of an “unofficial politicizing of literature” ,the supposition being that by championing Scottishness ,we risk producing a parochial literature subservient to the agenda of Creative Scotland and, by extension, the SNP dominated Scottish Government. Gunn’s complaint seems churlish at first glance (how is the production of “a strategy rooted in, and of, Scotland’s people and places” a negative thing one may legitimately wonder) but her complaint addresses a valid issue: should Scotland’s National Literature aspire to be apolitical? Is this possible or even desirable? Is her complaint actually validated by a slew of works demonstrating neo‐Tartanism? Murray Pittock famously claimed in The Road to Independence (2008, 114) that Scotland was in the process of: “achieving a form of cultural autonomy in the absence of its political equivalent: that Scottish identity was materially if not constitutionally becoming ever more manifest” Of particular interest in the negotiation of identity in modern Scotland are those ‘formulations of cultural autonomy’, presently perhaps contingent but coalescing in tandem with the development of the nation ‐specifically texts of “speculative” fiction by authors who are not simply imagining other dispensations for Scotland, but who participate in the profoundly ludic processes of reterritorialization( already advanced and kept vigorous by a clash of antagonistic propaganda blocks ) and in prefiguring possible future Scotlands. To this end I will consider works by Iain M Banks and a raft of authors (many members of GSFWC) with a stake in Scottish identity such as Gary Gibson, Neil Williamson, Michael Cobley, Michel Faber et al. My aim is then to determine whether Scotland’s literature is genuinely “at peril” from a faux cultural aesthetic, revanchism or whether this is simply a natural recursive of Scotland as an autopoietic social system and the role speculative fiction plays in this. 272 S58 “The Symbolic Power of Humour: Gender Issues and Derision” “The Male Body and the Role of the Camera in “The Office” (UK) Lynn Blin, Univ. Paul‐Valéry Montpellier The British sitcom, “The Office” (BBC, 2001‐2003) was created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Starring Gervais as David Brent, the homophobic, sexist, racist, misogynist regional director of the fictional Wernham Hogg Paper Company, the series turned the sitcom genre on its head. Abandoning devices such as the laugh track, and three‐camera shooting, which have traditionally given the genre its comic impetus, the series was shot as a documentary. Intended as a spoof on the docu‐soap trend of the late 90’s, “The Office” is also a biting satire on the colossal tedium of a working environment with an incompetent boss who erroneously considers himself to be “a leader first, a friend second, and, an entertainer third.” “The Office” was not only ground breaking in its format. Though the humour devices used are consistent with those explained in the three main linguistic theories of humour, it is in its use of humiliation humour that “The Office” is truly innovative. By filming the series in documentary form, Gervais and Merchant introduce a supplementary character into the show, and that is the camera itself. Each sexist or misogynist comment is an opportunity for the camera to linger on the facial expressions and body language of the characters. And where the female body has traditionally been the target of sitcoms based on sexist humour, in “The Office”, it is the male body that is put on display. Though sexist jokes, comments, and pranks abound, it is the authors of the jokes themselves that become the butt, giving a new turn to the complex relationship of the maker of the joke, the butt, and the audience. By first examining recent developments in humour theory and then taking a closer look at the male body on display, I want to examine how the specificity of the devices used make “The Office” a study in humour as well a worthy subject of interest to gender theorists. The Symbolic Power of Humour: Gender Issues and Derision – Mary Kingsley Shirley C. Doulière, University of Bordeaux This presentation intends to explore the apparent paradox of a woman, Mary Kingsley, and her use of self‐deprecation, sometimes bordering on misogynist humour. Mary Kingsley was a Victorian explorer who paddled her way through Congo and Cameroon. She published two narratives of her expeditions: Travels in West Africa and two years later West African Studies. Both were instant best sellers and were followed by numerous tours in which she would, invariably, be the butt of her own jokes, whether about her appearance or her many failures as a woman; failures explained because she is a woman and because she fails to be what was expected of a woman. She was a fervent opponent to the female suffrage, wrote letters to the head of the Royal Geographical Society to warn him against the actions of “dangerous women” wanting to be accepted to the RGS. She claimed that the women who applied into learned societies were ‘shrieking females and androgyns.’ However she later applied to join at least three learned societies. Her jokes can be seen as a way to ease the anxiety and ambivalence she felt as a woman of independent means and character, but with no desire to be a trailblazer. This misogynist humour allowed her to align herself with the ruling patriarchy with whom she identified more than with her ascribed gender and fight the 273 troubling fact that she was the unwilling element that helped create a new norm for women. Feminist Humor: Characteristics, Differences and Norms Sandra Dufour, Université de Bourgogne This paper examines the characteristics of feminist humor and the issues at stake, and the way it has been considered and analyzed throughout the years in the United States by writers, politicians, sociologists and also by contemporary feminist humorists. Writer Kate Clinton has come up with a compact word for feminist humorists – “fumerists” – because it captures the idea of being funny and wanting to burn the house down all at once. Feminist humor, according to Clinton, “is about making light in this land of reversals, where we are told as we are laughing, tears streaming down our faces, that we have no sense of humor.” She goes on to say that “Men have used humor against women for so long – we know implicitly whose butt is the butt of their jokes – that we do not trust humor. Masculine humor is deflective. It allows denial of responsibility, the oh‐I‐ was‐just‐kidding disclaimer. It is escapist, something to gloss over and get through the hard times, without ever having to do any of the hard work of change. Masculine humor is essentially not about change.” When one deals with the question of feminist humor, the question of the differences between men’s humor and women’s humor come up. For some the difference is between revolt and revolution. Women’s humor calls into question the largest issues, questions the way the world is put together. The underlying question is moreover that of women’s power: Women’s humor has a particular interest in challenging the most formidable structures because they keep women from positions of power. Women’s humor is about women speaking up. Poet Marianne Moore, born in 1887, wrote that “Humor saves a few steps, it saves years,” and fiction writer Katherine Mansfield, born in 1888, suggested in her journal that “to be wildly enthusiastic, or deadly serious – both are wrong. Both pass. One must keep ever present a sense of humor.” One may also wonder why the feminine tradition of humor has remained essentially hidden from the mainstream. One of the possible answers lies in a paradox: When women joke, they are exploring a particularly feminine tradition of humor. The idea that women have their own humor, that a feminine tradition of humor could exist apart from the traditional masculine version, is not considered a viable possibility, and so women who initiate humor are seen as acting like men. Studies by sociologists and psychologists go far in proving “that society may hold different expectations regarding boys’ and girls’ humor.” These social norms, argues psychologist Paul McGhee, dictate that “males should be the initiators of humor, while females should be responders.” Comic cloaks and serious subjects: humour in the work of Djuna Barnes Margaret Gillespie, Université de Franche‐Comté American modernist Djuna Barnes (1890‐1982) has long been celebrated for displaying two potentially antithetical qualities – striking beauty and caustic wit. This seductive if unusual dyad contributed largely to forming Barnes’ literary persona as one at once complicit with, and rebelling against, contemporary expectations of demure, decorative femininity. Photographer Berenice Abbott, an early Greenwich Village acquaintance, was one of the first of many to remark on the combination of glamour and mordant repartee that characterised Barnes – “ ‘romantic’ in dress, frequently in a cape, always immaculate, 274 brilliant and extremely witty” (Herring). Lost Generation chronicler Robert McAlmon similarly described the writer as “far too good looking […] not to command fondness and admiration” but with “a wise‐cracking tongue that I was far too discreet to try and rival” (Benstock). It is all the more surprising then, that the humour, which I believe forms a key strand in Barnes’s textual poetics, should have received so little attention from scholars, and that its link with the writer’s own highly elusive gender politics should not have been more frequently explored. Indeed, if the difficulty and obscurity of Barnes’s more clearly modernist writing has seemed almost by definition to preclude the very possibility of comedy (“in writing she appears she must inject metaphysics, mysticism and her own strange version of ‘literary quality’ into her work” bemoaned McAlmon), the writer also self‐consciously deployed humour as a label as a means to downplay her more explicitly Sapphic output (“slight satirical wigging” Barnes). This paper will argue for the centrality of humour in Barnes, in which the tension between the author’s “collusion and resistance” (Caselli) will be shown to echo a parallel dynamic in her poetics, where a “comic cloak may hide a […] serious subject” and a barred female voice attempting to break through (Benstock). Humor and Gender in Contemporary British Fiction Justine Gonneaud, Univ. Avignon With Bergson’s postulate that “in laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour” as a starting point, the aim of this paper will be to explore and confront various practices of humor, laughter and satire regarding representations of gender in contemporary British literature. From Jeanette Winterson to Angela Carter, passing by Brigid Brophy but also male authors such as Will Self and Peter Ackroyd, many contemporary writers have explored and questioned the performativity of gender through representations of androgynous or hermaphroditic characters and their sex changes. Based on selected works from the aforementioned corpus, I propose to study the “corrective” function of humor – in keeping with the bergsonian acceptation of laughter – through an analysis of the satirical representations of gender stereotypes and their subversion enabled by the hermaphroditic motif. Secondly, by showing that the platonic myth is simultaneously debunked and extolled in contemporary fiction, I would like to address the structural ambiguity of laughter regarding gender politics, in keeping with a postmodern definition of satire whose aim, according to Dustin Griffin, is rather exploratory than explanatory. Finally, using Helene Cixous’s figure of laughing Medusa as a symbol advocating for the creation of a new “impregnable language that will wreck partitions”, I would like to suggest that contemporary fiction also explores a reconstructive aspect of laughter, thus redefining humor as an affirmative and potent tool, producing a new poetics of gender. “Funny ha‐ha or funny peculiar?” The special sense of humor of three women writers of the American South: Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers Katalin G. Kállay, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest 275 The title of my paper begins with a quotation from Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man”, a story which takes place in a beauty parlour, lacking all beauty in a small town of the American South. The story can be read as a caricature of the local vernacular speech, the narrow‐ minded attitude of common women of the early 1940s. Still, whatever is “funny” about the text becomes also “peculiar”: not only because of the freak show which is a constant point of reference in the conversations but because of the lavender mirror in the center, through which the reader can grasp the grotesqueness of the everyday situation – while perhaps catching a glimpse of him‐ or herself. I wish to examine the nature and the power of a special type of humor characteristic not only of Welty’s but of Flannery O’Connor’s and Carson McCullers’s fiction as well, making a distinction between derision (exclusive laughter, “laughing at” something or someone) and self‐irony (inclusive laughter, “laughing with” someone). Keeping in mind the original meaning of the word “humor”, i.e. ‘body fluid’, ‘liquid’, I will argue that the works I analyse present a unique blend of these two attitudes – constituting a shared sense of identity with which the reader, regardless of where he or she is from, has a choice to identify. Beside “Petrified Man”, I wish to focus on “Good Country People” by O’Connor and The Ballad of the Sad Café by McCullers. I hope to show how laughter in these texts may turn into pain, and then again, how pain may turn into laughter. Stephen Leacock’s Abnormalized Romance Made Normal Humorously Gerald Lynch, University of Ottawa Stephen Leacock (1869‐1944) was the English‐speaking world’s best known humorist from 1910‐1925. His numerous works include two books on humour, wherein he frequently refers to Henri Bergson’s Le Rire (1900), which was arguably the first study to theorize humour as normalizing. In the longest section of Leacock’s classic short story cycle, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), he treats of the romance, marriage, and new family of Peter Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh. Leacock’s view of gender in these three stories is essentialist: by implication he presents the perfect relationship as one that balances a female talent for romance with a male investment in realism. When things go wrong in the love story, it is because foolish Peter wholly accepts silly Zena’s excessively romantic view of heroism. Peter achieves heroic status by re‐asserting his connection to the real – he displays great loyalty in protecting the town’s, Mariposa’s, harvest money in a ‘bank robbery’ – which leads to a normalizing of his and Zena’s relationship and a happy ending. Thus the eccentric is humorously pulled back to the centre in conservative Leacock’s vision of love and organic community in Mariposa. ‘Touched’ by Humour and Death: Characters in John McGahern’s Fiction Dana Radler, Bucharest University of Economic Studies John McGahern’s stories bring to life characters in both comic and tragic instances, and their whole existence goes under the spotlight, reflecting mild, ironic or sarcastic touches. In between automatisms and mobility often directed to dogmatism or mental stereotypes, canons, workers, teachers, writers or family members display their ignorance, occasional (lack of) manners, boredom or elevation, often imitating what seems to be ‘decent’ in terms of taste. Class, gender and false pretenses are ridiculed and exposed in both novels and short stories, and laughter moves from a classical Kantian play instance to a Freudian‐ supported analysis of condensation and ambiguity as vehicles employed by a realist creator. 276 Gender‐Based Humour in Alan Bennet’s The History Boys Alberto Rossi, University of Verona Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London in 2004. Set in a boys’ grammar school where eight students are trying to perfect their knowledge of history in order to enter Oxford or Cambridge, the play stages a subversion of stereotypical gender roles. The location permits Bennett to describe a quite unusual framework: in effect, the male students of eighteen prove unwilling to participate in the teachers' humour about sex and relationships. Contrary to what is expected, the students seem to be interested only in learning, while sexuality is not part of their world. As they reply to jokes by explaining them in a very logical way, humour is deprived of its strength (Norrick, Chiaro), but actually this strength is yet involuntarily delivered by their narrating sexual intercourses using historical metaphors to describe the female body and penetration. Only in the second act, when two characters discover their homosexuality, they start making jokes about their own manliness. So, self‐irony starts functioning as an instrument of defence, used to protect the boys’ belonging to human society and hence their admission to prestigious colleges. I will therefore point out how gender‐based humour functions as a cathartic device (Joanne R. Gilbert) that in the end allows the boys to self‐define themselves. 277 S59: Religion and Literatures in English Co‐convenors: Pilar Somacarrera (Autonomous University of Madrid), and Alison Jack (University of Edinburgh) Rewriting the Gospels in Contemporary British Fiction (Barbara Schaff, U. of Göttingen) Although the Bible has always inspired the literary imagination, a considerable number of novels about novels about Jesus and his disciples were published only in very recent years. This paper will explore the surge of post‐millenial biblical fiction by looking at Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel (2012), Richard Beard’s Lazarus is Dead (2012), Colm Tóibin’s The Testament of Mary (2012) and Niall Williams’s John (2008). It will discuss the novels’ take on historical vs. gospel truths and gospel stories, their narrative forms and the ways in which the medium gospel and the genre of life writing is reflected. Lastly, it will address the question in how far these novels can be contextualised in what has come to be known as the postsecular age. Shaggy God Stories: Subverting Teleology in Contemporary Fictions in English (Valeria Mosca, U. of Genova) Teleology and consequentiality are concepts we often employ to make sense of the world and the self, and that we traditionally associate to narratives. Even though we expect chains of consequential events to bring plots to coherent endings, however, fictional products exist that do not conform to these narrative conventions – products that disappoint our human and readerly expectations for consequentiality. Good examples of this would be the famous shaggy‐dog‐story nonsense jokes: misunderstood by most, these puzzling and anticlimactic narrations often result in people laughing at their own feelings of entitlement to traditional forms of teleological narrative progressions. Teleology is obviously very much at stake in religious discourse, and especially so in the monotheistic, Western traditions. However, examples exist of non‐teleological, non‐ consequential, and, perhaps, even anti‐narrative fictions whose main intertexts are explicitly Biblical: among those, J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and Carlton Mellick III’s desecrating The Baby Jesus Butt Plug (2003). My aim is to explore the ways in which the loss of teleology and coherent progression are worked into these ‘shaggy God stories’, which nonetheless borrow extensively from religious intertexts, and situate themselves in a tradition that is based on teleology and supported by a narrative apparatus. The Equalization of the Image: The Way Changing Ideologies Underwrite Religious Imagery in Eliot and Bishop (Trevor Westmorland, Autonomous U. of Madrid) The socio‐historical circumstances of poets T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop resulted in their respective associations with modernism and postmodernism. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and Bishop’s “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Concordance” are both poems which explore the implicit value of poetic imagery, specifically through the use of images based in a biblical tradition. Taking into account both their differing literary movement and religious backgrounds, this essay will attempt to expose the poems as a microcosm of the fundamental way that faith in the power of the image has altered with the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist sentimentality, which includes the loss of faith in meta‐ narratives that is a requirement of traditional religious discourse. Specifically, though both poets present a variety of images, a close reading will demonstrate that the “Anglo‐ Catholic” Eliot believes in the extra‐personal power of his images to define a worldview, 278 whereas the “unbelieving” Bishop’s poem is a search for validation in the power of the image which is never attained; in the end the images from her concordance Bible are equal to those random moments of her own travels, and everything is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’ Ann‐Marie Macdonald’s Fall on Your Knees, or the New Bible for Women (Helena Sánchez‐Gayoso, Autonomous U. of Madrid) Ann‐Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1997) challenges dominant modes of discourse, prominently phallocentric discourses such as History, the English Canon, or the Catholic Church by including the voice of the marginalised or silent “other” inside these same metanarratives. By recalling Genette’s theory, this paper will explore how MacDonald appropriates passages from the Bible (hypotext) not only to construct this novel, which is presented as a pastiche of different grand narratives, but also to enact an alternative female religious experience within the Biblical tradition. In order to show this project of depatriarchalising the Bible, close attention will be paid to different Biblical references. By decontextualizing these Biblical passages from their textual origin, MacDonald is able to populate them with feminist meaning and create hypertexts that challenge restrictive biblical truths. Fall on Your Knees thus emerges as a new construction, or using one of the novel’s key metaphors, as a rebirth or regeneration of other truths, expressed not through the immobile truth of HIS‐story but through the fluidity and hybridity of OTHER‐stories. It is in this light where Fall on Your Knees can be understood as the new Bible for women. Doctorow’s Biblical Politics in City of God (2000) (María Ferrández‐San Miguel , University of Zaragoza) Asked in an interview after the publication of his last novel, E.L. Doctorow explained: “I think of my politics as biblical politics: you shouldn't murder, you shouldn't steal, that sort of thing” (Wolf). Published in 2000, City of God is E.L. Doctorow’s most ambitious, complex and enigmatic work so far. It is a highly metafictional text that may be best seen as a collection of skillfully interwoven plots and voices that create a kaleidoscopic universe of complementary ontological levels. The main plot recounts the stealing of the crucifix from the altar of the Episcopalian church of Saint Timothy’s, and Reverend Pemberton’s attempts to recover it as he stands at the brink of apostasy, only to find it on the roof of a synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. But this is merely one strand in the narrative world of City of God. In spite of the novel’s mosaic nature, all the interspersed storylines reveal an underlying common concern with ethics and justice. This paper argues that such preoccupation is tightly connected to Doctorow’s leftist ideology. I will explore the way in which Doctorow’s politics, his heightened ethical sense of justice and his own condition as a secular Jew collude in City of God. In other words, the aim will be to assess the extent to which Doctorow’s ideology in the novel derives from, or relates to, his upbringing in a Jewish‐humanist secular milieu. The Garden of Eden in Margaret Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford (Alison Jack, U. of Ediburgh) The work of the Scottish writer Margaret Oliphant is deeply infused with biblical images and allusions, often to the point of quotation. The opening novella in her Chronicles of Carlingford series, The Rector (1863), uses the image of paradise or the Garden of Eden as a recurring and uneasy metaphor for a place of belonging. George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) offers a less ambivalent use of the image, for example. In my paper I will argue that 279 Oliphant’s upbringing in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition offers some explanation for this, and illuminates her intertextual use of paradise imagery as well as other biblical allusions. The Typology of Apocalypse: Early Modern Revelations of the Whore of Babylon. (Victoria Brownlee, NUI Galway) This paper addresses the politically charged Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation. Acknowledging how this biblical book was popularly mapped onto the on‐ going struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism in the early modern period, it examines the exegetical practices that facilitated the translation of Revelation’s narratives and figures from biblical page to political present. The paper contends that a specifically typological reading of this biblical woman ensured that her body, as well as her seductive and deceiving nature (as detailed in Revelation 17), became a potent signifier of Catholicism and the threat it posed to the reformed faith. Considering how Protestantism’s ideologically inscribed Whore permeated the period’s literary writings, this paper will illuminate how this biblical women is reimagined in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590/1596) and Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon (c.1607). In doing so, I argue for a more capacious, and ideologically contested reading of the Whore, and the processes of typological revelation generally, in this period’s literature. More Than To Eat? The Temptation Scene of Genesis 3 in Literary Context. (Marta Zając) The paper examines the temptation scene of Gen 3, in particular, the eating of the forbidden fruit. The very function of eating is to be given theological significance, in which I will rely on the interdisciplinary study of Carol Meyers ‐ Discovering Eve. Ancient Israelite Women in Context. To contextualize the biblical scene in question is one of the tasks of my reading; yet, the other will be to maintain the theological framework needed to speak about Christian dilemmas in the way which respects the most vital parts of Christian creed. Therefore, in my presentation I will include texts without direct religious references, still with some focus on eating (“Mad Tea‐Party” in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Dulce Domum in Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows) as well as those in which the religious engagement of the authors leaves no doubt (“The Unexpected Meeting” in Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and “The Elfland” in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy). Still, my ultimate aim will be to present the eating of the forbidden fruit as both much more and much less than a mere act of transgression. The Raising of Lazarus Plot and the Metaphors of Resurrection in the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury (Nina Moroz Lomonosov, Moscow State U.) In one of his late interviews (2010) Ray Bradbury described himself as a "delicatessen religionist" inspired by Eastern and Western religions. Nevertheless, in many cases Bradbury turns out to be closer to Christian tradition than we could expect. Moreover, Bradbury’s ethics is quite straightforward, sometimes verging on the Puritan didacticism and the motif of “the sinful brotherhood of mankind” in “Nuclear Apocalypse” stories of 1950‐60s. The existence of an inextricable link between a human soul and a body is one of Bradbury's basic ideas, tracing from his early grotesques (The October Country, 1955) to nearly Christian fables of Long After Midnight (1976) and late stories of the 2000s (e.g. Dorian in Excelsis). My particular interest lies in Bradbury’s main Biblical metaphor of carnal resurrection, the Raising of Lazarus. Bradbury returned to it many times in both sci‐ fi and gothic stories (Some Live Like Lazarus; Lazarus Come Forth; G.B.S.‐Mark V, etc.). The 280 famous story I Sing the Body Electric! (1969) comprises both the robot imagery and the motif of resurrection, reconsidering several New Testament images. “Oh, of course, one accepts the Gospels, naturally”: Bible Intertextuality in Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote (Beatriz Valverde , Loyola U. Andalucía) ABSTRACT: When Graham Greene wrote Monsignor Quixote (published in 1982), one of his aims was to reflect critically on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spain of the late 1970s, as well as on the support this institution had offered to the former dictatorship of Franco – the so called ‘National Catholicism’. In this novel, the reader witnesses the evolution of the protagonist, Father Quixote, from a religious living a complacent life in a small village in La Mancha to a priest in rebellion against the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Spain, represented mainly by his Bishop. In this paper, I will examine Greene’s intertextual use of different religious texts to fight a model of conservative Catholic Church that he rejects. I will focus my analysis especially on the selection of quotations from the Gospels that the Bishop of La Mancha and Father Quixote make in their dialogic interactions, quotations that portray their different vision of the role that the Church should have in society. Female spirituality in Kate O’Brien’s biography of Teresa of Avila. (Pilar Somacarrera, Autonomous University of Madrid) Kate O’Brien had a controversial life which resembles in some ways that of Teresa of Avila. Both the Irish writer and the Spanish one were censored and suffered the rejection of society who often did not understand their works. As Eibhear Walshe points out, O´Brien is a deeply problematic figure because of her gender identity, the nature of her writing and her cultural placing. Her “personal portrait” of the Spanish mystic (Teresa of Avila, 1951) has been read by Aintxane Mentxaka as a lesbian text. Teresa of Avila, who has also been considered a lesbian, was a highly controversial figure during her times and had problems with the Spanish Inquisition. In this paper, I intend to establish parallelisms between the lives and the dissident spirituality of these two women writers which is deeply informed by their gender identity. Mission Literature in South Africa: Herbert Dhlomo and Nongqawuse (Giuliana Iannacaro, U. of Milan) My paper focuses on late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century South African mission literature; in particular, it discusses a play published in 1935 and written by a South African writer, Herbert I. E. Dhlomo (1903‐1956). The play is entitled The Girl Who Killed to Save (Nongqause the Liberator) – (Johannesburg, Lovedale Press, 1935) – and deals with an episode in South African history known in Western historiography as “The Xhosa Cattle‐Killing Movement”. Dhlomo was educated at Lovedale, a mission station founded in 1824 by the Glasgow Missionary Society (Eastern Cape Province). Working on Dhlomo’s play gives me the possibility to raise a number of questions regarding the intersection between Christian teaching and the representation of South African (in this case, Xhosa) traditional beliefs, myths and stories. The Girl Who Killed to Save has a clear educational purpose and its ‘message’ was meant to be plain and easily transmissible; a close reading, though, highlights the ideological complexity of the text, due to the reception and re‐elaboration of Christianity by a young South African writer who was not unaware of the growing socio‐political tensions of his times. Those tensions are clearly identifiable in the play and often prove irreconcilable. 281 “Proofs” of the existence of God in the apologetic works of G.K Chesterton and C.S. Lewis (Tomas Niedokos, John Paul II Catholic U. Of Lublin) The title brings to mind five proofs of the existence of God formulated by St Thomas Aquinas. The popular English Christian writers G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis were not learned theologians, however, in their apologetic works they undertook a similar task, to set forth the basic tenets of Christianity in an accessible way. Theirs was an exercise in “applied theology” rather than theoretical speculation; God was to be sought and found in the most mundane experiences of everyday life, not in the realm of abstract concepts or in the depths of one’s mind. This kind of apology employs a thoroughly English Baconian inductive method of generalising stepwise on the basis of experience rather than axioms, which can then trigger a chain of logical deduction. The five “proofs” of the existence of God described by Chesterton and Lewis in an intellectually and literary pleasing form, employing metaphors and images of war, sport, health, theatre etc., are: the existence of repeatable laws of nature, a proof by contradiction falsifying a thoroughly materialistic approach, a new approach to the “argument from morality” and an argument echoing in a way Aquinas’ Proof From Degrees of Perfection, as well as a sense of the Numinous. “Suspensive Parables In The Poetics of Louise Glück” (Marie Olivier, U. of Paris‐East) Throughout her work, and more particularly in the collections The Wild Iris (1992) and Meadowlands (1996), contemporary American poet Louise Glück has continuously explored the figure of the parable (along with that of the fable) in poems that investigate the narrative and the allegorical aspects of such religious and literary genres while suspending their didactic aim. In Meadowlands, the parables serve the mythological context of an actualized and modern Odyssey voiced by Ulysses, Telemachus, Penelope, Circe and their contemporary personae. In The Wild Iris, poems assume the shape of prayers and a dialogic structure between the creatures (plants, flowers and the gardener) and a divine instance. Vespers and matines are riddled with an ontological and a religious doubt which is not unlike Dickinson’s; Glück’s skepticism is rather Puritan but also influenced by the Jewish heritage of the poet.In this paper, I propose to study how Glück’s use of the parable does not aim at delivering a clear and straight message but rather at suspending meaning and referentiality through a poetics which blurs the frontiers between genders, literary and liturgical genres, and sacred writings. 282 S60 “Memory, Autobiography, History: Exploring the Boundaries” Co‐convenors: Irena Grubica, University of Rijeka, Croatia, Aoife Leahy, Independent Scholar, Ireland Tihana Klepač, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. “Mary Helena Fortune: An Independent Fly in the Webs of Victorian Society.” Mary Helena Fortune (c.1833–1909) was a pioneer Australian crime fiction writer. At a time when marriage and domesticity still largely defined women's lives, and “Answers and Correspondence” in the Australian Journal in almost every issue included advice on proper behaviour for women whereby they were “expected to give birth, raise families and provide a moral, civilising influence,” Fortune freely admitted in her autobiographical journalism to being self‐supporting, and not having a spouse. She claimed that her tea tasted better when she remembered that she has “earned every penny of the money that bought it“. The story of Fortune’s life, her writing, her husbands, sons and lovers is extraordinary, and was potentially dangerous for her, given the hypocritical Victorian morals. Thus, being fully aware of the webs the Victorian society set for independent flies, Fortune wrote under a pseudonym Waif Wander which shielded her, and protected her income from the audiences whose values she did not share. Her memoirs, partly fictionalised, a common Victorian genre, reveal an extraordinary woman and extraordinary times in Australian history. Nicoleta Stanca, Faculty of Letters, Dept of Modern Languages and Literatures and Communication Sciences, Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania. “‘This Great Magic Mountain Called Romania’: Memory, Autobiography, History: Exploring Irish‐ Romanian Boundaries in Peter Hurley’s The Way of the Crosses.” This paper will look at the manner in which Romania is perceived by an Irishman, Peter Hurley, living In Romania for twenty years, travelling on foot from Săpânța to Bucharest (26 days, 650 kilometres) and recounting it all in a book, The Way of the Crosses (2013). The title of Hurley’s book may have been inspired by a hybrid Irish‐Romanian experience, signalled to the author by another Irishman, Shaun Davey, who, in 2009, composed music on the “lyrics” of the epitaphs on the crosses in the Merry Cemetery of Săpânța, Romania. Travelling, being inspired by Romanian landscape and culture, with the background of the Irish writer’s “sense of place”, Hurley’s account is meant to reach audiences beyond the Romanian border and enable further interaction. The project of walking the way of the crosses and the writing about it, drawing maps and showing pictures fit in the Irish author’s preoccupation with bringing to the fore authentic traditional Romania. His travel writing becomes a means through which Romanian‐Irish personal and collective memory is transmitted beyond boundaries, avoiding ideological perspectives, using elements such as Dacian potttery, Romanian ceramic production today and the story of the last family of potters in Maramures. Rocco De Leo, University of Calabria – DSU, Italy “The Space(s) of the Outsider: History and Memory in Edward Said's Out of Place.” Memory can be considered the main feature characterizing the highly problematic narrative technique of life‐writing: from Saint Augustine to Franklin and Rousseau, it has commonly been the most important basis upon which people (for different reasons) have built the story of their Selves. Out of Place, Edward Said’s personal account of his life from 1935 to the mid‐1960s, when he was a university student in the United States, offers rare 283 insights into the early life of one of our finest thinkers. Convinced by a fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 to leave a record of where he was born and lived for years, in his memoir Said rediscovers his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, in order to let the reader understand how his identity as a man and as a critic emerged from that background. This paper seeks to explore Said’s inner feelings and deep thoughts of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, an outsider; and how historical, geographical and political events combine together in order to build up an integrated but confused identity, shaped by the ambiguous self‐images of a young man’s coming of age Aude Haffen, University Paul Valéry‐Montpellier III, France. “Christopher Isherwood’s Kathleen and Frank: memories and pre‐history of a queer autobiographer.” In 1971, at the age of 67, Christopher Isherwood published as a full‐fledged 360‐page book what is usually confined in the first chapters of an autobiography: Kathleen and Frank is the biography of his parents, and it also includes their genealogy, ie the lives of the Machell‐ Smiths (his mother’s parents) and the Bradshaw‐Isherwoods (his father’s ancestors), with historical analepses back to the time of the Civil War and direct and indirect memories of a family manor literally haunted by ghosts from the past. Its form has immediate records of moods and events prevail over hindsight and re‐constructed narratives. Indeed the (auto)biographer’s third‐person account, blending facts, assumptions and “Christopher” ’s personal memories, gives way to a juxtaposition of his father’s letters and his mother’s diaries, sparsely commented on by the son/(auto)biographer in seemingly random, impressionistic, often bracketed remarks, exegeses and childhood reminiscences. For the pacifist and queer son of a Hero‐Father killed in action near Ypres in 1915, the Past and History had long been equated to a repressive ideology conveyed by “disembodied voices from pulpits, newspapers, books” (Kathleen and Frank 356) and meant to shape the proper British masculinity he challenged and eschewed both in his life and in his autobiographical personae. Stephen Joyce, Aarhus University, Denmark. “All the Facts We Cannot Know: History and Memory in Dictee.” Audre Lorde’s famous statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” implies a strong political alliance between marginalised groups seeking emancipation and the postmodernist assault on dominant metanarratives and methods of knowledge. Yet this seeming confluence of interests papers over a fundamental schism, for the establishment of group consciousness depends on the kind of shared histories and memories that postmodern theory discredits as artificially constructed. Perhaps no work in American literature explores this problem better than Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s avant‐ garde autobiography Dictee. At once both a refugee from an impoverished post‐war Korea and a member of student protest movements and radical art circles in the USA in the 1960s and 70s, Cha drew on her extensive knowledge of literary and cultural theory, as well as her personal background, to explore how the intellectual assault on the authority of history, memory, and art simultaneously undercuts the efforts of marginalised groups to have their histories and memories of oppression recognised. Dictee juxtaposes chapters that present the postmodern case against history and memory with accounts of her mother’s life during the Japanese Occupation of Korea and memories of family members killed during the post‐war years of dictatorship and asks how we can hope to give voice to these pasts when postmodernism has dismantled the tools necessary to unearth them. From her unique dual perspective, Cha reveals that the problem is not dismantling the 284 master’s house but that the master’s imperfect tools are still necessary to build the subaltern’s house. Tuğba ŞİMŞEK, Artvin Çoruh Uni. ‐ Fen‐Edebiyat Fakültesi, Turkey. “The Veiled Stories of Conor McPherson in the play of The Veil.” Conor McPherson is a very remarkable contemporary Irish playwright. He is very well‐ known for his storytelling/monologue technique like in The Weir (1997), The Dublin Carol (2000), Shining City (2005), or The Seafarer (2006). In his plays, he mostly tries to release and redeem his characters from their troubled minds and, psychological and physical entrapments. He plays with this thin line between reality and imagination through narratives of his characters. In this play called The Veil (2011) he again puts his characters in such a position that their problems will be exposed through the use of narrative technique of storytelling and through the employment of the supernatural, which may be regarded as an indispensable part of McPherson’s theatre. McPherson’s The Veil explores Ireland in the 19th century so its setting reflects the Ascendency Ireland which, in the light of the currents economic and social circumstances, is about to decline. This play also demonstrates a parallelism to the psyche of the fading Celtic Tiger in terms of being haunted by poverty and deprivation. The storytelling technique enables to explore how memory functions in McPherson’s play in terms of individual and collective Irish psyche. Besides, the supernatural is deployed as a catalyst to reveal these stories. This paper is to deal with revelation of stories in the very context of decadence and decline of traditional and established values in the Ascendancy Ireland of the 19th century by paralleling the Celtic Tiger on the wane and to analyse them in terms of how memory and narrative affect individual and collective consciousness, and both the past and the present in the construction of identity. Benjamin Keatinge, South East European University, Macedonia. “Memory, History and Autobiography in the Poetry and Prose of Richard Murphy.” Richard Murphy’s long poem The Battle of Aughrim (1968) has been praised for its work of historical excavation in recreating the events of a pivotal battle in Irish history. Ted Hughes has identified Murphy’s “classical strengths” in his recall of “the actuality of events, the facts and sufferings of history”. Equally important, however, are the ways in which Murphy’s poem explores historical memory and the place of Aughrim in collective historical imagining. The battle, known in Irish as ‘Aughrim of the slaughter’, has been claimed in different ways by differing factions in Ireland; indeed, Murphy’s poem foregrounds a battle almost eclipsed by the triumphalism in Northern Ireland around the Battle of the Boyne of 1690, despite Aughrim’s arguably greater historical consequence. The poem shows an awareness of how “History is happening today” and is recreated by each generation. The battle also has personal resonance for Murphy since his ancestors fought on both sides. The poem’s “actuality” is thus also an autobiographical one by which Murphy seeks to explain “the divisions and devastations” in his own self, as he writes in his autobiography The Kick (2002). This paper proposes to re‐examine Murphy’s poem as an example of how memory and belief often diverge saying more about the prejudices of victor or vanquished than about “the facts … of history”. Issues of religion, nationhood and language are mixed up with the (mis)rememberings which surround this chapter in Irish history. Murphy’s poem allows us to explore these issues while also reflecting on the poet’s own role as chronicler, historian and autobiographer. 285 Elena Pinyaeva, University of Moscow, Russia. “Towards Polyphony in Attaining the Truth, or Self‐representation as Self‐invention in R. Nye’s Fictional Autobiography The Voyage of the Destiny.” R. Nye’s The Voyage of the Destiny (1982) celebrates a hybrid mixture of sub‐genres that constitute a conventional life‐writing discourse: the memoir, confession, travel writing and Bildungsroman. It presents Sir Walter Raleigh’s fictional autobiography, which takes the form of a diary written in the course of his voyage in search of El Dorado’s legendary gold. Although the narrator attempts to memorialize his life experience and make others recognize the truth about himself, his “confession” puts authenticity under question with regard to the failure of the transcendent notion of the wholeness of the self. The novel’s break with tradition is mainly achieved through using multifarious subject positions that exchange their narrative functions being involved into homodiegetic experiments; the latter in their turn lead to the narrator’s repetition and splitting, causing the subject to create a “patchwork” of disjointed discursive fragments and think both the past and the present differently. Since the unified self, as the novel proves, seems to be insecure, nor can it form its own linear narrative, the autobiography concerned, therefore, might be seen as a historical and ideological construct, which produces an effect of constantly changing discourse. Paola Baseotto, Insubria University, Italy. “Memory and Salvation in Puritan Autobiographical Writings.” I propose to discuss a paradigmatic example of individual and collective construction, orientation and manipulation of memories in Puritan autobiographical writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following an analysis of over 200 spiritual autobiographies and a large number of letters and diaries by Elizabethan and Stuart puritans, I discuss how their authors often modelled their past experiences on authoritative contemporary or scriptural patterns. The puritans viewed sanctification and new birth as the outcome of a characteristic sequence of spiritual, psychological and emotional changes which believers were urged to describe in autobiographical conversion narratives. The writing of spiritual autobiographies was often motivated by a desire to join the ‘spiritual aristocracy’ of the regenerates by offering detailed accounts of successful conversion experiences. Authors drew inspiration from and often appropriated elements of the process of spiritual awakening of paragons of sanctification like St Paul and Luther. It is worth noting how authors re‐interpreted their lives in the light of the sanctifying paradigm set by spiritual authorities and how they retrieved, re‐invented or re‐shaped their memories (especially their childhood memories) to make them conform to a well‐ established pattern. Anna Izabela Cichoń, Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. “Collective, Cultural and Individual Memory: Twentieth Century History in Doris Lessing’s Autobiographical Works.” In her memoires Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) and in her alternative biography of her parents Alfred and Emily (2002), Doris Lessing scrutinizes her and her family’s life in a socio‐political perspective. She ruminates over the influence of the broad historical processes in the twentieth century—colonialism, the two world‐ wars and communism—upon her personal experience and self‐formation. In her autobiographies, Lessing traces back her family’s routes to explore her situatedness in history, first as a daughter of the Great War survivors and middle class colonials in Persia and in Southern Rhodesia, and then as an emerging author, who returns to the post‐ 286 Second World War England. While re‐creating her life, Lessing highlights the contextual character of individual memory and examines the complex nature of remembering/forgetting/reconstructing the past, which gives a meta‐thematic dimension to her narratives. In the paper, I focus on Lessing’s reflection on the connection between collective, cultural and individual memories and on her search for individual agency, which she finds in the process of writing only, in the creative acts of re‐visiting and re‐ writing the past. Concetta Maria Sigona (presenting) and María Amor Barros del Río, University of Burgos, Spain. “Reconstruction and memories in Caterina Edwards' Finding Rosa.” As a Canadian author with English and Italian origins, Caterina Edwards has been constantly living among three different realities that have shaped her sense of belonging. Far from looking for her identity, in Finding Rosa (2008) she searches for information about her Italian heritage. More than being a personal quest, this novel represents a historical and cultural exploration of Italian emigrated women's lives before and after migration to the USA, the historical reconstruction of Istria exodus towards places all over the world and the search for her mother's identity who was suffering from dementia. This novel is about lost history and lost memory and a quest for a past and a home. Respondent: Aoife Leahy 287 S61 “Contemporary Irish female writing at the intersection of history and memory” Convenors: Anne Fogarty (UCD) & Marisol Morales‐Ladrón (U of Alcalá) Places saturated with memory: The Figure of the Traveller in the works of Marina Carr, Claire Keegan and Evelyn Conlon Melania Terrazas, University of La Rioja (Spain) The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the last decade of the twenty‐first century, several Irish female writers have engaged in the exploration of a type of fiction that attempts to place Irish women back in a history from which they were often written out. Here, I analyse the figure of the ‘tinker’ as depicted by Marina Car in her play By the Bog of Cats (2002) and by Claire Keegan in her short‐story “The Forrester Daughter” (Walk the Blue Fields, 2007). I also investigate the figure of the orphan girl as depicted by Evelyn Conlon in her latest novel Not the Same Sky (2013). Carr, Keegan and Conlon tackle the issue of memory, both as an individual psychological construct and as a collective recollection in their writings. On the one hand, Carr constructs her main female character, Hester Swane, and her daughter Josie, as ‘tinkers’ or members of this traveller community in order to emphasize their otherworldliness and separation from the settled cultural and societal norm in the Irish Midlands. On the other hand, Keegan uses Martha and her daughter Victoria, also of tinker blood, to reject the Mother Ireland image of compassion and suffering and represent the reality of modern Irish women in rural Ireland. Both Hester and Martha find in “the Bog of Cats” and “the blue fields” the solitude that will let their mind calm down and their memory surface. Both Carr and Keegan assert the force of the mother‐daughter link in their writings. Their tinker female characters contribute to the emotional and tragic impact of their stories because, using Lanters (2008: 149) words, they struggle “with questions of identity, fate and self‐determination”. However, their tinker heritage prevent them from escaping from their mythical homes or makes them unwilling to do so. Our third women writer, Conlon, narrates the moving story of over 4.000 Irish girls orphaned by famine, who were shipped from Ireland to New Plymouth in England and on to Sydney, Australia on 21 ships between 1848 and 1850. They were sent to work as domestic servants, and the novel is a reflection on their lives. Conlon draws the narrative back into the present, in Dublin, and returns to the character of Joy Kennedy, a sculptor who receives a letter from Australia asking her to come and help to create a memorial to the famine orphan girls in Sydney. Such an important move situates the orphans in history. Conlon recreates how these orphan girls had to dig a hole and put their memories in it. In Not the Same Sky, she honors their memory and unearths their lives. This aim of this paper is to explore the process involved not only in what we remember of these ‘tinkers’ and orphan girls, the most vulnerable in the social order, but in how and why we actually recall the past lived by these marginalized women in a given way. The Reimagining of Female Identity in Lia Mills’ Fallen Nada Buzadžić Nikolajević, University of Belgrade The paper aims at presenting the ways in which female identity and female experience of the world are reimagined in Lia Mills’ novel Fallen. By skilfully exploring the multiple points of both tensions and connections between female characters in the novel, Lia Mills 288 makes her narrative feminocentric, at the same time managing not to make her female protagonist a feminist spokesperson but rather a person coming of age in extraordinary circumstances and creating her identity ‘in the face of an overwhelming sense of illegitimacy and disempowerment’ (Fogarty, 2002: 86). Applying the method of close reading and looking into the narrative strategies employed in the novel, the author of the paper attempts at exploring how historical material and the imagination of a creative writer are intersected in this novel in order to bring history and memory to life, vividly recreating the context of the lived experience of women in Ireland in the early twentieth century in the backdrop of a world war and national rising. Much as this period is not commonly ‘renowned as a hotbed of feminism’ (Pierse, 2014), Katie’s coming of age at the end of the novel clearly indicates that she finds the courage to reject the silence imposed on women’s issues. History, Memory and Identity in Translation:Anne Enright in English and German Katharina Walter, University of Innsbruck This paper examines intersections of history and memory in recent writings by Anne Enright to map out differences, however subtle, in the English original texts and their German translations. The argument demonstrates that translations can destabilize notions of history and of individual, national or religious identity not only in the cultures that receive them, as Lawrence Venuti has recurrently argued, but also in the source cultures. Apart from representations of history, memory and identity in Enright’s literary oeuvre, another important area of enquiry in this paper is the identity of literary originals compared to their translated versions. Key questions this paper addresses include the following: How can what is supposedly unique to Enright’s literary style as well as to the Irish cultural tradition be transferred into a German‐speaking linguistic, historical and cultural environment? What has to be captured and what can be surrendered for literary translation to be “faithful” and/or ethical? And how can we determine the ownership of literary texts and ideas, which is both compromised and enriched by translation? These questions are important in‐ and outside the literary marketplace in a world in which personal boundaries as well as boundaries of time and space are constantly re‐negotiated. “That is How it was for Irish Girls in 1972: Coming of Age in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancers Dancing” Lucía Morera, Universidad de Zaragoza Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Irish women distanced themselves progressively from the traditional feminine roles of mother or wife, adopting instead a more independent and active role in society. In spite of the Irish State's continuous attempts at maintaining control over women, Irish society became more contemporary, allowing women the opportunity to develop their identity in different directions. Writing about the experience of being a woman using the ‘coming‐of‐age novel’ as a framework, is an example of that development. The Irish author Éilís Ní Dhuibhne dealt with this issue in her novel The Dancers Dancing (1999): the idea of entering into womanhood in the changing Ireland of the 1970s when female identity still remained unclear. The protagonist, Orla, a middle‐aged Irish woman, recalls memories of her own pre‐adolescent experience during the summer of 1972 through the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator. While the Northern Irish “Troubles” were raging, she was studying Irish in Donegal. Her experience in Gaeltacht liberates and distances her from her community ties and, as a 289 consequence, Orla has to face her own prejudices and fears about her emerging womanhood. Whilst embarking upon her journey to self‐discovery, acquiring knowledge and vital experience, she takes the engrossed reader along with her in every step of her path towards maturity. 290 S63. BIOGRAPHY Conveners : Joanny MOULIN (The Biography Society, Aix‐Marseille Université, France) & J. W. Hans RENDERS J.W.Renders@rug.nl (Biography Institute, University of Groningen, the Netherlands) Tuesday 23rd August 17.00‐19.00 — “Historical Perspectives” RENDERS, Hans (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) — Biographies as Multipliers; The First World War as Turning Point in the Lives of Modernist Artists — It is readily assumed that just before the outbreak of the First World War, intellectuals and artists were pacifists. Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, for instance, published many articles which conveyed his pacifist convictions. However, comparative biographical research has shown that Van Doesburg’s views were not representative of those of his peers. This chapter will show how a modernist artist’s seemingly representative view turns out to be rather unique, thanks to biographical research. The concept of a ‘turning point’ as an argument for partial biography – a moment or an event in a person’s life that influences that person’s subsequent public deeds or actions – serves here as an important biographical‐methodological aid. How have biographers of modern artists dealt with their subjects’ reactions to the Great War? How did artists react and respond to the violence and brutality of war, and to the vigorous nationalism of this period? These are not simple questions to answer, particularly because the opinions of artists did not remain stable over the war’s four‐year span. For biographers it is fruitful to investigate whether the First World War was a turning point in their subjects’ lives – and, if so, to explore whether such a transformation was representative of the reactions of other artists towards the war. Yet, regretfully, most biographers of modernist artists have not attempted to investigate the representativeness or uniqueness of their subjects’ beliefs. To substantiate the proposition that the turning point is a fruitful theoretical focus for a biography, this chapter investigates how the opinions of a select group of modernist artists evolved during the war, and how their biographers wrote about these changes and put them in perspective. We will compare the lives and views of the Dutch art theorist, architect, painter, and poet Theo van Doesburg; the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara; the German playwright and co‐ founder of the Dadaist movement Hugo Ball; the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich; the Italian founder of Futurism Filippo Marinetti; and other modernist artists. At the centre of this chapter lies a research question concerning artists’ reflections on the war and what their biographers have said about this. Do their interpretations confirm what has been said in the literature about the relation between modernist art and the First World War, or do they put this relation into a different perspective? RICHARDS Page (University of Hong Kong, China) — Biography, the Historical Lyric, and Rita Dove — The contemporary lyric’s rich possibilities for biographical telling have remained largely unexplored. There is one major trigger, therefore, for this research: Rita Dove’s Pulitzer‐Prize winning Thomas and Beulah, a book of lyric and biography founded in the lives of the poet’s maternal grandparents. There has been no other major and radically successful impulse in English, previous to this publication, for the irruption of lyric in the genre of biography, a major milestone on a new landscape of what I am calling the “historical lyric.” I will argue, however, that there are relevant and underlying back‐ 291 stories for this irruption of importing two “unnatural” elements into modern and contemporary lyric poetry: namely, the history of biography and third‐person voicing, united and forged first to this degree by Dove in the groundbreaking lyrics of Thomas and Beulah. My paper will serve, therefore, as an overview to the pioneering work in lyric and biography, initiated in the poems of Rita Dove. It also aims, more widely, to assess the impact of this work: creatively, on modernist and contemporary lyric form itself; and historically, on what newly constitutes telling a “life” or “micro‐history” when represented in the relatively few but emerging examples of historical and biographical lyric. Poetry is, of course, full of poems that fall between the cracks of genre, but rarely does a new pattern within a genre begin to appear with the historical force that we see in the lyric updates on biography in Rita Dove. While research on links between autobiography and lyric already has created a sub‐volume of its own in critical studies, there is work to be done on the phenomenon of lyric and biographical voicing: a characteristic of poetry both new and urgent to contemporary understandings of biography, history and poetics. Brief Bio: Page Richards is an Associate Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. Educated at Harvard University for the Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language and holding a Master's degree in Creative Writing from Boston University, she has also studied at the Playwrights' Theatre in Boston and has contributed to theatre and film production in Hollywood. Richards received a national Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities in the U.S., Outstanding Teaching Award from the Faculty of Arts at HKU, a Vermont Studio Writer’s Fellowship for Poetry and Translation, among many other awards. She publishes on poetry, American literature, drama, and performance. Her work has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, the Harvard Review, Wascana Review, the Journal of Modern Languages, and 'After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman, among others; she is the author of Distancing English: A Chapter in the History of the Inexpressible and Lightly Separate. She has studied and taught at Harvard University and Boston University, offering courses in poetry, drama, and creative writing. She currently directs the MFA in Creative Writing, the HKU Black Box Theatre, Moving Poetry, the HKU International Poetry Prize, the Writers’ Series, and production of Yuan Yang: A Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing. BROCK Malin Lidström (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden) — Mad, bad or (just) sad? Recent biofiction of Zelda Fitzgerald — The publication of Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald in 1970 is considered a watershed moment in feminist biography. In contrast to then existing biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Milford’s portrayal of Zelda was largely sympathetic towards her literary efforts, quoting long passages from Zelda’s short stories and unfinished novel. Equally significant was Milford’s insistence on Scott’s literary debt to Zelda. In Milford’s biography, Scott considers Zelda’s life and letters his intellectual property and is threatened by Zelda’s insistence on using the same material in her own writing. Attempting to set the record straight, Milford took great pains to distinguish the (bio)fictional female characters in Scott’s writing from Zelda, the person. In the 2000s, several biofictional works of Zelda have appeared. In this paper I read these works in relation to Milford’s biographical “saving” of Zelda, paying special attention to how Zelda’s supposed schizophrenia and literary efforts have been depicted. In the process, I also hope to generate a discussion of biography’s “truth” claims in light of the emerging field of biofictional studies. WILSON COSTA Karyn (Aix‐Marseille Université, France) ‐ “Auguste Angellier's Life of Robert Burns: an Indulgent Biography” — “It is always the biographer’s fantasy to have 292 forged, in the crucible of life‐writing, the only true likeness” (Robert McCrum, the Observer, 31/5/15). Auguste Angellier’s cradle‐to‐the‐grave life of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns (1759‐96) is an aesthetic response to the theoretical, scientific approach to literary criticism and life writing adopted by Hippolyte Taine. Based on the formula ‘race‐ milieu‐moment’ – the inherited disposition, the environment that modifies the inherited racial disposition and the momentum of past and present cultural traditions (Encyclopaedia Britannica) – Taine’s sociological approach investigates the causal dependence of literature on its milieu within a framework of hard‐and‐fast rules. Angellier’s Life of Burns modified this approach to the critical study of an author and his work, causing something of a sensation on its publication in the 1890s. The Frenchman seeks to define and explain the personality of Robert Burns as he sees it, the essence of his genius, by emphasizing aesthetic criteria in what he defines as a realistic novel, based on facts, letters, Burns’s own admissions. Burns, he writes, lived in a continual state of poetry; his Life of Burns is an exhaustive dramatization of everyday moments in that Life by a fellow‐poet with an avowed affinity with his biographical subject. Angellier’s true likeness, one that previous biographers had, in his view, distorted and perverted, is that of the Poet of Love. The forging of this likeness, its inspiration and its after‐life, will be the subject of this paper. POLLAND Imke (Justus‐Liebig‐Universität Gießen, Germany) — Imaginary Biography? Portraying the public and private persona in the royal biopic The Queen. — Although it may not be the only award‐winning film centring on a British sovereign in recent years, Stephen Frears’s film The Queen (2006) forms an exception: It is the first biopic of a living monarch. This fact confronts the director with several difficulties: On the one hand, he has to portray the official, symbolical, public persona of Queen Elizabeth II, while at the same time trying to grasp the private person behind the “body politic” (to speak in Kantorowicz’s terms). Thus this film constantly oscillates between imaginatively “tearing down the palace walls” in order to picture Elizabeth as mother or grandmother (body natural) and re‐enacting situations of official engagements showing her as Queen (body politic). The paper will explore how this biopic negotiates between factual and fictional accounts and in what ways it combines documentary material, re‐enactments of actual (well‐known) news footage, and imagined/staged “behind the scenes” shots. The main argument is that the genre conventions as well as the medium, the format and the intended audiences of the biopic pose new challenges for the approach and practice of biography in general, as it highlights dramatizing and entertaining aspects and thus asks for a re‐positioning between the factual/fictional dichotomy. In addition to that, it will be proposed to conceptualize the royal biopic as a subgenre in its own right, allowing for its special requirements and difficulties. The main questions to be addressed are the following: ‐ Which strategies/aesthetics of authentication are employed? ‐ How can the spaces opened up for innovations/changes by the biopic be conceptualised for the genre of biography? ‐ What ethics/principles are required pertaining to the person portrayed? ‐ What are the main features of royal biopics? In how far can they – according to these characteristics – be conceptualised as a subgenre? Wednesday 24th August 14‐16 — “Biographers” MOULIN Joanny (Aix‐Marseille Université, France)— André Maurois, or the Aesthetic Advantage of Biography Over the Novel — André Maurois (1885‐1967) is today a partly forgotten French writer, and rather unjustly so, or rather for a reason that pertains more of French literary history than of is the intrinsic literary value of his oeuvre. For historical 293 reasons, biography as a literary genre has been less flourishing in French than in other national literary traditions. In 1918, in his preface to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey wrote: “The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.” For a Frenchman today, this reads a surprising paradox, for we are rather under the impression that, unlike the English, the French have never had a great biographical tradition: we have never had a Walton and an Aubrey, a Johnson and a Boswell, a Carlyle and a Lytton Strachey. But we have had a Maurois: a contemporary of Lytton Strachey and the New Biography movement in Britain, his 1928 Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge gave the seminal reflexions on modern biography, Aspects of Biography, in the wake of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, at a time when the theory of the novel was still inchoative. On the whole, Maurois’s oeuvre comprises no less than 18 biographies of French and English writers, political and historical figures, as well as of the scientist Sir Alexander Fleming. Toward the end of his life, Maurois devoted most of his energy to writing biographies, as if both he and the public had finally recognized that this was the genre in which he was making his most significant contribution to literature. Because he was a member of the French Academy, and something of an official public figure, Maurois is often thought to have been an “academic” writer, a capital sin in the days of the “nouveau roman”, while the “French theory” period that ruled the roast for two decades after his death had little time and admiration for biography. However, that has occulted the fact that his biographies, unlike his novels, are far from academic, but on the contrary they have brought new life to the genre, by approaching biography as a form of art, thus setting the trend for what is sometimes called “biographie à la française”, as distinct from the more sedate and longer forms of historiography favoured in Britain and America. This article would offer to do justice to Maurois’ achievement as an innovative biographer, re‐reading his major biographies in the light of his theoretical reflections in Aspects de la biographie, but also Destins exemplaires, Mémoires, etc. so as to cast a new light on the literary value of these underestimated works, that make such pleasurable reads up to this day. DE HAAN Binne (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) Richard Holmes: A biographer‐historian par excellence — The British biographer Richard Holmes (1945) is well known as a master of ‘literary biography’. He gained prominence in the 1970s and 1980s as biographer of British literary giants like Shelley, Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, Richard Savage and Wollstonecraft. His hybdrid book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), in which Holmes combined the genres of biography, travelogue and autobiography even became a classic in literary circles. Holmes became one of the ambassadors of the genre of biography, and eventually even became Professor in Biography and taught courses in biography at the University of East‐Anglia, Norwich. Holmes wrote several theoretical pieces on biography as a methodology. One of his central observations in these considerations is the distinction he makes in biographical research between archival field work and the interpretative ‘dreamwork’ a biographer performs. This article argues that, despite the mainly literary acclaim Holmes has received, his biographical research reveals an outstanding historical commitment, that brought the field of biography to a higher level. Holmes is a biographer‐historian par excellence: by scrupulously retrieving and examing historical documents and texts, and critically interpreting them in a masterful way, he combines skills that historians ideally should pursue to combine too. Holmes has used the metaphor of biograpy as a ‘handshake’ with 294 the past. Holmes indeed tries to do justice to the past by giving as much care as possible to the traces and documents left by the past – examining them detective like, as a microhistorian, but also by presenting them in a careful way to let speak the past itself properly, and by interpreting them ingeniously and tactfully as a biographer from the present. Holmes therefore possesses a fruitful fascination for the past via a ‘personalized’ perspective that leads to a a very relevant and better understanding of cultural and societal developments in this past, by which we can better understand the present. The importance Holmes attaches to biographical research as an act of historical understanding, even also leads to books that are not directly cradle to grave biographies or biographies in the proper use of the word, dedicated to one individual. It brought Holmes to write masterly ‘group biographies’ that changed our view of history and also of the protagonists Holmes has studies and interpreted intensively in an innovative manner in these projects: The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) and Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (2013), his latest two major books, are proofs of that mechanism. In fact, we can observe in hindsight that this mechanism provided the fundament too for his previous biographical works, in which often several protagonists filled the stage. THIRRIARD Maryam (Aix‐Marseille Université, France)— Harold Nicolson, the “New Biographer” — In 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote what was to become her revolutionising manifesto for life‐writing: “The New Biography”19. She had in mind recent works such as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) or Queen Victoria (1921); however, her essay was principally intended as a book review of Harold Nicolson’s Some People, published that same year20. It transpired that Some People had much more to it than simply being a portrait gallery: it had a sense of beginning and ending, the time line being set by Harold Nicolson’s own life span. Woolf gave much praise to Nicolson’s innovative life‐writing techniques and the way he had managed to set himself free from the rituals and constraints of Victorian biography. Most of all, she relished his having brought “the granite and the rainbow” so close together. Nicolson’s successive careers as diplomat, journalist, politician and radio broadcaster established him as a fine political and historical analyst of home politics and international affairs; his talents as a diarist and portraitist are still valued to this day for the historical information his first‐hand accounts offer. At a specific stage in his life – Paris, 1919 ‐ Nicolson also engaged in a literary career, as he set about writing the life of the French decadent poet, Paul Verlaine. All in all, Nicolson wrote eleven full length biographies, including his semi‐autobiographical piece Some People. He also provided a complete study of biography, entitled The Development of English Biography and published in 1929 as part of The Hogarth Lectures on Literature series. Writing Literary Biography in 1957, Leon Edel described Harold Nicolson and André Maurois as having “offered us during the 1920’s the liveliest discussion of biography we have had in our half century”21; in this regard, they joined Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. It is from this perspective that I wish to present Nicolson’s biographical work: by assessing his particular contribution to the evolution of biography at this pivotal moment in the history of biography as a literary practice while highlighting the reasons for which he should definitely be considered as part of the canon. Focusing mainly on Nicolson’s earlier biographies, the following questions shall to be addressed: what led Nicolson to engage in a literary career of writing biographies and in which way have his earliest productions set 19 Woolf, Virginia. “The New Biography”. Granite and Rainbow Essays. Forgotten Books, 2015. Print. 20 Nicolson, Harold. Some People. London: Faber Finds, 2010. Print. 21 Edel, Leon. Literary biography. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1959. Print, 6. 295 the tone for his biographical style? How did Nicolson’s theory and practice help develop new forms and techniques for modernist biography? How has Nicolson’s praxis – for instance, his resorting to the devices of fictional writing – contributed to defining biography as a literary genre? What is it exactly that makes him a “New Biographer”, in the Woolfean sense? TREMBLAY Alexandre (Aix‐Marseille Université, France)Giles Lytton Strachey and Biography: The Oddity of True Interpretation — Giles Lytton Strachey succumbs to a stomach cancer in 1932 at 51 years of age. He has to wait for the release of Eminent Victorians, 14 years before his well‐known quote: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it ». (HOLROYD, 1968) in 1918 before the rest of his work acquires the type of assent he holds today. Amongst the most distinguished oeuvres: Queen Victoria (1921) grants him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize a year later in 1922, Book and Characters (1922), Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928) and Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (1931) contribute to assert his position as biographer. Nonetheless, his significant input, namely to The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement, validates his career as a critic as well. In 1912, before becoming a notorious public figure, Strachey releases Landmark in French Literature. This publication is a concise and opinionated depiction of the evolution of French Literature from the Middles Ages spanning to the end of the 19th century. From 1907 to 1909, his critics which seem to be theatrical in nature are published in The Spectator. Although, Lytton Strachey reveals himself quite late, it seems fair to believe he contributed to the rise of a style as well as a post‐Victorian frame of mind. This article is meant to highlight various modalities of biographical writing which wreak havoc Victorian traditions at the beginning of the 20th century. It is what Michael Holroyd calls “The New biography » in his biographical work Lytton Strachey: The New Biography. Through the oeuvre that enables the writer to become a circumvented biographer: Eminent Victorians, we will expose how the author undergoes a process of Renaissance in the writing of historical works leading him to the biography genre. The difference between an historian and a biographer not being quite clear at the time, as it is still today it seems, we will attempt to bring additional meaning to the status of biographer in a historiographical context. Moreover, the scientific methodology input as well as the artistic type of input appears to yearn for a modernized equilibrium within these innovative parameters which enables biographers to free themselves from this Victorian ponderosity. Finally, we will attempt to find a pattern concerning the rapport Strachey holds with the personalities he wishes to undertake this biographical endeavor. For the sake succinctness, we will refer to them as biographees. As it appears Lytton Strachey’s dose of interpretation sets out new grounds striving to enhance the comprehension of readers. SABLAYROLLES François (Université Paris 2 Panthéon‐Assas, France) — The Silhouetted Figure of the Biographer — Arguably one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time, O’Faolain was in his youth swept along by the wave of revolutionary idealism that led him to join the ranks of the Anti‐ Treaty resistance movement. His hopes were dashed by the emergence in the 1920s and 1930s of a morally repressive, as well as ideologically and politically conservative, Ireland. O’Faolain’s choice to return to Ireland to confront the power of the Censorship Board which had banned his first collection of short stories, Midsummer Night Madness (1932), testifies to his conception of writing, whether it be fiction, biography, or essay, as an act of resistance. While O’Faolain’s realist aesthetic in fiction questioned idealised representations of Ireland, his interest in historical biographies – he wrote highly popular biographies of 296 Constance Markievicz, Daniel O’Connell, Hugh O’Neill and Eamon de Valera – aimed to challenge the dominant nationalist historiography, thereby joining in the academic “revisionist” movement that was emerging at the time under the influence of T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards. If O’Faolain’s versions of Irish history had a significant impact in Ireland and were praised by historians of his time, some intellectuals noted a certain literary stamp that bore witness to his style as a writer of fiction but which sits uneasily with history writing. The historian F. S. L. Lyons, for example remarked upon the overwhelming presence of the “biographic voice” in O’Faolain’s biographies. While O’Faolain often commented on the self‐referential – sometimes even autobiographic – dimension of his fiction, this paper will explore the limit between biography, autobiography and memory. It will examine how the biographer’s presence materialises in his work and questions the value of these biographies as history writing. After having established the coexistence of the “stylistic” presence of the biographer, and of his presence as a “witness” of historical events, I will study to what extent O’Faolain’s technique and voice tend to sculpt the biographic figures in his own image, leading to the emergence of a form of veiled, shadowy self‐portrait. This will lead me to study the specificity of the “relationship” the biographer entertains with his characters, showing how much it owes to the New English Biography. While the presence of memory and of the biographic ‘voice’ may be seen as encroaching on the scientific rigour and objectivity required of history writing, they nonetheless contribute to renewing and revising the tradition of historical biographies in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Bio: A French post doctoral researcher in Irish literature, François Sablayrolles completed a PhD on the influence of Sean O'Faolain’s historical biographies on his realist fiction in December 2013 under the supervision of Carle Bonfous‐Murat at Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle entitled: “La biographie historique et son influence sur la fiction réaliste irlandaise de l’entre‐deux‐guerres: l’exemple de Sean O’Faolain”. He also completed an MPhil in Angl‐Irish Literature at Trinity College. Thursday 25th August 11.00‐13.00 — “Interdisciplinary perspectives” DI MASCIO Patrick (Aix‐Marseille Université) Biographying Freud — There have been many attempts at biographying Freud: testimonies – if that counts as biography ‐, authorized and unauthorized, revisionist and loyalist, popular and scholarly, in print and on the screen… The whole frantic biographical activity has had a commanding background that biographers could not possibly ignore: the notion promulgated by the Master himself, that biographers were condemned to lie and conceal the truth about their heroes ‐ or heroines for that matter… Besides, Freud himself in his Selbstdarstellung was quite intent on indicating that the works and the Cause were what matters… “Das Beste, was du wissen kannst, darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen! “ Freud loved that quotation from Faust… Of course, Freud’s whole business is precisely about ignoring whatever form of taboo or tact, witness his exposition of Leonardo’s homosexual phantasy… The work of the biographers of the Master has been caught between two opposite trends: disclosing or keeping secrets. The moral dilemma of the biographer ‐ when the biographer is lucky enough to come upon sources worthy of a dilemma ‐ has been anticipated by the biographers’ provider and providence: the Freud Archives. The tempo of the biographical‐publishing business around Freud has been orchestrated by the “Archives”, who have been intent on preserving the privacy of the characters of the Freudian saga, and the stature of the Master. If we recapitulate the history of the biographies of Freud, we realize that the overall trend has been from hagiography to debunking, and then from debunking to 297 “objectivity”… Ernest Jones, Paul Roazen, Jeff Masson, Peter Swales, Peter Gay are the main biographers who illustrate the vicissitudes of the biographying of Freud. The fluctuations between hagiography, debunking and objectivity, the underlying motives of the biographying impulse – some sort of sublimation of the Sehtrieb Freud analyzed in children, a curiosity for the primal scene of theory ‐ have to do with our conception of science and more specifically of the human sciences – psychoanalysis being paradigmatic of the human sciences. They have to do with the unconscious of our conception of truth and objectivity. They have to do with a phantasy, neither Immaculate Conception nor revelation, but a phantasy of purity and of goodness, of radical Otherness. It is this phantasy as a motive for biography that I will try to illustrate in this paper. FAUSEL, Heidi (Aix‐Marseille Université, France) — A study in time travel: writing the life of William Caxton — Delving into the life of another human being is always a mystery, be it that of someone close to us or someone more distanced. As even lives close by in time and place can be woefully misunderstood. So the question arises not only how to interpret and understand another’s life but, moreover, how to render a life that was lived more than five hundred years ago and make it comprehensible and connect it to a modern understanding of our times and those of the past. The task at hand must also distinguish fact from fiction, and when one examines the life of William Caxton of the 15th century there seem to be few facts to build upon which leads to much speculation by his reputable scholars such as W.Blades, N.F.Blakes, Lotte Hellinger or F.E. Penninger. “The first genuine date of his life” according to William Blades is 1438 when Caxton’s apprenticeship to Robert Large was documented in the “Warden’s Account” of the Mercer’s Company, and so it is known when exactly he embarked upon a life of a mercer merchant, that took him to printing. His date of birth is an object of pure speculation: as to how old he might have been at the beginning of his apprenticeship and the duration thereof. Different writers of different eras give different approximations setting his date of birth anywhere from 1412 to 1424 depending on when they were writing. But is the question of when exactly a life started as important as how it developed and what it achieved? Another challenge and paradox to understanding the facts of W. Caxton’s life is that he wrote about himself and the books he printed. It would seem to be the biographer’s dream, the task boiling down to primarily reformulating his famous prologues and epilogues in modern English and simply backing them up with some archival records. Except not all his dates are reliable, not all his facts seem kosher, and sometimes rather misleading. In one of the epilogues to the first book ever printed in the English vernacular The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, Caxton maintains that it was “begun in one day and also finished in one day” and also mentions the year 1471. So one might gather that it was printed on one day in the German city of Cologne. Except the math does not add up, as it could not have been printed in one day and even the city is questionable. Which shows that our English printer is an unreliable narrator and makes one wonder why. Yet these discrepancies give the study of his life texture and mystery, invite investigations into the possibilities of his intentions, how his life fit into his times, the end of the 15th century, how it pertains to our own at the start of the twenty‐first, lead to a two‐fold investigation aiming to reveal that which is unique and that which is universal, a continuous quest to make sense in a sometimes senseless world. RENSEN Marleen (University of Amsterdam the Netherlands) Biography, Cultural Mediation and Transnational Studies — This paper will address the practice of biography as a form of cultural mediation. This practice is particularly prominent in the 298 context of Franco‐German relations in the twentieth century, when numerous writers published biographies of artists from the other side of the Rhine in order to advance mutual understanding. For instance, in 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War, the Austrian‐Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote a biography of Romain Rolland. He intended to inform German readers about French culture by presenting them the life story of this prominent French pacifist. Zweig’s biography highlights the European scope of Rolland’s life and works by constantly bringing out resemblances with artists from outside of France, mostly from Germany. In a similar vein, Klaus Mann published a biographical study of André Gide shortly after the Second World War. Comparable to Zweig’s biography of Rolland, he frames Gide’s life story from the perspective of Franco‐German relations and points out his affiliation with Goethe and Nietzsche, thus displaying a shared European cultural heritage. Both Zweig and Mann seek to take their subjects out of national frameworks by focusing on shared and connected cultural elements, as well as cultural exchange and crossings. They overtly portray their subjects as Europeans whose lives exceed national boundaries and articulate a certain idea of Europe. Even if their monographs are rather admiring portraits than critical, full‐fledged biographies, they refer to them as biographies. Thus seen, they are interesting sources for what they reveal about the ways people have thought about the biographical genre and how they have employed it in the past. In this paper I want to further explore the practice of writing ‘European lives’ as a means to mediate between cultures and promote a common European identity. I will focus on Mann’s biography of Gide as a case study and reflect more generally upon methodological issues concerning cultural mediation and the transnational approach to the writing of lives. HARMSMA Jonne (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) From Model to Vision: A Biographical Turn in Political Economy? — In 1988 Robert Skidelsky, famed biographer of John Maynard Keynes, was one of the contributors of the edited volume The Troubled Face of Biography, which sketched a bleak outlook for biography – albeit with regard to its future as a genre in academia. Relatively optimistic in this choir of gloom, Skidelsky praised some recent biographies for the soundness of its research, concluding, however, that they were ‘works of scholarship rather than imagination’.22 Almost three decades later the tide has turned. Biography has risen to new heights, in quality, ingenuity and esteem.23 Elaborating on this ‘biographical turn’, investigating the contribution of biographical research to the field of economics, the history of economic thinking and political economy, Skidelsky’s conclusion of biography’s lack of ‘imagination’ is put to the test. Besides examining Skidelsky’s work as a biographer, other publications and research projects are highlight to signal the increased use of the biographical perspective within economic history. By doing so, this paper will address the question of the added value of turning to biography in this field. The quality of historical research – Skidelsky’s ‘scholarship’ – is widely acknowledged, but what about the imaginative part? Taking a 22 Robert Skidelsky, ‘Only Connect: Biography and Truth’, in Eric Homberger and John Charmley (eds), The Troubled Face of Biography, New York: St. Martin’s, 1988, p. 8. 23 Simone Lässig, ‘Introduction: Biography in Modern History – Modern Historiography in Biography’, in Volker Berghahn and Simone Lässig (eds), Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography , New York/London: Berghahn, 2008, pp. 1‐26; Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (eds), Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing , Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014; Joseph C. Miller, ‘A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn’, in Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (eds), Biography and the Black Atlantic , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, pp. 19‐47 and Hans Renders, Binne de Haan and Jonne Harmsma (eds), The Biographical Turn: Lives in History , Routlegde: London forthcoming. 299 biographical perspective forces the historian to take into perspective more than only one context, complicating, so to speak, the formality of theory, economic models and schools of thinking, focusing instead on the real world many‐sidedness of economics’ history.24 Intrinsically, the biographical perspective, through its agency perspective, highlights this many‐sided entanglement of the abstraction of (economic) reasoning on the one hand, and an eclectic mash of personality, normativity, politics, ideology, religion, culture and historical context on the other. As Skidelsky conclusion eloquently conveys the purport of biographical research for the understanding of economic history: ‘There was no single Keynes, no identity in solitude’.25 Investigating this heterogeneity of contexts and the complex interplay of dimensions, biography forcefully ties scholarship to imagination. By taking a biographical turn in economic history ‘model’ superseded by ‘vision’, and the abstraction of theory is problematized and expanded on. POULOMI Mitra (Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India)— “Cinematic (Mis)representation of Femininity: Virginia Woolf in The Hours” — The biopic has emerged as a popular mode of film making in contemporary culture. As such it deserves greater critical attention than it has so far received. Like its literary counterpart—the biography, the biopic too is a fascinating but complex and hybrid genre interlacing the ‘real’ and the ‘reel’. The paper shall attempt to bring forth the significance of biopic in the contemporary age by looking at the cultural implications of adapting a woman author— Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours. Woolf is certainly one of the most influential of woman authors of the modern age who drew our attention time and again to the obsession of men to define women in their texts and the struggle of women writers. The paper shall attempt to deconstruct the cinematic representation of Woolf by using theories of feminism and the very observations made by Woolf herself about male constructions of femininity. In the same breath the study will attempt to extend the scope of Dennis Bingham’s analysis of female biopics by studying how far the observations made by Bingham apply to the particular screening of the female creative writer. 24 Joshua S. Hanan and Catherine Chaput, 'A Rhetoric of Economics beyond Civic Humanism: Exploring the Political Economy of Rhetoric in the Context of Late Neoliberalism', in: Journal of Cultural Economy 8(2015)1, pp. 16‐24 and Jonne Harmsma, ‘“Honest politics”: A Biographical Perspective on Economic Expertise as a Political Style’, in: Renders, de Haan and Harmsma, The Biographical Turn . 25 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: A Biography. Vol. 2. The Economist as Saviour, 1920‐1937, New York: Penguin Books, 1995, p. xxxiii. 300 S64: “Life‐Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections” Convenors: Sandra Mayer, Julia Lajta‐Novak Charlotte Boyce (University of Portsmouth, UK): “‘Who in the world am I?’ Lewis Carroll in Contemporary Biofiction” Long before he achieved fame as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known by his literary pseudonym, Lewis Carroll) exhibited a fascination with Victorian celebrity, lionising the best‐known authors, artists and actors of his day. Yet he was also fiercely protective of his own privacy and generally refused to indulge fan requests for autographs or photographs; as he explained to one enquirer, “my constant aim is to remain, personally, unknown”. Given this reticence, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that Carroll’s biography is peppered with lacunae, the result of missing or destroyed documents. These gaps in the historical record have served only to heighten post‐Victorian interest in Carroll as a literary celebrity and, in particular, to increase speculation regarding the ‘truth’ of his relationship to his child‐muse, Alice Liddell. This paper examines the ways in which two contemporary biofictions – Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001) and Gaynor Arnold’s After Such Kindness (2012) – respond to recent biographic constructions of the Carroll‐Alice relationship as scandalously paedophilic. I argue that, although the novels’ confessional narrative structures and use of fictionalised diary entries and first‐person monologues create a quasi‐autobiographic impression of intimacy and authenticity, the texts ultimately subvert the reader’s wish for epistemological certainty. In doing so, they work ironically to bolster Carroll’s celebrity status in the twenty‐first century, adding to the enigmatic aura that has historically surrounded his persona. Fátima Chinita (Lisbon Polytechnic Institute, Portugal): “Film Directors as Unsung Artistic (Anti) Heroes” The starting point of this paper is a question: why are biopics of film directors so scarce? The claim can be made that directors are not ‘stars’, have no inherent glamour and therefore do not make for good box office. This eminently commercial rationale is countered by the existence of devoted film fans and academic cinephiles to whom, in fact, a director is the maestro of cinematic creation. Moreover, about a dozen biopics of film directors did get made. The subjects are Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Robert Flaherty, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hughes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, James Whale, and Ed Wood. Overall, there seems to be a lack of industry interest in the production of biopics of film directors, exacerbated by the attitude of most directors themselves, who may feel more comfortable dealing with their own artistic issues in cinematic allegories or in films where they can represent themselves in a true self‐reflexive style. However, my aim here is to look at the exceptions, trying to find the common denominators in the filmic depictions made and rationalizing the choices made in those biopics. In doing so I hope to address the following questions: What prompted directors to depict specific directorial figures? What was their approach and why? How do these films appeal to the general audience and to a cinephile public in particular? Have they paid a service or a disservice to the Hollywood myth? I focus specifically on Sergei M. Eisenstein (Eisenstein in Guanajuato, directed by Peter Greenaway, 2015) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Pasolini, Abel Ferrara, 2014), two of the 301 most influential film directors of all time and both of them authors of crucial theories on cinema. How did these two charismatic and notorious figures (aka enfants térribles of the intelligentsia), who took part in the writing of cinematic history, get themselves treated by cinematic history in the authorial frescoes of Greenaway and Ferrara? Timo Frühwirth (University of Vienna, Austria):“An Austrian Auden: A Media‐ Construction Story” W. H. Auden (1907‐1973) is one of the most acclaimed writers in the twentieth century. But the final fifteen years of his life — which Auden divided between New York City and Kirchstetten in Austria — re‐main biographically undetermined. If his life and art add up to the distinctive fame of the Anglo‐American Pulitzer‐Prize winner, Austrian media project an image which blanks much of such writing and lifestyle, in accordance with Daniel J. Boorstin’s definition of the celebrity as “a person who is known for his well‐ knownness” and “human pseudo‐event” made meaningful through mass‐media representation (1961,57). Such representations involve selective strategies which, for Raymond Williams, are constitutive of the construction of culture (1961,68); similarly, for Stuart Hall, it is through selection that identity is storied “into a single, coherent, narrative” (1999,5). If Austrian media re‐construct Auden by an unlikely analogy to Josef Weinheber, ‘poet laureate’ of Nazi‐Germany, this analogy structures a narrative that is co‐authored by W. H. Auden himself. And from competing media stories, a distinctive poetics and politics of such mediatisation processes emerges. If that precludes common notions of the transparent medium, media representation yet creates a reductive transparency. Against an opacity that for Édouard Glissant is “subsistence within an irreducible singularity” (1997,190), for Bill Brown, we “look through” the other to see what they disclose about everything else but themselves (2001,4). In the light of the media projection of an ‘Austrian Auden’, the celebrity becomes understandable in terms of the narrative strategies that render readable the ‘other’: what shines through is a familiar plotline. Eva Gordon (Broward College, Florida, US):“Las Meninas, Performing Dwarfs, and Michael Jackson Fan Day: The Uneasy Gaze of the Living Icon” What are the ramifications of human beings transmogrified, by the stigma of disability or celebrity, into objects of cultural fascination, and how can we begin to define the consequences of this process for both the human object and the culture doing the objectifying? This paper seeks to compare the experience of performing dwarfs as objects to be stared at, played with, and further miniaturized in the eyes of the public, with the contemporary treatment of Hollywood celebrities as abstract, dehumanized figures. I will examine the memoirs of Joseph Burowlaski; tales of the Lilliput Troupe from The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz; and essays on Velazquez’s iconic painting Las Meninas. These writings illuminate the mechanisms by which celebrities are miniaturized, objectified, virtually turned into life‐size dolls for popular consumption. Texts used to examine contemporary celebrity include Moonwalk, the 1988 memoir by Michael Jackson (edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), and essays on celebrity studies by Graeme Turner and Oliver Lovesey. Disability Studies provides a bridge between analysis of the historical role of performing dwarfs and today’s media‐driven cultural obsession with celebrity. The preoccupation with the body by disability scholars helps ground our conceptualizations of 302 both the famous dwarf and the contemporary celebrity. In both cases, the object is made irregular, made smaller on a human scale, through a distorted sense of his or her size. Presenter Bio: Eva Gordon holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Spalding University and an MA in English from Saint Louis University, Madrid. She currently teaches writing and literature at Broward College and is co‐author of The Everything Guide to Writing Children’s Books, 2nd Edition. Philip Jacobi (University of Passau, Germany): “‘Soup and Salmon and Ducklings’: The Politics of the Cookbook as Life‐Writing” In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs. Ramsay, when asked about the Boef en Daube she is preparing, reveals: “What passes for cookery in England is an abomination […]. It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather.” This fragment of a recipe reveals much of Woolf’s attitude towards society and culture – as indeed writing about food generally does. In my paper I want to explore the cookbook as an often neglected type of life‐ writing: it is both pivotal historical source of (female) life‐writing and multi‐layered expression of contemporary celebrity, where the line between autobiography and instruction is sometimes as wobbly as jelly. As a type of text, the cookbook occupies a curious position of disparate and often conflicting ambitions. The common enumeration of ingredients and instructional provision of cooking techniques reflect the economic and social circumstance of its creation. The meal produced from these ingredients is site of both private desire and public ideal. Moreover, other types of text contained within reveal the ideological stances and attitudinal values of their authors, while the authors’ “voices” (Barbara Ketchum Wheaton) project commodified personas in order to catalyse their media images. British cookbook writers, like Isabella Beeton, Elizabeth David, Fanny Cradock, Delia Smith, and Nigella Lawson, deal in a special brand of celebrity: some have through temporal distance become blueprints for feminine ideals of certain periods, some have shaped their social nonconformity into stories of culinary insurgency, while others slyly employ conspiratory candour in their writing to further their brands by squarely aiming at both our hearts and taste buds. Rosemary Kay (University of Manchester, UK): “The Dickens Phenomenon: The Making of a 21st Century Brand” Charles Dickens, celebrity in his own lifetime, has been mythologised, manipulated, subverted and reinvented ever since his death in 1870; so how do versions of Dickens disturb and inform contemporary Biography Theory? Dickens became a household name, a character who mythologised his own image, even before he died. The reach and influence of his celebrity status, not only in literature, but also within global culture, has if anything increased since then. Lyn Pykett in Dickens describes it as “the complex historical phenomenon of the Dickens Industry”.26 One aspect of this industry is the change in biographical methodology used to represent Dickens. Investigating that change can illuminate the interests and preoccupations of the age in which each new version of Dickens is spawned. This paper considers three such versions: one by his biographer friend, John Forster, (1872‐1874), relying heavily on Dickens’ own autobiographical material, and subject to his own myth‐making; Flanagan’s fictional Dickens in Wanting (2008), a post‐colonial novel using postmodern literary devices to explore authorial identity and the process of self‐fashioning; and my metafictional novel, 26 Lyn Pykett, Dickens (London: Macmillan, 2012), p.2. 303 Anchorage, part of my Creative Writing PhD, which delivers a version of Dickens enduring the pressures of celebrity whilst wrestling with personal disquiet: he is exploiting and manipulating the image of a real person, the woman inspiring his creation Miss Havisham. All these versions are products of their time, reflecting changes in the expectation, delivery and manipulation of biographical material. As Taylor and Woolf pointed out: “Successive generations have used the Victorian past in order to locate themselves in the present.”27 Holly‐Gale Millette (University of Southampton, UK): “The Observed of All Observers”: Lydia Thompson Looks Back” Looking backward from now, I do not believe anybody saw the little mite bounding across the stage, but I thought differently then, and imagined myself to be the centre of attraction, ‘the observed of all observers’.28 So begins Lydia Thompson when recalling her lifetime on the popular stage. Women’s relationship to theatre and culture at this time was substantial but their narratives have too often been short sighted and their life writing – especially, that of popular performers – is limited. Similar to the time‐trapped/travelling novel of the same name (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 1887), Thompson’s text is both a time capsule and an artefact recovered. Its short 139 pages confronts gossip, discusses stalkers and fans, defends claims of impropriety, and details her dress and fashion choices on and off the stage. Lydia Thompson, the nineteenth‐century British dancer and comedienne, had an active following in America and achieved immense success there – more so than in her own country, in terms of fandom and remuneration. This paper offers a unique perspective on an artefact of personal testimony that witnesses the human impact of being a transatlantic celebrity on the late 19th century popular stage, and it evidences how fame offered her a certain protection and freedom from her working‐class childhood – something Roof (2009) observes as ‘fame’s aura’ acting as a ‘self‐corrective’ (122) – by validating Thompson despite her working class beginnings. Anne‐Marie Millim (University of Luxembourg): “Fan Pages: The Fear of Lionism in the Diaries of Lewis Carroll and William Allingham” Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, an intense suspiciousness of the invasive lionism of the unknown and unknowable masses of readers pervaded Victorian culture, as is demonstrated by Hallam Tennyson’s Memoir (1897) of his father. This paper focuses on the diaries of the writer, photographer and academic Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), who only met Alfred Lord Tennyson briefly, and the Irish poet William Allingham, who was a very close acquaintance of the poet and was, at times, his confidant. It shows that, despite their varying degrees of closeness to Tennyson, both diarists display a constant fear of potential accusations of lionism. Their acute awareness of potentially inappropriate fandom means that the diary is no longer a strictly private record of personal experience, but that it becomes a semi‐ or pre‐public text that allows the diarists to fashion themselves as part of Tennyson’s privileged entourage, as opposed to the voracious and voyeuristic masses. In their very possessive attitude towards the poet they try to craft the personas of legitimate fans. Consciously reacting to societal prejudice Ed. Miles Taylor and Michael Woolf, The Victorians since 1901, Histories, Representations and Revisions (Manchester University Press, 2004) p.i. 28 Lydia Thompson. My Early Life: Recollections and Anecdotes of My Theatrical Career. Unpublished Typescript Proof Copy, dated 1893, p. 90. RA VIC/Add Mss.U.82 in The Royal Archives, Windsor, UK. 27 304 against fandom, Dodgson and Allingham keep justifying the propriety of their admiration of Tennyson within their diaries, even after they had successfully acquainted the poet. This paper stands in corrective of critical accounts that dismiss mass‐produced memorabilia, such as cartes‐de‐visite, as meaningless commodities. It reveals the ways in which Tennyson’s poetry, image and person were ingrained within these diarists’ subjective and creative consciousness and the impact of celebrity culture on their attitude towards, and behavior around, the laureate. Marcus O’Dair (Middlesex University, UK): “Authorised Biography and the Creating, Reinforcing and Challenging of Myths: A Popular Music Case Study” The dust‐jacket promise to expose “the man behind the myth” – a provocative model represented, for instance, by Goldman’s biographies of Elvis Presley (1981) and John Lennon (1998) – has become a biographical cliché. Yet Strachan (2003), writing specifically on popular music, states that biographies “create” and “reinforce”, as well as “challenge”, the dominant representations of popular musicians. Edel (1959) suggests that “the most competent biographers seek a narrative technique suitable to the subject matter”. The subject of my own recent biography, the musician Robert Wyatt, is a Marxist, and Marxist theory has tended to eschew bourgeois individualism. As a complement to that, my book attempts to move beyond a Romantic model of individual genius through collecting multiple accounts, drawing on principles of oral history. To an extent, this sits in tension with the book’s ‘authorised’ status. Yet though we might expect an authorised account to be ‘whitewashed’, even hagiographic, Wyatt has stated there are passages with which he is not comfortable. In terms of the ‘cult’ celebrity that Wyatt enjoys, then, my approach is, at the very least, ambiguous This paper will discuss the issues involved in writing an authorised life story, touching on associated challenges (censorship, including self‐censorship) and opportunities (access). The discussion will be framed by reference to the ‘warts and all’ approach of the ‘new biography’ introduced by Strachey and Woolf. I will examine the politics of writing ‘celebrity’ lives, the influence of myth on the writing and reading of such lives and the extent to which, in an authorised biography, the ‘celebrity’ can him/herself be considered a life writer, occupying what Foucault (1969) calls the ‘author function’. Annette Rubery (independent researcher, UK): “The Dying Actress: Peg Woffington’s Sick‐Bed Portrait” Peg Woffington (1717?‐1760) was one of the most popular actresses of the 18th century, but is now almost completely forgotten. She initially made her name in breeches and travesty roles, but would eventually gain celebrity status as a versatile comedienne. Brilliant and beautiful, she was discovered in 1730s Ireland, then blazed a trail through the London theatre scene until 1757 when she suffered a stroke while performing in As You Like It. Woffington never returned to the stage but lingered, bed‐ridden, until her death in 1760 aged around 43. During her lifetime Woffington never married but conducted a series of high‐profile affairs with prominent men, such as the actor‐manager David Garrick, with whom she lived openly. The main challenges for her biographer are the absence of almost anything written by the actress herself, coupled with the spectre of her ‘scandalous’ private life. The latter resulted in the publication, after her death, of a titillating memoir that depicted her as a prostitute; several 19th‐century male writers attempted to undo the damage, but in the process obscured her with an avalanche of Victorian sentimentality. I would suggest that a reappraisal of Woffington’s portraits can offer us a better understanding of her identity. I would like to focus on the curious portrait 305 by an unknown artist of Woffington on her sick‐bed. Why would a wealthy actress, famed for her beauty, want to be portrayed like this and what does it say about her attitudes to fame and to her own mortality? Berkem Gürenci Sağlam (Çankaya University, Turkey):“Becoming Jane: A Romanticized Biopic” The overwhelming popularity of Jane Austen’s fiction in the last three decades owes much to the popularity of the author herself. Following the impact of the 1990s BBC and Hollywood adaptations of her works, “Austen‐mania,” “Jane‐mania,” and “Jane‐ism” have become common phrases of popular culture. The phenomenon has even spread to social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram, as well as merchandise ranging from vintage‐ style pens to “Darcy knickers.” On the more literary side of this scale are novels and films that use the “real” Jane Austen as a fictional character, such as in Stephanie Borran’s detective series which began with Jane and the Unpleasantness of Scargrave Manor. This paper will be concerned with a film that feeds into the iconography of this commercial Austen franchise, Julian Jarrod’s Becoming Jane. Based on Jon Hunter Spence’s biography Becoming Jane Austen, the film elaborates on a relationship between Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy, a man mentioned twice in her letters to her sister, and around whom much speculation exists. It suggests primarily that Jane Austen could not have become an author without having had an affair. The main aim of this paper will be to reveal how this biographical film can be read as an example of the romanticization of the heroine in line with her iconic status in popular culture. Amara Thornton (University College London, UK): “The Archaeologist as Celebrity” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, generations of British archaeologists working overseas in the exotic East promoted themselves in print. They established a relationship with the press and with publishers to ensure their personal and professional identities had ‘market value’, necessary for the continuation of their work. Drawing on research into archaeologists’ and publishers’ archives, digitised periodicals and archaeological memoirs and travelogues, this paper will discuss the ways in which archaeologists projected their own identities to create a culture of ‘celebrity’ within their lifetimes, with a view to encouraging active investment in research from an engaged public, and cementing the value of their emerging discipline and its related practices. It will present the myriad means by which archaeologists communicated their lives and work to the public – through public lectures, annual events and exhibitions, books and, later film, television and radio, a multi‐strand approach that exposes archaeologists’ promotional nous. It will also evaluate how later authors memorialised and exploited the adventuresome heroics of these bold archaeologists to bring archaeology to wider audiences through biographies and collective histories. In exploring these routes to celebrity, this paper will also investigate the message archaeologists promoted and projected about themselves and their work, and in doing so question why ‘the archaeologist’ has come to be seen as an adventurer with ‘foreign’ links, a spy, a looter, and even a cursed professional. 306 S65. Contemporary Writers on Writing: Performative Practices and Intermediality In the contemporary ‘convergence culture’, marked by an explosion of ‘performance discourse’, writers are growingly exploring other media to tackle issues concerning their own writing and literature at large. They do so through performative and intermedial practices that make the writer‐text‐reader relationship more dynamic and interactive, and that sometimes turn authors into celebrities. The seminar will focus on these manifold practices by which writers perform themselves, their idea of literature, or their authorial role, not limiting themselves to the written page but making also use of audiovisual and digital resources, such as documentaries, films, video‐interviews, booktrailers, blogs, forums, links to social networks. Convenors Amaya Fernandez Menicucci and Alessandra Ruggiero (Università di Teramo, IT) C. Maria Laudando (University of Naples “L’Orientale”) Authorial Dissemination and Metamorphoses in the Medial Network A number of studies (among many others, Landow, Hayles, Ryan) have recently discussed the new dynamic and inter‐medial reconfigurations of narrative and textuality that have emerged in the fluid ‘post‐age’ scenario of our present highlighting the prominence of processual modularity, and ‘flickering’, interactive multi‐modality that the new technologies have enabled to instantiate. These ongoing transformations have also brought to the fore the ‘performative’ dimension of the relation, the very “inter‐ship”, between authors and readers/spectators. If the audience remains one of the most elusive and relevant issues of the contemporary debate, the question of authorship is no less fractious and cogent. Indeed, despite the repeated death notices (of the author, of the text, of the self, and ‘humanities’ as a whole) that have characterised the debate on the postmodern condition, the new technologies have undoubtedly also enabled new affective and promotional affordances for authorial dissemination through the rich medial network of our convergence culture (Ulmer and Jenkins). Starting from the complex conceptual elaboration of the author through the critical stages of Western modernity (Benjamin, Barthes, Said, Foucault, among many others) and in the light of the performative inflection of authors‐as‐performers, the paper examines a number of interactive and flexible digital resources such as websites, documentaries, lectures and online interviews through which ‘authors’ as different as Tim Crouch, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and William Kentridge seem to exploit to the full, each in their own distinctive voices and attitudes, the risks and opportunities of their own authorial and inter‐medial dissemination and equivocation. Maddalena Pennacchia (Roma Tre University) The Show of Literature: Celebrity Writers on Screens My paper aims to analyse a television genre of which the BBC is very fond, namely the ‘authored documentary’. The authored documentary usually consists of a series of episodes presenting the subjective view of its author, a personality of renown, on the chosen topic. I would like to focus on the four episodes of Faulks on Fiction where the best sellers writer Sebastian Faulks presents his own history of the British novel supporting his opinions with a wealth of talking heads interviews to celebrated contemporary authors. Following the economic logic of convergence, the television program also became a book, A Story of the Novel in 28 Characters, ‘first published in 2011 to accompany the television series entitled Faulks on Fiction, first broadcast on BBC2 in 2011’. I will compare the two 307 products and try to show their intermedial meaning and the celebrity‐making dynamics that are triggered by them. Lucia Esposito (University of Teramo) ‘Welcome to the Jasper Fforde Website’: pop culture, crossmediality, interactivity In the passage from literacy to the secondary orality of electronic culture both the way in which stories are constructed and the role of the author in their construction have dramatically changed, restoring the older idea of literature as a performative environment and the former collaborative transaction between performer and audience. Serial, multi‐ linear, and participative narrations simultaneously take place as social events or practices on multiple platforms, originating new ‘narrative ecosystems’ (Innocenti‐Pescatore), where the birth and proliferation of new creative audiences (Jenkins, Castells), such as online communities and fanfiction writers, is fostered. The paper aims at exploring this new environment to understand the way in which the new storytellers are negotiating their role and their creativity with ‘wreaders’ (Barthes) or ‘prosumers’ (Toffler). Jasper Fforde, the author of a number of serialized novels, will be the privileged focus of this investigation. Exploiting the new cultural ground and values, he builds a crossmedial microcosm whose ‘grand central’ locus of interconnections is the fully‐fledged website www.jasperfforde.com. Ranging from links to other social networks to pages in which readers’ contributions are welcome, the site is also a favourite place where the author exchanges his own ideas on literature and on his books with the audience through both verbal and audiovisual means. Amaya Fernández‐Menicucci Michael Bunker: From Virtual Persona to Fiction Writer In the trans‐mediatic era of You Tube and Blogspot.com, it is possible for a v/blogger to become a cyber‐celebrity and end up authoring books, thus reversing the more traditional progression of the unknown writer who must first attain literary and commercial success, before acquiring media fame. Michael Bunker, author of the Pennsylvania saga (2014) and creator of the Amish Sci‐Fi genre, had been gathering acolytes and fascinated fans around his original blog on Biblical Agrarianism since the early 2000s, but he did not begin to publish works of fiction until 2013. Not only has his performance as a controversial guru guaranteed grass‐root support for his ideas, but it has also provided his post‐apocalyptic fiction with almost immediate success. From the point of view of performance studies, it is particularly interesting to note that Bunker had actually been playing the role of the charismatic leader in a survivalist, pseudo‐Amish community for years before he started writing about life in such a community. As a case study of the mechanisms by which the writer’s public performance of the self influences and shapes literary production, I would like to provide a chronological analysis of the process through which Bunker has merged his identity as the founder and patriarchal leader of a small Christian fundamentalist community in Texas with his personae as writer of and character in Sci‐Fi novels. Serena Baiesi (University of Bologna) New performances of the past: Jane Austen, a vampire in New York Many contemporary writers have produced numerous editorial attempts at re‐writing, re‐ mediating, and re‐creating Jane Austen’s novels. However, along with the many sequels, prequels, mash‐up, film adaptations, blogs, and games created about her world and characters, we have also arrived at a new representation of Austen as performative artist in a modern society. Indeed, Jane Austen has been re‐invented as both fictional character 308 and potential celebrity in our contemporary world through several media. Even though we cannot experience her presence as a human being in the world, her existence and influence as a writer has been articulated on screen and the page in several ways. In this talk, I aim to explore how the contemporary writer Michael Thomas Ford represents Jane Austen’s body through the pages of his novel, Jane Bites Back. Here, the English Georgian writer is turned into a modern American girl, an aspiring novelist and owner of a bookshop in a small village in the state of New York. Moreover, Jane Austen not only faces many difficulties in fulfilling her ambitions as a writer, but is also a vampire. Another character in the novel includes Lord Byron, who embodies auto‐performativity and self‐affirmation in terms of his literary career and personal performance from the past. In Ford’s novel, the interactive dynamic between writer and readers is re‐mediated, culminating in a new relationship between reader, modern writer and the cult of celebrity, creating new practices which situate both character and writer in a modern and complex society haunted by the desire of fulfilment as professional writer as well as vampire. 309 S67: Word and Image in Children’s Literature Convenors: Karen Brown (University of Saint‐Andrews, Scotland); Camille Fort (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France); Laurence Petit (Université Paul Valéry‐Montpellier 3, France) Session A: Monday 16:30‐18:30 1. Nature and Form of Picture Books Véronique Alexandre, “Taking a closer look at The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg, (1986) – conflating cultural legacies and book forms.” In The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg the viewer's imagination sets off in different directions across aesthetic and historical territories, as the pages – or plates ‐‐ bind together Antiquity, 17th century Europe and the USA, painting, sculpture, and film. We may think of Henry James and Daisy Miller here where Daisy is also Persephone. A similar intercultural transatlantic admixture is at work in The Stranger, with a Christian sensitivity that owes as much to Chris Van Allsburg’s American heritage as to his study of Rembrandt. The Stranger raises questions about the nature and purpose of a children’s book. Discussions arising from it cannot be confined to the identity of the eponymous character but must embrace a range of questions related to creation and book design (the very thin line between an artist’s book and a children’s book), visual literacy, the importance granted to the narrative verbal continuum, and the intercultural obstacles faced by publishers when translating children’s books for a foreign readership. Magdalena Sikorska (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland) Beyond the verbal and the visual: the ‘sensual’ in picturebooks. The meaning of children’s picturebooks depends on the verbal and the visual. Yet, very often the ‘primary’ meaning of the word and image gives way to more nuanced messages addressing thesensual world. My paper will discuss the potential and diversity of the ‘sensual’ in children’s picturebooks achieved through complex juxtaposition of the word and the image. I will explore such notions as synaesthesia, onomatopoeia, sound and colour symbolism, re‐creation and re‐evaluation of spacethrough touch and acoustics mediated by the verbal and the visual. To illustrate the above mentioned points I would like to share fragments of the following picturebooks: Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree (2001) and Rules of Summer (2013), Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Green (2013), and John Burningham’s Would You Rather (1994). 2. On Editorial Choices and How They Affect Picture Books Linda Pillere (Aix‐Marseille Université, France) Convergence and Divergence of Verbal and Visual Modes of Representation in Children’s Fiction If we follow the principle that “the body of the text is not exclusively linguistic” (McGann 1991, 13), but a “laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes”, what exactly is the role played by these non‐verbal features in children’s fiction, and how exactly should we analyse them? Using recent approaches to multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen; Kong; Nørgaard), this paper analyses the role of illustrations and other visual modes in children’s 310 literature. In order to gain a clearer idea of what any specific visual element may contribute to the meaning of a text, I will be comparing different editions of children’s fiction published in the last fifteen years or so, and more precisely American English and British English editions of the same book. The co‐existence of two editions – in so far as they differ – offers instantaneous examples of the role played by editorial choice in the presentation of text. This comparison will lead us to consider other sociocultural elements, since “all modes have, like language, been shaped through their cultural, historical and social uses to realize social functions as required by different communities” (Jewitt 2013, 251). Jiri Rambousek (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) Translations Illustrated The paper deals with the relations between illustrations and text in books for children written in English and in their Czech translations and adaptations. Changes in the use of illustrations occurring in different editions of a book reveal the views of the function of pictures held by their editors/publishers, and these may be more pronounced when the work is transferred to a different context. The original pictures may be taken over, left out, or replaced with newly commissioned illustrations. A more detailed look shows more refined categories; examples of specific instances will come, among others, from the works by Harriet M. Bennett, Wilhelm Busch, and Lewis Carroll. As a special case in point, instances where the text explicitly refers to a picture will be discussed. While sometimes these references are duly noted and dealt with (e.g., the description of a table in Alice in Wonderland is changed to fit the new picture), very often they are neglected, with consequences for the consistency of the whole. The paper will discuss possible reasons behind the publishers’ decisions; economy, shifts in target group, and failure to understand the role of illustrations in a particular text may all play their role. Session B: Tuesday 08:30‐10:30 3. To Divert and To Instruct: The Educational Dimension of Picture Books Justine Breton (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France) ‘Representing political education in child‐oriented media: the case of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone’ In The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White describes the childhood of the future King of England, Arthur, dubbed ‘the Wart’. The author dedicates a major part of his text to the young hero’s political education, established through Merlyn’s teaching and animal metamorphoses. Nevertheless, the Wart’s rise to power, which dictates the diegetic structure of the novel, is not maintained in Disney’s adaptation for the screen (1963). The animated movie reinvests the meaning of the sequences devoted to metamorphosis by erasing the political lessons taught to Wart during his adventures in the guise of an animal. The combined political and educational reading of White’s novel disappears, to be replaced with a wider and more entertaining dimension. Since the Wart is never pictured as a ruler in the movie, his political training is deleted in favour of more general instruction, addressing not only the hero, but every child viewer. We intend to focus on this discrepancy between the political and the educational readings of these two versions of The Sword in the Stone, while taking into account the difference between the two media. 311 Alyce Mahon (University of Cambridge, England) Dorothea Tanning’s Chimerical World Surrealism was born of a fervent belief in the power of word and image to re‐enchant a disenchanted world. Following Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland which showed children “a world which is just the other side of the mirror” (Louis Aragon,1931) they turned to children’s literature as a model for re‐fashioning the world of grown‐ups. My paper’s focus will be on Dorothea Tanning (1910‐2012) who staged young girls, bizarre creatures and uncanny spaces in such paintings as Children’s Games, 1942, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943 and Palaestra, 1947 and in her fantastic novel Abyss (written in 1947, published in 1977), with its seven year old heroine Destina Meridian. All too often the figure of Alice and the dream state itself in Surrealism are read purely in gendered terms as girl and fairy tale are seen to play to male fantasy or to enact a revenge on it. My paper insists we need to go further in our socio‐political analysis: Tanning’s turn to the child, the bed time story, and what she called “the chimerical world of perpetual astonishment” is a mode of instruction through fantasy, calling on the power of wonder in an age of terror. Katarzyna Smyczyńska (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland) Contemporary tales of terror in words, images, and in between Unlike children's books by Beatrix Potter and Janosch, which implicitly undermine the semantic harmony between the illustrations and the text, and thus ironically challenge widespread assumptions about the transparency of the narration, two picturebooks by Jon Klassen and one by Roberto Innocenti and Aaron Frisch exemplify a striking symbiosis between the verbal and visual narrative modes. Klassen's I Want My Hat Back and This Is Not My Hat, and Innocenti and Frisch's The Girl in Red convey a genuinely terrifying, metaphorical vision of human relationships and offer a bitter, not to say latently apocalyptic diagnosis of contemporary western culture. While each book relies on different aesthetic modes and makes use of different tension‐building narrative strategies – Frisch's text (perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the vividness of Innocenti's illustrations) being worth examining in its own right – they all immerse their readers in the gradually intensifying experience of horror. A spectacle of inescapable violence, disguised and unpunished, is constructed via visual and verbal allusions and ironic understatements. Residing in the text and the illustrations, or in narrative gaps between them, irony constructs the nihilistic overtones of the stories and a sense of powerlessness in confrontation with the predatory cynicism of the powerful. 4. Moods and Ideas: The Political and Philosophical Dimension of Picturebooks Shona Kallestrup (University of St Andrews, Scotland) Life imitates art: word, image ‐ and interior design ‐ in the children’s tales of Queen Marie of Romania This paper examines the interface between word, image and persona creation in the illustrated children’s tales of Queen Marie of Romania. As ‘Mother of all the Romanians’, and subsequently ‘Mother‐in‐law of the Balkans’, her children’s tales functioned metaphorically on a number of levels following World War I and served to shape public perceptions of newly unified Greater Romania, both nationally and abroad. The tales’ engagement with Romanian folk culture, together with their often thinly disguised 312 autobiographical references, served didactic, propagandist and aesthetic aims. One could argue that their visual interpretation by leading‐edge illustrators such as Edmond Dulac, Mabel Lucie Attwell, Sulamith Wülfing, Maud and Miska Petersham, Ignat Bednarik and Nicolae Grant, was part of the Queen’s wider project to create a distinctive artistic self‐ image, embodied most vividly in the series of unusual homes she designed for herself across Greater Romania. Hence this paper will explore links between text, image and the material environments of architecture and interior design in order to demonstrate how the visual and narrative settings of the tales related to Marie’s nationally‐driven processes of public persona creation. Isabelle Gras (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France) Metaphorical display of moods and ideas in picturebooks by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, by Shaun Tan and by Brian Selznick Images have two basic modes of external reference, according to Doonan: denotation and exemplification. Drawing on her conception of exemplification as a means to express abstract notions, conditions or ideas, this presentation studies how images interact with text in picturebooks to suggest and metaphorically display moods, ideas about art and language or philosophical reflections. Three picturebooks were selected for this purpose: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, and Rules of Summer, by Shaun Tan. In each one, images or sequences will be analyzed, following a metafunctional systemic approach. This will show that particular pictorial elements in McKean’s images contribute to evoking the complex mood of the main character, that the type of interaction between text and image chosen by Selznick builds a cinematographic metaphor into his story, and that Tan’s images interact with the text to suggest metaphorical interpretations of conflictual conceptions of the world. Jade Dillon (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland) Deconstructing Minds: A Psychoanalytical Deconstruction of the Brain as a Fantasy Island in Disney‐Pixar’s Inside Out Children’s literature and film is often fuelled by societal paradigms and embedded ideologies within the fantasy elements of children’s fiction. Upon its release in June 2015, Disney‐Pixar’s Inside Out has become one of the most thought‐provoking fictional productions due to its majestic animation and realistically harrowing use of childhood depression as thematic content. From a deconstructive perspective, it is evident that Inside Out functions as a metaphysical and metaphorical analogy for child psychoanalysis which transcends the label of mindless child entertainment. This paper will investigate a central aspect of Inside Out which underpins the deconstruction of psychoanalytic theory within the text; the brain will be deconstructed as an alternate fantasy universe which parallels the reality of the child narrator, thus governing the memories it recalls to be contextual through Freud’s evaluation of repression. Similarly, the cinematic elements of the brain and the Emotions will be deconstructed to unveil elements of psychological content. Session D: Tuesday 17:00‐19:00 313 5. Animals and Animality in Picturebooks Claudia Alonso (University of Valencia, Spain) The animal seen, the animal read: A few considerations on the complex nature between nonhuman otherness and children’s literature. Nonhuman others bear a long‐standing presence in children’s literature in global cultures, and have increasingly become the object of literary study in English‐speaking communities, particularly due to the influence of Victorian mentality in the development of such animal characters. From nursery rhymes to children’s picture books, and from animal autobiographies to young adult fiction, nonhuman others are often featured in such genres, following the demands imposed by the child’s own psychological and emotional development. The object of this presentation is to question the boundaries of what it is that critics generally consider representative children’s literature on the basis of the expectations generated by the animal presence. I present an exegesis through the lens of ethology and posthumanism whereupon attendees bring themselves to question the biopolitics underlying the image and the voicedness of nonhuman others in a series of texts aimed at young readers. Through a revision of canonical strategies employed in a series of classics (from Mark Twain’s “A Dog’s Tale” to contemporary publications such as Dear Zoo), I aim to analyze how the transition from the emotional connection with the animal to the eventual acceptance of institutionalized forms of animal exploitation is articulated through the word and the image. Elizabeth and James Wallace (Boston College, USA) Animals and Animalism in the Illustrations of Garth Williams As the biographers of Garth Williams (1912‐1996), we claim that he profoundly impacted the interpretation of animals in post‐war American children’s literature. The illustrator of more than 150 books, Williams worked with many notable children’s authors—Margaret Wise, E.B. White, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, to name a few. His drawings uniformly captured an original and distinct perspective of the animal world, making visible the secrets of their creature life. His illustrations filled the conceptual gap between the author’s word and readers’ imagination of the animal in four distinct and powerful ways. First, unlike Disney, whose Mickey Mouse stands in for “everyman,” Williams created fully individuated animal personalities who nevertheless retain the elusive mystery of their animal nature. Second, adding levels of meaning to characters like Stuart Little, Williams demonstrated how the diminutive animal could be challenged by the scale of the human world yet capable of ratiocination—in other words, “big” in his smallness. Hélène Gaillard (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France) Representing & retelling the Three Little Pigs’ story : words and images in postmodern variations As one of the most famous folk tales, the story of the Three Little Pigs has been adapted many times but the recent postmodern variations are particularly interesting for the interaction between the textual and visual contents. The notions of perspective, viewpoint and interpretation are central in all three picture books and contribute to the development of a critical mind for young readers. Eugene Trivizas’s version illustrated by Helen Oxenbury has a subtle intermedial approach opposing a traditional narrative and visual style to a more modern subtext and unusual 314 angles. David Wiesner’s book crosses not only the textual but also the iconic boundaries of the original tale: the story shifts from traditional storyboard frames to a metafictional world where the pigs become more realistically depicted and gain autonomy by escaping the linear plot. Told by the unreliable wolf, Jon Scieszka’s narrative becomes a new story characterized by cropping and framing. As the wolf claims that he has been framed, the visual input relies on multiple perspectives challenging the construction of meaning. Based on transmediality and metafiction, these fractured versions are highly enjoyed by young and older audiences and also aim at emphasizing distance with the original narrative and highlighting discrepancies between words and images. 6. Variations on Lewis Carroll Rose Weeber (American University of Paris, France) ‘Curiouser and Curiouser’: Charles Robinson’s Invasion of Wonderland Celebrating its 150th birthday this year, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was first published in 1866 and illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. Charles Robinson (1870‐1937), as well as others, illustrated the tale after the end of the copyright in 1907. Why is Charles’ interpretation of this everlasting tale a total change with the tradition? First, he brought the Arts and Crafts Movement to the eyes of children by introducing decorative illustrations throughout the book while detaching himself from his contemporaries by addressing a juvenile public instead of collectors. He was also the first to change Alice’s features from a blonde to a brunette, based on Alice Liddell, the real girl behind the tale. Moreover as his Alice is much more adventurous, Charles centered his visual expression on Wonderland and its mysteries, and brought this new world to life through more than 155 illustrations ‐leaving little undecorated pages‐ bringing the children in a continuous quest alongside little Alice. From nonsense to fear, the artist fully grasps the potential of his own images, he leads the reader from dream to reality and from reality to dream in a way that the reader only escapes by turning the last page of the book. Laurence Le Guen (Université Rennes 2, France) Suzy Lee’s “Alice in wonderland”: rewriting by images “And what is the use of a book” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations ?” The book Alice in wonderland, published in 1865, starts with these words. Suzy Lee offers a personal vision, without words. Images thus dominate. As a result, textuality resides in pictures which initiate many different meanings and create a story. Some analysts claim that photography must be banished from books for children. Since photography reflects reality, they tend to lose their imagination. This analysis seeks to prove precisely that this classic plot is disrupted. Using this medium, Suzy Lee brings us into a fairy tale world from which the child does not stand back. On the contrary, the latter gets deeply involved in the visual process. This book of photographs becomes autonomous because Lewis Carroll’s book lies in the collective imagination. Indeed, it is not necessary to quote the author to build a more visual universe. Despite this fact, the original source text is never far, with Lewis Caroll’s words written on the last page as a key example of that principle “Is all our life, then, but a dream? ”. Raluca Petrescu (ENS Paris, France) 315 Nonsense as state of consciousness: The Mad Gardener’s Song and its illustrations in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1867) presents a particular narrative scheme, consisting of a regular spiral, as the narrator experiences two alternating states of consciousness; the passing from one state to the other is accompanied by certain signs or guiding elements. Amongst these, the most compelling is the Mad Gardener’s song: the nonsense poem in nine four‐verse stanzas that punctuates the narration at certain moments is a threshold ritual, a nonsense initiation mantra. Its splendid comic vigour cannot deter from its Unheimlich‐inducing functions: “He thought he saw a Buffalo/Upon the chimney‐ piece:/He looked again, and found it was/His Sister's Husband's Niece./'Unless you leave this house,' he said,/"I'll send for the Police!' ». Harry Furniss, the “black and white man”, illustrates the song by depicting the other reality: not the niece, but the buffalo, albeit in a dress. An intense relationship forms between the notions of comic revelation, imaginary awakening, and extreme catachrese in the semiotic structure of these illustrated stanzas. Can there be such a thing as a nonsense initiation, and what is the part theirein played by hallucinatory visualisation, graphic embodiment? 316 S69. Young Adult Fiction and Theory of Mind Conveners: Lydia Kokkola and Alison Waller Session One (Monday: 16.30‐18.30): The Body and Mind Reading YA Fiction 1. Leah Phillips “I just send my mind somewhere else”: Shape‐Shifting and the Mind/Body Split in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals Quartet The liberal humanist model of self that is available in the West is one underscored by the Cartesian dualism that separates mind from, and privileges it over, body. Daine’s shape‐ shifting in Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet, an example of mythopoeic YA fantasy, offers a narrative of self that complicates this paradigmatic opposition by offering inflections of mind into body, inside into outside, self into other, and human into animal (and, always, vice versa). Through the symbiotic joining of minds that precipitates it, Daine’s full body shape‐shifting posits the mind as that which is shared between embodied selves, not that which divides them. As mythopoeic YA fantasy, this quartet features many functions associated with mythic literatures, especially myth’s offering of frameworks for living and being in this world, an offering that the YA aspect of this fantasy heightens. As such, the embodied self offered by Daine’s shape‐shifting serves as a framework for an embodied subjectivity that does not exclude woman, animal, or the other from its structure. This is especially provocative for adolescent girls who, because of being adolescent (thus disrupting binary pairs) and female (thus othered by the male/female binary), have the most to lose under dominant narratives. 2. Alison Waller ‘Coming to Consciousness: Waking up the body and mind in YA fiction’ The waking up scene is surprisingly common in speculative and fantastic YA fiction. As a literary trope it serves to defamiliarise consciousness, rendering the protagonists’ self‐ experience of both body and mind strange and disjointed. Waking up after an accident, operation, transformation or out‐of‐body journey, adolescent characters are forced to question the relationship between thought, language, sensation and the material world around them. In this paper I offer an analysis of the waking up scene in a range of YA texts from the last 30 years, including Peter Dickinson’s Eva (1988), Rhiannon Lassiter’s Hex (1998), MT Andersen’s Feed (2002), and Francis Harding’s Cuckoo Song (2014). I will demonstrate how these authors explore certain theories of consciousness – for example, the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) and the problem of qualia (Chalmers, 1996) – through case studies of disoriented adolescent characters. The doubling of before and after identities also provides fertile ground for testing theory of mind, as awakening protagonists have to ascribe conscious alterity to past and unfamiliar versions of themselves. As such, waking scenes serve a purpose as both literary conventions to open up plots of mystery and suspense, but also as moments of introspection which introduce young readers to philosophical and cognitive concepts that they can apply to their own lives. 3. Clare Walsh An education in difference: a comparative study of the representation of mind‐styles in John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) and Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery (2007). The concept of a fictional ‘mind style’, first introduced by (Fowler 1977: 76), can usefully be applied to an analysis of two works of contemporary young adult fiction which 317 represent minds impaired, in one case, by a restricted worldview (Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) and, in the other, by high‐functioning autism (Ted in The London Eye Mystery). Each author employs a different narrative technique in order to convey the atypical mind‐styles of their characters: Bruno is the central focaliser in Boy, whereas Ted narrates his own story. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of each novel in heightening literary affect for readers and in underlining the novels’ themes about memory, friendship and belonging. Interestingly, both novels also incorporate a secondary mediating consciousness in the person of the boys’ older female siblings, Gretel and Kat respectively. I will argue that while readers are cued to recognise Gretel as a false guide, one who wilfully misreads Bruno as ‘stupid’, they are cued to perceive Kat as a sympathetic guide who provides insights into Ted’s logical, if skewed, mental functioning. I will conclude that both novels, in their different ways, offer their readers an education in difference which is potentially schema‐refreshing. 4. Lydia Kokkola Hands on Reading: The Body, the Brain and the Book Since the New London group coined the term ‘New Literacies’ to describe the activities involved in making sense of on‐line digital texts, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which this form of reading differs from traditional book reading. A broad array of studies demonstrate that reading print‐on‐paper texts are better for memory recall after reading (Mangen, Walgermo & Brønnick, 2013), for digesting complex information (Stoop, Kreutzer & Kircz, 2013a, 2013b), and for immersing oneself in a story (Mangen 2013b; Mangen & Kuiken 2014). Digital texts, on the other hand, are only superior for “quick information gathering, communication and navigation” (Stoop, Kreutzer & Kircz, 2013a, 2013b). The reasons for these differences are not yet clear, but the physical ways in which our bodies perform literate acts and how our brain processes materials provides a means by which to examine this phenomenon. This paper begins by summarising existing research on how the brain responds to these different environments, and how the bodily movements that surround these acts of literacy differ. It will conclude with a proposal that changing how children use their bodies when they are reading might improve comprehension. Discussant: Maria Nikolajeva Round Table Discussion with the four presenters. Session Two (Tuesday: 11.00‐13.00): Empathy and YA Fiction 1. Anna Savoie Seeing Similarities to Overcome Differences: Opportunities for Empathy in Native American Adolescent Fiction Research shows that reading literature can help develop readers’ empathy and theory of mind both in the short and long term. Through the lens of cognitive poetics, this theoretical study investigates the specific advantages young adult literature offers to adolescent readers in terms of empathy development. Multicultural young adult literature presents a certain challenge to readers who are of the majority race. Studies show that we use more empathy with those we consider to be similar to us, or those we categorize as “in‐group.” Racial differences between the reader and the protagonist could cause an unconscious “out‐group categorization,” which lessens the reader’s ability to use, and therefore develop, empathy. This study focuses on two Native American young adult novels, Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Rain Is Not My Indian Name and Eric Gansworth’s If I Ever 318 Get Out of Here. It argues that by offering a commonality, the depictions of adolescence in these two novels mitigate the possibility of an out‐group categorization of the protagonists. It then examines how these novels present opportunities to the reader for empathy and mind‐reading use and development. The study concludes that the depictions of adolescence in these novels would cause majority culture adolescent readers to use and develop more empathy with them than they would with adult Native American novels. More broadly, the study analyses in a new light the particular advantages young adult literature offers to adolescent readers, namely that the strong presence of adolescence mitigates any out‐group categorizations and increases the likelihood of empathy development through reading. The impact of this new argument is potentially groundbreaking for teachers, school curriculums, and educational policy‐makers alike. 2. Justyna Deszcz‐Tryhubczak Cognitive Lessons about Social Movements: Social Minds, Theory of Mind & Empathy in Radical Fantasy Fiction for Young Readers We live in times of emergent bottom‐up participatory democracy based on social movements whose participants, regardless of class, race, gender and age divisions, unite to address specific social or political problems. If social movements can be seen as instances of collective cognitive praxis (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), then what leads to their formation and sustains them is their members’ capability for mind reading and empathy as a basis for progressive thought and democracy based on caring for others and cooperation (Lakoff 2009). Radical Fantasy fiction for young readers—one of the currently available modes of utopian thinking and representation—propagates the ideal of participatory democracy through its focus on solidarity of the oppressed across social and economic divides. I argue that the potential appeal of Radical Fantasy to contemporary young readers rests on its metarepresentations of social minds, intermental thought, and interactions (Palmer 2010), as enabled by Theory of Mind and empathy. If reading literature indeed improves the competencies of ToM and empathy (Kidd and Castano 2013), it is not misguidedly optimistic to hope that texts like Radical Fantasy—especially when used as a background for intergenerational dialog and inter‐age connectedness— provide training in a safe mode for solidarity. As a result, Radical Fantasy may tune post‐ millennial young readers to becoming political actors, thereby turning out to be an important cultural contribution to the rise of participatory democracy, based, among others, on intergenerational justice. 3. Mike Cadden and Karen Coats Once More, With Feeling: Two Views on How Authors Make Readers Feel Things Most commentaries that address realistic young adult fiction highlight its ability to engage readers through the creation of relatable characters. Mike Cadden argues that such identification is not as straightforward as it seems; instead, he identifies a range of character types and rhetorical strategies that evoke what Lars Bernaerts calls a “double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization” (69) that draws readers along a continuum from indifference to empathy while simultaneously allowing for critical distance and evaluative response. His approach could thus be called stimulus‐driven, in that it depends on rhetorical choices made by authors to evoke the appropriate responses in readers. Karen Coats, on the other hand, approaches reading from a mind‐driven approach, bringing insights from cognitive studies, affect theory and psychoanalysis to bear on the way readers engage in the double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization, and exploring how breaches of expressive thresholds (such as crying while reading) are 319 theorized in those discourses. In this paper we will bring these two approaches into conversation through a close reading of narrative voice and characterization in E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau‐Banks and Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up. Through our discussion of these texts, we explore the connections, gaps, and impasses that emerge between traditional rhetorical theory and its newer cognitive variations when it comes to examining how readers engage with other minds. Discussant: Maria Nikolajeva Round Table Discussion with the four presenters. 320 S71 “Thinking about Theatre and Neoliberalism” Victor Merriman, (Edge Hill University, UK) The Austerity Fraud: Critical Performance Perspectives ‘Neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity ... subdues democratic desires and imperils democratic dreams.’ Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (MIT Press, 2015): 44 This paper considers the performative dynamics of the fraudulent politics of ‘Austerity’ (2008‐ongoing) as an enabler, in the West, of what may be the penultimate phase of neoliberalisation. Drawing on work done, since 2010, by members of the Performance and Civic Futures group, including the author, it sets out a critique of Austerity Culture across key public institutions, events and projects. The argument considers the potential of performance theory to point to acts of social praxis, toward futures better than what elite groups are currently prepared to concede. Hélène Lecossois (Université du Maine, Le Mans, France) The value of failure in Ireland’s theatre of (post)modernity The (re)calibration of bodies for efficiency, performance, labour has been one of the hallmarks of the theatre of modernity. Yet this theatre has also harboured pockets of possible resistance to this calibration. It is in these pockets of resistance, located in the theatricality of the theatre, that this paper is interested. It looks at the ways in which theatrical performance might open up possibilities of thinking disruptively about neoliberalism’s imperatives of success and efficiency. As Nicholas Rideout has pointed out, it is precisely because theatre is so deeply nestled within the sphere of (late) capitalism that it is such a good, if perverse, place, to look for potential political alternatives. (N. Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (2013)) This paper will not look at the elements which might go wrong during a performance (N. Rideout, Sara Janes Bailes) but will focus instead on instances of failure inscribed in the (performance) script of a play (in Synge or Beckett for instance) and will inquire into their creative possibilities for thinking critically about neoliberalism. Aoife Monks (Queen Mary University of London, UK) Unhomely Virtuosity Virtuosity emerged as a category of performance in the 18th century, and became an important metaphor for identity in modernity. This paper considers the relationship between virtuosity and nostalgia, and argues that these categories converge particularly intensely in the virtuosic performances of Irishness during the 1990s Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. Focussing in particular on the stage show Riverdance, and drawing on the Stage Irish entrepreneurs of the mid‐19th Century, this paper will ask what homes are lost and recuperated through virtuosic performance. Lionel Pilkington (NUI Galway, Ireland) Theatre paying its way: Theatre and Economics in 1980s Ireland An important political shift took place in Ireland in the early to mid 1980s when the country’s model of governance swung sharply away from a social state to a neoliberal enterprise schema—that now‐familiar agenda of austerity that valorizes individual and profit‐oriented enterprise, is committed to a programme of privatization and an unleashing of market forces, and entails what is presented as a necessary and inevitable retraction of state responsibility towards all forms of social provision. This paper will discuss the ways in which Ireland’s neoliberal turn can be related to the extraordinary 321 burgeoning of institutional theatre initiatives in the early 1980s and, specifically, on how (a) we might describe and conceptualize the relationship between theatre as a practice and as a funded institution and (b) how we might discuss the relationship between theatre, taxation and acting as paid labour. Special consideration will be given to the Abbey Theatre, Druid Theatre Company, and Rough Magic Theatre Company as well as some of the notable productions of this period. Mark Phelan (Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland) ‘Boom Town’: the Neoliberal Politics of Performance in Post‐Conflict Belfast One of the many paradoxes of the Troubles is that the North's repressive state apparatus, which was responsible for provoking (and perpetuating) the conflict, also inadvertently shielded society from neoliberal policies unleashed by Thatcher in 1980s' Britain. Viewed from this perspective, the North's conflict exposes neo‐liberal ideology that free markets and a weak state can provide peace and prosperity to be utterly illusory, for the political conditions and contexts that enabled the North's peace process to succeed were pronouncedly statist. And so, in the aftermath of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, one of the most unsettling aspects of this political settlement ‐ alongside the institutionalisation of sectarian politics ‐ has been the increasing consensus, from otherwise polarised parties, over the application of neo‐liberal policies in the North, such as Sinn Féin and the DUP's commitment to lowering corporation tax rates to the same levels as Republic of Ireland. These and other neoliberal policies and practices in the North often appear deeply counterproductive to peace, especially given the palpable lack of a "peace dividend" to working‐class communities from across the sectarian divide, who suffered most from the Troubles and have benefited least, especially in 'boom town' Belfast. This paper will explore these issues in the work of a number of contemporary artists and playwrights as well as exploring the limitations of some of these critiques given that theatre is frequently pressed into performing the neoliberal peace. Isabel Karremann (Universität Würzburg, Germany) How to Survive the Economic Crisis with Shakespeare The paper will focus on figures from Shakespearean drama who not only survive precarious situations of indebtedness, but rather turn them into an enabling, liberating experience. The point is emphatically not to establish a genealogy that legitimizes a neo‐ liberalist framework, but rather to argue against an angst‐and‐anxiety‐driven crisis rhetoric that is familiar from the Euro‐crisis and to articulate a more empowering, less victimized subject position endowed with agency instead. Just as importantly, it seeks to argue against a very similar crisis rhetoric prevalent in New Historicism (which has dominated early modern scholarship for the last twenty years) that reduces the theatre and its cultural and social functions to an articulation of 'anxieties' indicative of 'identity crises' at the individual and collective level. While this approach obviously has great explanatory force and allows literature (along with the literary critic) an important anti‐ ideological critical function, it also tends to disregard other possible responses to precarious situations. The argument of the paper will be placed this within a framework of historical theatre practice and theatre business concerns, as well as within the framework of recent critical considerations on 'the art of failure' (Halberstam), 'reparative reading' (Sedgwick) and 'cruel optimism' (Berlant). Michael McKinnie (Queen Mary University of London, UK) Theatre Financing and Real Estate 322 This paper explores the relationship between the financing of contemporary theatre and urban property markets. While theatre and performance studies has become increasingly preoccupied with the spatiality of performance in recent years, it has arguably failed to pay sufficient attention to many of the complex economic, and especially property, relations underpinning the spatial practices with which it is concerned. These relations impinge not only on where theatres are located or the types of work produced, they also affect the ways that theatres are financed in distinctive ways. This paper focuses on recent theatre‐building in Toronto, Canada. For a number of years Toronto has experienced one of the world’s largest commercial and residential construction booms. After a long period where theatre infrastructure lagged behind a fast‐growing performance industry (due in large part to constraints on public spending on arts infrastructure) a number of new theatres have been built. These, however, have been financed to a notable degree through agreements between private developers and theatre companies that have been made possible by fiscal mechanisms within municipal planning law. This paper considers the cultural and urban politics of such developments, where theatre infrastructure is not only affected by real estate markets, but where the financing of it comes to depend directly on those markets (with all their attendant complexities). John Freeman (University of Detroit Mercy, USA) Outsorcery: Synthespians as the Acting Precariat Class Technological advances in GGI (Computer Generated Imaging) and stand‐alone holograms no doubt presage the day when synthespian actors will be coming to a theater near you. Thus, when director Kerry Conran put out a casting call for an actor to play the perfect villain in his 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, no less a luminary than Laurence Olivier stepped forth to answer the call. Dead for fifteen years? No problem. Through the wonders of CGI and archival footage, he has resumed his career in what looks to be a very long run indeed. Outsourcing here takes on the character of “outsorcery,” a conjuring of the dead to do work once the sole province of the living. Post‐Fordist modes of production, abetted by this technology, threaten to transform the actor qua laborer into ”fragments…assembled under a new law,” microfragments and recombinations of an informatic and immaterializing mode of production beyond even Walter Benjamin’s theorizing about film and auratic transference. I will explore the nature of this technology, what it delivers and fails to deliver, and the ethical questions that arise when thespians are replaced by synthespians. Frédéric Mesplède (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France) Theatre and Neoliberalism or Fiction Against Fiction This paper will address the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and theatre in Lucy Prebble’s play Enron (2009) and David Hare’s play The Power of Yes (2009). During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher revitalised liberalism (in its strictly economical meaning) and its core tenet of free market in a series of economic policies soon to be labelled “neoliberal”. The plays under study address the notion of free market and its most notorious manifestation that are financial markets. In Enron, Lucy Prebble fictionalises the financial scandal of Enron which led to the bankruptcy of one of the biggest energy trading companies in the USA in 2001. In The Power of Yes, as the full title of the play suggests: “A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis”, David Hare stages a dramatist (himself) who wants to write a play about the 2008 financial crisis. The dramatist therefore interviews key figures in the financial sector to understand the financial crisis. What these plays attempt to do is to challenge the hegemony of 323 neoliberalism and free market by creating what Jacques Rancière calls a new “common aisthesis”. (Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics.) By creating their own story of neoliberalism, the playwrights challenge neoliberal thinkers and decision makers who try to pass their ideology as the only way to perceive the world. An ideology being, in the end, a story which interprets the world in a specific way (for a specific purpose). The confrontation between theatre and neoliberalism can be rephrased as “fiction against fiction”. To challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism, the plays debunk the fundamental principles of (neo)liberalism, defined by Adam Smith, by staging their contradictions. This challenge of the neoliberal ideology is also accompanied by a reflection on theatre and performance. Breaking with the tradition of “engaged theatre”, Lucy Prebble and David Hare opt for an emancipating dramaturgy, namely “storytelling”, which acknowledges that spectators ought to be “emancipated” by the play, according to Jacques Rancière’s definitions (The Emancipated Spectator). The end of theatre is not to be sought outside theatre in a collective political action. Theatre is not a political tool, it is only the playwright’s privileged way to express him‐ or herself. A play is also the perfect space for confronting words and ideologies with live tangible actions, which is impossible in television, radio or cinema. David Hare and Lucy Prebble want to entertain and to inform (not to educate) spectators thanks to their plays. To achieve this, the playwrights must design their plays so that they can be understood by spectators who have little knowledge in economics. Also, their plays must be appealing enough to attract spectators who live in a society where economics is often described as austere and reserved to economists. 324 S72 Dilemmmas of Identity in Postmulticultural American Fiction and Drama” Co‐convenors: Enikő Maior, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, Lenke Németh, University of Debrecen, Hungary Lenke Németh, University of Debrecen, Hungary “Blackface,Yellowface, and Whiteface: Masking and Unmasking in Postmulticultural American Drama” In the 1990s the multicultural era of American culture is replaced by the postmulticultural pattern, which involves new ways of looking at race and ethnicity. Inescapably, postmulticultural discourse moves beyond essentialist definitions of these concepts and introduces new articulations of racial and ethnic meanings, thus offering re‐definitions of cultural identity and what constitutes Americanness. Being a most appropriate form of expressiveness for showing and reflecting on the changing dynamics of cultural identity, American drama in the postmulticultural era produces challenging explorations of new kinds of post‐racial and post‐ethnic identity. By discussing innovative ways of the dramatic rendering of cultural identity in selected plays by Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, David Henry Hwang, and Suzan‐Lori Parks I will argue that these dramatists effectively reverse cliched racial and ethnic images of identity through the revitalization of the ancient device of masking. Teresa Botelho, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal “Choosing Identities and the Lies of the Body in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia” The critical collapse of the stable binaries that ground systems of knowledge about racial ascription dependent on the discredited semiotics of the visible, has fostered in contemporary American literature a reinvention of the passing narrative, now invested in projects that re‐imagine identity, examining its flexibility in ways that disrupt both the rigid paradigms that underlie its construction and the linkage between embodied signifiers and social meanings. This paper will discuss two such texts, the 1998 novel Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, and the 2007 play Yellow Face, by David Henry Hwang which investigate, from different perspectives, the identity puzzle open by the realization that race as a concept has no essencialized groundings and is a societal, historicized construct; by examining how the traditional protocols of passing in both texts are inverted by constituting Blackness and Asianness as identities of desire, this paper discusses how they open foundational questions, namely asking whether the racial liminality of a body allows an individual to emotionally inhabit both Blackness and Whiteness, and whether an etho‐racial identification of choice, grounded on desire and performance, is ever available to a post‐racial passer. Identity Formation in Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook Eniko Maior I propose to investigate the fictional work of Gary Shteyngart The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) in order to demonstrate that Shteyngart, an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR, in 1972 presents a fictional world that draws closely on places the 325 author knows but transforms them for the purposes of presenting images of literary alienation. He left Russia but did not forget either about his Russian roots or his Jewish identity. The key question “Who am I?” has to be answered before offering a thorough textual analysis. Vladimir Girshkin, the protagonist of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook would like to avoid walking like a Jew but on the other hand he would like to make his parents proud of their Russian Jewish boy. Can he escape his ethnicity and find happiness? Shteyngart’s hero, Vladimir Girshkin does not belong to one world, he is the son of immigrants who does not know how to define his own identity and to find happiness. The writer with the help of satire actually shows the protagonist’s search for his identity in this absurd and strange world. My task is to show if this is possible or is just a utopian dream. 326 S73 “Literary Prizes and Cultural Context” Co‐convenors: Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, David Malcolm, University of Gdank, Poland (1) Tugba Sabanoglu, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany The Man Booker Prize and Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia This paper seeks to contribute to the “exotic vs. home‐grown novel” debate that has been revolving around the Man Booker Prize and prompting questions about British literary culture’s engagement with postcolonialism since its debut in 1969. It will look at the body of winners (as well as contenders) as a culturally sanctioned catalogue to investigate the post‐imperial condition to be observed in British political and cultural life that Paul Gilroy identifies as “Postcolonial Melancholia”. I contend that rather than enjoying an abundance of “political correctness”, Booker‐winning novels that deal with postcolonial experience could be read as an attempt at confronting, or even better, properly mourning Britain’s unsettling colonial history. However, as Gilroy further delineates in his argumentation, the consolidation of contemporary British identity through acknowledging past horrors is never far from being precarious. A careful look into the “English” or “home‐grown” winners of the prize will reveal that although by foregrounding works that represent the extra‐national the body of Booker winning novels goes beyond a post‐imperial urge to revert back to past glory; it still simultaneously accommodates a reservoir of Englishness that endeavours to sustain itself as something intrinsically different than a sense of post‐ imperial Britishness that needs constant communication and confrontation with an unsavoury historical and cultural baggage. (2) Aniela Korzeniowska, University of Warsaw, Poland James Kelman and His 1994 Man Booker Prize In this paper I would like to address the issue of the consequences of being awarded prizes, receiving nominations for the same said prizes and the frequent controversies surrounding both the nominees and the judges, with special attention devoted to Scottish writer James Kelman. Kelman’s first experience with the Man Booker Prize (popularly referred to simply as the Booker Prize) was when his novel A Disaffection was included on its shortlist in 1989. Then, a few years later, in 1994, and to the horror of many, he actually received the prize for his stream of consciousness novel How late it was, how late. Although his Translated Accounts. A Novel found itself on the longlist for the 2001 award and he was also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in both 2009 and 2011, it was his 1994 novel that aroused an astounding amount of press attention both at home and abroad. It is interesting to go a little more deeply into the reasons for this attention and what the consequences of this award were for Kelman himself, his future writing, and for other writers experimenting with form and language. (3) Ulla Ratheiser, University of Innsbruck, Austria, Indeed, a “wicked idea that good writing and entertainment are incompatible” (H. Jacobson) – Comic Literature and Literary Prizes When Howard Jacobson was shortlisted for and eventually won the Man Booker Prize 2010 for his novel The Finkler Question reactions were divided. They ranged from “a 327 completely worthy winner of this great prize” (Andrew Motion) to “Jacobson should not win.” (Jonathan Beckmann) What has been mostly sidelined, though, except for some cursory comments, is the fact that The Finkler Question is one of the very few comic novels to have won this prestigious prize (Mark Brown). The fraught relationship of comic writing and literary prizes is the particular intersection this paper will aim to explore by referencing The Finkler Question, and reading it also against the backdrop of Edward St Aubyn’s Booker Prize satire Lost for Words (2014). (4) Wojciech Drąg, University of Wrocław, Poland Hopes Still High: The Goldsmiths Prize Three Years after Its Launch The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 by the Goldsmiths College in reaction to the frequently voiced concerns that the Man Booker had been failing to recognise genuinely demanding fiction. The founders announced their dedication to “celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” The launch of the prize was met with much hope and enthusiasm: the Times Literary Supplement called it “fantastic news for literature” and for “prize culture,” whereas the New Statesman predicted that it would “encourage young writers to write boldly” and “provide a breakwater” against the fear of the reign of the “Amazon culture.” Three years on, it is still too early to say if the Goldsmiths Prize has lived up to those expectations, but a tentative assessment of its influence so far can be conducted and will be the aim of this paper. After outlining the prize’s objectives, its rules of entry and introducing the winning and shortlisted novels, I will compare the overlap between the novels recognised by the Goldsmiths with those appreciated by the Man Booker and the Costa. Finally, I shall examine the effect that the prize has had on the commercial and critical success of the winning novels. (5) Violetta Trofimova, St. Petersburg, Russia Female Intrusion into Literary Prize Culture of Late Seventeenth‐Century France This paper seeks to analyze the phenomenon of women winners of academic literary competitions in France in the last decades of the seventeenth century. While women were largely excluded from academic life during that period, and their membership in the academies was problematic, academic competitions were open to everyone irrespective of sex and social status. Even French Academy (closed for women up to the twentieth century) welcomed all participants for its contests, including the contest in “eloquence” first conducted in 1671. It is important to note that the first winner of this contest was Madeleine de Scudery, a leading French woman writer of her time. The reception of her victory will be discussed in this paper. Scudery was an exception because she received a prize for an essay, and not a piece of poetry, as other women winners did. The topics of the contests will be discussed with a special focus on their relationship to politics and social problems, for example, peacemaking and female education. Besides that, general formation of literary prize culture will be analyzed, including the rules of the contests, the advertisement, the jury, and the award ceremonies. (6) David Malcolm, University of Gdańsk, Poland (co‐convenor) The Role of the Short‐Story Prize in the Development of British Short Fiction 328 It is widely believed that the short story has been an ignored and disparaged form in twentieth‐ and twenty‐first century British fiction. Contrasts are usually made with the esteem in which the short story is held in Ireland and the USA. British publishers have usually shown a reluctance to publish short fiction, certainly short fiction by less well‐ known writers. The main literary prizes in Britain are given to novels. Yet, there have long been major short‐story prizes, both for mainstream fiction and for genre fiction, in the United Kingdom. Recently, a number of high‐profile short‐story awards – the BBC National Short Story Award, the Costa Book Award, among others – have sought to change the dire status of the short story in Britain. This paper will suggest that the effect exercised by these awards on the position of the short story in UK publishing has been negligible. It will consider recent winners of the BBC National Short Story Award, arguing that high‐profile awards tend to be won by established writers writing within the genre conventions of the social‐psychological short story. Experimental short fiction, historical short fiction, crime short fiction, and other categories of short prose must seek either their own prize‐awarding bodies or go uncelebrated on a larger scale. (7) Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria (co‐convenor) British and Irish Poetry Prizes – A Critical Evaluation Prizes have become a normal part of any moderately successful literary career. Writer’s handbooks usually list more than 200 prizes for Great Britain and Ireland, the majority of them being awarded for new novels. Just around ten per cent of the literary prizes are awarded in the field of poetry. For a non‐UK publisher (for example, Poetry Salzburg), even considering the idea of submitting new collections for British poetry prizes, quickly brings complete disillusion. The guidelines defining the rules and conditions of entry usually contain the stereotype requirement “first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland”. The majority of the Irish poetry awards contrasts pleasantly with their British counterparts. The Patrick Kavanagh Award, one of the most prestigious poetry prizes in Ireland, is confined to poets born in Ireland, or of Irish nationality, or long‐term residents of Ireland. But country of publication is irrelevant. Similarly, the Poetry Now Award is presented for the best single volume of poetry by an Irish poet, irrespective of place of publication. This paper will evaluate the most important British and Irish poetry prizes and try to find out whether the policy of British poetry‐prize administrators is in compliance with terms of EU agreements. 329 S74 “21st‐Century Female Crime Fiction” Co‐convenors: Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria, Sienkiewicz‐Charlish, University of Gdansk, Poland, Agnieszka (1) Jessica Homberg‐Schramm, University of Cologne, Germany Female ‘Tartan Noir’: Denise Mina’s 21st‐ Century Crime Fiction Scottish women’s writing has long been characterised by a double marginalisation of their writers, both as Scottish and as women. The subsequent rise of female writers and their increased visibility in the late 20th and 21st centuries has not been paralleled in the genre of crime fiction that is still dominated by male authors in Scotland. After scrutinising the genre label ‘Tartan Noir’, the paper provides a short overview of female Scottish crime fiction. Published at the turn of the century, Denise Mina’s Garnethill trilogy (1998—2001) will then be employed as an example of crime fiction that is dedicated to a female perspective. The paper will demonstrate in which ways Mina exposes institutionalised violence against women pervading all levels of Scottish society in her novels. A special focus will be on Mina’s depiction of the city as a post‐industrial space that reflects the conditions of and facilitates the growth of violence. In a last step, the paper will critically engage with Mina’s agenda that presents the mirroring of men’s violent behaviour as the only resort available to women. (2) Agnieszka Sienkiewicz‐Charlish, University of Gdansk, Poland (co‐convenor) Glasgow Noir: Denise Mina’s The Red Road Denise Mina has published 12 novels as well as a number of short stories, plays and graphic novels. Her writing has been identified with “explicitly feminist politics” (Scotsman). She claims that she is a “lifelong feminist” (Mullin) and wants to use crime fiction to present a “narrative about very disempowered people becoming empowered” (Trouble and Strife). Consequently, Mina focuses on the personal and professional struggles of individual and often vulnerable women such as a former psychiatric patient and a sexual abuse survivor Maureen O’Donnell (Garnethill Trilogy) and would‐be journalist Paddy Meehan (The Field of Blood, The Dead Hour, The Last Breath). Mina’s novels are less concerned with personal guilt than with the social evils that create criminals and the predators who nurture them. She explores such themes as family, social injustice and institutional violence offering a window to contemporary reality. Mina’s focus on the social issues puts her close to the fiction of William McIlvanney or Ian Rankin; however, Mina has increased the psychological element and given voice to the characters often unprivileged in crime fiction. The paper is going to offer a closer reading of Mina’s The Red Road (2013), featuring a female police officer, DI Alex Marrow. It will examine how Mina’s political intentions are played out in the novel and how she escapes the limitations of the serial format of the police procedural by subverting its conventions. (3) Eduardo García Agustín, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Spain Crime in Pandemic Times: Louise Welsh and Her Plague Times Trilogy. In the two published novels of her still unfinished “Plague Times Trilogy,” Scottish writer Louise Welsh presents a world being devastated by a highly infectious disease known as “The Sweats.” After developing all its symptoms, some people become survivors in a world where life and death have acquired a new signification. However, amongst the millions of 330 victims, the main characters in each novel become unexpected detectives and find themselves immersed in a contemporary, apocalyptic whodunit in which solving a crime becomes the only remnant of the pre‐sweats human logic. Some people’s lives become thus “grievable,” borrowing Judith Butler’s term from Frames of War (2009), as opposed to millions of massive ungrievable lives: Dr Simon Sharkley for Stevie Flint in A Lovely Way to Burn (2014) and the different member of the community Magnus McFall meets in Death is a Welcome Guest (2015). My presentation arises from Ascari’s claim that, when reading, “we grasp only those aspects of texts that our cultural position and subjectivity enables us to recognise and to relate to other data” (2007). My approach highlights the darkened, almost Gothic, elements that tinge the literary, televisual and cinematographic references in both novels by Louise Welsh, as well as the readers’ true real life, where crimes, massive deaths and several pandemics do actually take place. This leads to the questioning on characters and readers alike of the true human condition, where the divide between good and bad, death and life are far too subtle. (4) Wolfgang Görtschacher, University of Salzburg, Austria (co‐convenor) “I’m a lot smarter than most of those dozy detectives you see on the box. And I’m a lot less patient.” – Val McDermid’s The Skeleton Road (2014) Val McDermid’s standalone novel The Skeleton Road (2014), a whodunit novel, is introduced by an epigraph which forms its thematic leitmotif: “the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy and administer space.” It prepares her readers for a very political crime novel. Set in Edinburgh, Oxford, and Croatia during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, it involves as protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, Head of the Historic Cases Unit for Police Scotland. The main themes range from genocide and ethnic tensions to individual human betrayal. This paper will offer an in‐depth analysis of the novel that is based on an interview with the author conducted in Salzburg in November 2015. (5) Stephen Butler, Ulster University, Great Britain The Likeness of Male and Female Detectives in Tana French’s Fiction Tana French is one of Ireland’s most successful crime writers, an impressive achievement considering the almost completely masculine bias of the genre’s publishing record until the second half of the first decade of the twenty‐first century. Unlike other female writers in the genre though, it could be argued that gender politics plays little of a role in her work. In her first novel In The Woods, the main character is the male detective Rob Ryan around whom much of the plot focuses, with his partner Cassie Maddox in the role of female sidekick. In French’s next novel, The Likeness, Cassie, however, is the main protagonist, and the plot revolves around an old undercover case she used to work. Much was gleaned of Cassie’s character second‐hand in the first novel, whilst she assumes the main role in the second, and the contrast between the two approaches to Cassie’s characterisation is a key element of comparison between the two novels. In the third novel, Faithful Place, Frank Mackie who is a former superior officer of Cassie’s and the principle secondary character of the second novel takes the role of the main character, and as in the first novel there are further insights into Cassie’s character, once more from a secondary source. This paper will examine how these various narrative focalisations add infinite layers of complexity to Cassie’s character, with insights offered as much from her male companions as from herself, in a manner that seriously deconstructs any gender binaries in this form of crime 331 writing. That Tana French herself is a novelist equally adroit at handling male and female characters and narrative voices is a testimony to her unique talent in the contemporary crime fiction context. (6) Laura Ellen Joyce, Edinburgh Napier and UEA., Great Britain 21st‐Century Marriage Thrillers: Gaslighting in Gone Girl (2012) and Her Story (2015) Gone Girl, a bestselling crime novel (and later a Hollywood blockbuster) and Her Story, a critically acclaimed videogame, are both proof of the reach of female‐centred crime fiction in contemporary culture. In this paper I will argue that both stories are updated versions of the marriage thriller, the most famous of which is Gregory Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight. This film was so famous that it coined a new term, ‘gaslighting’, which is used colloquially to describe prolonged psychological abuse, usually intimate partner abuse. Both Gone Girl and Her Story centre on murderous female narrators who have been victim in some way to ‘gaslighting’, and I would argue that the marriage thriller is alive and well in contemporary female‐centred crime fiction. Through careful narration, inventive storytelling, and experimental techniques, both Her Story and Gone Girl update the marriage thriller to reveal that ‘gaslighting’ and intimate partner abuse are still very real threats in the 21st century. (7) Maria Vara, Hellenic Air Force Academy, Athens, Greece Metafictional Crime Novels by Women: The 21st‐Century Greek Progeny While women have been among the most prolific crime authors, the metafictional crime novel (a term implying the appreciation of mysteries which remain hopelessly unresolved), is still stereotypically considered to be a male‐dominated territory. During the past two decades, while crime fiction became regional and multi‐ethnic, the Greek progeny turned into a distinctive product that has begun to develop a tradition, albeit with no visible metafictional input, let alone by women authors. The purpose of this paper is to highlight and contextualise this input, by focusing on two contemporary crime novels whereby metafictional artifice is constituted by the layering of multiple narrative levels: Soti Triantafillou’s Kinezika Koutia. Tesseris Epoches tou Detective Malone [Chinese Boxes. Four Seasons for Detective Malone], published in Greek in 2006, (translated in German in 2009 and in Italian in 2012), and Argiro Mantoglou’s Lefki Revans [White Revenge, which connotes an invalid one], published in 2012, only in Greek so far. Both novels more or less explicitly deploy and subvert traditional conventions of the genre, using the idea of Chinese nested boxes in order to host queries about the formation of gender and subjectivity in a contemporary urban context. (8) Tiina Mäntymäki, University of Vaasa, Finland Fearsome Encounters in Unni Lindell’s Rødhette Norwegian crime writer Unni Lindell’s psychological thriller Rødhette (2004) revolves around a fearsome encounter with a ‘wolf’ and a female child in a forest which dramatically leads to the birth of a female serial killer. The thriller draws both on the various versions of a medieval folktale featuring a girl in a red hood, circulated mainly by female storytellers, and the more recent written versions by male writers such as Perrault and Brothers Grimm. Moreover, this crime novel joins the continuum of numerous 332 contemporary rewritings of the story in which the woman stigmatized by the colour red metamorphoses into a subversive force. In this paper, my aim is to detect the ways in which the female murderer is constructed in terms of affect, applying Sara Ahmed’s ideas of strangeness as an epistemological category and fear as an emotion which produces ‘fearsome encounters’. I discuss the protagonist’s murdering career as a series of encounters with strangeness and fear. After her seminal encounter with male violence as a child, the murderer‐to‐be constructs a fiction of the ‘wolf’ and produces this fiction as a phobic object, a ‘strange body’ which later comes to serve as a point of recognition whenever she feels threatened and a motivator for murder. (9) Elena Avanzas Álvarez, University of Oviedo, Spain 'The Doctor Is Here': Female and Feminist Forensic Doctors in Contemporary Crime Fiction Patricia Cornwell inaugurated a new era in crime fiction when she saw her first Kay Scarpetta novel, Postmortem, published in 1990. However, Cornwell did much more than simply creating the forensic thriller: she created an archetype that has changed female and feminist characters in 21st century crime fiction. It is not a coincidence that most forensic doctors in crime fiction – a label under which I will include both novels and television shows – are women. They are what Sally Munt calls "The New Woman": 'powerful detectives [who] resolve three unstable forms close to the liberal feminist heart – the individual, the family, and the state' (1994: 29). So, I will analyse their political and gendered concerns in relation to the three fields Munt highlights. First, how both women's agency plays a key role in constructing their own identities. Secondly, how they balance their lives with traditional family roles associated with women, and, finally, how they interact with the state and their work in a field traditionally constructed as male. The aim of this paper is to analyse female forensic doctors as the evolution of the traditional female sleuth paying special attention to their bodies, the spaces they occupy, and their relationship with traditional constructions of femininity, all from a feminist point of view. 333 S75. “MEDIA, CULTURE AND FOOD ‐ MEANING OF NEW NARRATIVES” Co‐convenors María José Coperías‐Aguilar, Universitat de València, Spain Slávka Tomaščíková, Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika v Košiciach, Slovakia The immense growth of new media in the 21st century has caused substantial changes in the old media, both in their forms and their contents. In the last two decades food as a cultural phenomenon has become one of the most visible narrative categories in discourses of old and new media. The space provided to various elements related to food has been enormous and is still growing. Contributions to this seminar will focus on the analysis of food elements which constitute new narratives in any kind of media, traditional or digital. They will also examine the relations between culture, food and media consumption addressing questions connected to the role food plays in the creation of meaning in contemporary media narratives. Taste and Consumption in Hannibal: Food and Corpses as Cultural Signifiers Astrid Schwegler Castañer, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain Food and its related processes such as taste are often used as metaphors for abstract concepts since they are at once part of one of the most basic human need and a symbolic system that defines personal and national differences. NBC’s TV‐Series Hannibal (2013‐ 15) entwines aesthetic taste with its literal meaning of gustatory perception to present a critical view of US consumerist society through the aesthetics of violence and bodies, which are consumed as cultural products. I will look at how aesthetic taste coupled with the recurring conceptual metaphor of cannibalism/consumerism are linked to how characters showcase and acquire their social status, moral values and ultimately power. This, in connection to the show’s highly stylized visual aesthetics and its distortion of features of the serial killer fiction tradition, will show how the consumption of violence and bodies in parallel to art and food blurs ethical boundaries of both the characters and the audience, offering a criticism of the current consumerist society. Advertising Italian Food Overseas through the Visual Media Lucia Abbamonte, Seconda Università di Napoli, Italy Flavia Cavaliere, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy By acting as a pervasive sixth sense, the media is responsible for ‘cultivating’ viewers’ conceptions of social reality and creating meanings. In the world of advertising, the visual media often constructs portrayals, which are filtered through viewers’ race, socioeconomic status, etc. Particularly in food advertising, a close relation between ethnic/national cultures and food is foregrounded. We investigated the evolution of the ‘typically Italian’ Food‐Family‐Females association over the decades and we showed how in US TV commercials of the 1980s to the 1990s of Italian (style) food, Italian American women were depicted either as caring (grand) mothers and ‘aproned’ good cooks, whereas in 2000‐2010 US TV commercials, the foregrounding of more fashionable typecasts is recognisable. In the pragmatic TV commercial dimension, the preparation and consumption of (supposedly) fresh Mediterranean food, with its culture‐laden elements, is transferred outside its socio‐cultural cradle and re‐shaped in a persuasive meta‐fictional setting. By using MCDA tools, we accounted for how videos, images, language switching, accents, music, costumes work synergically to create meanings. Through the pragmatically 334 devised framing of products’ images, taglines, auditory settings, and that of characters’ transitive gaze vectors, gestures, and proxemics, an ongoing multi‐sensorial process of configuration takes place, where an evolving Italianicity reaches beyond its Mediterranean boundary. Culture, Food and Subtitling: The Appetite for Narration in Audio‐Visual Media Eleonora Sasso, Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti‐Pescara, Italy This paper takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphors “ideas are food” and “food is thought” as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) in order to advance a new reading of subtitling, one which sees this medium as a new audio‐visual narrative category. Such films as Chocolat (1988), Waitress (2007), Julie & Julia (2009), Chef (2014), and The Hundred‐Foot Journey (2014) not only envision their own detailed blueprints of the culture of food, but are also audio‐visual narratives examining the relationship between culture, food and media. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues ‐‐ the role of food in the creation of ideas, subtitling strategies for rendering culture‐bound terms related to food, etc. ‐‐ which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re‐read the aforementioned corpus of subtitled films from a cognitive perspective. I will analyse food conceptual metaphors pertaining to the films mentioned above in order to demonstrate that the mind is conceptualized in bodily terms and that “food for thought” constitutes appropriate ideas for mental eating in new filmic narratives. Through Vianne, Jessa, Julie, Julia, Carl, Madame Mallory, and Hasan, I suggest, food consumption acquires a cultural valence in the creation of meaning in contemporary audio‐visual narratives. Digitally Modified Food or How to Find Who We Are When We Read What We Eat: The Case of Food Blogs Otilia Pacea, Universitatea Ovidius din Constanța, Romania Food blogging is where old and new media collide, where traditional everyday food practices and cooking discourse interact with emerging digital forms in the most unpredictable ways. In food blogs, every recipe gets tested and food news shared, from niche food stories of gluten free kosher or high‐fiber Nicaraguan cooking, to food jokes or restaurant reviews. Every kitchen story gets told across various media platforms, reaching audiences, online and offline, national and global. In the context of such genre migration and proliferation, conventional taxonomies are no longer valid. To classify blogs today between thematic and personal blogs, as previously suggested, is to blissfully ignore the legions of such successful content prosumers as the food bloggers. Computer‐mediated communication may be overpopulated with a myriad of mixed forms and blogs in general might be dead or simply, difficult to reach with so much overlapping. Yet the increasing popularity of the more recently emerged genre of the food blog proves the contrary. This paper explores the socio‐cultural construction of identity in the discourse of the most widely read food blogs, testing a unifying framework for analysis that correlates traditional linguistic indicators of self‐expression with media features (image, theme, website design, link, exchange analysis). 335 S76 “Gendered Bodies in Transit: from Alienation to Regeneration?” “Recovering from a Traumatic Past. Restored Identity in Meg Kingston’s Chrystal Heart” Marta Alonso Jerez, Universidad de Málaga Chrystal seemed the typical nineteenth‐century lady, passive and well‐mannered; however, an act of violence turns her into someone radically different, an active and powerful being not fully human. She heals both physically and spiritually, becoming a mature and strong woman, completely healed from that traumatic event and who will never be a victim again. Meg Kingston’s Chrystal Heart (2013) is a clear example of the new identities arising in twenty‐first‐century steampunk movement and some of its members’ main features, such as keeping Victorian manners, while showing some of the characteristics of contemporary women. This work not only explores gender stereotypes in Victorian England but also the features of the new steampunk woman of the twenty‐first century, who has achieved to recover from the trauma of past times and has learnt to use the elements which were previously the source of discrimination in her advantage. Throughout my paper, I will deal with Judith Butler’s ideas on gender and identity as well as Michel Foucault’s notions of control. I will also make use of trauma studies to develop my statements. Similarly, I will make reference to the relationship between fashion and identity argued by Helene E. Roberts. “Deviant Women: Neo‐Victorian Madwomen and Embodied Resistance” Ashley Orr, Australian National University The Victorians are often characterised by their obsession with “progress” and yet their attitudes toward deviant women were far from progressive. Recovering the experiences of such marginalised women – often absent from the historical record – is a key concern of neo‐Victorian fiction and its criticism. However, scholarship has largely ignored fictional representations of embodied modes of resistance to mechanisms of power and control. My paper addresses this gap with reference to the figure of the madwoman in Wendy Wallace’s neo‐Victorian novel The Painted Bridge (2012). Anna, the novel’s protagonist, is wrongfully institutionalised by her controlling husband and subjected to a treatment program akin to torture. Despite her trauma, she forms a community with her fellow female patients and, together, they actively subvert the quasi‐medical disciplinary regimes designed to restore their subservience to male authority. My analysis takes an interdisciplinary approach that brings together corporeal feminism, cultural memory studies, and neo‐Victorian literary criticism to argue that the Victorian “madwoman” in Wallace’s novel reflects the ongoing relevance of Victorian gender ideology in demarcating normal and deviant female bodies in the present. Moreover, I examine the way in which such bodies, through collective action, assert their independence by constructing alternative ways of being in the world. “Emma Donoghue’s novel Room as an allegory of patriarchy and a post‐patriarchal fantasy” Eva Kowal, Jagiellonian University, Krakow 336 In my presentation, I would like to discuss the child character from Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room, five‐year‐old Jack, as a “deviant” body who is punished for being an impure and androgynous “Devil’s seed” – paradoxically only after his “(self‐)liberation” from the “captivity” of which he was never aware. I would like to reflect on the relativity and problematic duality created by the walls of the shed/Room, which itself will be seen as both the most hyperbolic symbol of patriarchy (in its actual, physical form: the shed) and a model for a non‐ or post‐patriarchal society (in its potentiality and its emotional and imaginary form: Room). Drawing upon the writings of Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), and Christiane Olivier (Jocasta’s Children. The Imprint of the Mother) I would like to analyse the co‐existence in the novel of the realistic traumatic experience of Ma’s imprisonment because of her forceful reduction to the female body and sexuality (which corresponds with the phallogocentric perception of women) with what I read as a fantasy/science‐fiction vision of a future generation of sons not brought up in accordance with the Law of the Father, who could give rise to an otherwise unimaginable non‐/post‐ patriarchal society. Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (University of Málaga), "The Hottentot Venus, and the Neo‐Victorian: The Problematization of South‐Africa and the Sexual Identity of the Black Other". In her novel, Hottentot Venus, published in 2003, Barbara Chase‐Riboud tries to bring to light the story of a woman whose life represents the utmost vilification of the female black body and sexuality but in a fictionalised way. In this context, she tries to question issues of sexual exploitation and discrimination and to re‐write the history of slave‐women giving a voice to the victims. The experience and the memory of slavery constitute a key element in the reconstruction of the past and in the construction of a better future. Similarly, the process of recovery and identity construction in a postcolonial era determined by the traces of colonial trauma is an important element in the fictionalisation of Sarah Baartman’s life as an icon of the idealisation and problematisation of South‐Africa. Also the author resorts to spectrality to give her protagonist some agency in a post‐positivist sense, but also to symbolise the silenced voices of subaltern colonial people that haunt our present postcolonial societies. These issues bring to the fore questions of race and feminism, the idealization of the colonies and colonised people in contrast with white imperial subjects, and the consideration of the contemporary neo‐slave narrative as a Neo‐ Victorian genre. “Scars, tattoos, hairstyles: redressing pain and healing in the poetry of Patience Agbabi” Manuela Coppola, Università della Calabria The Black body has historically been the battleground for discourses of power and subjection, trauma and representation. Reduced to non‐human commodity during slavery, considered as a primitive object to be examined and displayed under the scientific and/or voyeuristic gaze of the white male, the Black female body in particular has been subject to exploitation, as well as to scrutiny and discipline. Moving away from notions of “afro‐ pessimism”, in this paper I will focus on the ways in which the contemporary British poet of Nigerian origin Patience Agbabi has re‐articulated the black female body as a complex and ambiguous site of pain, suffering and healing. Far from being either represented as a site of victimization or celebrated as a source of material and spiritual nurture, the black 337 gendered body is reconceptualised in her poetry as a shifting signifier which is incessantly re‐written through its unstable markers of identity such as skin and hair, a performative tool able to deal with past and present traumas. In particular, I contend that Agbabi redresses the contemporary pained body in new and unpredictable ways, turning the entangled performance of pain and pleasure into an empowering and liberating instrument which challenges the expected trajectory from alienation to healing. “Bring up the Bodies”: Hilary Mantel’s Vindication of the Rights of Women in History” Simonetta Falchi, Università di Sassari Mantel’s trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light) questions the possibility of narrating “true” “facts”: can the official history we learn from books and documents really be said truer than a novel? To which degree are facts manipulated, and by whom? Are women the victims of patriarchal violence, or its accomplices? Firstly, a possible answer to these questions will be offered analysing the metaphor of Anne’s body as a scapegoat on the altar of HIStory, as it emerges from the dualistic opposition between the queen’s dismembered body and the undivided, augmented, body of Thomas Cromwell –significantly reverberating in the other Thomases of the novels. Secondly, Anne’s traumatised body will be considered as a body of evidence mining the well‐established version of history by promoting – through the power of proof – a revision of the narratives in terms of HERstory. In this view, the four women who protect Anne’s body represent the blossoms of a nascent sorority, and their cry – “We do not want men to handle her” – the manifesto of a possibility to open up a healing discourse of regeneration and empowerment. “The Dying Body: Caste and Nationhood in Contemporary Indian Short Stories” Antonia Navarro Tejero, Universidad de Córdoba This paper will address issues associated with end‐of‐life experiences as represented in Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast”, a short story taken from her 1992 collection The Art of Dying, and Mahasweta Devi’s “Breast‐Giver”, from her 1997 collection Breast Stories. Both Indian women writers deploy female characters who die of cancer, and how families treat the dying old women in the Indian society. Though both authors are Hindu Brahmins, Hariharan deals with repression and escape as related to female selfhood in a brahminical community, and Devi pays particular attention to low caste women. However, both focus on the gender‐violence these women’s social existence leads to. Following Judith Butler’s theories of violence and mourning, Mary Douglass’ notions of pollution and taboo, and Gayatri Spivak’s subalternity, we will examine the metaphor of the cancerous tumor, and the rejection of the hospital as a foreign institution. We will conclude by asserting that the short stories discussed in this paper can be read as a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system as well as a weapon of resistance. The Other’s Other: Alterity and Resilience in Olive Senior’s “Arrival of the Snake‐ Woman” Teresa Carbayo López de Pablo, Universidad de Zaragoza Most of Olive Senior’s fiction revolves around the intersection between race, class and gender in Jamaican rural communities. In “Arrival of the Snake Woman” (1989, 2009), the 338 author explores the encounter with otherness in an African‐Jamaican Creole context upon the arrival of an Indian migrant, and the neo‐colonial and communal structures of power that aim to alienate and dehumanize her. Drawing on the theoretical framework of abjection and narratives of community, as well as on Jamaican folklore and Caribbean feminist discourses, this paper will focus on the mechanisms—linguistic, mythical and institutional—adopted by the inhabitants of Mount Rose, the community described by Senior, to marginalize and demonize the Indo‐Caribbean woman known as “snake‐ woman” or “Miss Coolie”. In doing so, it will explore how myths and religion have fuelled discrimination against (female) otherness within Afro‐Jamaican communities. It is my contention that such process of displacement and racial exclusion is contested by Miss Coolie’s anansi‐like survival strategies of accommodation and negotiation, which will ultimately subvert racial and gender hierarchies, allowing her “to perform the cultural identity of her choice”. Senior’s choice of an Indo‐Caribbean character—despite her falling into clichés—complicates and displaces the Caribbean Afro‐European dichotomy that has traditionally ignored the Indian presence, ultimately presenting Indian migration in Jamaica as a regenerating force for the community. “Gendered Bodies in Transit in Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir Are you somebody?” María Elena Jaime de Pablos, Universidad de Almeria The aim of this paper is to examine the international bestseller Are you somebody?, which was published in 1996 as an autobiographical work by the Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain, from a gender perspective. Cathy Caruth’s cultural trauma theory will be applied to analyse O’Faolain’s memoir which renders the disturbing effects of gendering bodies on individuals who live in a patriarchal society like Ireland’s. In Are you somebody? Nuala O’Faolain constructs the narrative of her life through selected memories which range from childhood, as a girl trying to survive in a poor dysfunctional family in Eamon de Valera’s Ireland, where she can witness how female bodies are gendered through psychological and physical violence and constant pregnancy, to adulthood as a cosmopolitan unmarried middle‐aged woman who openly subverts the patriarchal ideology in the Celtic Tiger years. The strategies that O’Faolain employs –university education, extensive reading, travelling, etc.– to learn how to reject and deconstruct the personal, gender and national identity, grounded on false essentialist patriarchal prejudices, that she was told to assume at an early stage of her life, will receive focal attention. Similarly, Nuala’s mind and body transformation to achieve a more liberating and satisfactory personal, sexual and professional identity, founded on global influences, gender equality, integrity principles and enriching human relationships, will also be thoroughly analysed. “The Magdalenes: Subjected bodies and “peripheral sexualities” in Conlon’s The Magdalen (1999) and Mullan’s The Magdalen Sisters (2002)” Elena Cantueso Urbano, Universidad de Málaga In this paper I analyse the vulnerability of women’s bodies in connection to a historical fact that disestablished 20th century Ireland; I am referring to the so called Magdalen laundries where thousands of ‘deviant’ women were enclosed to embrace a pious life and develop laundry work. Sexual repression and punishment has been one of the measures taken by the Catholic Church to maintain social order. Given that, all those women who did not conform to the morality standards approved by the Church were automatically considered 339 ‘fallen women’ and sent to Magdalen asylums where they were rehabilitated following the religious doctrine. Following Adriana Cavarero’s work Horrorism I take the Magdalen’s bodies as the target of modern forms of violence. Moreover, I study the Magdalenes as “peripheral sexualities” (Foucault) condemned for a sinful life by the Irish Catholic Church. Morality, sexuality, violence and identity are key concepts in this paper which explores the hidden cruel reality about the Magdalenes. Given the social resonance of this historical fact, several cultural products have resulted as a sign of people’s uneasiness. Following postmodernism and gender studies, I analyse Marita Conlon’s novel and Peter Mullan’s film exploring women’s bodies and their identities in the Irish Catholic State. 340 S77. Women on the Move: Diasporic Bodies, Diasporic Memories, Constructing Femininity in the Transitional and Transnational Era in Contemporary Narratives in English.” Co‐convenors Julia Tofantšuk, Tallinn University, Estonia Silvia Pellicer Ortín, University of Zaragoza, Spain Abram, Nicola (University of Reading, UK) “Diasporic Bodies, diasporic books: Yvonne Vera’s short stories” This paper will examine the relationship between women and space as represented in works by Yvonne Vera, an award‐winning author whose own biography is a tale of transit and transition spanning Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and Canada. Vera’s under‐examined first book, the 1992 short story collection Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals, is the paper’s focus. The opening story, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, seeds the themes – identity, power, belonging – that circulate throughout the collection (and, indeed, in Vera’s subsequent novels). I propose Vera’s use of form as a feminist means of making space. For example, her cinematic scenes slow the speed of time, forcing a lingering look at the world she creates. I read Vera’s use of the short story form as particularly significant; the typographical spaces between texts are suggestive of the lives unlived and stories still untold. To conclude this exploration of women’s writing as a space to imagine new identities, I will reflect on the material text as a ‘body’ that is itself in circulation: made by individuals’ hands and moving across national borders. I thus suggest the literary archive as demanding our scholarly attention, as the site of texts and identities that are – unpublished, unremembered – still in motion. Vera, Yvonne, Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (Toronto: TSAR, 1992) Vera, Yvonne, Opening Spaces: An Anthology of Contemporary African Women’s Writing (Oxford: Heinemann, 1999) Bigot, Corinne (Paris Ouest Nanterre, France) “The thing around your neck”: making sense of home and self in contemporary diasporic short stories by women In this paper I would like to look at how contemporary female writers (Nalo Hopkinson, Edwige Dandicat, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Chimamanda NGozi Adichie) explore the diasporic female experience foregrounding the female body and the senses. Home and memory of home, experienced as ‘the thing around your neck,’ even in a new life and new home with a ‘new husband’in an arranged marriage, sustained in the memory of odors and tastes of traditional food, embodied by ghosts, or encapsulated in a batik hanging in an American bedroom, remain a bond that seems to prevent the young woman from finding out who she is in the new country and may eventually force her to flee once more – or forever. Foregrounding of the body and the senses (women’s hands and tongues ‘thickened by pottery’, touch, cooking, or a hybrid tongue, with Creole, Bengali or Igbo words that resist assimilation) are the means to express the loss of identity in trying to make sense of home and self. Yet, the emphasis on the body and the senses, as well as diasporic narratives by women ‘boiling’ in the narrator’s blood suggest hope of finding a space and voice of their own. Cobo Pinero, Maria Rocio (University of Cádiz, Spain) “Taiye Selasi and the Afropolitan Daughters of the Diaspora” 341 The aim of this paper is to analyze the main features of Taiye Selasi’s influential coinage, “Afropolitan” (2005), and if her debut novel, Ghana Must Go (2013), embodies such components. In order to do so, I first confront Selasi’s term with new theories of cosmopolitanism (Braidotti, Click Schiller, Mignolo), while considering questions of gender, race, power and transculturation. Although the Afropolitan consciousness outlined in Selasi’s “‘Bye‐Bye, Babar’ (or: What is an Afropolitan?)” complicates and destabilizes fixed notions of identity, it refers to privileged experiences of migration from Africa to the West. The general positive ideas associated to Afropolitanism and the international experience, noticeably contrast with her more nuanced and multilayered portrait in Ghana Must Go. The dreams of success in the United States are the main source of conflict and frustration for the family of African descent that leads the choral story. The three parts of the novel display an aesthetic of mobility and dislocation distinctive of the characters’ diasporic subjectivities, in transit between Nigeria, Ghana, England and the United States. A critical notion of Afropolitanism is further articulated: one that questions gender roles, delves into the historical motives of the contemporary diaspora and privileges identities on the move. Courtois, Cedric (Paris I, Pantheon Sorbonne, France) “Need[ing] to fill the void with sound:” Giving a Voice to Displaced African Women in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) On Black Sisters’ Street deals with four African prostitutes in Antwerp, Belgium. Their pimp offered them a “[middle?] passage to Europe.” Only through the death of one of them will they voice their unspeakable stories with “garrotted voices,” “silence(s),” and “shout[s],” conveying a cacophonous first impression. Becoming Abigail narrates the life of a Nigerian teenager. After her father commits suicide, Abigail falls into the hands of a relative who plans to prostitute her in London. While Unigwe’s novel is interested in sounds but also silence(s), which “become the [imagined] community [readers] share” with these women, Abani’s novella is inward‐ looking. In this paper, we analyse a whole linguistic spectrum ranging from muteness to logorrhoea. These works are diasporic female narratives of development. By using the Bildungsroman –associated with masculinist views – Abani and Unigwe aim to debunk patriarchy. This paper analyses both works under the light of feminist and diaspora theory. The stories presented are individual stories which become a collective one: the story of “the silenced minority”, as Caryl Phillips wrote. Arizti, Bárbara (University of Zaragoza, Spain) “See Now Then (2013): A Palimpsestuous Reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s Limit Case Autobiography” In The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2011), Gilmore asserts that life writing has been transformed by the representation of traumatic experiences, giving way to works tethering on the edge between the fictional and the factual. I intend to read Kincaid’s latest novel as a limit case autobiography on the domestic trauma of a failed marriage based on the author’s experience. Time features prominently in See Now Then. Mrs Sweet, the main character, often ponders on how her Now quickly turns into a Then and on how the Then still painfully impinges on the Now. In the novel, references to different kinds of time —personal, geological, historical, mythical, mystical, etc.— dispose themselves like the layers of a 342 palimpsest. My analysis does not, nevertheless, involve a traditional palimpsestic reading of the text in an attempt to reach down to its deepest hidden meanings, but, as Dillon puts it in her monograph on the palimpsest, I perform a palimpsestuous approach that explores the interplay of themes in the Now, this complex variegated surface, where the trauma of an estranged marriage intertwines with those of the mother‐daughter relationship and the legacy of the Empire —the staples of Kincaid’s on‐going serial autobiography. Antxustegi‐Etxarte Aranga, Maialen (University of Deusto Bilbao, Spain) “Travelling the U.S‐Mexican border, challenging chicanidad” Crossing a national border might represent a simple routine or a revolutionary factor in the development of border identity. The site of the border, with its political implications, directly affects the border‐crossing experience in cultural, economical, and legal terms. The case of the U.S.‐Mexican border is particularly dramatic, and it is the purpose of this study to examine the feminization of this modern border struggle. In the 1960s, Aztlán, the Chicano homeland, embodied the ideological conceptualization of El Movimiento and was pivotal in the design of Chicana/os’ political activism. Nevertheless, little was said about the way in which tradition maintained Chicanas’ triple oppression as working, colored women. In order to overcome this void Tejana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa reinterpreted the concept of Aztlán by locating her alternative homeland in the U.S.‐Mexico border. Her concept of the Borderland dismissed a constraining understanding of traditional nationalisms, and, instead, she promoted a mestiza conceptualization of the border. The novel El Puente/The Bridge (2000) by Chicano author Ito Romo revolves around the apparently uneventful everyday life of individuals living on both sides of the U.S.‐Mexican border. It is through day‐to‐day practices that the women in these Borderlands challenge constraining notions of womanhood, nationalism and chicanidad. Sánchez Palencia, Carolina (University of Sevilla, Spain) “Under the Skin of British History: Bodies in Transit in Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004)” Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) shows how notions of race, nation and space were redefined in the context of postwar Britain when the first generation of Caribbean immigrants following the arrival of the Windrush in 1948 challenged “the perverse logic of ethnic absolutism” (Gilroy 2004: 110), and called upon a necessary reassessment of what it meant to be British. This paper interrogates Levy’s novel to examine how these social, political and cultural dislocations are primarily registered in the body as the locus of an identity that is no longer coherent and unified, but always divided and displaced. I draw from Body Theory (Foucault; Grosz; Haraway) and Postcolonial Studies (Gilroy; Hall; Brah) to analyze the complex ways in which multicultural environments have endorsed a hierarchy of bodies as organizing principle while simultaneously negotiating non‐ essentialist modes of cross‐racial relationships. Most of the issues addressed by Levy – racial segregation, cultural prejudice, ghettoization, housing discrimination, miscegenation—involve a centrality of the body that has been overlooked in much of the critical work about the Anglo‐Caribbean author. In this light, it is interesting to note how she suggests that postwar anxiety about racial impurity coexisted with the exoticization and eroticization of the Other, a complex synergy presiding the “libidinal economy” of colonial and postcolonial Britain. Mirza, Maryam (University of Liege, Belgium) 343 “The Intellectual Female Body in Indian Diasporic Fiction by Women Writers” Through the prism of two novels by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013), and Kirin Narayan’s campus novel Love, Stars, and All That (1994), this paper grapples with literary depictions of first‐ and second‐generation female immigrants of Indian descent working as academics in North America. Some of the questions that my paper will address are as follows: in what ways does a transnational academic career and their choice of specialization inform the female characters’ class and gendered identity in the ‘host’ country? To what extent does the immigrant’s intellectual journey in these novels echo her engagement with her cultural heritage (as appears to be the case with Gita, the protagonist of Narayan’s novel, who becomes a scholar of Indian folklore)? Or rather does it reflect a conflict‐ridden relationship with the Indian diasporic community and become a means of avoiding a confrontation with one’s racialized identity (which, for instance, Moushimi in The Namesake seems to do by specializing in French literature)? The paper will also seek to evaluate the extent to which a transnational academic career proves to be a liberating experience (emotionally, sexually or otherwise) for the female characters. Barros del Rio, Maria Amor (presenting) and Concetta Maria Sigona (University of Burgos, Spain) “Looking back on the American Dream: Irish female migration and return in two contemporary novels” In the last years there has been an increasing production of Irish narrative addressing issues of exile and diaspora. That profusion of migrant fiction suggests a need to express cultural identity negotiations, in particular those of women abroad. Edna O´Brien´s The Light of Evening (2006) and Colm Tóibín´s Brooklyn (2009) explore a troubling sense of place through the testimonies of emigrated and returned Irish women. Both novels are set at present time but they recall female diasporic experiences in the early decades of the 20th century. In these novels, physical and emotional (dis)locations problematise the traditional representations of Irish womanhood and their place within Irish society. Through the lens of translocational positionality (Anthias 2002, 2008), negotiations within the boundaries of time and space are revealed. An intersectional approach will illuminate how these novels use migration to question female identification with the unitary national subject. The analysis will finally unveil the real and symbolic contradictions lived by Irish women experiencing displacement and it will demonstrate how issues of identity are affected by geographical and cultural spatialities. Gilbert, Ruth (University of Winchester, UK) “Dislocations: Exploring Diasporic Identifications in Contemporary British Jewish Women’s Writing” This paper looks at dislocation and disjunction as recurring motifs in contemporary British Jewish women’s writing. By focusing particularly on figurations of place and space, it considers how contemporary British Jewish women writers explore themes of connection and disconnection: not focusing entirely on fixed ideas of home and exile but rather exploring ‘the experience of Diaspora’ that can be, in Bryan Cheyette’s words, ‘a blessing or a curse or, more commonly, an uneasy amalgam of the two states.’ Focussing on themes of place and displacement, belonging and longing, sites of origin and destination, this study will also reflect on more contemporary relocations within recent British Jewish writing. For British Jews, the diaspora undoubtedly presents some past and current ambiguities, namely being simultaneously a well‐established, highly assimilated cultural group, yet 344 demonstrating, especially in texts written by women, an ongoing preoccupation with issues of hybridity and liminal identifications. Thus, dislocation will be arguably understood, in Yellin’s words, as a source of generative tension and creative possibility, whereas diaspora will be paradoxically looked at from the increasingly decentred conditions of today’s Britain, the place where these writers are supposed to belong. Glebova, Olga (Jan Długosz University of Częstochowa, Poland) “‘My sisters, my daughters, my clones, myself’: female identity and female bonds in the speculative fiction of Weldon and Atwood” The proposed paper aims to examine representations of femininity in two works of contemporary women’s speculative fiction: The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) by Fay Weldon and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. Both novels provide an ecofeminist critique of modern science as a projection of men’s values and explore possible effects of futuristic technological developments on female bodies and female identity. In Weldon’s novel, the experience of cloning is envisioned as an empowering one. The bonds of sisterhood formed by the protagonist and her clones signify a utopian non‐ hierarchical space of female solidarity, where the stratified social positions are reversed and intermixed, identities are redefined and women are allowed choice, freedom and success. By contrast, in Atwood’s dark feminist dystopia the many‐layered female hierarchy, established by means of sexual and social engineering, is a travesty of the feminist ideal of sisterhood since women, segregated according to their fertility and class status, are devoid of self‐determination and agency. Although the two novels offer strikingly different scenarios of how male interference in nature may affect female identity and female–female power relations, they both view female bonding as a formative force in the development of female subjectivity. Pellicer‐Ortín, Silvia (University of Zaragoza, Spain) “Short Stories on the Move: Mapping Memory and Constructing the (Jewish) Diasporic Female Self in Michelene Wandor’s False Relations (2004)” False Relations is a collection of short stories whose time span goes back to Biblical times, passing through the Renaissance, and returning to the present, and whose settings move across the globe. Among these miscellaneous dimensions, diverse literary genres are re‐ written as well as multifarious voices enter a mutual dialogue that transcends time and space boundaries and shapes the polyphonic collection of stories that British‐Jewish writer Michélene Wandor has pieced together with the aim of disclosing the complex mechanisms that underlie the construction of Jewish female identities in the transnational era. The main aim of my study is to analyse the narrative elements that assemble these stories to demonstrate that they respond to the need to foster transnational and multidirectional links so that the women depicted may make sense of their disrupted sense of history and identity, whereas they also struggle to keep their specificity against hegemonic discourses. In order to do so, I will have recourse to the theoretical background provided by Memory, Diaspora and Jewish Studies, together with some transnational feminist ideas, as well as the narratological tools used to untangle the literary devices mastered by this writer to call attention to the fact that Jewish women not only have experienced the duality of living as women in a male‐dominated culture, but also the duality of being part of foreign environments. Tofantšuk, Julia (University of Tallinn, Estonia) 345 “Family, Tradition, Rebellion, Woman: the Multiple Skins of Femininity in Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English” In my paper, I wish to explore several issues pertinent in the writings of Charlotte Mendelson, a British Jewish writer of a younger generation (b. 1972), known for her award‐winning Daughters of Jerusalem (2003) and Orange‐shortlisted When We Were Bad (2007). How do the diaspora experience and the specific female experience (mother‐ daughter relations, generational differences and frozen herstory, sexuality, gendered expectations, forbidden relationships) mutually complicate one another? Is there such a thing as a ‘specific Hungarian experience’ of Almost English or ‘specific Jewish experience’ that Mendelson addressed in her earlier novels or, rather, a universal ‘diaspora experience’ or ‘the experience of hybridity’? What is it like for a woman to be ‘in‐between’, a ‘not anymore’ and ‘not yet’ in multiple senses – as an adolescent, a member of a closed migrant community in London, part of a closed educational system vs. society at large… Last but not least, what are the narrative and artistic means to communicate this complicated experience? How does the heroine literally feel culture on her skin? How does the writer, known for her predilection for smells, tastes, food and texture, reproduce the material world that both defines and problematizes her hybridity – as well as her uniqueness? 346 S78 Travel and Disease across Literatures and Cultures Co‐convenors Ryszard W. Wolny, Opole University, Poland Sanja Runtić, University of Osijek, Croatia In this seminar we propose to investigate the ways in which literature, film and art have dealt with the various aspects of disease and dying. We will be particularly interested in the representations and images that combine traveling with disease. Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man are just a handful of examples of outstanding works combining traveling with death. We will be interested in a more in‐depth investigation of these phenomena in culture. We would like to analyse and juxtapose various works of art that highlight diseased bodies traveling for cure or dignified death. We want to establish how literature and film deal with the problem of old age as well as mental health and balance. We would like investigate how health (including mental health and balance) are imagined and represented symbolically. List of presenters: 1) Ljubica Matek, University of Osijek, Croatia “What will survive of us is love”: Dementia and Dignity in Lisa Genova’s Still Alice Lisa Genova's novel Still Alice (2007) focuses on Alice Howland, a 50‐year old linguistics professor, and her struggle with early‐onset Alzheimer's disease. Narrated from Alice's perspective but in third‐person point of view, the story gives a convincing insight into a rapid disintegration of personality caused by an incurable neurological disease. Rather than focusing on a literal (spatial) journey, the novel represents a temporal journey of Alice’s gradual disassociation from what she has known to be “herself”. In addition to looking at the problem of Alice’s disappearing identity which is rooted in language (the illness targets what she perceives to be her defining feature – her ability to use and analyse words), the paper will focus on the problem of preserving dignity in spite of Alice’s rapidly diminishing cognitive abilities. The paper proposes that the only way for both the patient and her carers to deal with the unstoppable corrosion of personality caused by the loss of cognitive and linguistic abilities, and short‐term memory is to reject the metaphor of an “empty shell” to describe a patient with dementia, and accept the new post‐language, poststructuralist dimension that is still available to Alice and thanks to which she is still Alice: one of emotions and affection, instead of labels and language. 2) Stankomir Nicieja, University of Opole, Poland The Journey’s End: Aging and Its Representation in Paolo Sorrentino’s Recent Films Although still relatively young for the internationally accomplished filmmaker (born in 1970), the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino seems increasingly drawn in his recent films to the themes of aging, disease and death. In my presentation I want to take a closer look at how Sorrentino handles those topical issues, particularly in the cultural context of the crisis of institutional religions (and generally Western crisis of spirituality) as well as the market‐induced cult of youth, unconstrained consumption and sexual prowess. For that purpose I will analyse two of his most recent productions, The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza, 2013) and Youth (La giovinezza, 2015), where Sorrentino explores the specific dilemmas of the elite members of the outgoing generation born immediately after the second World War, who entered into maturity taking full advantage of the liberal and 347 creative atmosphere of the post‐war economic boom in Western Europe, only to leave the stage ravaged by endemic crisis, inequality, and various other excesses of neoliberal greed. 3) Sanja Runtić, University of Osijek, Croatia The Diseased and the Decolonized: Travel and Disease in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks This paper examines the correspondence between travel and disease in Native American novels Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko and Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich. Juxtaposing the novels' protagonists, Tayo and Pauline, it focuses on the detrimental effects of their dislocation from the tribal matrix and their contact with the dominant world. Whereas Tayo's identity quest is centripetal and in itself represents a "homing‐in" journey, a ceremony of convalescence from the painful emotional ramifications of World War II trauma and his alienation from the Pueblo tradition, Pauline's voyage to the all‐ white community of Argus leads to a complete mental imbalance and disintegration. In her attempt to assimilate, Pauline becomes obsessed with racial purity and Christianity, and engages in malicious and dysfunctional behavior. Struggling to deny her Anishinaabe background and purge herself from "its evils," she harms and kills other people, starts practicing bizarre rituals of asceticism and bodily mortification, and ultimately descends into madness. Observing the two characters' different understanding of indigenous epistemologies, and interpreting their bodies as constructs "imprinted by history" and "disciplinary discursive practices," the paper attempts to expose the correlation between disease and colonization, i.e. healing and decolonization. 4) Ryszard W. Wolny, University of Opole, Poland Travel and Disease in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912), presents a story of an artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, suffering from the writer’s block who travels to Venice to look for inspiration and where he eventually finds his death. In the meantime, he suffers from depression strengthened by feats of febrile listlessness, pressure in the temples, heaviness of the eyelids that make discontent befall him. The putrid smell of the lagoon hastens his departure, but a strange coincidence makes him change his mind. He returns to the hotel drawn by the enthrallment for the young lad, Tadzio, he had spotted there. Wandering through the streets of Venice, he ignores the health notices in the city, only later learning that there is a serious cholera epidemic in Venice. But he does not escape, nor does he warn the boy’s family of the fatal danger. He dies in his beach chair, looking at the boy on the beach. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore the relationship between travel and disease as juxtaposed with a growing passion for a youth, unmistakably, a sign of life affirmation in a sickly body and burnt‐out mind. 5) Jadranka Zlomislić, University of Osijek Eros and Thanatos – Death and Desire on Campus The paper examines the ways in which works belonging within the sub‐genre of the academic novel deal with the human preoccupation with illness and death. Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Philip Roth’s Dying Animal have been selected as representative portrayals whose thematic concern is not only closely related to the world of higher education but also stretches across the American cultural landscape with its expressed fear of aging and death. Philip Roth and Don DeLillo differ in their writing styles but in their novels both depict the American male academic trapped by fear of dying and illness. 348 The paper explores the transformation of the social and psychological landscape of America which redefined the modern American culture with its perceptions of aging, dying, death, and grieving. The aim of this paper is to show how these two novels reflect the modern American cultural denial of death through characters engaged in a daily struggle between Eros and Thanatos. 349 S79 “20th and 21st century British Literature and medical discourse” 1. Gonul Bakay (Bahcesehir University,Turkey), "Madness in The Woman on the Edge of Time" This paper aims to examine the treatment of madness in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) with reference to R.D. Laing’s theories. The story of the novel takes place in two settings: the New York of 1976 and Massachusetts in 2137. On the one hand, the book analyzes the casual events of 1976, and on the other hand, it deals with scientific discoveries that affect the present and probably the future. Connie gets into a fight with her niece’s (Dolly’s) pimp Geraldo because he tries to convince Dolly to have an abortion. Connie hurts Geraldo and he commits her into an asylum. Connie is then selected for a scıentific experiment. Doctors intend to put an implant in her brain which they believe will control Connie’s nervous outbursts. Connie tries to resist this experiment and tries to escape from the asylum but can not. Because she can not escape the asylum, she poisons the doctors who intend to operate on her. The book does not offer a neat satisfying ending ‐ as in life there are very few satisfying endings to stories. Connie is poor, hispanic, and lives on the periphery of society. Was Connie mad? Or were the people in her environment insane? The novel does not end on a promising note. 2. Nicolas P. Boileau (University of Aix‐Marseille, France), "The Production of Symptoms by Psychiatric Discourse: Evidence in Literature from Woolf to Kane" The emergence of a new science of the mind at the end of the long 19th century – psychoanalysis – led to the re‐consideration and re‐construction of mental illness, and its representation throughout the 20th century. The fact that the emergence of this theory coincided with a global, artistic movement now called Modernism invites us to a reflection about the way in which the history of medical treatment in the 20th century ‐ ranging from the consideration of the advent of cognitive psychology and its scientific apparatus, to an understanding of the multiple fractures within the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis – helps understand new figures of madness in literature, and contributes to producing new symptoms. This will be exemplified by a short history – to be developed in future works – of the effect of Modernism on contemporary writing, especially in theatre (‘in‐yer‐face’) but also in contemporary hybrid forms that do not pertain to postmodernism per se (McGregor, Diski and Cusk). I will thus touch upon the disappearance of the “mad woman in the attic” and its avatars, in order to concentrate on new ways of representing the irrational at a time of generalised, ordinary psychosis (Miller). Laurence Petit (University of Montpellier 3, France), "Figuring and Dis‐Figuring Illness: Pathological Images and Therapeutic Words in Anita Brookner's Look at Me." Anita Brookner’s 1983 novel Look at Me recounts the story of Frances Hinton, a short‐ story writer who is the reference librarian of a medical institute specializing in problems of human behavior. Frances’s task consists in archiving reproductions of artwork depicting doctors, patients, and diseases through the ages – a veritable “encyclopaedia of illness and death,” as she puts it. As Frances becomes involved with the Institute’s research doctors, the novel itself develops into a veritable narrative of illness and death, whereby the pictorial images come to be metaphors for Frances’s mental and physical disintegration. The metaphorical death that ensues creates the conditions for a therapeutic writing 350 retreat as Frances embarks on her lifetime project – writing an autobiographical novel centered on the medical institute and its occupants, in other words writing the very novel that we have been reading throughout. Drawing from Julia Kristeva, Marianne Hirsch, and Frances Restuccia, this paper explores the relationship between the visual and verbal representations of illness that in‐form the novel, as images and words, by trying to figure and contain the random, chaotic, and erratic nature of illness, come to be seen as metaphorical frames against terror, from an ontological as well as a historicized perspective. 4. Claire Poinsot (University of Paris 3 ‐ Sorbonne Nouvelle, France), "Conflincting Interpretations of the Epileptic experience in W. B. Yeats's play The Unicorn from the Stars (1907). W. B. Yeats’ representation of epilepsy in The Unicorn from the Stars combines realistic symptoms and prejudiced popular perceptions. The protagonist delivers a first‐person narrative of his experience of “the falling sickness”, dwelling on the sensory hallucinations and peace he felt when in an epilepsy‐induced trance. Yet his observations are repeatedly dismissed as irrelevant by the representatives of the Church, of hard work and pragmatism. Martin’s trance and visions are actually either identified as a symptom of an individual illness, a curse, or as a sign of divine election. Yeats refuses to acknowledge medical expertise in the process of diagnosis and healing – significantly, the medical voice is never embodied on stage but displaced on a manual promoting interchangeable remedies that never single out the idiosyncrasies of epilepsy. As often, Yeats rejects the (medical) establishment in favour of the poetry of self‐ expression – be it induced or not by a pathological state. Yet, in spite of his patient‐centred approach, one should keep in mind Yeats’ own view of epilepsy as a hereditary defect that should be kept under control – a point he expressed in his 1939 eugenic essay On the Boiler and that obsessed him to his death the very same year. 5. Angela Thurstance (University of Leicester), “Bumpy episodemics, fragmentation and infected narrative in Reina James’ This Time of Dying.” Jennifer Cooke argues that ‘[e]ach author writes plague by allowing features of the disease to infect their writing’. 29 She draws attention to the presence of ‘small, almost self‐ contained narrative outbreaks’ or ‘episodemics’ which erupt from the main narrative like the characteristic buboes on plague victims so that the ‘surface of the narrative is rumpled by the bumpy observations’. 30 These episodemics are collected by the narrator as evidence of the spread of the disease, their brevity reinforcing the ‘untimely interruption of life’.31 In this paper, I will consider James’s narrative in relation to Cooke’s theories on plague narrative. I will explore James’s use of language to reflect the panic and fear created by the pandemic and show how the spread of influenza is reflected in the urgent language used to describe it. I will examine James’s use of episodemics to mirror the spread of disease, offer diverse glimpses of those affected, and break up the flow of the narrative to create fragmentation to reflect the sense of panic and disorientation experienced during the pandemic. Jennifer Cooke, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 19. 30 Cooke, ‘Writing Plague’, p. 25. 31 Cooke, ‘Writing Plague’, p. 26. 29 351 6. Antolin Trinidad (Yale University, USA), "Fragmentation, Resilience and the Cancer Narrative: Arguments from the Cancer Memoir" Medical practice now elevates the importance of the illness narrative as a major determinant of treatment trajectory and prognosis. Whereas previous eras in medical care favored medical authority, recent trends favor shared decision making which in turn strengthens the emphasis given to first‐person narratives. The cancer memoir is a form of patient narrative that documents the negotiation within the (long term) relationship with the physician. It also describes narrative strategies to palliate the perceived fragmentation of the self. Cancer treatment often spans many years requiring a relationship with the physician, a relationship tensely characterized by polarities of professional distance and intimacy. Three recent cancer memoirs illustrate the roles of these narratives in the lives of patients in treatment: Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness, Susan Gubar’s Memoirs of a Debulked Woman and Christopher Hitchen’s Mortality. My argument is that the cancer memoir not only attempts to represent the experiences during the treatment but also represents and constructs the complex relational negotiation with the treating physician, an issue that also abuts prognosis and survival. Illness narratives become not only forms of representation but also strategies of resilience. 352 S80. Writing Old Age in Twenty‐First‐Century Fiction Convenors: Sarah Falcus (University of Huddersfield) and Maricel Oró‐Piqueras (University of Lleida) An Introductory Approach to the Portrayal of Ageing in Carol Rumen’s and Lorna Crozier’s Poetry by Núria Mina Riera (University of Lleida, Spain) Both Carol Rumens (1944) and Lorna Crozier (1948) are well‐established poets in the British and the Canadian tradition, respectively. Nevertheless, Carol Rumens’ works published from 2005 onwards, namely the poetry collections Blind Spots (2008) and De Chirico’s Threads (2010), remain largely unstudied. As two female artists from the same generation, their poetry collections contain a number of reflections on the ageing process recounted from different age perspectives. However, Rumens’ and Crozier’s depictions of the experience of moving along the life course do not always concur with each other. Taking as a starting point the view posited by Núria Casado‐Gual — when discussing the representations of ageing in the works by Joanna McClelland Glass (2015) — that complex and even ambivalent portrayals of the ageing experience help portray a more realistic and deeper understanding of the process of growing old, this paper will compare four different stages of the life‐course as portrayed by Rumens with the same stages as depicted by Crozier in her poetry, namely: the climacterium, sexual appetite in late middle‐age, and the life‐changing experiences of the death of a father and of a mother. Furthermore, the essay will track the evolution of the representation of these stages along both writers’ literary career, paying especial attention to Rumens’ two latest poetry collections. In this way, both Rumens’ and Crozier’s depiction of ageing from the perspective of their young‐old age will also be taken into consideration, in order to observe whether they favour notions of progress or decline, or both, in their poetry. Núria Mina Riera holds a BA degree in English Philology and a Master’s Degree on Teaching English at Secondary School Level, both of them from the University of Lleida (Spain). Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate of contemporary Canadian poetry and an assistant lecturer at the same university. Her dissertation analyses the process of formation of “the late style” in Lorna Crozier’s works from an interdisciplinary approach of aging and ecocritical studies. As a lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics, she teaches English language in the Teacher‐Training programme for future English teachers, and English poetry, 19th and 20th century history of the United Kingdom and Canadian and Australian culture to English‐Studies undergraduates. Ancient Country, Old Attitudes, New Beginnings: Old Age in Twenty‐First‐Century Welsh Fiction in English by Elinor Shepley (Cardiff University, U.K.) Older characters have played significant roles in Welsh fiction written in English since its emergence in the early years of the twentieth century. From inspirational grandmothers and playful grandfathers to gossips, burdens, the invalided, the institutionalised and the independent, writers have engaged with character types and stereotypes and have sought to render older protagonists’ innermost thoughts on the experience of ageing. Where texts are concerned with history, the Welsh language and traditional culture, elderly characters have often acted as remembrancers of the past. In novels and short fictions published in the twenty‐first century, stereotypes are rare and a number of Welsh writers offer fresh imaginings of what later life might involve. Short stories by Glenda Beagan and Emyr Humphreys tell of widowed women who develop personally and politically after the deaths of their husbands, for example, while 353 Christopher Meredith’s The Book of Idiots (2012) engages with older men’s anxieties about and experiences of retirement. Meredith and writers including Trezza Azzopardi can also be seen to critique the treatment of older people in contemporary society and their representation in the dominant cultural discourse. A later life well lived appears contingent on establishing or holding on to one’s home in contemporary Welsh fiction. Returns to places from childhood are common and often promote a rediscovery of national identity. Echoing the elderly custodians of the past that feature in Welsh literature from the last century, older characters become involved in preserving the country and safeguarding its culture, history and landscape. This paper will explore the above trends and issues through analysis of recent novels and short stories by Trezza Azzopardi, Glenda Beagan, Emyr Humphreys and Christopher Meredith. Elinor Shepley is a doctoral research student at Cardiff University. Her research examines the representation of old age in Anglophone Welsh fiction published after 1900. Elinor wrote her Masters dissertation on old age in the fiction of Emyr Humphreys, a section of which was published in Almanac: The Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English. Mapping Old Age in Deborah Moggach’s novels: when retirement becomes the new beginning by Maricel Oró‐Piqueras (University of Lleida, Spain) Despite the fact that Deborah Moggach does not define herself as a popular fiction writer, some of her novels, especially the ones published in the last years, have become very successful and have been widely read. Deborah Moggach’s has tackled various topics and has focused on diverse historical periods in her writing; however, there is a topic which is recurrent in her last novels: retirement and all the cultural, social and family consequences that follow retirement in contemporary Britain. For many years, retirement has been considered a time of leisure in which one would be contented with his or her achievement in life and would wait for death to arrive. With an exponential ageing of the population, retirement represents the entering into a phase in which one may start a complete new life: one may fall in love again, start a new business or pursue a dream which has not yet become true. In novels such as Close Relations (1997), These Foolish Things (2004) and Heartbreak Hotel (2013), Moggach explores the concerns and expectations, the possibilities and obstacles of British characters after retirement, making use of her specific humorous touch. Maricel Oró‐Piqueras is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and Linguistics, Univerity of Lleida (Spain). She is also a member of research group Dedal‐lit since it started to work on the representation of fictional images of ageing and old age in 2002. In 2007, she defended her PhD thesis entitled “Ageing Corporealities in Contemporary English Fiction: Redefining Stereotypes”, which was published in book format by Lap Lambert in 2011. She is currently conducting research on British contemporary writers such as Penelope Lively, Julian Barnes and Deborah Moggach, and on the portrayal of ageing and old age in TV series. She has published her research in journals such as Journal of Aging Studies and Odisea. Love and Sexuality in Fay Weldon’s Rhode Island Blues by Ana Díaz‐Rodríguez (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) Love and sexuality have always been universal themes in Literature. As a topic they have motivated many relevant titles, both in fiction and criticism, becoming an imperishable 354 source of inspiration for authors . However, it is commonly a field focused on young people, being very uncommon to find any text dealing with love and sexuality in senescence, mainly due to socio‐cultural reasons, which negatively associate old age with a period of life ruled by loneliness and lack of sexual desire. Fortunately, thanks to the emergence of new fields in literary criticism as aging studies, these sort of taboo topics are beginning to be resolved. Bearing this in mind, the aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of Fay Weldon's Rhode Island Blues (2000) in which the British author vindicates the right of enjoying private life in old age. With a theoretical framework based on aging studies and feminist criticism, we pay attention to relevant topics such as the omission of love and sexuality in senescence in literature as well as the slow but firm advances that authors like Weldon are making in order to break with this silence and give voice to this sector of population often ignored by society. Ana graduated in English Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2013. In 2014 she specialised in Advanced English Studies, presenting a master's dissertation on aging studies, where she analysed the topic of female aging in Doris Lessing's fiction. Currently, she is working on a PhD Thesis where, combining aging studies with feminist criticism, she is studying the representation and function of the female aging characters in contemporary literature in English. “Here’s how it starts, the long process by which you become your children’s child”: Unease about aging in Ian McEwan’s later fiction by Tomasz Dobrogoszcz (University of Lodz, Poland) Early McEwan’s fiction, Kafkaesque‐dark and often disconcertingly macabre, never focuses on the elderly; his protagonists are mostly young adults, or even teenagers. But since his 1998 novel Amsterdam, an end‐of‐millennium elegy, pervaded with obsessional ruminations on finality and death, the novelist systematically has taken up the issue of aging. In later novels, his protagonists are usually affluent individuals representing several professional fields, interpellated into positions of high social esteem. Although old age is never McEwan’s most direct concern, his characters experience encounters with senility and dementia, either age‐ or illness‐induced, which affect themselves (Atonement), their parents (Saturday) or friends (Amsterdam). They painfully realise that the long process of aging may bring about various hues of humiliation: the collapse of the family (The Children Act), the infirmity and ugliness of the body (Solar), the dire need to settle accounts with the ghosts of the past (Atonement), the fear of dotage (Saturday) or the contemplation of euthanasia (Amsterdam). But, as this presentation attempts to evidence, on many occasions McEwan uses the process of aging as a metaphor for a more general condition of the present‐day Western civilisation. By means of different textual strategies, such as, e.g., intertextual allusions to Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” he emphasises the inertia and melancholy suffusing the contemporary man. The deterioration of the human body may be often read to symbolise the decline of humanity, the degradation of the environment or the void at the core of human subjectivity. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz teaches British literature and literary translation at the University of Lodz, Poland. His main fields of research include contemporary British and postcolonial literature, as well as poststructuralist and psychoanalytical literary theory. He has published articles on such writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, John Banville or 355 E.M. Forster. He is the editor of "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts In Monty Python", published in 2014. He translated into Polish "The Location of Culture" by Homi K. Bhabha, as well as many other critical and literary texts, e.g. by Hayden White or Dipesh Chakrabarty. He is currently working on a monograph on Ian McEwan. Entering the ‘Dementia World’ in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (2014) by Jennie Chapman (University of Hull, U.K.) Until the twenty‐first century, dementia was rarely depicted in fiction. Contrastingly, in the last fifteen years enough novels have been published to allow us to speak of ‘dementia fiction’ as an emergent sub‐genre.32 Dementia fiction reflects not only the increasing prevalence of a disease that currently affects one in fourteen over‐65s, but also represents an attempt to render into narrative a condition which resists its own telling: the nature of dementia makes it increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, for a person with the condition to narrate his or her own subjective experience. As such, the role of dementia fiction is partly compensatory: it imaginatively restores the words that the disease works insidiously to revoke. Emma Healey’s Costa Prize‐winning debut Elizabeth is Missing (2014) imagines the experience of dementia from the first‐person perspective of its protagonist‐narrator Maud, a woman in her eighties living with dementia. Where other dementia novels are conveyed in the third person and thus reaffirm the person with dementia’s status as an (often mysterious) object of the young and healthy gaze, Healey’s novel invites the reader to enter the ‘dementia world’ that Maud inhabits. I argue that this interpellation of the reader is undertaken to reveal how behaviour that appears inexplicable and even disturbing to those without neurological impairment in fact conforms to the internal logic of the dementia world, in which time, space, and language operate according to different imperatives and exigencies. Placing the reader alongside Maud in this shared narrative space allows the former to see latter not as a pitiful victim of cognitive decline, but as an intelligent, perceptive and often subversive figure. Healey’s novel thus offers a powerful corrective to the diminishing and dehumanizing ways in which older people with dementia have been popularly portrayed. Dr Jennie Chapman is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Hull. She completed her AHRC‐funded PhD at the University of Manchester in 2010 and published her first monograph, Plotting Apocalypse: Reading, Agency, and Identity in the Left Behind Series with the University Press of Mississippi in 2013. She is now working on a second monograph which explores representations of dementia in contemporary British and American fiction. Between Autonomy and Isolation: Old Age and Dementia in Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest by Sara Strauss (Paderborn University, Germany) In consequence of the rapidly ageing populations in Western societies and with old age being the leading risk factor for age‐related mental disorders, the prevalence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease is on a steady rise. Against this background there is a growing public interest in an insight into the consciousness of dementia patients. Numerous literary texts and films show this increasing public awareness of dementia and Alzheimer’s Examples include Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), Lisa Genova’s Still Alice (2009) Paul Harding’s, Tinkers (2009), Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (2009), Walter Mosley’s The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (2010), Lore Segal’s Half the Kingdom (2013) and Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves (2014). 32 356 disease and move the subjective experience of dementia patients into the centre of attention. These narratives address the challenges which old age and age‐related diseases entail not only for the individual but also for society as a whole. They focus on issues such as the personal identity and autonomy of dementia patients as well as their social marginalisation due to the disease. At the same time, the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia, which cause a severe loss of the patients’ cognitive and linguistic faculties, pose fundamental challenges to literary representation. Authors of narrative fiction meet the challenge of representing the situation of mentally confused, disoriented characters who are unable to express their experience through language with the help of different narrative modes and techniques and with experimenting with traditional genre conventions. This paper analyses Fiona McFarlane’s novel The Night Guest (2014), a mystery novel told from the perspective of an elderly protagonist who is severely affected by dementia. It focuses on the fictional representation of symptoms of dementia, the social isolation of the elderly as well as on discourses of autonomy and paternalism as discussed in McFarlane’s novel. Sara Strauss is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Paderborn, Germany. Her research interests focus on 20th‐ and 21st‐century narrative fiction, narrative theory, medical ethics and ageing studies. She completed her PhD with a thesis on contemporary British stream of consciousness fiction (“This Bright Inward Cinema of Thought”: Stream of Consciousness in Contemporary English Fiction, Trier: WVT, 2013) and has published articles on British, Irish and Canadian literature and culture, for example on the narrative fiction of Alice Munro, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Ian McEwan. At the moment she is working on a project on the narrative representation of dementia in English‐language literature and culture. Dementia and Generational Time in Adele Parks’ Whatever It Takes (2012) and Kirsty Wark’s The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle (2014) by Sarah Falcus (University of Huddersfield, UK) and Katsura Sako (Keio University, Japan) The cultural discourse of dementia is very much connected to the way we view the life course. It is seen as a time of decline into loss of self and death, a time characterised by the absence of linear progression, activity and meaning, a time associated with the ‘fourth age’. In its association with old age, it also signifies pathological ageing in opposition to healthy ageing. Amongst the many recent literary texts that have explored the experience of dementia, there are those that seem to interrogate this narrative of the time of dementia. Examining Adele Parks’ Whatever It Takes (2012) and Kirsty Wark’s The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle (2014), this paper explores the ways in which they challenge the problematic temporal conception of dementia and of the ageing self in their emphasis upon generational and familial time. These two popular novels focus upon family relationships across generations, and both include the experiences of a woman in early midlife negotiating a relationship with an older woman with dementia: in Whatever It Takes, this is Eloise and her mother‐in‐law, and in The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle, this is Martha and her mother. Though time in these novels is at one level linear, as generations succeed each other, it is also both palimpsestic and transcendent, as one generation is in dialogue with those that have come before and those that will come after. However, the mystery plots that drive the novels, the revelations of family secrets and hidden parentage, reinstate an individualistic narrative as they serve as a vehicle for the younger protagonist’s self‐ reflection and change. This narrative of individual progress – perhaps echoing a 357 postfeminist emphasis upon choice and self‐(re)invention in middle age – is in tension with the more expansive conception of familial and generational time that is otherwise central to both texts. Extending the experience of dementia from the personal to the familial and to the generational, these texts offer the possibility of telling stories of lives that are lived outside of the linear. But they also risk reinforcing a narrative of progress that is defined by personal growth, the very discourse that supports the ‘loss‐of‐self’ model of dementia. Sarah Falcus is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She has published in the areas of contemporary women’s writing, feminism and literary gerontology. She is currently co‐authoring a book on literary narratives of dementia with Katsura Sako. Katsura Sako is an Associate Professor of English at Keio University. Her current research interests are in ageing and old age in contemporary writing, and she is currently working with Sarah Falcus on a study of narratives of dementia. Reinterpreting the Past in Later Life through Objects in the Novel by Sarah Salway Getting the Picture (2010) by Rocío González Torres (University of Málaga, Spain) Old age in Contemporary British fiction has often been portrayed within the bounds of social exclusion where the aging body seems to be subjected to being hidden in the home, or in the case of physical frailty or illness in a retirement community. The attachment that the elderly establish with the physical environment is forged during years of accumulative experience and memory. This bond with the house is also reflected with the accumulation of objects such as photographs, letters, clothes, and jewellery. Through materiality, the ageing self finds a path to express and maintain an identity threatened by the passing of the years. Unfortunately, these memorabilia are a reliable ally to memory loss and self‐ doubt. The aim of this paper is to analyze the novel written by Sarah Salway Getting the Picture (2010) where the characters of Martin Morris and George Griffiths meet when they move to a retirement community called Pilgrim House. Though Griffiths is unaware of the relation that Martin had with his deceased wife, Martin plans to reveal the truth of his affair with George’s wife by showing the material proof of their meetings. Salway highlights the important role of letters and pictures as they destabilize the self with a reality that can alter the memory of our past or the image we hold of our loved ones. In fact, Getting the Picture (2010) gives an insightful portrayal of how life can be changed by the revealing effect of objects. Through a retrospective look into our lives we analyze and revive moments, people and feelings, but with Sarah Salway’s novel we also explore the multiple ways in which memory can be deceived. I am from Córdoba, Spain. I have a degree in English Studies from the University of Córdoba, and I received my Master’s degree in Multilingual and Intercultural Communication at the University of Málaga, where I am currently doing my PhD in Material Memory in Contemporary Fiction about Ageing. My thesis deals with the personal bonding that old people establish with their material possessions. Furthermore, my research focuses on female British novelists in their attempt to give voice to women coming of age within the setting of their material and personal mementos. I am also interested in memories studies, environmental psychology and spatial studies. 358 I have been working for the Fundación General at Málaga University for the last two years, teaching Gender Issues in North America and the Hispanic World: Cross Cultural Perspectives and Cross‐Cultural Psychology. 359 S81 “Ekphrasis Today” Convenors: Renate Brosch, Universität Stuttgart; Danuta Fjellestad, Uppsala Universitet; Gabriele Rippl, University of Berne Anne‐Sophie Letessier: Figuration, disfiguration, figurability in Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart’s fourth novel, The Underpainter (1997), is a Künstlerroman fraught with pictorial references, from Cézanne to Robert Henry, in a manner that is akin to name‐dropping and which might be seen as requiring elite literacy and education. However, in an age when the reader can access almost any image with a mouse click, as well as a wealth of information on artists, Urquhart chooses to play upon the plasticity of the ekphrastic genre. Indeed, she resorts to a blend of notional and Homeric ekphrasis when describing her character’s devising an aesthetic based on the drastic technique of disfiguration which he refers to as “the concept of formal ambiguity:” the alteration of a figurative underpainting through the superposition of layers of paint and glazes. Drawing upon the conceptual opposition between figuration and figurability introduced by French philosopher George Didi‐Huberman, I would argue that Urquhart’s ekphrastic strategies are evidence of her reflection on the efficiency of painting outside the realm of knowledge and visual skills, because of their relation to discourse. The Underpainter ponders on what paintings visually present without visibly representing, an experience which entails a suspension of the ability to produce meaning and knowledge, to which language bears witness. Jolene Mathieson: The Written Body, Rival Voices and Failed Semiotics in New Media Poetry While seminal literature on the subject of new media poetry (Funkhouser, 2012) and its potentially ekphrastic properties (Lindhé, 2013) has been published in recent years, the relationship between digital poetry and traditional art ekphrasis has yet to be adequately explored. This paper thus proposes to examine, by example of Harry Giles’ “Photo of Maud Wagner” (2013), new media poetry and the digital strategies it utilizes in the ekphrastic remediation of the art image. Harry Giles’ multi‐modal poem consists of a text written in a combination of ‘computer code’ and anagrams, the typographical arrangement of which actually re‐creates the concrete image of the famously tattooed and photographed Maud Wagner. Additionally, a sound file accompanying the written poem comprises of two voices: a digital female voice which performs the code, and a competing ‘analogue’ male voice which performs the anagrams. This layered, hybrid, verbal re‐presentation of Maud Wagner’s photo, I argue, is on one hand, a paragonal contemplation on the inability of pictorial semiotics to capture, and therewith, successfully reproduce the living essence of its human subject. But on the other, via its rival audio voices and competing semiotic systems, it prompts us to ask: If an ekphrastic poem successfully reproduces a failed image, doesn’t it too fail its human subject? Anja Meyer: The use of cinekphrasis in Joe Wright’s cinematographic production With the proliferation of visual‐media from the end of the nineteenth century onward, the notion of ekphrasis has assumed new meanings, going beyond the traditional assumption that ekphrastic texts are essentially verbal. In our contemporary culture, intermedial encounters have become so pervasive and significant that “the ekphrastic object today encompasses not only the traditional arts, but also photography, film, video and television” (Grønstad, 2012). Following Rajewsky’s classification of ekphrasis as a specific 360 subcategory of intermediality, named intermedial reference (Rajewsky, 2005) and Grønstad’s notion of cinekphrasis as “an intertextual mobilization by which static, singular images are conceptually re‐animated as moving images” (Grønstad 2012), the aim of my paper is to analyse the cinematographic production of British director Joe Wright, focusing, in particular, on the ekphrastic quality of representative key scenes in the movies “Pride and Prejudice” (2005), “Atonement” (2007) and “Anna Karenina” (2012). In each cinematic adaptation, the process of ekphrasis is invoked in specific scenes resembling or reinterpreting works of art or artistic styles (for example, the scene of the evacuation of Dunkirk during WWII in “Atonement” looks like a Hieronymus Bosch war postcard, while “Pride and Prejudice” presents a strong pictorial influence and classicist references, like Canova’s marble statues). Such process firmly contributes to disclose the psychological sphere of some characters, but also a specific symbolical imagery, that could not be conveyed in other ways. Angeliki Tseti: Narrating “Unaccommodable Fact”: Photographic Ekphrasis and Trauma in Graham Swift’s Out of This World With the advent of Trauma Studies, photography has often been distinguished as the traumatic genre par excellence, owing, predominantly, to its ‘frozen’ temporality “that best captures the trauma and loss,” as per Marianne Hirsch (“The Day Time Stopped” 2), or to the “striking parallels between the workings of the camera and the structure of traumatic memory” (Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence 8). This paper discusses Graham Swift’s Out of this World as a photo‐novel that places these parallels at the core of its narrative development by employing photography with a view to depicting the protagonists’ inherently traumatized subjecthood, and narrating the complex nexus of relationships established between them following a terrorist attack. What is more, I submit, by introducing ekphrastic renditions of photographs of atrocity and war, the novel references the reader/viewers’ cultural knowledge and works towards activating what Liliane Louvel terms “the pictorial third,” “a virtual image engineered by the text and reinvented by the reader” (“Photography as Critical Idiom” 45), while, nevertheless, shunning the “compassion fatigue” often instilled through the dissemination of such photographs in the media. Hence, while the adoption of the photo‐ textual mode designates the viewer/reader as an integral part of the meaning‐making process, the employment of photography in ekphrasis signals the possibility of addressing trauma through affective engagement and attention. Teresa Bruś: Ekphrastic Self‐Reflexion The paper proposes to engage with questions concerning the emerging potential of the principles of ekphrasis in an expanded field of digital production and consumption of images. My analysis of autobiographical life narratives by acclaimed photographers (Sally Mann, Annie Leibovitz, Sebastião Salgado and Irving Penn) will show that photography continues to demand and rely on ekphrasis. Photographers themselves render ekphrastically the radical change in medium from the analogue to digital photography to illustrate technically‐determined contexts for shifting subjectivity. In these narratives ekphrasis functions both socially and historically. Relying on Mieke Bal’s definition of ekphrasis as a deployment of visibility within a linguistic discourse, I will seek to examine the constitutive role of ekphrasis in recent autobiographical narratives. Nadezhda Prozorova: Terrors of Attraction: Ekphrasis and its Functions in John Banville's Novels 361 The paper focuses on the provocative character of ekphrasis in Banville's prose. Two of his novels ‐ Book of Evidence (1989) and Ghosts (1993) ‐ are of special interest for this purpose. These novels are concentrated on a mysterious and irresistable power of painting, provoking Banville's characters to commit distgustful crimes. Thus ekphrasis becomes the source of novels' plot structure with its elements of thriller and detective story.The detailed description of imaginative Portrait of a Woman with Gloves in The Book of Evidence demonstrates the hypnotic power of the painted woman, at the same time attractive and terrific. Besides, Banville emphasizes the mystery of individual perception that can't be expressed in the terms of reason. In Ghosts Banville focuses on the "ghostly" nature of artistic imagination that inhabits the world with phantoms of its fantasy. The depiction of a small island where the writer settles his ghost‐like personages refers to a subtle art of Antoine Watteau whose paintings stand behind the most powerful imagery of the novel. Banville's skill to find appropriate verbal equivalent for visual images demonstrates the main paradox of ekphrasis: creating illusion of visual art by means of words ekphrasis reminds of the supreme power of logos. "In the beginning was the Word..." 362 S83: “Literary and cinematographic prequels, sequels, and coquels” Co‐convenors : Ivan Callus, University of Malta Armelle Parey, Université de Caen, France Isabelle Roblin, Université du Littoral‐Côte d’Opale, France Georges Letissier, Université de Nantes, Franc • • • • • • • • Ben Davies (University of Portsmouth, UK), “The Prequel: Familiar Narratives, Uncertain Times” Anne‐Laure Fortin‐Tournès (University of Maine, France), “Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to Jane Eyre : from visuality to iconicity” Françoise Král (Université de Caen, France) “New filiations in The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips” Georges Letissier (Université de Nantes, Frances) “Transcultural Imaginaries, Wuthering Heights’ Prequel and Coquel: Lord Byron’s ‘The Dream’ and Alison Croggon’s Black Spring” Armelle Parey (Université de Caen, France), “Servants with a voice in Jo Baker’s Longbourn, a coquel to Pride and Prejudice” Isabelle Roblin (Université du Littoral‐Côte d'Opale, France) “P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a Sequel With Many Twists » Ivan Callus (University of Malta, Malta), “Next ‐‐ Or, Sequels and the Serial Killer: The Case of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Novels » Anne‐Claire Le Reste (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, France) “So much for ghosts!” or The (Fatal?) Turn of the Screw” Ben Davies ‐ The Prequel: Familiar Narratives, Uncertain Times Prequels offer a return to well‐known narratives. More importantly, I shall argue, prequels allow us to rethink time in significant ways. They therefore appeal to readers/viewers, as they pose fundamental questions about time and offer new models of temporal direction and causation. Working across a number of contemporary examples, including Gertrude and Claudius (2000) and Skagboys (2012), I shall explore how prequels employ narrative techniques and structures to open up new conceptualisations of time. Firstly, prequels provide a way to rethink causality, as the ‘past narrative’ of the prequel is controlled and – to some extent – caused by the future narrative of its related text. Secondly, prequels challenge us to rethink absence, presence and order, as they must first of all be non‐ present, non‐existent; to come into existence, the prequel must first be suspended, as its future presence is predicated on its initial absence. Thirdly, prequels disturb our understanding of past, present and future, as they are always already proleptic; through allusions and diegetic content, the prequel refers to the future of its narrative successor, simultaneously anticipating and deferring this future. Moreover, past and future are not so easily discernible in the relationship between the prequel and its related text, as the ‘future’ narrative is a type of ‘past future’, a future that has already been. Ultimately, then, prequels can help to change how we interpret time and, crucially, how we construct narratives and sequences within and beyond literature; therein lies their potential and, possibly, their popularity. Anne‐Laure Fortin‐Tournès ‐ “Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to Jane Eyre : from visuality to iconicity” 363 My proposal for the “prequel, sequel, coquel” workshop at the Galway conference this coming summer hinges around an analysis of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre where the phenomenon of iconisation linked with the rewriting and the interpretation of the canonised literary work is facilitated by the poetic as well as the political import of visuality in Rhys’s novel. The notion of the gaze and in particular the “oppositional gaze” which is central to Rhys’s novel will be articulated with an analysis of the notion of iconicity as defined by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School so as to uncover the mechanisms whereby Wide Sargasso Sea has given its main protagonist Antoinette Cosway alias Bertha Mason a near‐iconic status and has become an iconic text in the process. Françoise Král ‐ New filiations in The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips If sequels, prequels and coquels have flourished in 20th century literature and its dialogue with the canon, and has taken a new turn with the postmodernist challenging of master narratives, such textual experimentations have taken a slightly different meaning in the so‐ called ‘postcolonial literatures or ‘anglophone literatures’ as I propose to refer to Caryl Phillips’s latest novel to date The Lost Child (2015). While previous prequels such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea purposefully shift the focus by inventing the subaltern subtext of Bertha Mason’s untold narrative, as convincingly argued by Gayatri Spivak in her famous analysis of Rhys’s novel in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Caryl Phillips’s Lost Child strikes another cord in this more mature project which feeds on the author’s lifetime engagement with literature at large and English literature and the canon, not only as something that needs to be challenged but also as part of his cultural, intellectual, affective makeup from which his voice has learnt to pitch the right notes in the emotional grammar of textual yarns. Caryl Phillips’s latest novel revisits a landscape loaded with references to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, his lost child making his novel technically speaking a prequel to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Focusing on Heathcliff as a child, situating his narrative before – chronologically speaking‐ Phillips symbolically reframes the filiation but also casts a new light on Brontë’s work, inscribing new meaning into the master narrative. Georges Letissier ‐ Transcultural Imaginaries, Wuthering Heights’ Prequel and Coquel: Lord Byron’s ‘The Dream’ and Alison Croggon’s Black Spring “How anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth” wonders Lockwood in Wuthering Heights’ coda. Precisely, generations of readers the world over have taken up the challenge by refusing that the pair of lovers should be put to rest once and for all. Wuthering Heights’ afterlife is closely related to the novel’s capacity to call up haunting as a unique component of the experience of reading. Spectrality tropes the process of rewriting, through the self‐generative power of the narrative to lend a new lease on life to its ghost: “twenty years, I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” Neo‐Victorian studies have underscored the foundational role of haunting in revisionary (re‐)writings by insisting on the traumatic persistence of a past that will not pass (Heilmann and Llewellyn, Arias and Pulham) whilst the Canadian writer Jane Urquhart showed the ghosts of Charlotte and Emily Brontë floating in the margins of her 1990 novel Changing Heaven. This paper purports to investigate Wuthering Heights’ imaginary afterlife from a slightly different angle, by starting from an oneiric prequel: Lord Byron’s ‘The Dream’ to consider a coquel: Alison Croggon’s Black Spring, described as a Tolkienesque epic fantasy. In a typically romantic vein, the poem calls up a dream vision which adumbrates Brontë’s plot. As a reader of Blackwood’s magazine and a writer of poetry, the Victorian novelist knew Byron full well. His dark, tormented inspiration influenced her own fictitious 364 universe. A contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy writer Alison Croggon was drawn to Brontë’s skill in conjuring up imaginary realms from a profound engagement with space, local legends and folklore. She nevertheless chose to leave out the realistic anchorage underpinning Wuthering Heights to fashion a fantasy world prioritizing suspense, adventures and escapism. Ultimately our aim is to highlight textual mutability from high to low culture, from exotic orientalism to Nordic mythology. Armelle Parey ‐ Servants with a voice in Jo Baker’s Longbourn Companion novels to Jane Austen’s works –of the type that often reorganizes a story from the point of view of a secondary character— “play up the comfort of familiarity” (see Lynch “Sequels” 165). This appears to be a valid argument considering that the companion novel eventually joins up with the original ending and consequently does not ruffle the primary design. These coquels would therefore present no challenge to the hypotext in the way that rewritings do or sequels might do. And yet, does not the fact that one reaches the same ending via a different route modify the primary message? Don’t the adventures of new or secondary characters have an impact on the lives of the original ones? Or on the way they are perceived by the reader? In Longbourn (2013), Jo Baker revisits the plot of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with a focus on the servants so that the Bennets’ adventures are now the backdrop to their servants’ lives. The reader thus follows what goes on in the kitchen while Austen’s characters are having dinner upstairs, for instance, or a scene is witnessed from the corner where the servant is standing. Contrary to other coquels, the heroines that now occupy the centre stage in Longbourn are in fact not even secondary but extremely minor. In the same way as Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea gave a voice to Bertha Mason, the object of only one chapter in Jane Eyre, Baker gives a voice to these servants who are often not even named in Pride and Prejudice, as they are mere accessories to the plot, part of the setting that gets described so little in Austen’s novels and makes Baker’s Sarah feel like a ghost. Unlike most sequels, novels that also revisit the same diegetic space, Longbourn does not glamorize the past. Rather, like others before her, Baker “giv(es) voice to those characters or subject‐positions they perceive to have been oppressed or repressed in the original” (Sanders). This paper will first examine how Baker carves her own narrative space within Austen’s novel then how this choice of characters actually takes the reader out of her comfort zone by throwing a new light on well‐known plot and characters and/or shedding light on what happens behind the scenes. Finally, as a companion novel, Longbourn must not and does not (directly) upset the happy ending of Pride and Prejudice but the latter is significantly displaced as both endings are not concomitant. Isabelle Roblin ‐ P. D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a Sequel With Many Twists Published in 2011, P. D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley is part of an already very long and at times tiresome tidal wave of Jane Austen continuations. There is however from the start a twist to the original story as it is both a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, as the title clearly indicates, and a classic murder mystery by one of the most respected crime writers of her generation (it is in fact the last novel she wrote). Indeed, the familiar characters from Pride and Prejudice (the Darcys, the Bennets, the Bingleys, the Wickhams?) find themselves in an unexpected situation, at the heart of a murder investigation. Death Comes to Pemberley combines many elements from different genres, from the gothic to the historical reconstruction of a Georgian inquest and trial. Moreover, passing and tantalizing 365 references are also made to characters from other Austen novels (the Knightleys, for example), turning it into a kind of playful mash‐up. This paper will examine the ways in which P. D. James not only pays homage to Jane Austen in this pastiche of Pride and Prejudice but also skillfully manages to add a new dimension to the already hackneyed Jane Austen fan fiction. Ivan Callus – Next—Or, Sequels and the Serial Killer: The Case of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley Novels After a framing look at prequels, coquels and sequels within crime fiction, this paper moves to consider the parallels and differences in Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. The representation of a serial killer like Tom Ripley necessitates, by its very rationale, the resources of the sequel. What makes Highsmith's cycle particularly intriguing is her fashioning of what might be thought of as the phenomenology of seriality and, hence, of its challenges to the study of mind and voice in narrative. Some of Highsmith's narrative devices in this regard have since become familiar in contemporary crime fiction, but what this paper attempts is a consideration of the innovativeness, even now, of her take on seriality and on sequence in life and death: in other words, on the psychologies of murder's nextness. One intriguing contradiction does, however, arise: in the adaptations of the Ripley novels in TV, film, theatre and beyond, sequels do not appear to feature. The paper concludes with some reflections on where one might look, in contemporary crime narrative, for the genre's further and possibly more daring play with the dynamic captured within this seemingly innocent word, 'next'. Anne‐Claire Le Reste ‐ “So much for ghosts!” or The (Fatal?) Turn of the Screw My paper will focus on the most recent rewritings of The Turn of the Screw, namely Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly by Donald Thomas, and Florence and Giles by John Harding, both published in 2010. Thomas’s novella is the first sequel to pick up the story in the aftermath of Miles’s death, after the governess has been convicted of murder, merging Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Henry James’s worlds to solve the mystery of Quint and Jessel’s apparitions. Harding’s novel is more of an adaptation but it also includes one of the rare prequels to the tale. While the previous spinoffs upheld the reality of the ghosts (Oates, Straub, Bailey) and/or the madness of the governess (Bailey, Wilson), these two instances discard the ghosts by turning them into flesh‐and‐blood murderers, but without opting for the mad governess theory. If spinoffs tend to fill in the blanks, these do so gleefully, methodically dispensing with all the ambiguities of James’s tale, and with its whole critical history in the process. This is all the more provocative as the essence of The Turn of the Screw arguably lies in its very blanks and its concomitant refusal to carry on beyond Mile’s enigmatic death, in a gesture which may be seen as deeply “anti‐sequel”. Analyzing the narrative strategies of these two spinoffs and their pre‐text will allow me to argue for a joyfully agonistic approach to the act of writing beyond the ending by examining the violence of adaptation (to borrow from Jean‐Jacques Lecercle’s theory of language) – or when the pleasure of rewriting may well reside in its murderous bent. Or 366 S84 “Cultural politics in Harry Potter: death, life and transition” Convenors: Dr. Rubén Jarazo‐Álvarez, University of the Balearic Islands, and Dr. Pilar Alderete‐Diez, National University of Ireland, Galway. Blood, life and death in Harry Potter: Voldemort’s transiting body and vampire imagery Dr. Rubén Jarazo Álvarez University of the Balearic Islands, Spain Gupta argues that Malfoy’s prejudice against blood‐lineage is one of several key elements of the book (2009: 101). But definitely blood concomitances in HP are visibly more complex than its association with fascism, mirroring also both references to Christianity and pagan rituals. As for Voldemort, in Philosopher’s Stone he drinks unicorn blood to sustain his life, and in Globet of Fire he draws Harry’s blood to resurrect his body. In addition, Harry’s mother self‐sacrifice (whose blood runs in his veins) resembles Christian symbolism in opposition to the antagonist, who symbolises anti‐Christ imagery (Guanio‐ Uluru, 2015). Voldemort is thus, what Judith Halberstam described as “the perfect figure for negative identity” (1995: 22), an entity who resembles a (magic) vampire, who cannot be reduced to a unique cultural component. From a psychoanalytical reading, just as vampires contain two opposing states within one body (life and death) (Jones, 1931: 99), Voldemort remains a body of contradictions and oppositions, encompassing the human condition. The relationship between the living human and the undead has always established within a continuum; Voldemort’s posthuman body transits, in fact, from former human to a new entity, just as vampire and victim oscillate between life and death in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. Death and life are definitely intertwined by blood in the saga and Voldemort is substantial to understand these two issues. In this paper, Voldemort will be analysed under the auspices of vampire (Christian and pagan) mythology in a saga where the lines of racial, cultural, sexual and ideological divisions are being blurred. Our antagonist rises to act as the dead body on which all these cultural uncertainties are mirrored in relation to Capitalism, with special emphasis on Thatcherism and present day Britishness. The Chosen One(s): The re‐imagination of English ethnic election in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series Chellyce Birch, University of Western Australia. Although we live in a posthuman, secular world, the concept of ethnic election or “chosenness” is an essential component of contemporary English national identity. To be chosen, according to Anthony D. Smith, “is to be singled out for special purposes” by a divine body, to be “saved and privileged” through obedience to God’s will and pre‐ determined path. As Liah Greenfeld explains, this element of English identity became prominent during the Elizabethan era when, with Protestant nationalism on the rise, the English began to feel “not only that God [was] English”. The perceived chosenness of the English has since permeated heroic cultural and literary works, in which protagonists undergo a metaphorical death of character, and are reborn as upstanding, divine leaders of the society in which they live. Drawing on Shakespearean and Dickensean heroic 367 archetypes, J.K. Rowling continues this tradition in the highly successful Harry Potter series. The epynomous Harry is repeatedly “chosen” to face seemingly insurmountable challenges, culminating with the sacrifice of his life in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Harry’s series‐long transition from schoolboy to hero is completed by his “death” and resurrection, and like his literary predecessors, that transition is considerably shaped by the context in which the text is produced. With the collpase of the vast Empire it controlled until the 20th century, coupled with the pressures of a global capitalist economy and culture, the metaphorical death of this element of the English character could be expected. However, as an analysis of the representation of Harry in Rowling’s series shows, these external pressures have lead to a reimagining of the idea of English ethnic election. Harry’s transition from boy to hero demonstrates that, although the language used to describe the nation as chosen has become more secular, the sacred belief in English chosenness remains intact. ‘A story about how humans are frightened of death’: Harry Potter, death and the cultural imagination Dr Anna Mackenzie University of Chester, UK In a series where death and its relationship with mortality is continually explored, exploded and discussed, the Harry Potter novels maintain a continuous interest in death, life, and the fragile line between them. This paper explores the representation of death in Harry Potter in two distinct ways. Firstly, by exploring the deaths of Albus Dumbledore and Sirius Black and the use of props (the Castle window and the Veil, respectively), performance and textual analysis of these demises reveals how such props are used to question and challenge the tenuous connection between life and death. The second part of this paper relates these texts to wider cultural conversations about death, considering William Shakespeare and John Donne’s poetry and Biblical allusions in Harry Potter. The inscription on the Potters’ gravestone in Godric’s Hollow reads: ‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’, adapted from Corinthians 15:26 (Rowling 2007, 267). Investigating the intertextual relationship between Shakespeare and Donne’s writings and Harry Potter reveals clear and fascinating connections traversing the Renaissance realms to the twentieth century, and demonstrates how Harry Potter contributes to this enduring ‘story about how humans are frightened of death’ (332). Children and ‘The Next Great Adventure’: Death and How to Deal With It in the Harry Potter Series. Dr. Pilar Alderete‐Diez Spanish and Children Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway In spite of the lengthy discussions by Harry Potter fans about the possible death of certain characters in the Deathly Hallows, while J.K. Rowling was in the process of writing it; there has not been much analysis about this topic. It is obvious that death is one of the main issues in the books and the way it is underlined throughout the series opens up the ground for the discussion on one of the most taboo themes in Western culture amongst children, although children stories have always embroidered death into their plots – even as a character‐, showing the fascination that humans of all ages have with the unknown stage of non‐living. 368 This presentation was triggered by the comment from a thirteen year old boy in my family who reported that the last book helped him deal with the painful sudden death of his own mother, only weeks after the publication of the book. It was not the first time our dialogue about Harry Potter would direct my research, and since his previous comment had led down the route of translation and humour with successful results, I decided to embark in this new adventure and see where it would take me for this conference. My task for this presentation will be to examine death in the books, its imagery, its language and the types of death to which children are exposed and the different options and role models offered for coping with the numerous, and many times brutal, deaths. I will be searching for connections to other well‐known children books and attempting to map a portion of Death’s territory in the imagination of contemporary children. Flirting with Posthumanist Technologies in Harry Potter: Overconsumption of a Good Thing Dr Maryann Nguyen Houston Community College, Houston (TX), USA One could equate the witches and wizards’ magic and its use in J.K. Rowling’s world of the Harry Potter series to technology in the way we “Muggles” use and rely upon technology and science in our daily lives. Magic is both the Wizarding world’s technology and science, thus one can think of the Hallows and Horcruxes as magical equivalents of technological tools and scientific advancements to attain immortality. If one considers the Hallows and Horcruxes as means to extend a “normal” lifespan and reflects upon Elaine Ostry’s assertion that “one category of evolution from human to posthuman is the ‘prolongation of life’ [whereby humans attempt]…to extend the lifespan beyond current limits, even trying to achieve immortality through scientific advance” (223‐ 4), one could then argue that both Hallows and Horcruxes are posthumanist technological tools. When a person combines the Deathly Hallows one cheats Death; when Voldermort creates his Horcruxes he, too, makes himself virtually immortal. Both the Hallows and Horcruxes exist outside the limits of “normal magic” for a “normal” wizard, thereby further situating these two technologies in the realm of posthumanism. In the same way that Muggles consume technology, witches and wizards can consume (or over‐consume) these posthumanist magical technologies. Two major consumers exist in HP: Albus Dumbledore, the “conservative” consumer, and Lord Voldermort, the over‐consumer. Dumbledore understand the limits of his direct or indirect consumption of these tools. Voldemort, however, not only uses posthumanist technologies but over‐uses them to become a posthuman. Each horcrux he creates not only distorts his physiognomy into the monstrous but produces a less human physiology and psychology. He’s not only “evil” but becomes supernatural evil incarnate. Furthermore, as excess consumer, he perverts the capitalist system’s mantra. He, the consumer, gains immortality and the “producers” of these horcruxes, pay the ultimate sacrifice with their lives. Classical antiquity in the Harry Potter saga Andrea Ladrón de Guevara Quintela University of Murcia, Spain J.K. Rowling’s magical universe is full of references to classical antiquity. Theses references are present in the neologisms (most of the spells are written in Latin) or the magical creatures (e.g. sphinx and Pegasus), but the main ones are found on the themes and the 369 adventures that the hero and his friends have to overcome. In similar terms, our protagonist must overcome a myriad of labours, as did Heracles, Theseus or Jason before him. However, his own death in the seventh book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) should be specially remarked. Rowling completed a Degree in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. This background allowed her to turn to classical themes, which are recurrent from the introduction –where she reproduces some verses of Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers– to the prophecy that is going to determine the hero’s life. All in all, the classical influence on Rowling’s work is vast and it deserves to be analysed in detail so as to fully understand the prophecy of the seventh book. 370 S85 – Fantasy Literature & Place Erin Horokova, University of Glasgow: “Enchanting the World” Horace Walpole sought via literary and material projects to bring the fantastic into the mundane, and to dwell in that altered reality. The writer of The Castle of Otranto and the builder of Strawberry Hill, Walpole was an originating figure in both gothic revival architecture and gothic literature. But even as Walpole was collecting artifacts and building a utopic, ‘gloomth’y retreat from modernity and the city (and, as a queer man, crafting spaces for himself outside of heteronormative relations), he was the PM’s son, serving in Parliament, and, via his extensive correspondence, participating actively in Society. Networking is as much the source of Walpole’s legacy as any discrete accomplishment; it was the means by which he founded genres. I’d like to propose that Walpole’s activities are not strangely juxtaposed, but in fact fundamentally intertwined. Using his letters, fiction, and art criticism, as well as Brooks’ The Gothic Revival, Pearce’s On Collecting and Rose’s The Pleasure of Ruins (with a little Burke, Sontag and Benjamin), I’ll discuss the centrality of place and materiality to Walpole’s conception of the fantastic. Even as Walpole’s seemingly disparate projects are actually interdependent, his aesthetic of bright, cheerful, ‘gloomy‐warmth’ and literary camp positions charm at the core of the gothic. We normally view the gothic sublime and charm as diametrically opposed (threatening wilderness vs cosy domestic space), and the real‐world spaces these aesthetics relate to as similarly at odds. I aim to trouble that unstable binary and illuminate the connections between the canny and the uncanny, the foundational kinship between Walpole’s dream‐worlds and his real one. Rebecca Long, Trinity College, Dublin: “Physical and metaphysical landscapes in Irish children’s literature” Patricia Lynch’s The Turf Cutter’s Donkey (1939) engages with the physical and metaphysical landscapes of Ireland through the central figures’ experiences of myth, temporality, and identity. A particular pattern of re‐imagination occurs in the landscape Lynch depicts, where imaginative vision and experiences of emplacement produce instances of ‘mythic apprehension’33. The depth of the narrative engagements across and within this text reveals the extent to which representations of landscape in Irish fantasy literature for children is dominated by images of cultural heritage. Within the text, landscape is the medium through which experiences of childhood are articulated, and through which images of cultural heritage are transmitted and re‐imagined. This paper investigates how the child figures at the centre of Patricia Lynch’s The Turf Cutter’s Donkey (1939), Seamus and Eileen, move extensively through the physical and metaphysical landscapes of the West of Ireland, and the extent to which an awareness or knowledge of mythological narratives supports or inhibits their ability to progress through the environments they find themselves in. Ireland is explored as a constructed or storied space, created through the dynamic process of narration, and perpetuated and re‐created through a recurring cycle of myths. This paper investigates the extent to which narrative treatments of physical and metaphysical landscapes in Irish children’s literature transmit images of cultural heritage, and whether the landscapes depicted in a fantasy text such as The Turfcutter’s Donkey Kraft E. Von Maltzahn, Nature a Landscape: Dwelling and Understanding (Montreal: McGill‐Queen’s University Press, 1994), 19. 33. 371 support imaginative engagement with narratives of Ireland’s pasts, presents, and futures. I posit that through the act of re‐imagination, and through imaginative reveries into the landscapes of Ireland, the child figures in this text are presented with opportunities to reconcile past and present realities, both personal and national, through recurring narrative patterns. Lindsay Meyers, NUI Galway: “Impossible Dreams: The Subversive Nature of Fascist Architecture in Bruno Paolo Arcangeli’s Venite con me nell’impossibile (1941)” Eversice the first Golden Age of Fantasy in the late nineteenth century the urban and rural landscapes of children’s fantasy have served as powerful vehicles for reflecting on social and political issues. Rural landscapes have tended to be associated with beauty, spiritual growth, liberty and emancipation while urban landscapes have tended to symbolise uglynes, industrialisation, exploitation and oppression. Fascist architecture with its stark solidity and imposing solemnity has consistently been employed in works of fantasy and science‐fiction to symbolise evil, and both the recent Hunger Games trilogy and the new Star Wars Movie rely heavily on this trope. Bruno Paolo Arcangeli ‘s employment of fascist architecture in Venite con me nell’impossibile, a children’s fantasy which first appeated in Italy in 1941, does not, however, display any of the by‐now‐established literary conventions. The fascist landscapes in this work are rural not urban and the solemn and highly immaginative fascist buildings that appear in the illustrations to the work are, in many ways, far more original than their post‐war counterparts. Why is this work so strikingly different, and what exactly was its ideological message? By focussing in detail on the content and illustrations of this little‐known fantasy and by situating both elements in the context of Italian fascism, this paper aims to shed new light on the relationship between the architecture and ideologies of fascism in twentieth‐century children’s literature. Franziska Burstyn, Universität Siegen: “Second Star to the Right Hemisphere, and Straight on to Enchantment; Charles Taylor and the Mapping of the Fantastic Realm” Within the genre of fantasy, the entrance into the fantastic realm often entails a re‐ enchantment of the characters who set foot into secondary worlds. Accordingly, the mapping of primary and secondary world follows a principle which can also be explained with Charles Taylor’s hypothesis of enchantment as a ‘pre‐modern’ condition as opposed to the ‘modern’ state of disenchantment. Taylor draws on Max Weber’s ideas on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ as a byproduct of secularization within contemporary Western societies, which necessitates a re‐enchantment of the world as a basic human need. On closer examination, the interconnection between disenchantment and (re‐ )enchantment also bears resemblances to the neurological interrelation between the left and right hemisphere of the human brain. In fact, popular science typically associates the left hemisphere with analytical thought, essentially organizing, analyzing and rationalizing information on a ‘disenchanted’ level, while the right hemisphere focusses on the moment; it is the creative and emotional force striving for a state of ‘enchantment’. This paper will map the primordial need for fantasy on the basis of a sociological as well as neurological explanatory model by interrelating the dichotomy of primary and secondary world with Taylor’s theory on (re‐)enchantment. While the exchange between the primary and the secondary world in fantastic narratives also points to a state of re‐enchantment, the genre may also be argued to visualize both cognitive counterpoints. In order to show the mechanisms of both sociological and neurological patterns, this paper will examine J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911). 372 Eva Oppermann, Universität Kassel : “The Heterotopian Qualities of the Secondary Worlds in Rowling’s Harry Potter‐Books and Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instrument” Worlds of Fantasy often contain not only what can be called “our” world but at least one more world which is closed to all but the members of a certain group of special humans, such as Rowling’s Witches and Wizards and Clare’s Shadowhunters. In my contribution, I would like to explore in which respects either the whole secondary world or certain places there correspond to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Aspects of this study will include the protective as well as exclusive character of a heterotopian place; here, Witches, Wizards, Shadowhunters, Werewolves and Vampires are safe from espionage by Muggles or Mundanes, and sometimes only they can enter. Other places reveal their true character only to insiders of the community. On theother hand, these places also separate the community of the supernatural from ordinary society by hiding away the strange. Because ofthis, ‘contact zones’ will be of special interest. One further aspect will be the ‘geographical’ setting of many such places which only appear on magical or ‘enruned’ maps but not on ordinary ones. Furthermore, with regard to Clare, I will have a look at the meaning of NewYork and Alicante in the first three volumes of The Mortal Instruments. Sinead Moriarty, Roehampton University: “A Hostile Wilderness? The Antarctic in fantasy literature for children” The Antarctic was the ultimate unknown wilderness landscape. Hidden by a seemingly impenetrable wall of ice the Antarctic landscape retained its mysterious nature late into the nineteenth century. This allowed a rich body of fantasy literature to develop around the Antarctic with writers from Coleridge to Poe creating imaginary accounts of expeditions within the icy continent. Many early fantasy representations of the Antarctic depicted the landscape as a deeply uncanny environment, characterised by death, the return of the dead and malignant supernatural forces. Even after explorers began to investigate and map the interior of the continent, literature for both adults and children continued to imagine the Antarctic as a malevolent and treacherous wilderness. Despite revolutionary cultural changes in the perception of wilderness landscapes, and the contemporary veneration of these spaces, the Antarctic has remained a largely uncanny space within fantasy literature for children. Many Antarctic fantasy texts for child audiences imagine the continent as a landscape characterised by death, filled with ghosts, the return of the dead and mortal dangers for their child characters. However in contemporary Antarctic fantasy literature for children this essentially uncanny landscape sometimes offers vital opportunities for growth and development for the child characters. In these texts the Antarctic is a space which threatens death but also supports growth. I will focus on Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness (2005) and Margaret Mahy’s The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom (2001), analysing their contrasting approaches to the representation of the Antarctic as an uncanny landscape. I will specifically focus on the journeys of their child protagonists through the Antarctic landscape and the ways these child characters are able to progress and gain agency in this unique space. Aishwarya Subramanian, Newcastle University: “Landscape and Postimperial Identity in British Children's Fantasy” This paper considers a series of fantasy novels written in the 1960s and 70s, in which British identity is rooted in the particularities of a physical landscape and in local histories 373 and myths/traditions, and places them within the context of a broader discourse around national identity in the wake of empire and rapid decolonization. Drawing on aspects of works by Alan Garner, Penelope Lively and Susan Cooper, I will discuss the process by which the British landscape is re‐enchanted during this period, the realignment of Britishness from the empire to the domestic landscape, and the creation of a national identity based in local space and history. I'll be reading these books in the context of a tradition of localist discourse (drawing on Ian Baucom's Out of Place; also on Lucy Pearson's recent work on the presence of such a discourse within British children's literature since the 1930s) and examining reasons why it might see such a resurgence at this historical moment. Drawing on Baucom's suggestion that this localism is in part a response to a broader attempt to shift the location of national identity "from place to race", I'll also be addressing the question of how these books deal with the presence of outsiders to this shared national history. Laura Tosi, Università di Venezia ‐ Ca' Foscari: “Child bodies in dystopian spaces: spectacles of metamorphosis and suffering” Metamorphosis, body displacement and grotesque distortion are the bedrock of fantasy. Mutations and alterations of children’s bodies can especially be found in dystopian spaces within fantasy locations. In the nineteenth century, examples range from Alice shrinking, elongating and almost disappearing in Wonderland (a land with a distinctly dystopic flavour), to Flora’s deformed and object‐shaped guests at her birthday party (in the Land of Nowhere in Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses), to Pinocchio changing into a donkey in Il Paese dei Balocchi. In contemporary dystopian fantasies such as Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy or Dashner’s Maze Runner series, however, the metamorphic, distorted or mutilated bodies of children, who must fight in a Darwinian struggle for survival, are placed at the centre of a panoptical structure watched by adults: the arena and the maze. My paper investigates the way 19th century nightmarish fantasy spaces frame and contain the child’s bodily transformations and contrasts them with the way teenage bodies interact with their spaces of competition for existence in contemporary YA dystopian novels. While body alterations in 19th century are rectified in the end, and reframed as symbolic journeys that end with a return to normality, contemporary dystopian fantasies are constructed as adult controlled spaces which produce traumatic experiences and scarred, suffering bodies. In Hunger Games and Maze Runner, mutations, mutilations and distortions of child and teenage bodies have become public spectacles to be witnessed as they are displayed in sophisticated landscapes for horrific transformations that have been built and devised by future adult societies. 374 S86: Calculables and Incalculables in Teaching English Today Co‐convenors: Dr Roy Sellars, University of St Gallen and University of Southern Denmark Prof Graham Allen, University College Cork The process of calculation has become ever more prominent in departments of English across Europe. Accreditations, benchmarking, internationalisation, transparency, audits, assessments, learning outcomes, key competences, deliverables: the list goes on. At the same time, teaching practice remains, we propose, fundamentally and necessarily incalculable. In this seminar we want to bring together teachers from different European contexts in order to reflect on recent developments and to ask: how can resistance to pedagogical calculation be conceptualised and organised without falling back into passive critique or another discourse of calculables? If the history of theory and before it philosophy entails, as we would assert, a history of pedagogics (teaching practices which reflect not only on their practice but also on their very possibility), does theory/philosophy have anything to say, today, in defence of the incalculable? Dr Elizabeth Hoult, Birkbeck, University of London Contemplating Hope in the Infinite in a Prison Reading Group In this paper I will give an account of a recent research project which convened a science fiction film group in a men’s prison. Escaping the walls of the university, and teaching in the context of a funded research project rather than the curriculum apparatus, has led me to a pedagogical experience which has been characterised by people confined in space and time, but where, paradoxically, the accountancy and accountability measures that saturate more traditional university environments were largely absent. The process of thinking about infinite space and time in these confined contexts has led to open and plural readings of both the texts (e.g. Kubrick’s 2001) and the participants’ own futures in the context of incalculable space and time. I’ll offer some possible readings of this freedom. Dr Michael O’Sullivan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Imperfect Knowledge of the Knowledge Economy and the Teaching of Literature The language of the “knowledge economy” is based on allegiance to what are often described as rigorously calculated macroeconomic models of universities as markets. University administration teams employ these models, they tell us, in place of older models based on tradition and educational philosophy because they are less open to the kinds of chance and uncertainty that could send us crashing in this same market. However, this paper explores the imperfect knowledge of the Knowledge Economy. As Frydman and Goldberg argue with their IKE (Imperfect Knowledge Economics, 2015), rational choice macroeconomic theory has for too long ignored the “radical uncertainty” (Keynes, 1936) and imperfect knowledge that behavioural economics must be based on. They argue that, regardless of whether agents are “fully rational” or “less than fully rational,” “fully predetermined microfoundations are incompatible [...] with profit‐seeking in real‐world markets,” and that, in order to open macroeconomic models to “minimally reasonable decision‐making [...], economists must jettison their core premise that non‐routine change is unimportant for understanding market outcomes.” If any discipline can help our students and universities imaginatively engage with the economic [...] and ethical importance of radical uncertainty, imperfect knowledge, and non‐routine change in 375 planning for the future, it is literature, and specifically a theoretical approach to literature. This paper will explore these ideas in relation to the teaching of such writers as Samuel Beckett and David Foster Wallace. Dr John W. P. Phillips, National University of Singapore, Leading and Misleading: A Hundred Years of English Teaching With an eye on two kinds of process, of calculation and of education, and therefore on two kinds of practice, I want to inquire into a possibility of teaching in its connection with 1) truths that cannot be proven and “that are, in fact, ‘false’”; 2) an “aesthetic education” that aims to combine opposite conditions “by cancellation (Aufhebung)”; and 3) a tension between what is teachable and unteachable. In addition, I propose a reading of short sections from Aristotle – the Ethics and the Analytics – and a passage from Sophocles’ Antigone (with several translations). The framework of a history of English serves as a guise or, as Rousseau would have had it, a “subterfuge”, and the motif of leading (in several senses) operates as a guide through an otherwise complex tangle of materials. Dr Sarah Wood, University of Kent, Dream Reckoning Taking up the panel call’s possibly psychoanalytic language of resistance and defence, I’d like to see what happens if we start to dream teaching, and start to read what Freud writes about calculation (Rechnung) in dreams. According to “On Dreams”, dream‐calculation produces “the wildest results”. Can dreams teach us how to reckon with pedagogical calculation? 376 S87 Richard Hakluyt Organisers: Daniel Carey (NUI Galway) and Claire Jowitt (UEA) Colm MacCrossan (Sheffield Hallam) ‘“The Master Thief of the Unknown World”: The Ambivalence of Hakluyt’s Drake’ In Richard Hakluyt’s enormous travel collection The Principal Navigations...of the English Nation (1598‐1600), no other voyager is named as often or in such a variety of contexts as Sir Francis Drake. He appears as the first commander to complete a voyage around the world (1577‐80), and as a leader of the English defence against the Spanish Armada (1588), and his influence in the text further extends from Virginia to Tierra del Fuego, Constantinople, and Ormus. Yet, while Hakluyt explicitly expressed an ambition to provide images of ‘famous predecessors’ to inspire further English voyaging, his text does surprisingly little to frame Drake’s activities in a way which would make him a cohesive exemplar to younger Englishmen. This paper examines the fragmentary representation of Drake in The Principal Navigations, taking into account the sources Hakluyt had available to him and the contexts in which it was produced, and asking what the treatment of Drake reveals about the larger collection and how it can be read critically today. Claire Jowitt (University of East Anglia) ‘Hakluyt and the Heroic: Captaincy at Sea and its Discontents’ Everyone knows what the sea means to an Englishman; what is not sufficiently known is the precise form of the connection between his relationship to the sea and his famous individualism. The Englishman sees himself as a captain on board a ship with a small group of people, the sea around and beneath him. He is almost alone; as captain he is in many ways isolated from his crew. So wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960) about the symbolic character of the English nation. For Englishmen (sic) the fantasy figure of the sea captain was a ‘remarkably stable’ national self‐identity, and Canetti describes how this isolated male figure personified his ship, sought to impose his ‘absolute’ and ‘undisputed’ ‘power of command’ on a sea that is ‘there to be ruled’, and provided a powerful collective vision of how to behave and interact with others that endured for generations. The model is clearly apparent in nineteenth‐century accounts of English colonial and imperial history where, for instance, J.A. Froude famously described Hakluyt’s collection of ‘English’ exploration, trade, and travel, The Principal Navigations (1589; 2nd rev. edn 1598/9‐1600) as ‘the prose epic of the modern English nation’ (Short Studies in Great Subjects, 1891). But Hakluyt’s texts present a more complicated and nuanced picture than these homogenising accounts of England’s nautical history allow. Though Froude is right to suggest that The Principal Navigations makes claims for the central role of sea captains such as Francis Drake, Walter Ralegh, and Thomas Cavendish in supporting English expansionist policies abroad and defending the nation in times of war, and Canetti makes astute connections between English national identity, individualism, and the figure of the sea captain, The Principal Navigations frequently includes disputes between ‘captains’ concerning the ‘power of command’. This paper focuses on the ways struggles to establish and maintain command by sea captains are recounted in The Principal Navigations to explore questions of how and why Hakluyt’s collection repeatedly emphasized and re‐cycled this particular motif. 377 Anthony Payne (NUI Galway) ‘Hakluyt and the Ancients’ This paper will discuss Hakluyt’s treatment of supposed ancient knowledge of the Americas, especially in the last volume of his Principal Navigations (1600). Hakluyt was not excited by the concept of a ‘New’ World. Indeed, using ancient authors, he questions its novelty. This was not purely a classicist’s deference to antiquity. It could be deployed against Iberian claims deriving from the originality of their American ‘discoveries’. These, according to Hakluyt, had been preceded by ancient voyagers and had been informed by the ancients’ knowledge of lands across the Atlantic. Implicit in this thinking is that if the lands found by Spain and Portugal were no more than rediscoveries, then the English, acting as true pioneers, were discovering a genuine new world. Hakluyt’s discussion of ancient knowledge of the New World had ample precedent. Ramusio, his model as a compiler of voyage accounts, had cited Plato’s Atlantis as evidence of the inhabitability of the entire globe and quoted Seneca’s Medea as prophetic of the discovery of the New World. But Ramusio was writing half a century before Hakluyt. Soon after 1600, Hakluyt’s successor, Samuel Purchas, rejected the ancient discovery tradition. Might Hakluyt’s intellectual world have seemed old fashioned even as his final volume came off the press? Jane Grogan (University College Dublin) ‘Vaunting Knowledge and Vouching antiquities in the Principall Navigations (1589)’ Hakluyt ordered his materials ‘regionally’, imitating Ramusio, as D.B. Quinn noted. The texts centre on travellers, not regions, vivid eye‐witness accounts rather than geographical pronouncements, but the structures of belief and endorsement that Hakluyt demanded, particularly for the New World materials, were not a given. Just a year later, for example, Edmund Spenser would enjoy some epistemological brinkmanship at Hakluyt’s expense, casting doubt on the veracity of both travellers and editors’ work for the dubious purposes of establishing Faeryland within the same appealing framework. ‘Who euer heard of th’Indian Peru? / Or who in venturous vessell measured / The Amazons huge riuer now found trew? / Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew?’ (The Faerie Queene, II Proem). That New World interests – Virginia, Peru – were at the heart of Hakluyt’s project in the Principal Navigations is a given; less clear are the significance of the Old World travel narratives interspersed among them: trading missions, pilgrimages and embassies to known parts of the world east and south. This paper confronts Hakluyt’s ordering of materials in the first edition of the Principal Navigations, exploring the implications of his mixture of accounts of the Old World and the New in its historical moment. John Carrigy (NUI Galway) ‘“To proove by Reason”: Historical precedent in the work of John Dee and Richard Hakluyt’ Elizabethan efforts to establish an English presence in the New World engendered a literature of both justification and promotion. Convincing both the state and prospective investors of the legality of colonial and exploratory ventures required rigorous, convincing arguments. Key texts in this tradition were John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577) and Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse on Western Planting (1582). The success of these persuasive texts is evident in the letters patent and voyages during these years. This paper will explore the uses of prior claims to sovereignty over the New World by Hakluyt and Dee, demonstrating the inter‐relatedness of the sources and substance of 378 their arguments. It will foreground the significance of Roman law and historical precedent, within a broader British antiquarian tradition, as the basis for sixteenth‐century imperial theory. It will focus in particular on the influence antiquarian methodologies had on the tone and content of imperial literature at this juncture. Ladan Niayesh (Paris‐Diderot) ‘Under Persian Eyes: Hakluyt’s Corrective to Safavid Chronicles’ To the historian looking for Persian accounts to match Hakluyt’s extensive Muscovy Company’s material on the beginnings of Anglo‐Iranian trade in the second half of the sixteenth century, surviving Safavid chronicles are a disappointment. Referring only in passing to European embassies, Persian sources mostly conflate Western visitors under the generic appellation of Farangi, which could be understood as a sign either of ignorance or of indifference on their part. Taking its cue from Rudi Matthee and Sholeh Quinn’s works on Safavid historiography’s aims and methods, this paper purports to provide a corrective to this view, by examining in particular Hakluyt’s accounts of Muscovy Company agents’ court audiences, which yield proof of a surprisingly deep awareness of European geopolitics on the part of the Shah and his nobles. With this evidence in mind, I will argue, the discrepancy between English and Persian sources can be accounted for through a process of selection and adjustment whereby the chroniclers make their accounts fit the Safavids’ Iran‐centred, providentialist view of world history. Daniel Carey (NUI Galway) ‘Hakluyt and the Clothworkers: Long Distance Trade and English Commercial Development’ Richard Hakluyt has long been understood as organizing The Principal Navigations (1589; 1598‐1600) around the interests of the Clothworkers’ Company, based on the fact that he received support from the Company in pursuing his studies in Oxford; the benefit he received in compiling the work from figures like Richard Staper, a prominent member of the company; and the evidence of his commitment to extending the demand for English finished cloth in distant markets (opposing the interests of the Merchant Adventurers). This paper reexamines the case for this view and suggests a more nuanced reading. Hakluyt certainly recognized the value of the trade in cloth to the English economy; but whether that makes his position identifiable solely with the interests of the Clothworkers’ Company is another matter. The cloth trade, yes, but Clothworkers exclusively? This seems less plausible. Membership in multiple companies complicates the picture of whose interests are being served. There are also other texts in the volumes that support the case for cloth from figures without any recognized connection with the Company (e.g. Sir Geoge Peckham); thus it was possible to advocate for cloth without being an agent of a single interest. If we situate Hakluyt’s work in relation to that of his influential elder cousin, also named Richard Hakluyt, is seems clear that his broader purpose is to stimulate economic development, provide for employment, and to strengthen English competitiveness with Spain in particular. 379 RT1: “Literary Journalism and Immigration: A Stranger in a Strange Land” Co‐convenors: John S. Bak, Université de Lorraine, France David Abrahamson, Northwestern University, IL U.S.A Literary journalism – a genre of nonfiction prose that lies at the conceptual intersection of literature and journalism – can be the best vehicle to tell a certain kind of story that reporting often neuters of its emotional appeal and literature inevitably elevates to universal heights that efface its individualistic nature. It can be argued that the cause célébre of the last few decades or so has been immigration, the ineluctable endgame of colonialist agendas. The discourse is global, poignant and often marked by nativism, racism and even violence. The proposed session will focus on ways in which a variety of national traditions of literary journalism have dealt with the immigrant experience, in particularly on how various perspectives (both by individual authors and in national traditions) have explored what it means to be – or, perhaps more importantly, to be view by others as – a stranger in a strange land. Speakers Alfred Archer, University of Bristol, UK Michael Hendrik, University of Bamberg, Germany Isabelle Meuret, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Hania A.M. Nashef, American University of Sharjah United Arab Emirates, RT2: Re‐defining the Contemporary in Anglo‐American Fiction Convenor: Dr. Ana‐Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania However cursory a glance at scholarship devoted to contemporary literature will identify the inconsistency with which the “contemporary” is defined and periodised nowadays. As it becomes increasingly evident that “literature after 1945” no longer means “contemporary literature,” new temporal landmarks are hard to agree upon and often seem tenuous, problematic and “fraught with conceptual and ideological difficulties” (Tew, The Contemporary British Novel, 60). Nonetheless, periodisations remain “pragmatically necessary and theoretically suggestive” (Tew 17). Taking fiction as our object, as the more referential and perhaps the most representative of contemporary literary genres, our round table aims to investigate the ways in which recent fiction in English has been narrativised in relation to various events, in search of a relational and workable periodisation of the contemporary. Speakers: 1. Prof. Peter Childs, Newman University, Birmingham, UK 2. Prof. Sämi Ludwig, Université de Haute‐Alsace, France 3. Dr. Sebastian Goes, Roehampton University, London, UK 4. Dr. Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth, UK 5. Dr. Emily Horton, Independent Scholar, London, UK 6. Ms. Corina Selejan, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania 7. Dr. Ana‐Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania (convenor) RT3: “Narrative Strategies in the Reconstruction of History in the Work of Contemporary British Women Novelists” Convenor: Ana Raquel Fernandes, University of Lisbon, Portugal 380 The aim of the round table is to enquire into the ways certain contemporary British women authors write into their fiction the processes by which they recreate and pay testimony to history. We will also examine the reasons why they recreate the past, whether they be political, social or artistic, and the strategies employed to establish a comparison to the present. Celia Wallhead will open the debate discussing Byatt’s collection of critical studies, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, in which the author set out her thoughts on the reasons behind what she called “the sudden flowering of the historical novel in Britain”. Wallhead will look at Byatt’s thoughts in the context of the postwar novel and its heritage. Furthermore, she’ll show how Byatt uses the strategies she identifies in her critical studies in her own fiction in the course of her literary career. María José de la Torre will focus on the latest fiction of Pat Baker and Sarah Waters in order to explore the relevance of their historical settings. In particular, de la Torre will address how their use of historical settings responds to some of the different modes of writing that the flourishing of the historical novel in Britain has given rise to. The Postmodern elements of fact/fiction hybridity will be approached, as well as the social realist streaks that may be found in the novels, which will link with the notion of rewriting history. Furthermore, Alexandra Cheira’s analysis of how visual elements (fact) and the stories weaved around them (fiction) are intertwined in Tracy Chevalier’s novels will make for a striking historical approach. Cheira will discuss Chevalier’s use of visual art to create her novels. She will also argue that Chevalier’s novels are neo‐historical in the sense that History is secondary to plot and characters. Finally, Winterson’s and Smith’s novelistic production, their interrogation of particular versions of history through the process of narrative, their depiction of alternative identities and the rewriting of personal and national myths will prompt the analysis by Ana Raquel Fernandes. Debate will be opened to the floor. At the end we expect to have demonstrated/discussed parallels, shifts and transformations in the writing of these authors and in the rewriting of history in contemporary British fiction by women authors. Speakers: 1. Celia Wallhead (University of Granada, Spain) 2. María José de la Torre (University of Granada, Spain) 3. Alexandra Cheira (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon/ ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies), Portugal 4. Ana Raquel Fernandes (Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon/ ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies), Portugal. RT4 “Stories of Their Own: Gender and the Contemporary Short Story in English (A collaboration of the European Network for Short Fiction Research [ENSFR] and the research project “Women’s Tales”, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [FEM2013‐41977‐P]) Co‐convenors: Jorge Sacido‐Romero, U Santiago de Compostela, Spain and Michelle Ryan‐ Sautour, Université d’Angers, France The aim of this round table is to explore the connection between the contemporary short story in Britain and Ireland and women’s experience by examining some theoretical issues pertaining to the above‐mentioned connection to then move on to analysing particular 381 texts. Women’s contribution, both qualitatively and quantitatively speaking, to the development of the contemporary short story cannot be explained only in terms of continuity with a rich female short story tradition, but also in terms of the genre’s inherent potential as a vehicle for the expression of a feminine experience that is critical with reality as it is symbolically structured. Speakers are: • Jorge Sacido‐Romero • Michelle Ryan‐Sautour • Laura Lojo‐Rodríguez • Paul March‐Russell • Sylvia Mieszkowski RT5: “Competition out of the ordinary: Roundtable on “top research” in English Studies” Co‐convenors: Janne Korkka, University of Turku, Finland Elina Valovirta, University of Turku, Finland The rhetoric of competition in today’s academia values “top researchers” (ERC) and “top universities” (QS Rankings) above the rest. This type of register denotes that by all accounts, competition in academia is fierce and intensifying. This roundtable questions and debates how the qualitatively proportional terms of “top”, “best” or “cutting‐edge” research rely heavily on the prerequisite of ordinary as its foundation or its flipside. Based on collaboration under the research project, “Out of the Ordinary. Challenging Commonplace Concepts in Anglophone Literature” (Academy of Finland), this roundtable challenges the hegemonic way in which the rhetoric of the “top” in discussions of academic competition has become so commonplace and self‐evident that it has in fact become ordinary, not special or ‘out of the ordinary’. Panellists from various European universities will engage with questions such as how to move beyond the axiomatic top‐bottom juxtaposition reproduced in the prevalent academic rhetoric of competition? What does the increasing competition to produce “top” publications, projects, and researchers mean for English Studies and its future? 1. Bénédicte Ledent, University of Liège, Belgium 2. Antonia Navarro Tejero, University of Córdoba, Spain 3. Joel Kuortti, University of Turku, Finland 4. Alexis Thadié, University of Paris‐Sorbonne, France RT6 “The Spatial Turn”: What is Literary Geography Now?” Convenors: Eleonora Rao (Università di Salerno) – David Cooper (Manchester Metropolitan University) The prominence of literary geography within English Studies has been heightened by the ‘spatial turn’ across the arts and humanities and has been formalized by the launch of a new open‐access international, interdisciplinary journal. It is an appropriate moment, therefore, to reflect on the current status of literary geography and to consider the different ways it is being practised across Europe. This roundtable discussion will invite scholars from several different countries to draw upon their critical processes and procedures to address the key question: “What is Literary Geography Now?”. Topics under consideration might include: the relationship between 382 creative and critical practices, geocriticism, literary geography and ecocriticism, interdisciplinary collaborations between literary critics and geographers, digital literary geography. Speakers: • Jane Suzanne Carroll • Kirsti Bohata • David Cooper • Bruna C. Mancini • Eleonora Rao • Rocco De Leo (respondent) • Jason Finch (respondent) RT7 “Romantic‐Era Labouring‐Class Poetry: New Critical Directions” Convenor: Franca Dellarosa (Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy) Co‐Convenor (in absentia) and Panel Advisor: Professor John Goodridge (Professor Emeritus, Nottingham Trent University, UK) Recent criticism has focused intensely on labouring‐class poetry, debating which writing profiles it should accommodate as a critical category, and under which agenda. An expanding corpus of British labouring‐class poetry is now widely available, as the editors of the special dedicated number of Criticism Donna Landry and William J. Christmas remarked in 2005; this provides a solid, text‐based foundation to stimulate appreciation of what is now recognized as ‘both a vibrant and sustained literary and cultural phenomenon’. Landry and Christmas make a strong case for critical exercise on labouring‐ class writing to move and embrace questions of formal and aesthetic order, therefore providing a necessary, healthy rebalancing of the categories of ‘history and the literary, or politics and aesthetics’, and circumventing the risk of sociological reductionism. Appraising the current debate for the recent Blackwell Companion to Romantic Poetry, Michael Scrivener records the ‘new turn to the aesthetic’ as a welcome shift of emphasis, associating the somewhat controversial element of the ‘biographical’ with the until recently prevailing ‘ideological’ approach – in the present, the critic’s task, in Scrivener’s words, is ‘to read the aesthetic ideologically and read the ideological aesthetically, giving full weight to the entire meaning of poetry’. The round table, also developing on the outcomes of the themed panel on labouring–class poetry ‘Exploring and Expanding the Archive of Labouring‐Class Print Culture’, convened by Bridget Keegan for the Conference Romantic Imprints (Cardiff, BARS Conference, July 2015), is intended to discuss the state of the art regarding labouring class poetry as a critical category, in the light of new scholarship and editing work. Speakers: • Franca Dellarosa • Jennifer Orr • Jack Windle RT9: “Using ideas from intercultural communication, literary texts and cultural studies to expand EAP practice: breaking new ground” Convenor: Ann Gulden, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway, 383 This provocative round table seeks to address and challenge the worrying tendencies towards conformity in EAP practice and its outcomes. EAP imposes a terministic screen which can be limiting and lead to the risk of cloned discourses. There is an element of instrumentality in much current EAP practice, which risks endorsing unreflecting formulaic writing. The power of EAP hegemonies can interfere with the development of academic identities in both L1 and L2 contexts. Using approaches from intercultural communication, literary and cultural studies, we propose to explore ways in which learner imagination and autonomy can be encouraged and such instrumentality challenged. Speakers: 1.Karen Bennett , Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal 2. Ann Torday Gulden, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway, 3. Tom Muir, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway, 4. Kart Rummel, Tallin University of Technology, Estonia 5. Kristin Solli, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway, RT11: “Creating a European Anglicists' Gender Studies Network” Co‐convenors: Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany Işil Baş, Boğaziçi University of Istanbul, Turkey María Socorro Suárez Lafuente, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain Women’s and Gender Studies have established themselves as a vibrant, highly innovative field of English Studies and contribute decisively to the crucial role the discipline plays among the humanities in Europe. The plethora of achievements across the continent makes it difficult to get an overall picture, particularly as the strong interdisciplinary orientation of Women’s and Gender Studies encourages co‐operation in smaller local or regional units. Much can therefore be gained from European exchange and synergies, as ESSE has already demonstrated. These effects can be heightened further by a network. Women’s and Gender Studies cut across all sectors of English Studies and a network can help to bring them together for focused work, greater international visibility and well‐ deserved prestige. On the basis of a wide‐ranging research project, the first part of the panel will give the first European overview of the current situation and highlight a number of landmark achievements. The second part will be devoted to organisational matters, including the fleshing out of initiatives and activities (such as setting up a directory of researchers and research). Speakers: Florence Binard, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France Renate Haas, University of Kiel, Germany María Socorro Suárez Lafuente, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain RT12: “Shakespeare in the Second Language Classroom” Co‐convenor: Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway Mention Shakespeare to a group of primary or secondary students, and you will get an equal measure of excitement and fear. Excitement over his iconic status and his universal presence in popular culture, and fear over his “difficult” language. This is particularly true for the second language classroom. However, across Scandinavia (and Europe), 384 Shakespeare is regularly mentioned by name in national curriculums. The Norwegian National Curriculum, for example, states: «Engelskspråklig litteratur, fra barnerim til Shakespeare, kan gi leseglede for livet og en dypere forståelse for andre og seg selv.» [English Literature, from nursery rhymes to Shakespeare, can offer a life‐long joy of reading and a deeper understanding of others and oneself]. This roundtable seeks to consider the innovative ways educators encourage students to appreciate Shakespeare and his language, and to interrogate the ways Shakespeare remains a resource for language learning across Scandinavia and Europe. The panel will include both educators and critics to discuss methods, resources, experiences, challenges, translations, adaptations, teaching through performance, and ways of encouraging a wider use of Shakespeare at all education, skill and age levels. Speakers: 1. Delilah Bermudez Brataas (Chair), Associate Professor of English, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway 2. Erica Hateley, Professor of English, NTNU, Norway 3. Christina Sandhaug, Assistant Professor of English, Hedmark University College, Norway 4. Kikki Lindell, Associate Professor of English, Lund University, Sweden 5. Svenn‐Arve Myklebost 6. Ellen Marie Kvaale 385 Posters 1. Casilda Garcia de la Maza, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain, “Integrating the general and the specific in a maritime English course” 2. Jiřina Popelíková and Lucie Gillová, Charles University in Prague, “Sound Symbolic Expressions from a Cross‐linguistic Perspective” 3. Michaela Šamalová, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, “Cross‐linguistic Influence: The Potential of Pedagogical Translation in English Language Teaching” 4. Sumie Akutsu, Toyo University, Japan, “Translation in the Teaching of English: A Case Study Using a Translation Corpus in an EFL Context” 5. Mark Donnellan, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan, “A Pilot Study in Intercultural Communication Between EFL Learners in Japan and Denmark” 6. Virginia Zorzi, University of Padua, Italy “Multi‐Dimensional Analysis and Public Communication of Science and Technology: a Corpus‐based Approach to the Media Coverage of Scientific and Technological Controversies” 7. Ene Kotkas (presenter), Tallinn Health Care College, Siret Piirsalu, Tallinn Health Care College, Estonia, Kateriina Rannula, Tallinn Health Care College Estonia, Elle Sõrmus, Tallinn Health Care College Estonia “Multilingual Teaching in ESP – Challenges and Benefits” 8. Rodrigo Pérez Lorido, University of Oviedo, Spain, “The role of (the avoidance of) centre embedding in the change OV to VO in English” 9. Davide Mazzi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, “There is no doubt about Irish sentiment…”: a corpus‐based enquiry into de Valera’s rhetoric” 10. Ofelya Poghosyan and Varduhi Ghumashyan, Yerevan State University, Russia, “English Borrowings in Nagorno‐Karabaghian Dialect of the Armenian Language” 11. Sonja Koren, University Department of Health Studies, University of Split, Croatia, “Conceptual Metaphors in Discourse on Organ Donation” 12. Savita Nair, Department of History and Department of Asian Studies, Furman University, South Carolina, USA, “India and Ireland: Old Connections, New Initiatives, and Unique Opportunities” 13. Ira Hansen, University of Turku, Finland, “Otherness of the Self: Trauma as Subjectivity‐Building in Paul Auster’s Fiction” 14. Emilia Di Martino, Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Napoli, “Not So Horrible Science: 'It’s science with the squishy bits left in!' Popular science writing/shows for children and young adults” 15. Harri Salovaara, University of Vaasa, “Resisting Hegemony through an Embodied Ecological Protest Masculinity” 16. Jimena Escudero Pérez, Universidad de Oviedo, “The female Ex Machina: new proposals of identity” 17. Nerea Riobó‐Pérez, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Sleeping Beauty as a Lethal Sexual Icon: Angela Carter’s Vampire Fairy Tale ‘The Lady of the House of Love” 18. Elena Markova, 'Higher School of Economics", Russia, “Professional competence of a Foreign Language teacher” 19. Serkan Şen, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey, “From English to Turkish: Morphological Borrowing and Compounding” 20. M. Dolores Perea‐Barberá University of Cádiz, Spain, "The teaching of Vocabulary Learning Strategies to Maritime English university students" 21. Nevin Faden Gürbüz Süleyman Demirel University, Turkey, “Postmodernism in Samuel Beckett’s Plays” 386 22. Nuria Fernández‐Quesada, Pablo de Olavide University, Spain, “More Torture Than Literature” (When Spanish Censors Read Beckett)" 387 Sub‐Plenary Lectures María Jesús Lorenzo Modia, Universidade da Coruña “National Identities in Nineteenth‐century Women’s Writings: Mary Brunton and Lady Morgan” CHAIR: María Socorro Suárez Lafuente Gaëtanelle Gilquin, FNRS – UCL, Belgium “A corpus‐based comparative and integrated approach to non‐native Englishes” CHAIR: Lieven Buysse Diego Saglia, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy “Continental Voices in Romantic Poetry: Appropriation, Ventriloquism, and Politics” CHAIR: Giovanni Iamartino Hugo Keiper, University of Graz, Austria “Of Hooks, Earworms, and Other Fishing Tackle. Observations on the Structure, Impact, and Reading of Pop/Rock Songs” CHAIR: Wolfgang Görtschacher Michaela Mudure, Babes‐Bolyai University Cluj‐Napoca, Romania “Gendering Blackness‐es: The African American and the Roma Women” Chair: Muireann O’Cinneide. Michel Van der Yeught, Aix‐Marseille University, France, “Developing English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Europe: mainstream approaches and complementary advances” CHAIR: Pierre Lurbe Madeleine Danova, Sofia University, Bulgari “Genre‐Bending: The Postmodern Biofiction and After” CHAIR: LUDMILLA KOSTOVA Frederik Van Dam, KULeuven, FWO “Songs without Sunrise: Irish Literature and the Risorgimento in the Victorian Age” CHAIR: Lieven Buysse Roberta Facchinetti, Università di Verona, Italy “English in the Media: When news discourse sheds its bark” Chair: Carlo Bajetta Adam Nádasdy, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary “Phonetic Transcription: Curse or Blessing?” CHAIR: Attila Kiss Susan Bruce, Keele University, UK “Articulating Public Goods: TV Drama, Public Institutions and the Value(s) of Humanities critique” CHAIR: Alison Waller 388 Anna Walczuk, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland “That Amazing Art of Words: the World, Time and Eternity in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth Jennings” CHAIR: Adrian Paterson Ondřej Pilný, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic “The Grotesque: Soliciting Audience Engagement in Contemporary Drama in English” CHAIR: Jana Chamonikolasova Marie‐Louise Coolahan, NUI Galway, Ireland “Circles, Triangles and Networks: The Transmission and Impact of Women’s Writing, 1550‐1700” CHAIR: AOIFE LEAHY Alessandra Marzola, University of Bergamo, Italy “‘The pity of war’ and its transformations in 20th century British Culture” Chair: Carlo Bajetta Päivi Pahta, University of Tampere, Finland “Multilingual Practices in Written Discourse: A Diachronic View of Global and Local Languages in Contact Chair: Anne Karhio Géza Kállay, Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary “Is There a Metaphysical Turn in Shakespeare Studies?”