Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik
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Wenn wir Shakespeare einen ‚skeptischen Europäer‘ nennen, ist das eine Aussage über das Werk, nicht den Dichter. Sie ist zudem das Resultat einer Beschäftigung mit den großen politischen Fragen, die seine Stücke aufwerfen, welche mithin eine erstaunliche Ambiguitätstoleranz offenbaren, die einerseits als Epochenspezifikum gelten darf, andererseits den Renaissance-Skeptizismus an die Moderne anschlussfähig macht.
“Za Hranetsiu” – “Beyond the Border”: Constructions of Identities in Ukrainian-Canadian Literature
(2010)
Grounded in the literary and cultural studies, the dissertation “Za Hranetsiu” – “Beyond the Border”: Constructions of Identities in Ukrainian-Canadian Literature answers the question how identities of different Ukrainian immigrants and their offspring have been constructed, continuously developed and transformed in contemporary Canadian literature. The study simultaneously presents a discussion of postmodern identities, a concise historical survey of Ukrainian immigration to Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an overall picture of the exceptionally substantial body of Ukrainian-Canadian literature. Detailed literary analyses focus on seven Ukrainian-Canadian works: Sons of the Soil (1939-45/1959) by Illia Kiriak, Yellow Boots (1954) by Vera Lysenko, A Letter to My Son (1981) by George Ryga, The Green Library (1996) by Janice Kulyk Keefer, The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir (1998) by Myrna Kostash, Kalyna’s Song (2003) by Lisa Grekul, and The Ladies’ Lending Library (2007) by Janice Kulyk Keefer.
The dissertation describes an Indigenous dream framework that underscores the significance of dreams as a mirror of trauma and a way that leads back to Indigenous knowledges. Significant differences of Western and Indigenous epistemology are exemplified by juxtaposing Western and Indigenous dream discourses. The selected prose fiction allows for a dream categorization that emphasizes the significance and meaning of dreams as a metaphorical as well as narrative device.
Nightmares/Anxiety dreams are often the result of the devastating effects of colonization and especially Residential School. Nightmares in the texts are often exact replicas of the abuse suffered in the boarding schools. They are discussed in the context of Robert Arthur Alexie’s novel Porcupines and China Dolls (2001/2009) represents dreams and traumatic nightmares and deals with the fictional Blue People First Nation. The community’s collective intergenerational trauma of Residential School experience keeps them stuck in dysfunctional dynamics dominated by suicides, sexual and physical abuse, drug and sex addictions.
Telling dreams, categorized as “instructing dreams,” and “announcing dreams,” teach the dreamer what will happen in the future. They are discussed in the context of Richard Van Camp’s short stories “On the Wings of this Prayer” and “The Fleshing” (Godless but Loyal to Heaven, 2012), which represent the category of the ecological nightmare as well as of telling dreams. Ecological nightmares display environmentally destructive effects of capitalist globalization that have come to “infect” the world. The Windigo figure in the stories serves as a manifestation of resource and in particular petro-capitalism and Western society’s constant need to subjugate nature. Ecological dreams hence call for ecological vigilance and establish Indigenous knowledges as a source of resurgence and restoration.
Existential dreams function as decolonizing tools that facilitate liberation. The thesis provides a literary analysis of Richard Wagamese’ novel Ragged Company (2008) and Cherie Dimaline’s short story “room 414” (Red Rooms, 2007) where homelessness is postulated as the manifestation of individual and tribal/communal disjointedness and isolation. Through existential dreaming, the urban lives of most of the characters dwelling in the shadows and margins of society are existentially transformed and healing seems possible. Paternalistic colonial mindsets continue to patronize Indigenous knowledges (as unreliable and unscientific) until Western “discoveries” prove what has been known for decades.
The thesis underscores dreams as an essential part of Indigenous Knowledges, i.e. as knowledge sources. Surmounting Western dream perceptions and instead valorizing Indigenous knowledges, the characters in the texts discussed in my thesis, unremittingly follow their dreams’ instruction and eventually achieve reconciliation and healing. In the fictional texts discussed, nightmares represent homelessness, trauma, stagnation, and a disconnection to one’s (Native) background, whereas dreams represent continuity through the restoration of identity, finding home, and a sense of belonging. The notion of a dream reality and a waking reality influencing and informing each other relies on sharing dreams with the community, eventually leading to an enactment of the dream or vision. Dreaming and identity are significantly linked and foster processes of intellectual self-determination. The characters’ inability to externalize their internal wishes, desires, and needs results in further denial and consequential bitterness that feed into the spiral of alcohol and drug abuse as well as metaphorical and literal homelessness. The dreams’ semantic field strongly alludes to ceremonial traditions and provides the prospect of a rooted Indigeneity. At the turning points in the lives of the characters, when dreams and visions start to appear, they are lost in translation. The characters’ own illiteracy towards Native epistemology and spirituality has them trapped in the inability to read and act on their dream messages. Strong (often female) Indigenous presences that go hand in hand with the appearance of dreams provide the protagonists with guidance and lead the way back to the “Old Ways.” Through dreaming, the spiral of colonialism is disrupted and replaced by the circle of reconciliation and relationality.
This paper is a literary analysis of Sebastian Barry’s six novels “The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty” (1998), “Annie Dunne” (2002), “A Long Long Way” (2005), “The Secret Scripture” (2008), “On Canaan’s Side” (2011) and “The Temporary Gentleman” (2014) and his two plays “The Steward of Christendom” (1995) and “Our Lady of Sligo” (1998). The analysis focuses on Barry’s presentation of (Irish) history, (Irish) nationalism, and personal and national identity in order to ascertain to what extent Barry can be labelled an Irish historical revisionist and compares Barry’s texts to revisionist fiction by other modern Irish authors to delineate Barry’s vision of a – generally more inclusive - Irish identity.
Written language in the public sphere (shop signs, advertisements, placards, graffiti, etc.) constitutes the “Linguistic Landscape” of an urban agglomeration. An examination of such displays gives us an insight into function, status and spread of certain languages. Here, the study of linguistic landscapes does not only bear a purely linguistic dimension, but necessarily links to other fields such as politics, semiotics, urban development, communication and literacy. In this case study the cityscapes of the Moldovan capital Chisinau and the Lithuanian capital Vilnius will be analyzed. Peripheral and central districts of the cities have been chosen. From each of these districts, data on the number of mother tongue speakers have been obtained. Two corpora, each containing 1000 items of specimen of written language have been made and contextualized with the help of GPS tracking to ensure the possibility of future diachronic research. The data for these corpora was collected in December 2010 and March 2011. The aim of this study is two-fold: On the one hand this approach gives an insight into the general use of different languages in Moldova and Lithuanian as well as on the functional domains they fulfill. On the other hand the distribution of different languages on signs in each district shows how minority languages such as Russian are represented in public. The results suggest that the linguistic landscape of Chisinau is actually very diverse and alongside Romanian, English and especially Russian are used frequently. The functional domains differ though. Whereas the national language is part of almost all shop signs and advertising in general, it is usually used in conjunction with Russian. Informal displays of written language such as graffiti or small placards are mostly written in Russian alone. Other minority languages in Moldova such as Gagauz and Ukrainian were almost never visible on written displays of language in the city. In contrast to that the linguistic landscape of Vilnius is far less diverse and although the Lithuanian capital is home to sizeable Russian- and Polish-speaking minorities, these demographic patterns do not show. Yet, apart from Lithuanian English is an integral part of the linguistic landscape, especially in advertising.
Bloody Beaut’ Blue: Australisches Englisch und die Konzeptualisierung des Australischen Ethos
(2005)
Die Dissertation basiert auf der Theorie der Kulturellen Linguistik (Palmer, 1996), der Analyse empirischer Daten des heutigen australischen Englisch als auch historischer Daten, welche die Entwicklung des australischen Englisch wiederspiegeln. Das Ziel der Dissertation ist es, Licht auf die Frage zu werfen, inwieweit die Sprache und das Ethos der Sprachgemeinschaft, welche diese Sprache spricht, einander beeinflussen und spiegeln. Die untersuchten Merkmale betreffen die sehr häufig im australischen Englisch anzutreffenden linguistischen Besonderheiten: Analogien, Rhyming Slang, Diminutive, Flüche aber auch prosodische Sprachaspekte. Die Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Wierzbicka) wird als grundlegendes Vergleichselement zwischen Sprache und Ethos hinzugezogen.
The thesis develops a scholarly-artistic modular method of analysis for literary studies, film studies and comic studies. Artistic modules of analysis are combined with established research methods used by the humanities on order to deepen the level of understanding of the analysed comic/literary/cineastic work. Martin Rowson's comic adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" is analysed with the scholartistic method and treated as an addative literary adaptation.
Until today most social, historical and cultural studies of the American postwar era have contributed to the myth of a relatively homogeneous society and culture. Even though they understood these years as a turning point for modern American society, they failed to encompass the polyvalence and heterogeneity of American society. Focussing mostly on white and middle class males, these studies formed a onedimensional picture of sociocultural conformity, a picture in which issues of gender, race and class were largely absent. Crossing the boundaries of feminist, cultural and historical studies this dissertation starts from identifying the gaps and problems in current academic research. Those sociopolitical structures that affected non-white women are then juxtaposed with the dominant postwar discourse of womanhood. The literary texts by women of color show them grappling with the conflicting demands of socioecnomic realities and pervasive role definitions. On the surface these literary interventions seemed to submit to dominant ideologies while opposing them at the same time. Thus they are both anticipatory and antagonistic. The dissent and criticism in writings by women of color seem to have become a catalyst for the deep social transformations in the following decades.
Abstract
This brief discussion paper is concerned with the sequence [have NP Vpp] and its distinction into a causative and a passive construction, which hinges on the (non-)agentivity of the subject participant, so that the sequence can be seen as ambiguous in that respect. Instead of analyzing these uses as two different constructions, I propose a unified analysis as instances of the affactive construction. This construction has the functional potential of putting primary focus on secondary participants, so-called afficiary participants. The potential ambiguity with regard to the agentivity of these participants is not an issue in usage, as it is only evoked as part of the conceptual content in the background.