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Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Sämi Ludwig Arguments from Above: Dissent in Early Nineteenth-Century American Reformist Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Astrid M. Fellner Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms: New Perspectives on American Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Anne Schröder Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation in the History of English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Friederike Müller From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? Current Changes in the Use of NEED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Christina Bismark ‘There’s after being changes’: Be after V-ing in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Rezensionsartikel: Andreas Mahler Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’. Zur Genealogie und Funktion des Literarischen in Früher Neuzeit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Inhalt 2 Rezensionen: Birgit Neumann Monika Fludernik, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Ulf Schulenberg Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Flutur Troshani Christoph Henry-Thommes, Recollection, Memory and Imagination: Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Daniel Leab Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Markus Hünemörder, Meike Zwingenberger (eds.), Europe and America: Cultures in Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 Patrycjia Kunjatto-Renard Nieves Pascual, Laura Alonso-Gallo and Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, eds., Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Ewa Antoszek Marc Priewe, Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/ o Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Manfred Kopp Till Kinzel, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie . . . . . . . . . 163 Ute Römer Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko (eds.), Planing, Gluing and Painting Corpora. Inside the Applied Corpus Linguist’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Eva Kuntschner Gabriele Linke, Populärliteratur als kulturelles Gedächtnis: Eine vergleichende Studie zu zeitgenössischen britischen und amerikanischen popular romances der Verlagsgruppe Harlequin Mills & Boon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Stipe Grgas Michele Bottalico and Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa, Borderline Identities in Chicano Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 Page Laws Winfried Herget and Alfred Hornung, eds., Religion in African-American Culture . . 172 Tünde Nagy Patrick Duffley, The English Gerund-Participle. A Comparison with the Infinitive . . . 175 Inhalt 3 Larisa Mikhaylova Roy Goldblatt, Jopi Nyman, and John A.Stotesbury (eds.), Close Encounters of an Other Kind. New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and American Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Georg Marko Encarnacion Hidalgo, Luis Quereda, Juan Santana (eds.), Corpora in the Foreign Language Classroom. Selected papers from the Sixth international Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC 6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 32, 2007 ist nach Autoren alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / www-gewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). Gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur in Wien, der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung und der Stadt Graz Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. Bezugspreis jährlich 76,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser 54,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft 42,-. 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Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Arguments from Above: Dissent in Early Nineteenth-Century American Reformist Discourse Sämi Ludwig Transcendentalists and reformers of the American Renaissance based their own arguments on education, the struggle against poverty, temperance, women’s rights, abolitionism, etc. to a large extent on gestures of dissent against the rulers of the day that echo the ethos of resistance in the American revolution and even earlier Puritan ‘non-conformity’ in colonial times. Arguing for all kinds of basic rights and change for the good, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Child, Beecher-Stowe, Garrison, John Brown, the Grimké sisters, Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, Douglass, Garnet, David Walker, and many others use an individualist language of moral dissent that is based on their religious intuition and their own personal sense of right. With few exceptions, they all refer to some higher or abstract metaphysics to justify their cause. Thus a formerly religious attitude of justification ‘from above’ has been secularized in America - not in the sense that it was eliminated, but in the sense that we can also find its conceptual formations in the realm of politics and the state and in cultural attitudes in general. This leaves many open questions about the nature of political debate and decision-making in the United States: How does it reflect on the American separation of church and state? Where or what is the ‘end’ of such dissent? What does it imply for the process of negotiation and what kind of new coherence will you get out of such a framework of oppositionalist change? 1. Introduction: American dissent beyond the Young Republic “In the nineteenth century, religious revivals […] helped to inspire abolitionism and a host of other reform movements.” (Eric Foner) “I’m against it! ” (Danny Kaye) In the United States there is a powerful discourse of ‘dissent’, a tradition of oppositional thinking which has developed from religious ‘non-conformity’ Sämi Ludwig 6 1 Like ‘dissent’, ‘liberty’ is a highly charged term because the political and economic liberties of the middle class were anticipated in Luther’s Protestant arguments for the “Liberty of a Christian” of 1520. against the Church to a political argument for independence against colonial England. Curiously, Americans have continuously applied such an attitude even against themselves and their own state - as if it were an ‘other’ to distance oneself from. This is a fairly paradoxical attitude towards a democratic government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as President Lincoln would have it in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 (Lauter 2002: 2010), and therefore warrants closer analysis. It points to a mode of political debate in which dissenters, i.e. the citizens with oppositional opinions, situate themselves in a literally ‘separatist’ gesture outside the framework of legal reference, refusing debate and, in particular, negotiation. As a model, this mode of disagreement stands in fundamental opposition to the basic democratic notion of a ‘parliament’, a political institution within which differences are expected to be discussed, views exchanged, and new consensus created. The history of Christian ‘dissent’ goes back to Puritan theology - a ‘dissenter’ was in disagreement with the Anglican Church. The justification of such Protestant oppositionalism was of course religious; it was based on metaphysical assumptions. Dissent came ‘from above’; it had to do with subtle theological arguments and the ‘liberty’ of religious choice. 1 Secular political and economic conflicts were considered a mere consequence of such dissent against ecclesiastical control. Or rather, for the American Puritans, who envisaged a theocratic regime and wanted to build a ‘City on a Hill’, the political and the spiritual were one and the same. It is crucial for us to realize that this convergence remained a powerful force in the American Revolution. Thus Robert A. Ferguson emphasizes the importance of “religious antiauthoritarianism” (Ferguson 1994: 393). He observes that in the context of colonial dissent sermons provided “most of the rhetorical tools” that were used “to justify later rebellion” (Ferguson 1994: 354) and explains this as follows: Distinctions between American virtue and English corruption constitute an increasing element in colonial discourse, but American leaders quickly grasp that it is safer to express these distinctions in religious rather than in political terms. Ecclesiastical differences are acceptable under liberty of conscience; political disputes raise the unacceptable prospect of faction. (Ferguson 1994: 395) This does of course have an influence on what he calls “the evolution of a language of dissent” (Ferguson 1994: 392): Religious thought brings its own dynamic to the deepening political crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. Christian polarities contribute less to an understanding Arguments from Above 7 2 One of the most memorable examples in Ferguson’s book-length contribution to The Cambridge History of American Literature is his pointing out that the motto “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” is neither from Jefferson nor from Franklin (who proposed it for the Great Seal of the United States). The phrase “is already on the lips of John Bradshaw, the regicide Judge who, as president of the parliamentary tribunal in 1649, refuses Charles I the right to speak before he is sentenced” (Ferguson 1994: 395). of complex problems in diplomacy and more to explanations based on an absolute difference. (Ferguson 1994: 394). As a further consequence, according to Ferguson, “[t]he answer, for many of those who seek independence, comes through God’s presence in colonial politics: heavenly authority supersedes an earthly King” (Ferguson 1994: 395). 2 Curiously these not-so-secular arguments of the Revolution as the historical watershed of American dissent in many ways provide a role model for the later domestic reform movements of the American Renaissance. To be sure, inspired by the Enlightenment, the original Founding Fathers moved away from such inspiration ‘from above’. They even had rather nasty things to say about religion. Thus John Adams writes about the formation of the American governments in Defense of the Constitutions of Government (1787): It will never be pretended that any persons employed had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven. … it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. (qtd. in Ferguson 1994: 388, Ferguson’s elision) And Jefferson writes in a letter of 1817 to Adams about “building a wall of separation between Church and State. […] My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.” To which he adds: “I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character” (qtd. in Ferguson 1994: 419). Still this is mild compared to what Tom Paine has to say in The Age of Reason (1794-1795), particularly in “Chapter VI: Of the True Theology”, where he claims that the Old Testament is making God Almighty act like a passionate man, that killed his son, when he could not revenge himself any other way; […] a man would be hanged that did such a thing […] The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself […] I here close the subject. I have shewn in all the foregoing parts of this work that the Bible and Testament are impositions and forgeries […] (Lauter 2002: 953-54). These statements bespeak a very secular view of the political debate. Yet it is crucial to understand that the values of the Founding Fathers as manifested in their legacy were soon seen very critically because of the Sämi Ludwig 8 conflict over slavery, when enlightened rationality was perverted by apologist arguments. Jefferson, the man who personifies the American Enlightenment and who wrote the Declaration of Independence is at the heart of this contradiction because he was at the same time a slave owner (and worse, as we now know from DNA evidence). Actually, four out of the first seven presidents owned slaves. Thus the federal American state was at the same time reviled both in the South, which asked for more States’ rights, and in the North, which found the Constitution a slavery-condoning document. This renewed resistance to institutional power over the question of slavery was a step back in the sense that it repeated older colonial gestures of resistance against government. Moreover, in the wake of the Second Great Awakening such gestures even hark further back to acts of non-conformity against the established Church. As a consequence the civic sphere remained conceptually entangled with religious motivation. My particular interest is in the internalized and conceptualized American culture of dissent. In this article I want to discuss how dissent becomes generalized beyond religion and political independence and turns against itself in the many reform movements of the American Renaissance, in which zealous reformers do nothing less than attack their own state. I am particularly interested in how the many reformers active during that period justified their work. The first half of the nineteenth century in America was a hotbed of reform movements that dealt with issues of education, class difference and utopian communities, gender and women’s suffrage, slavery and abolitionism, etc. There was much dissent to be voiced, but how exactly was it expressed? On what kind of arguments was its legitimacy based? Why exactly were certain conditions unacceptable and had to be changed, according to the reformers? What were their motivations? This survey will mainly focus on equal rights for women and on abolitionism. Its main sources are standard collections such as the Heath Anthology of American Literature and survey articles in literary histories. Thus, rather than discovering new or formerly hidden evidence, this article wants to focus on a corpus of representative views in American collections that define the field and provide the ‘American heritage’ with identity, with the very conceptual material that defines its tradition. We will see that the arguments for reform in the early nineteenth century are usually metaphysically grounded rather than based on Humanism, Enlightenment, Rationalism, or even worldly Common Sense. The dominant justification is that God would disagree with the present conditions because they do not conform to the absolute truths of the Bible. Arguments from Above 9 2. Emerson, Noyes, Child It is important to understand the importance of Transcendentalism for the zeitgeist of the period. Emersonian idealism sets the tone. Crucially it provides no criticism of religious inspiration but criticism of the Church only. Thus in his Harvard “Divinity School Address” (1838), Emerson states that “The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct” (Bode 1981: 82). Yet at the same time he suggests that “the doors to the temple stand open, night and day before every man” (Bode 1981: 76), and later: “Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (Bode 1981: 88). This transcendentalist argument provides an interesting kind of psychologizing: the external inspiration from a God above is translated into a divine intuition from within. As my examples of the different strategies of reformist argumentation in the American Renaissance will show, the degree of religious literalness varies in the different cases. Of particular interest is the quality of ‘secularization’ achieved. Among the utopian experiments of the period we find a rather Christian kind of socialism. John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1880), for example, was the founder and head of the Oneida Community - a more successful enterprise than the better-known Brook Farm. In his History of American Socialisms (1870), Noyes describes the ‘perfectionism’ of his project as follows: […] they kept their position as simple believers in Christianity, and steadfastly criticized Fourierism. […] the Oneida Community really issued from a conjunction between the Revivalism of Orthodoxy and the Socialism of Unitarianism. In 1846 […] the little church at Putney began cautiously to experiment in Communism. (Inge 1987: 218) The new enterprise is an interesting combination of orthodoxy and radicalism, ultimately based on notions of an extended Christian family: “Gradually a little school of believers gathered around him” (Inge 1987: 218). This is a far stretch from the atheist ‘Communism’ we find on other continents. Also when it comes to reforms in the wider society and issues of poverty and class, religious inspiration remained powerful - think of the Salvation Army, founded in Britain but also highly influential in the United States. Religious caritas is also an important motivation of sentimental compassion at this time. Thus in her “Letter 14” (1842) of the Letters from New York, which she wrote for the Boston Courier, Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) describes the wretched lives of young adolescents and then comments that “angels weep over the slow murder of a human soul” (Lauter 2002: 1796). To her, social misery is a simple outrage to heaven. Human identity is a matter of godly essence rather than one of secularized humanist psychology. Sämi Ludwig 10 3. Women’s rights: Grimké, Sojourner Truth, Stanton One of the most fertile fields to find good examples justifying reform is the realm of women’s rights. Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) offers the following argument about female identity in one of her Letters to Catherine Beecher (1837): Let us examine the account of her creation. ‘And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.’ Not as a gift - for Adam immediately recognized her as a part of himself - (‘this is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh’) - a companion and equal, not one hair’s breadth beneath him in the majesty and glory of her moral being; not placed under his authority as a subject, but by his side, on the same platform of human rights, under the same government of God only. (Lauter 2002: 2022, original italics) The equality demanded is equality under God, who is the maker and ruler over this new relationship. An even closer acquaintanceship with God can be found in Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883), whom Harriett Beecher-Stowe had chiasmically called the “Lybian Sibyl” in the Atlantic Monthly (Lauter 2002: 2023). In her reminiscences of Sojourner Truth, published in 1881, Frances D. Gage quotes the black feminist as follows: “Whar did your Christ come from? […] From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do wid Him” (Lauter 2002: 2026). Here the demand for equality is based on a woman’s intercourse with God Himself as the very origin of Christianity! Another good source on women’s rights is the account of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) on the important 1848 Seneca Falls convention, which she organized. She says about the context of this event that it “was held in the Methodist Church” and observes that “a religious earnestness dignified all the proceedings” (Lauter 2002: 2041). The result of this meeting was an interesting document, called “Declaration of Sentiment”, in which the participants basically reformulated the demands of the “Declaration of Independence” - with an emphasis on gender. In this rhetorically brilliant move, “man” was the offender instead of the King of England: “He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God” (Lauter 2002: 2044). This is a good illustration of how the argument, even when it borrows from the republican nationalism of the revolutionary period, takes recourse to God. Though Church and State may be separate entities, the inspirational ethics, the arguments for dissent, remain closely connected. The example further confirms that not even the rhetoric of the American Enlightenment can separate itself from metaphysics. Arguments from Above 11 4. White abolitionists: Stowe, Grimke, Garrison, Thoreau Turning from women’s rights to abolitionism - the most obvious field of dissent during this period - one often finds the same group of writers dissenting. And again, there is a predominantly religious motivation in their opinions. The most prominent case is possibly Harriett Beecher-Stowe (1811-1896), who came from a family of ministers and who wrote in her preface to the readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that she wanted to “send you off edified as if you had been hearing a sermon” (Lauter 2002: 2477). Her very writing against slavery is like a sermon and makes her assume the male prerogative of a minister. She is also famous for the claim that God inspired her book: “God wrote it” (Lauter 2002: 2477). In the Heath Anthology, Angelina Grimké can be found under the abolitionist heading as well, this time arguing against slavery in her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836). Already the title gives away her metaphysical orientation. Slavery “is contrary to the example and precepts of our holy and merciful Redeemer, and his apostles” (Lauter 2002: 1807). The enemies of abolitionism are simply un-Christian: In the great mob in Boston, last autumn, when the books and papers of the Anti-Slavery Society were thrown out of the windows of their office, one individual laid hold of the Bible and was about tossing it out to the ground, when another reminded him that it was the Bible he had in his hand. ‘O! ‘this all one,’ he replied, and out went the sacred volume, along with the rest. (Lauter 2002: 1807-08) Grimké advises her Southern sisters: I would set the slave free, and then go to prison or pay the fine. If a law commands me to sin I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly. The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians. (Lauter 2002: 1810, original italics) Note her depreciating remark about “any human power”. Dissent does not take place within the law but against the law. For her, “Republicans and Christians” merge in a single entity. This is the vision of a religiously charged political system in which protestant dissent and the republican drive for independence together fight institutionalized rules by which both feel oppressed. When Grimké gives the women of the South a long list of role models who have “stood up in all the dignity and strength of moral courage to be the leaders of the people”, Biblical names predominate: Miriam, Deborah, Esther, Mary Magdalene […] (Lauter 2002: 1810-11). Male abolitionists cite similar patterns of inspiration. Thus William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) also opposes the institutions of the state and calls the Sämi Ludwig 12 American Constitution a “covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell” (Lauter 2002: 1787). His abolitionism was strongly influenced by the Great Awakening. Note that in this statement he criticizes a document of the Enlightenment by using religious imagery, calling the Constitution a “covenant”. Another famous white abolitionist, John Brown, is not directly quoted in the Heath Anthology but represented in “A Plea for John Brown” (1860) by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who writes about Brown: “He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for the most part, see nothing at all - the Puritans. It would be in vain to kill him” (Lauter 2002: 1723). This aura makes him immortal - he is above human judgment: “He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist” (Lauter 2002: 1729). Thoreau further describes Brown as “rising above them literally by a whole body, […] the spectacle is a sublime one …” (Lauter 2002: 1729, original italics). The allusion is of course to the ascension of Christ: “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an Angel of Light” (Lauter 2002: 1736). The martyr of Abolitionism turns into a Christ figure, connected to the son of God through the transcendental circularity of a “chain”. Further below, I will again discuss the conceptual repercussions of such circular causalities in the work of Emerson. 5. Black abolitionists: Walker, Garnet, Douglass, Harper Black abolitionists do not necessarily argue in ways that are very different. Thus in his early “Appeal […] to the Coloured Citizens of the World” (1829), David Walker (1785-1830) states: “Can our condition be any worse? […] wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty! ! ! ! ! ” (Lauter 2002: 1778, original italics and exclamation marks). Like Brown, Walker is cynical about the achievements of the enlightened Republic of the Founding Fathers. And he claims “that God Almighty is the sole proprietor or master of the WHOLE human family” (Lauter 2002: 1779, original italics and capitals). Again God is the ultimate authority who can unsettle the system of bourgeois property ownership. Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882), a Presbyterian minister, observes in his “Address to the Slaves of the Unites States of America” (Buffalo 1843): “The bleeding captive pleaded his innocence, and pointed to Christianity who stood weeping at the cross. […] Nearly three millions of your fellow-citizens are prohibited by law and public opinion […] from reading the Book of Life” (Lauter 2002: 1903). Again slavery is criticized as an outrage against Christianity. Moreover, knowledge does not come from Enlightenment progress Arguments from Above 13 but from the Good Book, which is considered the source of true revelation. Garnet continues: God will not receive slavery, nor ignorance, nor any other state of mind, for love and obedience to him. Your condition does not absolve you from your moral obligation. […] Liberty is a spirit sent out from God, and like its great Author, it is no respecter of persons. (Lauter 2002: 1904) Notice the ontological status of liberty - it is not a matter of humanist definition but a spiritual notion above the respect for persons, “sent out from God”, and thus anchored in the old Protestant definitions of religious autonomy. Compared with many of the previous dissenters, Garnet’s rival Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) proves an outstanding abolitionist precisely because he does not argue metaphysically. For him, Enlightenment values stand higher than religion. He provides one of the few secular diatribes against slavery, stating in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? ” (1852): For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny, and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke, put together, have done. (Lauter 2002: 1893, original italics) This praise of Enlightenment thinkers and values is exceptional among abolitionist activists! Later Douglass even argues that “the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble […] plain, commonsense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law” (Lauter 2002: 1897, original capitals). These statements stand for a firm belief in secular liberalism, appealing to human values of common sense, as understood by “you and I”. They point to a humanist interpretation of the Enlightenment. The abolitionist argument returns, however, to a religious ontology with the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911). She writes in “On the Twenty-Fourth Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society” (1857): “The law of liberty is the law of God, and is antecedent to all human legislation. It existed in the mind of Deity when He hung the first world upon its orbit and gave it liberty to gather light from the central sun” (Lauter 2002: 1936). Again liberty is emphasized as the crucial concern of Abolitionism, and it is subjected to God’s definition as “antecedent” to human organization. The main argument for freeing the slaves is not merely the simple fact that they are human within some worldly framework of secular Humanism, but it comes from above, powered by godly authority as the crucial origin of the law and central focus of liberty. Sämi Ludwig 14 6. Metaphysical Republicanism: Fuller, Garnet There is a curious blend of proud American Republicanism and religious legitimation, which shows how strongly these two supposedly separate strands of tradition are entangled in American thought. Thus in her “Dispatch 18” (1848? ) to the New York Daily Tribune, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) starts off with a gesture of looking down on a decadent Europe of ancients régimes : Eighteen hundred years of this Christian culture in these European Kingdoms […] Modern Europe is the sequel to that history, […] this hollow England, […] this poor France, […] lost Poland […] - the public failure seems amazing, seems monstrous. (Lauter 2002: 1667) This is a reason for her to praise the progressive United States: “Yet, oh Eagle, […] Though wert to be the advance-guard of Humanity, the herald of all Progress; […] Liberty of the Press works well, and […] checks and balances naturally evolve from it which suffice to its government” (Lauter 2002: 1668). Still, she ends her ruminations with complaints about this horrible cancer of Slavery and this wicked War, that has grown out of it. […] lo! my Country the darkest offender, because with the least excuse, foresworn to the high calling with which she was called, - no champion of the rights of men, but a robber and a jailer; the scourge hid behind her banner; her eyes fixed, not on the stars, but on the possessions of other men. How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! […] God strengthen them and make them wise to achieve their purpose! (Lauter 2002: 1668-69) Despite her thorough knowledge of enlightened social organization, Fuller does not dare to leave it there and rely on human understanding. She curiously concludes her Dispatch with her eyes fixed “on the stars” and feels the necessity to invoke a blessing from God. A similar combination of Abolitionism and Revolutionary rhetoric can be found in the writings of Garnet, who was already quoted earlier. In the same “Address to the Slaves of the Unites States of America”, he also writes: “You had better all die - die immediately, than live as slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon posterity. […] rather die freemen, than live to be the slaves” (Lauter 2002: 1905, original italics). This is of course a deliberate use of the rhetoric of Pat Henry in his famous speech of 1775, arguing for American independence in the Virginia House of Burgess. But Garnet borrows from more Founding Fathers: “Brethren, arise, arise! ” he argues, “Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. […] Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! […] Trust in the living God. …” (Lauter 2002: 1906-08, original italics). Here the reference is to the urgency of Tom Paine’s revolutionary calls in Common Sense (1776): “Now is the seed-time of Continental union, faith and honor” (Lauter 2002: 936). The ideals of the Arguments from Above 15 Young Republic still provide some guidance to follow - yet at the same time Garnet feels the necessity to invoke God. 7. The “universal soul within or behind”: Emerson’s Metaphysical Playpen The conclusion from these examples is that during the American Renaissance attitudes towards the Enlightenment generally remained strongly embedded in religious convictions. A good metaphor to illustrate this convergence of religion and politics may be the image of Emerson’s “Circles” or his notion of “Circumference”, in which everything is interconnected through a chain of feedback loops. This ecological model of interaction is ultimately imagined in a concentric sense of circles that are like the spheres in a Ptolemaic universe. As Emerson writes in Nature (1836): Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, […] This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. (Lauter 2002: 1524) The famous Transcendentalist argues in terms of a diluted kind of typology, i.e., of an absolute type of super-individualist reason that does not emanate from dialogic human cognition but merely reflects the qualities of “a universal soul within or behind”. Elsewhere he calls this entity the ‘Oversoul’. The bottom-up humanist reason of the Enlightenment (Kant’s famous sapere aude! ) and the private inspiration of the Calvinist elect (in the sense of Puritan introspection) merge in the same Transcendental circle of containment. Thus further on in Nature, Emerson writes: “A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or circumference of the invisible world” (Lauter 2002: 1527). The origin is ultimately metaphysical - the ontology Platonic. For Emerson, dialogue is a matter of such circularity rather than interaction. Hence in “Circles” (1841) he writes: “Conversation is a game of circles” (Bode 1981: 233). And later he explains: “The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, […] things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact” (Bode 1981: 235-36). Interactional influence is suspended - note that this is significantly different from any assumptions on which the Enlightenment ‘separation of powers’ is based. For Emerson, there is but a centered, single force of motivation left. Consequently his individualism is divinely homologized - a pluralism that is based on a common, proto-religious truth. As “fact” is embedded in “spirit”, historical agency is embedded in a playpen of metaphysics. Sämi Ludwig 16 In view of this reformist discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century, maybe the American Renaissance really was a ‘rebirth’ - in the sense of ‘born-again’ theories, as a step back to pre-Enlightenment values - a lassoing-type of circumference of the American Enlightenment by confusedly (and often less confusedly) Divine powers from above. One gets the impression that for the reformers of the American Renaissance, the main reason for their dissent was like the righteousness of God. The examples of dissent during this period listed above show that the ontology of a religious weltbild of belief has not really been overcome by the Enlightenment values so strongly associated with the preceding American Revolution. Instead there is a blending, a transfer of spiritual concepts into the civic sphere. No wonder Robert P. Forbes suggests that there is an “Evangelical Enlightenment” in America (Forbes 1998). 8. Conclusion: “a majority of one” beyond negotiation In order to come to some more general conclusions that connect dissent during the American Renaissance with the present, this survey ends with a last example from America’s most famous dissenter, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and his “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) - a document that is still being invoked by American political activists of all colors. There he writes: I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectively withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one […] I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already. (Lauter 2002: 1678) Again, God is invoked as the ultimate authority, one that overrules all of the constitutional procedures of democracy. Being a “majority” has nothing to do with human numbers or secular politics but with being “right”. Considering the importance of this document in American political history and its impact on American democracy leads us to a more general set of questions: What kind of coherence results from such acts of non-conformity? Where and what is the ‘end’ of dissent? And how does this influence the functioning of such a democracy of dissent? This is what Thoreau has to say about participation in American democracy: “Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined” (Lauter 2002: 1681). Like the choice of a religious creed, affiliation with “any incorporated society” (which also stands for ‘the State’ in its most Arguments from Above 17 3 Gret Haller considers “das Bekenntnis zu (irgend)einer Religion geradezu Voraussetzung für die Integration in das amerikanische Volk” (Haller 2002: 41), i.e., the commitment to some religion is really a condition for integration in America. 4 See Gret Haller’s discussion of the meaning of ‘civil society’ in the United States (Haller 2002: 190). Like German Zivilgesellschaft (but unlike Zivilbevölkerung, which is opposed to the military), the American civil society is opposed to the government institutions of the state. 5 See my on-line article “Volunteers of America: From Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to the Coalition of the Willing”. 6 She sees this also in the context of neo-liberal demands against state control and hence talks about an “Ideologie der Entstaatlichung” (Haller 2002: 186), i.e., an ideology of diminishing the state. 7 See as a contemporary example of this attitude the “dissent is patriotic : : blog”. general sense) is seen as a matter of ‘joining’, of voluntary membership. Though like Europeans, Americans are of course citizens of their own nation by default, this example suggests that their attitude towards it is one that very much resembles voluntary affiliation. Thus surprised foreigners have time and again noticed the many exotic rituals confirming and renewing the attachment of Americans to their own American symbols, institutions, and fellow compatriots. 3 The ‘Pledge of Alliance’ to the American flag is only the most obvious of these. A further symptom of this sense of choice and active joining is the fact that Americans are a nation of volunteers. I argue in another paper that this attitude is at the root of the great influence of ‘civil society’ and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in American political life. American volunteerism in turn can be traced back to Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius (1710). The original do-gooder in America in turn had a substantial influence on Benjamin Franklin’s schemes for improvement in colonial America. Hence the origins of such ‘civic’ organization 4 are in religious missionary work and in social formations that opposed themselves against an alien and incompetent colonial government. 5 The problem remains, however, that “NGOs have no democratic legitimation” (as one participant recently put it at a conference on utopia in Freiburg/ Br.). As Gret Haller observes, it may be significant in this context that Americans usually do not talk about the state but merely about ‘government’ and ‘governing’. 6 The head of a state is still called “governor”, a term reminiscent of colonial administration. This naming confirms attitudes of negative wariness against government rather than positive identification with the state. 7 National identity is rather located with ‘the people’ and a patriotism of certainties often provided by religion - a differentiation which further suggests that the American separation of Church and State is unlike the European one. Whereas in Europe, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and its rule of cuius regio, eius religio, this separation has been a matter of State over Church, in the United States the relationship has been the other way round, Sämi Ludwig 18 8 Powerful evidence of this attitude and its political consequences today can still be found in a recent series of articles by Diana Henriques in The New York Times, in which she discusses the privileges of religious organizations in the United States. She illustrates how these groups even stand above the law when it comes to the supervision of schools, safety regulations and professional qualifications, union membership, medical coverage, the use of taxpayer money for religious instruction in prisons, and of course tax exemption for the religious organizations themselves … 9 Paul Lauter made this remark during the discussion of my paper at the 2006 EAAS conference in Cyprus. a rule of noli me tangere! - in which the Church is prioritized over the State (see Haller 2002: 38-41). Hence from a European perspective, American secularization has been incomplete. 8 As I have illustrated, rather than being eradicated, many religious habits have been transferred into the secular realm of politics, where they still survive. Here is an example of this from Ferguson: The primary architect of the separation of church and state, Jefferson is also first to ply the language of civil religion with complete effectiveness. He supplants the clergy by succeeding them in his own inaugural address. […] Elected, Jefferson delivers his own lay sermon. (Ferguson 1994: 425) By secularizing the established tradition of an election sermon, Jefferson remained within the discursive habit of the old, religious framework. It can be argued that we still find echoes of this when contemporary presidents end their ‘State of the Union’ addresses with an invocation of God. In view of such converging formations, the question is not about literal belief here. To be sure, as Paul Lauter has rightly suggested, there is a major difference between the religious convictions of the Grimké sisters and the ones of Thoreau. 9 But in the American type of secularization, this difference becomes fairly insignificant as long as the rhetoric remains basically the same. Whether the attitude of righteousness that motivates dissent is literally metaphysical or transcendentally vague: it remains autonomous in either case, prioritizing moral absolutes. Telling consequences of this proto-religious mode of discourse can be found in the foreign policy of the contemporary United States, which is, like the domestic ethos of ‘commitment’ (which has a much deeper ring in the United States than mere reliability), predominantly moralistically inspired by a rallying around concepts, as the recent effort to create a ‘coalition of the willing’ in the Iraq shows. Rather than the ornery European way of negotiating a solution, the American way is one of finding and implementing the ‘right’ solution - which is precisely beyond negotiation because it is right and supposed to transcend all the Emersonian ‘circles’ of opinion. Its values stand above the procedure - they are not negotiable as a result of procedural outcome. Hence the suspicion that American reform and American political commitment often still remains a Arguments from Above 19 matter of monologic inspiration ‘from above’ rather than a dialogic compromise among human beings - a discursive pattern that often more generally determines the nature of behavioral formation in the United States. References Bode, Carl, ed. (1981). The Portable Emerson. New York: Penguin Books. “dissent is patriotic : : blog.” [Online] http: / / dissentispatriotic.net/ serendipity/ . (accessed 1 November, 2007) Ferguson, Robert A. (1994). “The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820”. In: Sacvan Bercovitch (gen. ed.). The Cambridge History of American Literature. Volume One: 1590-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. 345-537. Foner, Eric (1998). The Story of American Freedom. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co. Forbes, Robert P. (1998). “Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment”. In John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (eds.). Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press. 68-108. Haller, Gret (2002). Die Grenzen der Soldarität. Europa und die USA im Umgang mit Staat, Nation und Religion. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. English version: (2007). The Limits of Atlanticism: Perceptions of State, Nation and Religion in Europe and the United States. Trl. Alan Nothnagle. Oxford/ New York: Berghahn Books. Henriques, Diana B. (2006). “In God’s Name: As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation”. The New York Times [Online], October 8, 2006. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2006/ 10/ 08/ business/ 08religious.html. Henriques, Diana B. (2006). “In God’s Name: Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights”. The New York Times [Online], October 9, 2006. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2006/ 10/ 09/ business/ 09religious.html. Henriques, Diana B. (2006). “In God’s Name: Religious Programs Expand, So Do Tax Breaks”. The New York Times [Online], October 10, 2006. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2006/ 10/ 10/ business/ 10religious.html. Henriques, Diana B. (2006). “In God’s Name: Religion-Based Tax Breaks: Housing to Paychecks to Books”. The New York Times [Online], October 11, 2006. http: / / www. nytimes.com/ 2006/ 10/ 11/ business/ 11religious.html. Henriques, Diana B. (2006). “In God’s Name: Ministry’s Medical Program Is Not Regulated”. The New York Times [Online], October 20, 2006. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2006/ 10/ 20/ business/ 20religion.html. Henriques, Diana B., and Andrew Lehren (2006). “Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid For by Taxes”. The New York Times [Online], December 10, 2006. http: / / www.nytimes. com/ 2006/ 12/ 10/ business/ 10faith.html? ref=us. Inge, Thomas, ed. (1987). A Nineteenth-Century American Reader. Washington D.C.: United States Information Agency. Lauter, Paul (gen. ed.) (2002). The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. Fourth edition. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Ludwig, Sämi (2007). “Volunteers of America: From Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to the Coalition of the Willing”. EJAS. European Journal of American Studies [Online], put online May. 16, 2007. http: / / ejas.revues.org/ document1182.html. Sämi Ludwig 20 Luther, Martin (1520). “Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen”. [Online, accessed Feb. 7, 2007]. http: / / www.fordham.edu/ halsall/ source/ luther-freiheit.html. Mather, Cotton (1710). Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good that Is to Be Devised and Designed. Boston: Samuel Gerrish. Sämi Ludwig Université de Haute Alsace Mulhouse (France) 1 This essay is a revised and larger version of a lecture given at the 2007 meeting of the Austrian University Teachers of English association (AAUTE) in Salzburg. It was conceived as a response to the question posed by one of my colleagues at the University of Vienna, who teaches linguistics, whether American Studies was not an outdated imperialist endeavor. From early one, American Studies has undergone a serious crisis of legitimation, but given the current discussion at Austrian universities concerning the implementation of the EU-wide Bologna process, that is, the introduction of a three-tier academic grade model instead of the traditional two-cycle system (Magister and doctorate), the question about the relevance of American Studies, its theories and methods is to be taken seriously. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms: New Perspectives on American Studies Astrid M. Fellner The following essay focuses on recent developments in American Studies. It addresses the paradigmatic shift in the focus and method of analysis from a nation-state based type of area studies to a transnational American Studies which accounts for the many multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and products and the social, political, economic, linguistic, and cultural interconnections generated in the process. Arguing for a comparative American Studies that drawing on Cultural Studies theories operates with a transnational consciousness and pays attention to the multiple crossroads of cultures in the Americas, this article provides a rationale for a new approach to American Studies in Austria. It also proposes a variety of ways in which a transnational perspective can be incorporated into the teaching of American Studies at Austrian universities. 1 Introduction In her much-debated presidential address to the American Studies Association (ASA) in November 1998, Janice Radway questioned the usefulness of the name ‘American Studies’ in times of globalization, postmodernism, and conceptions of postnational identities. As she provocatively put it, “If the Astrid M. Fellner 22 2 The concept of ‘redrawing the boundaries’ alludes to Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds.) (1992). Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. In their introduction, the editors argue that “[t]he boundaries to be reckoned with in literary studies range from national, linguistic, historical, generation, and geographical to racial, ethnic, social, sexual, political, ethical, and religious” (Greenblatt and Gunn 1992: 4). notion of a bounded national territory and a concomitant national identity deriving isomorphically from it are called into question, why perpetuate a specifically ‘American’ studies? ” (Radway 1998: 16-17). Needless to say, Radway’s comments have elicited a series of responses that have tried to show in what ways the name ‘American Studies’ still is important and therefore should be retained. German Americanist Sabine Sielke (2004: 276), for instance, has powerfully argued that in view of the revitalization of American exceptionalism, cultural closure, Anglo-American ties and ‘nation building’, in view of the New Cold War that has been waged since 11 September 2001, Radway’s grave-digging was certainly premature. September 11, most U.S. Americanists believe, has underlined the importance of American Studies, but I agree with Sielke that if this discipline is to survive, “we might want to reconsider its scope” (Sielke 2004: 276). In this article, I intend to do precisely that: I will look at some new directions of the project of American Studies, offering a survey of recent revisionist theoretical stances and critical practices that have contributed to a reconceptualization of this field. Providing a brief summary of the history of the discipline of American Studies, I will elaborate on a paradigm shift that has occurred in the field in the 21 st century. The ‘transnational turn’ in American Studies has effected a redefinition of the field, which has entailed a redrawing of the conceptual and geographic boundaries of ‘America’ (cf. Fisher Fishkin 2005 and also Gross 2000). Emphasizing the need for American Studies to become even more international and comparative in Austria, I want to pursue two aims in this essay: First, I want to argue for the use of certain critical models that take into account the global and transnational dimensions of the study of the literatures and cultures of the United States. In particular, I want to show how the various methodologies and theories of Cultural Studies can provide new conceptual tools with which to analyze ‘America’. Secondly, I want to propose a shift in the meanings of ‘America’ from a Eurocentric understanding to a pan-American global framework that seeks to study the confluences and divergences of social, economic and cultural exchanges between the Americas. The name American Studies, as I want to show, can only be retained if we abandon the rhetorical malpractice of equating ‘America’ with the United States and redraw the boundaries to include other nations in the Western hemisphere. 2 Such a remapping of American Studies Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 23 3 I use the term ‘American Studies’ here to refer to the name of a particular area studies formulation in the U.S. academy. As I will explain later on, the institutional landscapes of American Studies in Austria and Germany are different. For more information on the history of American Studies in the United States, see Lucy Maddox (ed.) (1999). Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline and George Lipsitz’s (2001). American Studies in a Moment of Danger. For the history of American Studies in Germany, see Günther H. Lenz and Klaus J. Millich (eds.) (1995). American Studies in Germany. For further information on the development of American Studies in Europe, and especially in Austria, see Walter Hölbling’s (1999). “Coming into View: European Re-Visions of ‘America’ after 1945”. 4 Michael Denning has identified this question as the founding question of American Studies (cf. Denning 1996: 360). The question of the Americanness of the United States has, of course, deep roots within American history. Famously asked in 1782 by J.H. St. John de Crèvecoeur when he inquired “What then, is the American, this new man? ” (Lauter 2006: 930), the definition of the ‘American character’ has preoccupied critics of American culture since. that crosses borders may seem problematic in the daily reality of academia, as the traditional concepts of the discipline as well as the institutional organization of American Studies itself need to be reconfigured. In the last part of this paper, I will, therefore, turn to some practical implications of the preceding descriptions and explore in what ways such transnational American Studies approaches can be applied and practiced in classrooms at Austrian universities. History of American Studies As an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into the ‘Americanness’ of U.S. American identity, the rise of American Studies as an academic discipline in the United States is closely related to the emergence of the United States as a global power after World War II. 3 From beginning on, it has focused on cultural issues, analyzing the fundamental question of “What is American? ” 4 “The rise of [...] American Studies”, as J. Hillis Miller has argued, was part of an attempt “to create the unified national culture we do not in fact have” (Miller 1998: 59). With its focus on the problematic nature of American national identity, American Studies in its early form focused on the literary tradition. “America”, as Sacvan Bercovitch explains, was seen to have “a literary canon that embodied the national promise” (Bercovitch 1993: 363). In fact, the early studies in American Studies, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), and Alan Trachtenberg’s Brooklyn Bridge (1965) operated from within a national paradigm of the United States as a bounded geographical and political space. They also attempted to stress those characteristics of American identity that they considered unique national features. The approaches of American Studies scholarship that focused on the Puritan past as the origin of ‘American culture’ (see, for instance, Perry Miller’s Astrid M. Fellner 24 5 The crisis of American Studies following the late 1960s triggered a series of self-reflexive writings. Starting with Gene Wise’s essay “Paradigm Dramas in American Studies”, which was published in 1979, several articles and books have focused on the history of American Studies. In particular, the presidential addresses to the annual American Studies Association Meetings delivered by former ASA presidents, which are reprinted in the journal American Quarterly, have offered provocative statements on the various moments of crisis of American Studies. Commenting on the breaking apart of the coherency of American Studies in the US, German Americanist Heinz Ickstadt has observed that on an institutional level American Studies has “sacrificed itself […] for the benefit of its numerous off-spring”. As he adds, “With some polemical exaggeration one might say that it regains visible existence only once a year when participants in the convention of the American Studies Association shed their identities as members of English, history, ethnic studies, African American studies, Chicano studies, Native American studies, popular culture studies, women’s studies, gay studies, film studies, or performance studies departments or programs and out themselves as Americanists” (Ickstadt 2002: 551). 6 Clearly, the different institutional landscape of American Studies in Austria is related to the fact that students who study English and American Studies often pursue a teaching degree in EFL, which explains why American Studies is mostly taught in English departments. 7 In Austria, there are separate American Studies departments at the universities of Innsbruck and Graz. In Vienna, Salzburg, and Klagenfurt, ‘Amerikanistik’ is a subsidiary of larger project to study America’s “Errand into the Wilderness”) or established a set of myths and symbols that constituted a model of democratic nationality were fundamental in establishing the paradigm of ‘American Exceptionalism’, which dominated the study of American culture for a long time. In its early forms, American Studies, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin has observed, “had little room for the dissenting voices of minorities and women, and a fixation on American innocence blinded many scholars to the country’s ambitious quest for empire” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 19). The redefinitions that followed during the 1970s were responses to the ideological pressures coming from Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, and postcolonial theories. As a result, the field has changed significantly since, and curricula and scholarship, especially in the United States, have responded adequately to the demise of the mythical cultural ‘consensus’ theory of early forms of American Studies. Understandings of American culture shaped by the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and other movements for social justice and change in American society have contributed to a new conception of ‘culture’. At the same time, however, the establishments of interdisciplinary programs such as Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American Studies, and so on, at U.S. American universities have in some ways led to a falling apart of ‘American Studies’ as academic programs or departments. 5 In Europe, American Studies has often been pursued as area studies, located primarily in traditional disciplines like English or history. 6 Efforts to establish American Studies as separate departments or degree programs in Germany and Austria have been rather slow. 7 At the same time, however, Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 25 departments of English and American Studies. In the summer of 2007, American Studies celebrated its 50 th anniversary in Innsbruck. On the current situation of American Studies in Austria, see Susanne Mettauer (2006). “American Studies in Austria” and (2005). “The Institutionalization of American Studies at Austrian Universities: The Innsbruck Model”. 8 Nicole Waller has made a similar observation about the situation of American Studies in Germany. As she says, “Ironically, the German academic conservatism which precluded the nationwide institution of ethnic or women’s studies thus indirectly nudged German Americanists to take in what would otherwise have been left out completely, thereby crossing disciplinary boundaries with comparative ease and creating a field which was becoming more dynamic, experimental, and suspect” (Waller 2005: 233-34). 9 In their Orientierung Anglistik/ Amerikanistik, Nünning and Jucker stress this focus on cultural issues in ‘Amerikanistik’: “In Teilen der Amerikanistik herrscht bis heute ein anderes Selbstverständnis vor als in der Anglistik, die sich bis vor nicht allzu langer Zeit vor allem als eine Fremdsprachenphilologie verstand. Bereits der Begriff American Studies verdeutlicht, dass sich die ‘Amerikastudien’ nicht nur mit Sprache und Literatur Nordamerikas, sondern mit der gesamten amerikanischen Kultur beschäftigen” (Nünning and Jucker 1999: 141). since fields of study like ethnic studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies or popular culture studies were not institutionalized as programs or departments at Austrian universities, Austrian Americanists have been able to move into these fields under the guise of American Studies. 8 Especially within the contexts of multiculturalism and Cultural Studies, the studies of minority cultures and popular cultures have become of great interest to many scholars and have attracted many students. The proliferation and the popularity of Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and Film Studies in Austria have, therefore, also greatly contributed to a rise of interest in ‘Amerikanistik’ or ‘Amerikastudien’, as American Studies is called in German. To be sure, ‘Amerikanistik’ at many Austrian universities has not been identical with American Studies; it has often meant American literature. Still, there has always been a focus on cultural issues in U.S. American society in Austrian American Studies classes, and the interdisciplinary approach to the study of the United States has been stressed. 9 For a long time, ‘Landeskunde’, even though an appendix to the mostly literary studies and linguistics oriented English departments, has offered a space in which to study ‘American culture’. As I will show, however, the rise of Cultural Studies in English and American Studies departments has offered new possibilities for the study of ‘American culture’. The Common Ground of American Studies and Cultural Studies Methodologically speaking, with its interdisciplinary focus, American Studies, one could argue, has from its beginning on been culture studies. It has always focused on cultural issues and has been preoccupied with the definition of ‘American culture’. Even before the cultural turn affected literary Astrid M. Fellner 26 10 J. Hillis Miller refers to an “almost universal” shift in literary studies from language “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base in the sense of institutionalization, conditions of production, technology, distribution, and consumption of ‘cultural products’” (Miller 1987: 283). 11 Fluck cites the example of Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (cf. Fluck 2007: 63). In his afterword to the 35 th Anniversary edition of this key American Studies text, Marx himself refers to the cultural radicalism of this work: “The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals” (Marx 1999: 383). studies in the late 1980s and 1990s, American Studies was concerned with the vexing issue of the relationship between literary texts and the contexts from which they come. 10 As many critics have pointed out, by offering cultural readings of literary texts, the development of American Studies anticipated many of the interdisciplinary concerns that became important in contemporary cultural criticism (cf. Ickstadt 2002: 546 and Lipsitz 1990: 622). As Heinz Ickstadt (2002: 546) explains, […] the first and second generations of American studies scholars, although ideologically at odds with the formalism of the New Critics, nevertheless used their strategies either to practice close reading of the literary text as a form of cultural analysis or to recognize the text’s cultural meaning in the analysis of its mythic structure. While scholars of the so-called myth-and-symbol school, like Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, explored mythic frameworks offering rather conservative accounts on ‘American’ national myths, they nevertheless asked “critical questions about the relationship between the social construction of cultural categories and power relations in American society” (Lipsitz 1990: 622). More importantly, they offered descriptions of American culture “as a modern culture with a specific potential for subversion and negation” (Fluck 2007: 62). Probing into the possibility of resistance in American culture, the founding fathers of American Studies identified a series of myths, but, as Winfried Fluck stresses, on a deeper level they also showed that “the major works of American literature are characterized by a unique potential for radical resistance” (Fluck 2007: 63). 11 It is this view of the importance of ‘culture’ as a site that opens up the possibility of resistance that aligns the American Studies project with the tradition of Cultural Studies. Identifying the common ground of American Studies and Cultural Studies, Michael Denning observes that the obsessive “concern for the character of Americans” of early American Studies could be seen as “the original ‘identity politics’” of the United States (Denning 1996: 273). The search for the ‘American character’ inherent in the works of the founding generation of American Studies scholars led to the importance of the revolutionary potential of the marginal subject in the analy- Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 27 sis of cultural identities in the new American culture studies in the 1970s. Seen from this perspective, American Studies and Cultural Studies share the general view of culture as a site of radical critique. Even though the early generation of American Studies scholars did not develop an explicit methodology concerning the approach to culture, Henry Nash Smith started a debate in the 1950s on the theory and practice of American Studies. In his “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method? ” he not only offered his well-known definition of the new “non-discipline” for which it would be impossible to devise an interdisciplinary method, but he also defined American Studies as “the study of American culture, past and present, as a whole” (Smith 1957: 1). In 1961, Sigmund Skard, one of the European founding fathers of American Studies, put more emphasis on national concerns in his definitions of this emerging interdisciplinary field. He called for “efforts to build up a systematic knowledge and understanding of America and its civilization as a connected whole, particularly in those fields - human geography, history, politics, law, religion, and literature - which constitute a national culture” (Skard 1961: 7). Both definitions point to a social understanding of culture that does not limit the study of culture to the works and practices of artistic and intellectual development, but views cultural analysis very much like British cultural materialist Raymond Williams as a “description of a particular way of life” (Williams 1961: 57). Famously using the word ‘culture’ to mean “a whole way of life” (Williams 1958: 6), Williams insisted that the state of a cultural period could not be studied by only reading acclaimed works of literature but also by analyzing the “structure of feeling”, the cultural values and attitudes that a group or society shares (Williams 1961: 48). Through the analysis of a wide range of cultural topics, the identification of some governing principles and myths through which national identity could be defined, and the incorporation of an oppositional perspective within American society, American Studies had, therefore, always been concerned with the analysis of ‘culture’ as a way of life. Stressing the democratization of culture through the participation of common people, American Studies from its inception has had similar concerns as European cultural theory. As George Lipsitz (1990: 622) explains, ethnography and folklore studies by New-Deal-supported scholars, the ‘cult of the common man’ pushed by Popular Front Marxism, and the use of ‘American Exceptionalism’ to stem the country’s drift toward involvement in World War II, all combined to focus scholarly attention upon the contours and dimensions of American Culture. However, as Lipsitz is quick to point out, for all their sensitivity to the function of language as a metaphorical construct that is laden with ideological meanings, the early scholars of the myth-and-symbol school made “sweeping Astrid M. Fellner 28 12 Bruce Kuklick’s 1972 article “Myth and Symbol in American Studies” was one of the first texts to offer a critique of the myth-and-symbol school. Kuklick, according to Gene Wise, was an important early voice in the criticism of “the concept of culture itself, and its usage in American Studies” (319). In his article, Kuklick “was to take on the symbol-myth-image school of explanation, particularly its habit of reading the whole culture from inside literary texts” (Wise 1979: 320). generalizations about society based upon images in relatively few elite literary texts, and they never adequately theorized the relationship between cultural texts and social action” (Lipsitz 1990: 623). 12 Despite its strong focus on interdisciplinarity, American Studies in its early phase lacked a clearly defined theoretical approach and identified the distinctive features of what was taken to be a homogenous ‘American culture’. When in 1979 Gene Wise reviewed the emerging anthropological approach within American Studies in his seminal article “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement”, he called for a new American Studies that would be pluralistic, self-reflexive, comparative, and cross-cultural. Wise expressed his faith in “the promise of perhaps another generation in the ‘new culture studies’” (Wise 1979: 336). He was certain that the new American culture studies, as he termed it, would have a more differentiated view of the concept of ‘culture’: We have moved beyond the block assumption that there is a single holistic ‘American Culture’, expressed in ‘The American Mind’, to a more discriminating consciousness that contemporary cultures function on several different levels, and in several different ways. We are less inclined now to take readings from a single vantage point on The American Experience; instead, we look upon America from a variety of different, often competing, perspectives - popular culture, black culture, the culture of women, youth culture, the culture of the aged, Hispanic-American culture, American Indian culture, material culture, the culture of poverty, folk culture, the culture of regionalism, the culture of academe, the culture of literature, the culture of professionalism, and so on. (Wise 1979: 319) Wise’s predictions of a more pluralist approach to ‘American culture’ that would be comparativist and cross-cultural were prophetic. In the 1980s, “the spectre of European cultural theory” began to haunt American Studies (Lipsitz 1990: 616). Poststructuralist theory, new historicism, feminist theory, critical race theory and postcolonial theory have radically transformed the study of ‘American culture’. These theories have not only broadened the scope of cultural texts but have also enabled new approaches to their study. As many scholars have pointed out, the relations between American Studies and European theory were uneasy at first, but British Cultural Studies, as Günter Lenz has put it, “seemed to offer new answers to the political and theoretical questions that deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the various Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 29 13 For more information on the history of Cultural Studies in the United States, see Lawrence Grossberg, (1996). “Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies”. 14 Hall’s anti-essentialist position concerning identity stresses that cultural identity is organized around points of difference which include identifications of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality nationality, political position, etc. Following Hall, the meaning of Americanness then is unstable and subject to continual change. The apparent unity of identity is achieved through the articulation of different elements that under other socio-political and historical circumstances could be re-articulated in different ways. For the notion of articulation, see Hall’s (1986). “On Postmodernism and Articulation”. modes of literary theory had posed, provoked, and left unresolved” (Lenz 2002: 461-62). American Studies as Cultural Studies The Cultural Studies approach from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which became popular in the U.S. with the famous ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990, affected the study of American culture in crucial ways. There were significant connections between British Cultural Studies and the American culture studies that Wise had proposed, but Cultural Studies provided new tools with which to analyze ‘America’ as a multi-faceted, pluralistic place in which ‘culture’ is seen as being produced and received in different ways by different groups of people. 13 It also contributed to the much-needed abandonment of the traditional notion of exceptionalism that had previously dominated the study of American culture. For Lawrence Grossberg, one of the key practitioners of Cultural Studies in the United States, “cultural studies is built upon a conflicted and conflictual theory of culture” (Lawrence 1997: 294). The study of ‘American culture’ within a Cultural Studies framework, then, entails a view of ‘American culture’ as contested, consisting of different histories by different groups of people that struggle to be heard and involves the analysis of these different cultures by identifying patterns of power, inequality, domination, and resistance. In this context, the works of British Cultural Studies theorist Stuart Hall have become important. Building on the structuralist implications of Lacanian and Althusserian criticism and blending them with the concept of hegemony as advanced by the Italian Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci, Hall’s works, for instance, have enabled forms of cultural criticisms that constitute cultural interventions by engaging dominant discourses and ideologies at specific sites where they may be articulated. 14 As a result, Americanists are now concerned with questions of representations, power, discourse, hegemony and identity as factors in the construction of ‘America’ as an ‘imagined community’ whose cultural identity is, following Hall, “not something that already Astrid M. Fellner 30 15 In his (1991). “Always Already Cultural Studies. Two Conferences and a Manifesto”, Grossberg lists fourteen points that map out a Cultural Studies enterprise for literary studies. Primarily addressing English departments, Grossberg states that Cultural Studies “often arrives in English departments in the form of an easy alliance between debased textuality and recent theory” (Grossberg 1991: 31). Calling for a more historically oriented Cultural Studies that “destabilizes and de-essentializes categories of race, class, gender, and nationality while simultaneously keeping them at the foreground of debate and definition” (Grossberg 1991: 31), Grossberg believes that English departments have much to gain from expanding their syllabi to include Cultural Studies. exists, transcending place, time, history and culture … fixed in some essentialized past, [but] subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (Hall 1990: 225). Concomitantly, Benedict Anderson’s concept of national identity as a construction that is assembled through symbols, rituals and administrative categories has greatly contributed to the analysis of the various narratives of nationhood that have created this ‘imagined community’. Interestingly, the institutionalization and subsequent commodification of Cultural Studies at U.S. American universities is viewed by many Cultural Studies practitioners with suspicion, as this success may threaten “its viability as a political and intellectual project” (Grossberg 1996: 131). Grossberg, for instance, has repeatedly referred to a crisis in Cultural Studies, as this has become an umbrella term, referring to a wide practice of cultural analysis without any clear agenda. 15 Some of the shortcomings of the ways in which Cultural Studies has operated in the predominant approaches in mass communication studies is the equation of culture with communication, which “fails to understand cultural studies’ more radial attempt to locate cultural practices within their complexly determined and determining contexts” (Grossberg 1996: 141). Benjamin Lee has accused Cultural Studies of being “relatively Eurocentric and noncomparative”, being nationalistic concerning issues of multiculturalism and the canon and lacking “any comparative or cross-cultural perspective” (Lee 1996: 220). Speaking of an international Cultural Studies that provides the basis for transnational collaborative work, Lee calls for a “more culturally sensitive international studies” as “the internationalization of culture and communication is producing a situation in which local and transnational issues are being brought into closer and faster contact” (Lee 1996: 231). The current debate about the need for a ‘radical contextualization’ of Cultural Studies has also led to what Denning (1996: 273) calls, a “national turn” in Cultural Studies. Paradoxically, the troubled state of Cultural Studies at U.S. American universities has led to the “revival of ‘American Studies’”, turning the latter once again into a site of “radical critique” (Denning 1996: 273). I have fleshed out the interconnections between American Studies and Cultural Studies in such detail because I believe that the institutionalization of the latter at Austrian universities offers a possibility for a new American Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 31 16 As is well-known, ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ is not an exact translation of Cultural Studies. In many ways, the concepts of ‘culture’ of Cultural Studies and American Studies have been incompatible with the German notion of ‘Kultur.’ As Sabine Sielke has pointed out, ideas disseminated by the influential Frankfurt School concerning the culture industry and mass culture made it difficult for American Studies in Germany “to place a highly successful, yet supposedly inferior culture center stage, thereby necessarily renegotiating the privileged position of European and, more particularly, of British culture” (Sielke 2005: 65). Given the dominance of the meaning of “critical theory’s modernist notion of Kunst and Kultur, it is evident why cultural studies did not get off the ground easily - if at all - in Germany, but has Studies that takes into account contemporary conditions of global transformation. Cultural Studies, as a series of practices that - at least implicitly - looks at culture through the critical lenses of feminism, Marxism, postcolonial, ethnic and sexuality studies has contributed to the much-needed theorizing of the study of ‘American culture’ in Austria. The notions of ‘culture’ propagated by Cultural Studies constitutes a shift in American Studies away from ‘area studies’ or ‘regional studies’ concentrating on the category of ‘place’ towards an American Cultural Studies that views ‘America’ in its transnational contexts. ‘Place’, I want to stress, remains important, but it is only one among other differentiating factors within ‘culture’, such as ethnic, social, or genderspecific ones. In other words, it is the link between the concepts of place and culture that has been complemented and complicated by other axes of difference. The increasingly felt need to question traditional concepts of place, space and nation, and of their relationships with culture, is by no means restricted to American Studies, but is a corollary consequence of all critical theories in the humanities. Disciplines in the humanities, to use Lawrence Grossberg’s argument about the ascription ‘American’ in the term ‘American Cultural Studies’, have all too often reified place and essentialized its link to culture (cf. Grossberg 1997: 289). As Levander and Levine (2008: 5) explain: Area studies typically emphasizes space or geographical locale over time and therefore has tended to uphold a constant idea of national identity. However, once we recognize that the nation is not the realization of an original essence but a historical configuration designed to include certain groups and exclude others, we are able to see the nation as a relational identity that emerges through constant collaboration, dialogue, and dissension. American Studies as Cultural Studies, I believe, can situate the teaching of critical awareness of ‘culture’ so as to address the cultural realities of the shifting relevance and nature of ‘place’ and ‘space’ in the contemporary world to what Homi Bhabha calls the “locations of culture” (Bhabha 1994: 1). However, in spite of the success of Cultural Studies and ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ in Austrian academia, the national paradigm of the United States as a clearly bordered geographical and political space has still remained intact in the daily reality of university. 16 The synecdochic identification of ‘America’ Astrid M. Fellner 32 thrived in Great Britain” (Sielke 2005: 65). A similar argument can be made for Austria. Especially in English departments, the privileged position of British culture complicates the study of American culture, which is still often perceived as inferior. with ‘the United States’ is commonplace. Despite the rise in interest in multicultural U.S. literatures, many U.S. American literature survey courses in Austria continue to rely on a Eurocentric model of culture, focusing on the melting-pot model of ethnic cultures rather than the cultural hybridities that the different literatures have produced. The notion that the history of North America begins with the arrival of the Puritans is still very much prevalent among students, and the idea that ‘American’ literature begins with John Smith and William Bradford is persistent. How do the theoretical redefinitions offered by the new American Studies and the recent critique concerning contextualization and historicity posed by the Cultural Studies movement rephrase the vital question of “What is American? ” Towards a Transnational American Studies When in 1991, Gregory S. Jay polemically stated that it was “time to stop teaching ‘American’ literature” (Jay 1991: 264), his essay inaugurated several attempts to reconceptualize the field of American Studies. In “The End of ‘American’ Literature: Toward a Multicultural Practice”, Jay argues that the “history and literature of the US have been misinterpreted so as to effectively underwrite the power and values of privileged classes and individuals” (Jay 1991: 266). Introducing the terms “Writing in the United States” and “Comparative American Literature” (Jay 1991: 268), Jay proposes the establishment of courses and programs in North American Studies that “would integrate the cultural history of the US with those of Canada, Mexico, the near Latin American countries, and the Caribbean” (Jay 1991: 268). Carolyn Porter’s 1994 review essay “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies” built on Jay’s argument and suggested that a new American Studies would confront (at least) a quadruple set of relations between (1) Europe and Latin America; (2) Latin America and North America; (3) North America and Europe; and (4) Africa and both Americas. The aim here would not be to expand American studies so as to incorporate the larger territory of the hemisphere, but rather to grasp how the cultural, political, and economic relations between and within the Americas might work to constellate the field itself, reinflecting its questions in accord with a larger frame (Porter: 1994: 510) In the wake of Jay’s definition of a comparative American Studies and Porter’s attempt to model a new comparative American Studies, a series of Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 33 17 José Martí, a Cuban intellectual living in New York City, published his essay “Nuestra Ameríca” in 1891. Distinguishing between two Americas, Martí uses the phrase “our America” to refer to Latin America, which he positions against “the other America which is not ours” (qtd. in Saldívar 1991: 6-7). For more information on Martí’s concept of ‘America’, see Porter 1994: 502 and Muthyala 2001: 100. theoretical texts by renowned American Studies scholars in the U.S., such as Paul Lauter, Donald E. Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Werner Sollors, and German Americanists, like Heinz Ickstadt and Günter Lenz, have appeared that have urged scholars to study American culture transnationally. Taking cues from Chicana/ o borderlands scholars Gloria Anzaldúa and José David Saldívar, who have theorized border spaces that resist being reduced to one ‘national tradition’, and making use of Mary Louise Pratt’s metaphor of the ‘contact zone’, these scholars are increasingly paying attention to the ways in which hybridities and fluidities have shaped cultural spaces. “The U.S.”, as Fisher Fishkin has reminded us, “is and has always been a transnational crossroads of cultures” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 43). “And that crossroads of cultures that we refer to as ‘American culture’ has itself generated a host of other crossroads of cultures as it has crossed borders” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 43). The field of American Studies, therefore, has to be reconceived in a dialogic manner to include the different cultural encounters between various peoples. The borders between these nations are, however, “less the origin of our history than the products of it” (Jay 1991: 268). Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos/ as, for instance, have constantly crossed borders. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life” (Anzaldúa 1999: Preface to the First Edition). When published in 1987, it was soon clear that Borderlands/ La Frontera would become a key text in the theorization of the border. In fact, the main impetus at the beginning of the 1990s for the theorizing of a new comparative American Studies came from the field of Chicano/ a Studies. According to Porter, the perspective of Chicano/ a Studies is especially salient because of the permeability of the U.S.-Mexican border. The remapping of cultural space undertaken by Chicano/ a critics and the resituation of cultural identity within the larger history of what José Martí called “nuestra América” had been at the center of Chicano/ a Studies from early on. 17 Porter, for example, discusses José David Saldívar’s Dialectics of Our America as one example of the view of ‘America’ as “plural and contestatory in its reference; because of their permeability as national boundaries, geopolitical borders are foregrounded as regions, borderlands that in turn reveal and renew cultural networks linking the Caribbean and Latin America to the Astrid M. Fellner 34 18 Much has been written on the reconfiguration of American Studies from a nationalist to a global analytic frame. For the most recent publication in Europe on the implications of the transnational paradigm for the study of American culture, see the collection Transnational American Studies, edited by Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt and Ingrid Thaler (2007). North” (Porter 1994: 468). Saldívar relies on a model of inter-American cultural exchanges between the Americas that goes back to Martí’s conception of America in “nuestra América”. Furthermore, John Muthyala also argues for a reformulation of American literary history in a pan-American global framework that relies on the dialectical model proposed by Saldívar. Along similar lines, Amy Kaplan has suggested the replacement of the ‘frontier’ as the dominant spatial metaphor in American Studies in favor of the site of ‘the borderlands’, which is a transterritorial conception of space. Borderlands, “not only lie at the geographic and political margins of national identity but as often traverse the center of the metropolis” (Kaplan 1993: 16). The metaphor of borderlands thus transforms “the traditional notion of the frontier from the primitive margins of civilization to a decentered cosmopolitanism” (Kaplan 1993: 16-17). In his articulation of a comparative American Studies, Rowe, in turn, elaborates on the model of the contact zone, which Pratt defines as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 2000: 575). As Rowe states (1998: 18), We can begin to reconfigure such borders by establishing intellectual and cultural ‘contact zones’, where a certain dialectics or dialogics of cultural exchange is understood to be a crucial aspect of how the field of ‘American Studies’ is constituted and how the related territories of ‘the Americas’ and ‘the United States’ ought to be understood. These fundamental reconsiderations of the field have called for a need for seeing ‘America’, as part of a world system, in which the exchange of commodities and the migrations of people know no borders. As a result, scholars have come to speak about ‘postnational’ American Studies (e.g. Rowe’s edited collection Post-Nationalist American Studies) or ‘transnational’ American Studies or an American Studies that “embrace[s] actively a paradigm of critical internationalism” (Desmond and Domínguez 1996: 475). 18 These scholars agree that a comparative American Studies also has to cross linguistic borders. In his recent “The Multilingual Turn in American Studies” and his project to republish non-English language works of U.S. literature, Werner Sollors, for instance, has vehemently argued for the study of U.S. literature as a polylingual as well as multicultural body of texts. The new American Studies, most proponents agree, “must address the multilingual reality of the United States in the curricular and scholarly reforms now under way in the field” (Rowe 1998: 13). Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 35 At this particular historical juncture, American Studies thus offers exciting perspectives on the connections between the global and the local, the transnational paradigm and the reality of the organization of countries into nationstates for the current generation of emerging Americanists. What are some implications of the critical models for developing a postor transnational curriculum for American Studies? The Futures of American Studies in Austria While the terms ‘postnational’ and ‘transnational’ signal that American Studies is becoming increasingly comparative and global in outlook, they also clearly point to a contradiction in terms, which is difficult to negotiate in the daily realities of our classrooms. How can a discipline that was founded on the premise of national identity be studied postor trans-nationally? The reconciliation of the national with a global view certainly lies at the heart of the problem in the current discussion around new reconfigurations of American Studies. Heinz Ickstadt has called this dilemma “an impossible redefinition of American studies as an at once locally decentralized and globally comprehensive field” (Ickstadt 2002: 553). Insisting that American Studies should “accept its name as its limitation and its boundary - that it cannot be a global and postcolonial, not even an international American studies in the sense of inter-American or intra-continental investigation” (Ickstadt 2002: 554), he calls for American Studies as “a comparative study of the U.S. and Canada” (Ickstadt 2002: 554). Indeed, one way to solve the problem is to accept the limitation of the national paradigm, but then, I suggest, we change our area studies courses to ‘U.S. Studies’, or ‘North American Studies’. Ickstadt, however, also has another suggestion to incorporate the new paradigm of the transnational into our studies. As he says, Americanists could ask the questions that the paradigm of the global has generated “without leaving the territory of American studies behind - that is, to do national American studies with a transnational consciousness: postcolonial studies may in this case not expand the borders of our discipline but the horizon of our questioning” (Ickstadt 2002: 555-56). A focus on the national combined with a transnational perspective is probably the best way out of the conundrum and serves as a viable solution to the teaching of American Studies at Austrian universities. Doing American Studies with a transnational consciousness constitutes a good way of negotiating the current dilemma. On the one hand, we can transnationalize the United States, and, on the other, we can take up the challenge and remap the boundaries of ‘America’. In this relational approach to national identity, then, the attempt to move beyond the U.S. nation does not mean that we abandon the concept of the nation altogether but rather that we adopt new Astrid M. Fellner 36 19 For more details on ‘Atlantic Studies’, see William Boelhower (2004). “‘I’ll Teach You How to Flow’: On Figuring out Atlantic Studies”. See also Donna Gabaccia (2004). “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World”. perspectives that allow us to view the U.S. beyond the terms of its own exceptionalist and imperialist self-imaginings. Such an approach also views the nation as a historically produced construct, which allows “not only a broader definition of what the United States includes but also a more historically complex view of the creative tensions and interdependencies that are embedded within and threaten to undo any fixed notion of ‘America’” (Levander and Levine 2008: 7). One way to engage this transnational perspective is to take up a transatlantic paradigm by pursuing what William Boelhower has called “Atlantic Studies”, which focuses on the so-called ‘circum-Atlantic world’, an oceanic space triangulated by the land masses of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Viewing the Atlantic world as a “fluid, decentered space of cultural interaction” (Waller 2005: 237), Atlantic Studies explores the interaction and interdependencies of Atlantic cultures from Africa to Europe and across the Americas and the Caribbean. Clearly, the study of ‘America’ within Atlantic Studies establishes a transcultural dialogue between the two hemispheres by offering new comparative dimensions, thereby contributing to the globalization of American Studies. 19 Another example of a productive way of extending the implications of an American Studies that operates with a transnational consciousness is to engage the hemispheric paradigm. As Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine point out, a hemispheric framework offers comparative and dialogical approaches to the study of the Americas. Decentering the U.S. nation, it examines “the intricately intertwined geographies, movements, and crossfiliations among peoples, regions, diasporas, and nations of the American hemisphere” (Levander and Levine 2008: 3). This approach yields new insights into colonial literatures, refiguring the field of Early American literature in crucial ways by reconceiving it in a dialogic manner to include the different cultural encounters between various peoples. An analysis of the hybridities and fluidities that have shaped cultural spaces in the early Americas can, for instance, include the vast body of travel narratives and chronicles that were written by French, English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish explorers. By comparing the accounts of Columbus, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Jacques Cartier, Samuel de Champlain, and John Smith, we can see that these early writings share the experiences of contact with Native Indian peoples. Yet, the descriptions of the encounters with the Amerindians differ vastly. While all of these texts draw the attention to the manner in which the encounters challenged the perceptions of the explorers as Europeans, the different accounts also reveal the Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 37 20 For more information on the ‘hemispheric turn’ and Ralph Bauer’s (2003) comparative analysis, see Susan Scott Parrish (2005). “The ‘Hemispheric Turn’ in Colonial American Studies”. 21 For more information on local appropriations of ‘American culture’ in Europe, see Rob Kroes (1996). If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture and the essays in Richard P. Horwitz (ed.) (1993). Exporting America: Essays on American Studies Abroad. cultural and ideological differences separating the Spanish, French, and British empires. A hemispheric approach thus holds significant promise for further enriching American Studies - and in particular the field which has traditionally been called ‘Early American Studies’ - by providing a frame of reference that, on the one hand, “configures the Americas as a hemispheric unit sharing certain common histories and New World encounters” (Muthyala 2001: 105), and, on the other, foregrounds the Americas as a set of interlinked continents with different histories of conquest and settlement. It shows that European imperial powers have local histories, and it highlights the specific cultural and historical consequences of encounters and clashes, and the different literary interpretations in the American hemisphere. As Ralph Bauer puts it: “Only from such a wider comparative perspective will we ultimately be able to decide what is particularly ‘Spanish American’ or ‘British American’ about colonial cultures that formed in the New World during the early modern period” (Bauer 2003: 296 ). 20 While the hemispheric paradigm seems particularly useful for the study of colonial literatures, other transnational approaches may seem more fitting for the study of contemporary global American culture. One possibility is heeding the advice that Paul Lauter has offered. To him, the question of a ‘postnational’ American Studies reflects “one way in which the very globalization of American culture seems to require an increased localization of its study” (Lauter 2001: 17-18). Clearly, the question here arises what the “localization of its study” can mean. The way I understand it, a localized analysis of ‘American culture’ can only operate with the term ‘America’ in quotation marks. Focusing precisely on the meaning of this term, a localized ‘American’ culture studies should be the “critical study of the circulation of ‘America’ as a commodity of new cultural imperialism and the ways in which local knowledges and arts have responded to such cultural importations” (Rowe 1998: 17). In other words, studying the globalization of U.S. American culture would entail the study of the local appropriations of ‘American culture’, the analysis of the patterns, effects, and rearticulations of what Reinhold Wagnleitner has termed “coca-colonialization” 21 . While I remain convinced of the need for Americanists to develop a more comparative approach to U.S. American literatures and cultures, on the one hand, and expand the territorial imagination that limits the meaning of ‘America’ to the official borders of the United States, on the other, I suspect that Astrid M. Fellner 38 22 For more information on this center, see: http: / / www-gewi.uni-graz.at/ csas/ englisch/ index_engl.html 23 See, http: / / www.uibk.ac.at/ americancorner/ 24 See, http: / / www.salzburgseminar.org/ 2008/ index.cfm these ideas may be realized in many small steps. Clearly, the new paradigms in American Studies that call for a comparative perspective should be accompanied by adequate theoretical investigations of our methodologies for conducting research, which involve a combined reframing of the traditional questions of “What is American? ” and “What is culture? ” The reformulations of these questions should then also affect our teaching. My emphasis on American Studies to cooperate with Cultural Studies therefore suggests the need for greater reliance on cultural theory than has been the case among those doing traditional U.S. American literature. Following the paradigms discussed above, we could establish courses in American Studies that integrate the cultural history of the U.S. with those of Canada, Mexico, other countries of the Americas, and the Caribbean. We could also pay more attention to the multilingual reality of the U.S. and not only focus on the Anglophone tradition. Continuing to bring in guest lecturers from different departments and other universities will contribute to an increased internationalizing of American Studies at Austrian universities. Clearly, American Studies will gain future strength if we build coalitions with other departments. The newly founded ‘Center for the Study of the Americas’ (CSAS) at the University of Graz is a good case in point. 22 Directed by U.S. Americanist Roberta Maierhofer and co-directed by Klaus Dieter Ertler, a specialist in Canadian and Latin American literature, this center links various departments and institutions and aims at investigating the many cultural areas of the Americas. The ‘American Corner Innsbruck’ (ACI), which is directed by Gudrun Grabher at the University of Innsbruck, is a new institution in Austria that is funded by the U.S. Embassy. Establishing links between the humanities and various other disciplines like law and medicine, this center is truly committed to transdisciplinary work. 23 The various ‘Centers for Canadian Studies’ at the University of Vienna, Innsbruck, and Graz involve research co-operations between Canadianists who are located in English and American Studies departments and departments of Romance Languages and Literatures. Interestingly, in Salzburg, ‘The Salzburg Seminar’, which in 1947 hosted the first Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, recently changed its name to ‘Salzburg Global Seminar’ in order to reflect the global reach of their programs. 24 These institutions are healthy signs that point to the fact that American Studies in Austria is a rich and engaging field with increased possibilities for becoming more comparative and transnational. The absence of separate American Studies departments at some universities thus need not indicate a Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 39 lack of vitality of the study of the literatures and cultures of the Americas, especially if the analysis of the Americas anticipates its future strength as a consequence of co-operations and coalitions between scholars from various departments, disciplines, and academic backgrounds. Putting Theory to Practice: Doing American Studies With a Transnational Consciousness In light of the current discussions around the inclusion of American Studies in the new B.A./ M.A. curricula and the ever-present reality of tight budgets, I think that is imperative that we find alternative ways of incorporating American topics into our classrooms. American Studies provides an excellent home for the methods and theories of Cultural Studies. Or, to reverse the order so as to more aptly reflect the current trend in Austrian universities, Cultural Studies classes can house American Studies. They can foster the study of the different cultures of the United States, of the Americas, and the various borders and contact zones. Since Cultural Studies conceives of culture as relational and is committed to the study of the production, reception, and varied use of texts, it can help generate the transnational consciousness required for a global study of U.S. cultures and the variegated processes of interaction of cultures in the Americas. “What topics and questions become salient if we reconceive our field with the transnational at its center? ” asks Fisher Fishkin (2005: 21-22) in her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004. “What roles might comparative, collaborative, border-crossing research play in this reconfigured field? ” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 22). German Americanist Günter Lenz, for instance, has proposed that “envisioning American studies in truly international perspective means enacting the transnational and intercultural discourses in real dialogues and debates among scholars from different parts of the world” (Lenz 2002: 98). Jane Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez also believe that a comparative perspective can be fostered through critical international dialogues (Desmond and Domínguez 1996: 485). In her long list of measures that could be taken to bring about a transnational perspective in American Studies classrooms, Fisher Fishkin also talks about the various possibilities of student-faculty exchanges and team-teaching. She mentions the various study abroad programs run by many U.S. universities, which she believes are “sites of potentially fruitful cross-border communication” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 40). In Austria, our students have long profited from the benefits of exchange programs. Many students are taking advantage of exchange programs - be they organized through the university or through the Fulbright Commission - and research grants to study in the United States. The mere fact of studying abroad does not, however, automatically lead to a transna- Astrid M. Fellner 40 tional consideration of ‘America’. Establishing a dialogue between students with different cultural backgrounds on transnational aspects, however, does involve a comparative perspective. As an Austrian Americanist teaching at the University of Vienna, I wanted to put theory to practice and introduce a transnational perspective to my American Cultural Studies classroom. Thus, in the summer term 2007, I decided to engage in a team-teaching project that I conducted with Klaus Heissenberger, a colleague from the University of Vienna and Timothy Conley, a U.S. American colleague from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Through this team-teaching experience I have not only gained valuable insights into the transnational character of ‘America’, but have also seen how important it is for students at the University of Vienna to talk about ‘American culture’ with U.S. American students. As Timothy Conley, Klaus Heissenberger and I have talked about the ways we teach American Studies at two universities - one in Austria, the other in the U.S. - we have discovered that despite being located in different national backgrounds and different educational systems both faculty and students at Bradley University and the University of Vienna share a common interest in learning about and arriving at a critical understanding of processes of the transcultural. When people in Austria speak about the effects ‘American culture’ has on their lives, they rarely think of novels, paintings, or theater. Therefore, we decided to teach a class on popular culture in order to account for the various ways in which ‘American culture’ is consumed, rejected, and appropriated in Austria. Our class entitled “Often Only a Place in the Mind: The Americanness of Popular Culture” aimed at conceiving of ‘American culture’ as complexly situated in a global context. Americanization, as Richard Pells has pointed out, generally refers to “the world-wide invasion of American movies, jazz, rock’n’roll, mass circulation magazines, bestselling books, advertising, comic strips, theme parks, shopping malls, fast food, and television programs” (Pells 1997: 495). Thus, concerns about “America” are frequently linked to the on-going debate about the effects of popular culture. Following the novelist Richard Brautigan’s definition of America as “often only a place in the mind,” our class set out to analyze the ‘Americanness’ of popular culture in all its conflicted meanings (Brautigan 1973: 116). The ‘Americanness’ of culture, students soon discovered, did not lie so much in the cultural text or practice, but was rather an effect of the diverse ways in which this text or practice was interpreted by people, which, in turn, was contingent on a variety of factors and contexts. In the Austrian context, ‘American’ texts have been appropriated in multiple ways, and the focus of our collaboration with students from Bradley University was the analysis of the various cultural crossings of popular culture in Austria. Assuming that a direct cultural exchange furthers differentiated understandings of such processes Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 41 25 The Bradley students came to Vienna as part of their summer study abroad program. They were accompanied by four faculty members who taught four courses: two professors were from the English dept. and they taught travel writing classes, one professor was from the Business School and he taught a leadership class, and one professor was from Communications. For more information on Bradley’s Study Abroad Program, see http: / / studyabroad. bradley.edu/ 26 Stuart Hall’s ‘circuit of culture’ describes a process whereby culture acquires meaning at five different ‘moments’: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. These ‘moments’ are interlinked with each other in an ongoing process of cultural encoding and dissemination. See Paul duGay (1997). Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. of cultural crossings, we established a dialogue between students at the University of Vienna and students from Bradley University. From May 25 to June 9, 2007, thirty-four Bradley students came to our class to talk about the meanings and pleasures of popular culture. 25 Looking at the ways in which ‘American’ products have been reinterpreted and recontextualized in Vienna, students analyzed ‘American culture’ in its contested relationships with other cultures and also paid attention to how cultural products had been recodified differently in different contexts. The Vienna students interviewed the Bradley students and they included their experiences of this cultural exchange in their term papers. Providing accounts of how their dialogues with the Bradley students had influenced their papers, the Vienna students were supposed to reflect on how this cultural encounter had impacted their views of the topic they had chosen, how their perspectives had changed (or had not changed) through the co-operation, and how the meanings of ‘Americanness’ of their topics had become more differentiated or complex. While the U.S. American students when faced with the challenge of reflecting on their own ‘Americanness’ very much reconsidered their positions as U.S. Americans in Austria, many University of Vienna students remained confirmed in their evaluation of popular culture. Applying the theories of Cultural Studies to their objects of research, our students carefully tried to locate the ‘Americanness’ in the various ‘moments’ of Stuart Hall’s ‘circuit of culture’, but they generally believed that most Austrians consumed these products without consciously perceiving any ‘Americanness’ 26 . At the same time, however, they thought that many people in Austria equated globalization with Americanization, considering the growing popularity of popular culture abroad as a rise in U.S. American cultural hegemony. What we realized in this class was that the generation of students who is now beginning to study at Austrian universities have grown up being surrounded by the discourse of Anti-Americanism. President George W. Bush is the only President they actively remember. Having grown up in the 1990s, Austrian students seem to have absorbed U.S. American culture to a point at which they no longer perceive it as ‘American’. Globalization and patterns of migration have created a transnational culture in which students often per- Astrid M. Fellner 42 ceive themselves as transnational subjects. Still, despite global views of the world and the disparaging attitude that many Austrians have towards ‘American culture’, for the younger generation, the U.S. still serves as ‘Leitkultur’. Regardless of globalization, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, for instance, have remained symbols of ‘America’ in everyday life in contemporary Austria. Especially Starbucks stands for a hip ‘American coffee culture’ that enjoys great popularity among students at the University of Vienna. As a deterritorialized signifier, ‘America’ is perceived as ‘cool.’ As the papers of our students revealed, young adults consume Hollywood movies, popular music, and other cultural productions as part of a global popular culture, which is, curiously enough, not regarded as ‘American’ yet very ‘American’ at the same time. It is this paradoxical situation of contemporary ‘American culture’ that lies at the heart of American Studies in a global world. Conclusion I want to end this essay with a rephrasing of my argument and a caveat: Even though the changing paradigms of American Studies call for a comparative and transnational focus in the study of the Americas, it is important that we do not neglect the study of the United States. As we widen the scope of American Studies and decentralize U.S. history and literature, we should also continue to focus on the United States as a nation. However, the study of the United States should not be seen in isolation but should be pursued with an awareness of the global interconnections of this nation. In their second edition to American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture, Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean (2006: 1) point to the particular significance of the study of the United States in times of the so-called ‘war on terror’: At a time when the United States of America is at the centre of world events, engaged in a global “war on terror,” and coming to terms with the many effects of the terrorist attacks of September 11 th , 2001, there has, perhaps, never been a more important period in which to study ‘America’. At this time ever-popular concepts in American history like ‘nation’, ‘empire’, ‘homeland’, ‘freedom’, and ‘patriotism’ have been given new meanings and interpretations, contested from the perspectives of those critical to the political project of President George W. Bush and celebrated by those who support him. It is our task as Americanists to address these “ever-popular concepts in American history” and analyze and critique the multiple discourses that have shaped the U.S. and its relation with other nations. In similar terms, Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus also call for the importance to continue to analyze the United States. As they put it, despite globalization and diasporas, despite the Internet and cyborgs, despite the communications revolution that has overseen the seeming breakdown of Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms 43 any boundary one might image, those of us who live in the United Sates are subject to its history, its crime and violence, its racism, its media structures, its education, its economy, its communities. As scholars and intellectuals, we are also deeply implicated in its shape, present and future. (Warren and Vavrus 2002: 1) As I have shown, as a field of study, American Studies emerged out of the historical crises of the 1930s and 40s and if the field at the close of the 20 th century, which Henry Luce famously called the ‘American Century’, faced a crisis, this crisis was aggravated by September 11. In Austria, the current equation of ‘America’ with the politics of U.S. government has made the study and teaching of U.S. American cultures difficult. The understanding of ‘America’ that many students have often comes from the media, popular culture, and the internet. When they enter universities, their opinions about the United States are clearly shaped by the current discourse of Anti-Americanism as propagated by the media and popular opinion that propagate essentialized views of culture. What September 11, however, has shown is that we are in dire need of more differentiated views on culture. More than ever, I believe, the goal of American Studies, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin has stressed, is not “exporting an arrogant, pro-American nationalism but understanding the multiple meanings of America and American culture in all their complexity” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 20). Scholars who teach American Studies should “provide the nuance, complexity, and historical context to correct reductive visions of America” (Fisher Fishkin 2005: 20). The future of American Studies in Austria should build upon and shed new light on traditional approaches, should offer more comparative perspectives on ‘American culture’ in all its diverse meanings, and should operate with a transnational consciousness that offers a more global perspective on the United States. It should also broaden the scope to include other cultures and their histories in the Americas. 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Gray and J. McGigan (eds.). Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader. London: Edward Arnold. 5-14. Wise, Gene (1979). “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement”. American Quarterly 31. Bibliography Issue. 293-337. Astrid Fellner Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Wien This article is based on a paper presented at the Directions in English Language Studies (DELS) conference, April 6-8, 2006 in Manchester. I would like to thank Ulrich Busse, Alexander Brock, Christian Mair, Ingo Plag, Naomi Hallan, Dietmar Schneider, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I remain solely responsible for all remaining shortcomings. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation in the History of English Anne Schröder The question of productivity has become one of the central empirical problems in English word-formation. In current approaches to morphological productivity, the existence of a continuum is acknowledged, at one end of which we find completely unproductive patterns and at the other highly productive ones, with a number of intermediate cases in between. As a consequence, various ways of measuring how productive a particular pattern is have been proposed in the literature. This paper highlights results from an ongoing study of verbal prefixation in English, of the kind download, upgrade, overachieve, underexpose, etc., in which different approaches to measuring productivity have been (or will be) applied. One of these - a dictionary-based investigation carried out on the basis of the OED - will be presented in detail and backed up with results from corpus-based research. The results of the present study show that the verbal patterns under investigation behave similarly to a number of other derivational patterns and methods of enlarging the vocabulary and that verbal prefixation of the type investigated has never ceased to be a productive means of verbal wordformation in English. 1. Introduction A number of authors have recently noted that the question of productivity has become one of the central empirical problems of word-formation (cf. e.g. Anne Schröder 48 1 Probably the most exhaustive list of definitions of productivity is provided by Rainer (1987: 188-190); this is also taken up by Bauer (2001: 25). 2 For a critical discussion and evaluation of the various measurements of productivity, see e.g. Schröder (2007). 3 See also Scheible (2005). 4 The examples given by Kastovsky are: outbid, outlive, outride and override, overreach, oversleep and underbid, undervalue, underrate. Bauer 2003: 70; Plag 1999: 1). However, when investigating the productivity of a particular word-formation pattern, one quickly realises that a number of rather different definitions of productivity are given in the literature 1 and that, as a consequence, various ways of measuring the productivity of a particular pattern have been proposed. In most recent publications, authors agree on three appropriate ways of measuring productivity: 1. measurements based on dictionary listings 2. measurements based on the analysis of corpora 3. measurements based on psychological tests of native speakers’ intuition, i.e. elicitation tests (cf. e.g. Bolozky 1999). 2 For the present study, which aims to investigate the productivity of verbal prefixation in the history of the English language, a definition of productivity based on the number of new forms occurring in a specified period of time appears most useful. According to Rainer (1987: 190), this measure has been most accurately formulated by Neuhaus (1973). This definition approaches productivity from a diachronic perspective, it is quantitative in nature and draws upon actual words. It can be investigated on the basis of a reliable chronological dictionary such as the OED (cf. e.g. Neuhaus 1973) and thus represents an application of the first of the three measuring types proposed. The verbs investigated are of the kind exemplified by download, upgrade, overachieve and underperform. These four verbs are recent creations: download is first attested in 1980, underperform in 1976, upgrade in 1920, 3 and overachieve in 1953 (OED 2002) and the question which I shall try to answer is whether these creations indicate an increase in productivity of a word-formation pattern which is often regarded as obsolescent or even fossilized, i.e. unproductive. Kastovsky, for instance, believes such formations to be moderately productive with the metaphorical meaning ‘to do sth. in excess’ or ‘below the expected limit’, 4 but unproductive in their literal meanings, as the latter are said to have been replaced by phrasal verbs in the Middle English period (2006: 254). Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 49 5 See also Schäfer (1989) for corrections and antedatings of the OED. 6 Because of the possibility of analogical coining, which is very apparent in pairs such as e.g. over-achieve - under-achieve and upgrade - downgrade, pairs of prefixes were chosen. 7 The morphological structure of this complex lexeme is difficult to analyse. The seemingly obvious analysis as [in [[crass] [ate]]], defining crass as the root, and crassate as the base to which the prefix inis attached to form the final complex lexeme, is contradicted by the fact that the OED does not attest the existence of the lexeme *crassate. A lexeme *incrass is not attested either. I do not believe that an analysis involving etymological information (L. incrassat-, ppl. stem of incrassare > E. incrassate) is available to the majority of English speakers, which however does not render this complex word unanalysable, as the adjective crass does exist. I therefore assume a non-hierarchical structure, such as: [[in] [crass] [ate]]. 8 The etymology is not entirely indisputable as both noun and verb are first attested in 1895; the latter, however, only in a dictionary, the first textual evidence dating from 1951 (OED 2002). 2. Data sampling and results The present investigation is based on the 2002 electronic version of the OED on CD-ROM. The advantage of this historical dictionary as a source of data lies in its attempt to cover the whole extant word stock of modern English, from their earliest records up to the present day and including all registers (OED 2002: preface). In addition, the OED provides the first citation dates of words, which “can be taken as a rough guide to the age of a word, even though it is clear that a word may have been in spoken use long before it was written down for the first time, and the first quotation in the OED may not be the very first time it was written down” (Jucker 1994: 150). 5 The following pairs of prefixes 6 were investigated: in-, out-, up-, down-, over-, under-, onand off-. As will become evident, the term PREFIX VERB is used in the present study as a cover term for verb-formations based on a number of morphological rules, whose common elements are: a) their first part, i.e. any of the eight prefixes mentioned above; b) the word class of the resulting derived complex lexeme, which must be a verb. The element following any of the eight prefixes may be a simple verb, e.g. to out-act, or an adjective, e.g. to out-active, a noun, e.g. to out-admiral, or a proper name, e.g. to out-Herod, (all free lexemes), or else of a bound (or free) complex lexeme, such as adjective + suffix, as in e.g. to incrassate. 7 Furthermore, many of the verbs subsumed under the term PREFIX VERB in the following analyses, such as downgrade, could be analysed as results of an inversion process from phrasal combinations (cf. Plag 2003: 143). These are included, just as are verbs derived by backformation, as e.g. to over-house from over-housed, or by conversion, e.g. to offprint. 8 This study is thus clearly output-oriented, as in word-formation we generally deal with heterogeneous patterns, consisting of a number of sub-patterns, which yield the same Anne Schröder 50 9 See also Börger, who, after a thorough discussion of the status of OVER+X lexemes states that these constitute “borderline cases situated somewhere between prefixation and compounding” (2006: 16). 10 Dalton-Puffer and Plag (2001: 242), referring back to Rainer (1993), also judge this semantic criterion to be “the most important criterion to distinguish a compound element from a suffix”. 11 Downis classified under the entry down, adv. and referred to as an adverb in the subentry ‘downin combination’. Overis not labelled in the entry’s head but is referred to as a prefix in the descriptive paragraph on the entry. The examples given, however, are referred to as compound verbs. Outis referred to as both prefix and adverb in the entry for out-. (OED 2002) 12 In the context of this paper, a word is considered to be a neologism at the time of its earliest citation in the OED. For a more detailed discussion of the term ‘neologism’ and its various definitions and applications, see Elsen (2004: 19-23), Busse (1996), Hohenhaus (1996: 15-68), and Raab-Fischer (1994: 3-6). outputs. Very frequently it is difficult, if not impossible, to know with certainty which morphological rule accounts for a specific output. I am aware of the fact that the term PREFIX in the present context is - and has been - problematic. Many of the verbs investigated here have actually been described as compound verbs (cf. e.g. Marchand 1969: 96) or as prefix compounds, “suggesting a status somewhat ambiguous between true compounds and some other kind of derivational formation” (Lass 1994: 198). 9 But, as Adams (2001: 71) points out, the initial elements of the verbs investigated (which she names particles) have much in common with prefixes, especially when they are semantically distinct and are used to form series of verbs, such as out-, over-, under-. 10 This view is partly supported by, for example, their classification in the OED. As mentioned above, a number of verbs relevant to my investigation are given under the articles on the respective prefixes in the OED and at least up-, in-, under-, on-, offare classified as such in the OED, although over-, down-, outare not. 11 Moreover, there seems to be little difference between underas in underlet (in the sense ‘to let to a sub-tenant’) and subin the synonymous sublet. The productivity of these eight prefixes was investigated as follows: I looked for verbs prefixed by any of the eight prefixes in the alphabetical list of main entries in the OED and noted the date of their earliest citation, which can be taken to correspond approximately to the date of their coinage. In addition, verbs which were not listed as main entries but were given under the main entry of a related headword (usually the related noun or adjective), as well as verbs given in the articles for the respective prefixes, were also noted with their earliest citation dates. On the basis of this search I was able to illustrate the developments or changes of productivity of the eight verbal prefixes in question, by analysing the absolute number of neologisms 12 created in time spans of 50 years, from the earliest periods attested in the OED to the present, resulting in graphs such as the following: Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 51 13 See also Scheible (2005) on the present-day productivity of verbal upand down-. 14 See Table 4 in the Appendix, where the relevant figures are put into italics and set in bold type. Figure 1: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix down- 13 Figure 2: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix up- A separate graph was generated for each of the eight prefixes (see also Figure 8 to Figure 13 in the Appendix). Combining all eight graphs into one diagram gives a rather blurred picture, as the prefixes for which I have a comparatively low total number of neologisms (as e.g. verbs with the prefix down-, cf. Figure 1) are not well represented. In order to gain a clearer picture, the changing patterns of productivity were compared in terms of the percentages of contribution, during the various periods, to the total number of neologisms for each pattern, as illustrated in the following figure: 14 Anne Schröder 52 15 For instance, Booij (1977: 5) believes productivity to be a matter of ‘all or nothing’. But it is primarily in inflectional morphology that productivity can be easily regarded as ‘all-or-none’ (Clark 1993: 127). Therefore many scholars take productivity as a matter of degree and believe some morphological processes to be more or less productive than other morphological processes and thus consider productivity to be a quantitative concept. See also Kettemann (1988: 13). Figure 3: OED analysis for verbs with the prefixes in- , out-, under-, over-, on-, off-, up, down-, in percentages In this diagram, increases of productivity during the Middle English and late Middle English period (although at slightly different points in time for the different prefixes) are clearly visible, as is a peak of productivity for nearly all patterns during the 16 th and 17 th centuries. Similarly, all patterns show a third peak of productivity during the 19 th century. If productivity is taken as qualitative concept, i.e. a morphological process is defined as either productive or unproductive, 15 all patterns apart from offcan be considered as currently productive, as they have produced at least one neologism since 1950. Table 4 in the Appendix presents the absolute numbers of neologisms created during each time span, together with percentages relative to the total number of formations during the respective time spans and relative to the total number of neologisms created by each word-formation patterns. Idealising the development of productivity of all prefix verbs, taking the total number of neologisms created in each of the periods calculated as a percentage of all neologisms (see last column of Table 4 in the Appendix), gives the following simplified graph: Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 53 Figure 4: OED analysis of patterns of productivity of English verbal prefixation, in percentages To many readers, the course of the graph in Figure 4 will look remarkably familiar, as it strongly resembles a graph by Wermser (1976: 24), which has been used in a number of reference works on the lexical development of the English language, for example in Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003: 72) or Nevalainen’s account on “Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics” in the 3 rd volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language (1999: 339). The striking correspondences between the graph in Figure 4 and Wermser’s graph become evident in Figure 5. Although there are some differences in methodology (Wermser counted the neologisms in time spans of 20 years and based his study on the shorter version of the OED), the same peaks of productivity are visible in both studies. Anne Schröder 54 16 As demonstrated by Durkin (2002), the documentation in the later editions of the OED has been improved immensely and the graphs presented here are thus surely more accurate than the one given by Wermser. Figure 5: Patterns of productivity of prefix verbs in relation to the lexical summits of English However, although it has been widely accepted that the number of first citations in the OED basically reflects the lexical growth of the English language, which can be represented graphically, as here or in Wermser (1976), the accuracy of this method has been equally widely criticised (e.g. Brewer 2000; Kastovsky 2006: 266/ 267; Schäfer 1980; Willinsky 1994). Most points of criticism are summarised by Algeo: The neat and impressive-looking line graphs that have been drawn to show the peaking of word-making in the vigorous, language intoxicated high Renaissance, its deep valley of decline in the eighteenth century, and its subsequent rise to a new, if lesser, high in the mid-nineteenth century show nothing about the language. What they show is the extent and assiduousness with which the OED volunteers read and excerpted books. Shakespeare was overread; the eighteenth century under-read - that is what the graphs show. (Algeo 1998: 64) Although the criticism thus voiced might be somewhat exaggerated and not entirely justified, especially for newer editions of the OED, 16 any such repre- Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 55 17 It is far beyond the scope of the present study to perform a manual analysis for each of the eight prefixes, so the analysis has been limited to one pair of antonymic prefixes, namely underand over-. 18 For a detailed description of the Lampeter Corpus, see Claridge (2000: chapter 2) or Schmied (1994). sentation, whether Wermser’s or mine, may yet provide only an imprecise picture of the growth of the English lexicon as a whole. However, it is plausible to assume that any distortions would affect more or less all word-formation processes to the same extent. I therefore feel justified in claiming that the diachronic development and increases and decreases of productivity of the eight prefixes investigated here have not taken a different course from that of other word-formation processes and methods of enlarging vocabulary, investigated by similar methods. These claims can be substantiated by corpus-based measurements. If, for example, the number of types, tokens and hapaxes obtained for prefix verbs with underand over- 17 in the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts, a collection of prose writings from 1640 to 1740 (Claridge 2000: 4), 18 are compared to those obtained from the Freiburg update of the Lancaster- Oslo/ Bergen Corpus (FLOB), a corpus which represents the state of British English in 1991 (see e.g. Mukherjee 2002: 30), we get the following results: Table 1: Number of types, tokens and hapaxes for prefix verbs with the prefixes underand overin the Lampeter Corpus and the FLOB Corpus overunder- Lampeter types 40 10 tokens 172 478 hapax legomena 19 3 FLOB types 42 21 tokens 169 413 hapax legomena 20 7 Table 1 shows that with regard to the number of types and tokens for the prefix verbs in overand undersome diachronic changes can be observed. While the number of types of prefix verbs in overhas remained comparatively stable, the number of types of prefix verbs in underhas doubled in the FLOB Corpus. However, the number of tokens of prefix verbs in underhas slightly decreased in PDE, while that for prefix verbs in overhas not changed diachronically. With regard to the hapaxes for these two types of verbal prefixation, Table 1 illustrates that the number for overhas remained relatively stable, while that for underhas more than doubled. Since the Anne Schröder 56 19 Börger does not define class D. In the context of the present analysis, semantically opaque, strongly lexicalised and frequent words, such as understand were classified in class D. number of hapaxes, i.e. those words occurring only once in a given corpus, are especially suited as an indication of morphological productivity (see e.g. Bauer 2004: 51), the fact that their numbers remained stable for the prefix overand more than doubled for underalso suggests that verbal prefixation as a word-formation process has not weakened diachronically. In addition, Kastovsky’s claim that prefix verbs are moderately productive with the metaphorical meanings of ‘to do sth. in excess’ or ‘below the expected limit’ only (2006: 254; see also above, p.2), also needs to be qualified. With Marchand, one can distinguish up to six semantic groups for the prefix overand five for the prefix under- (Marchand 1969: 97-100), and his scheme has been simplified and successfully applied to corpus data of Present-day English by Börger (2006), who distinguishes the following four semantic classes: A. negatively conceived excess (or deficiency) in terms of scalarity (e.g. to overreact); B. spatial meaning, literally or figuratively related to the concrete spatial prepositional meaning (e.g. to overshadow); C. abstract meaning conceptualised in terms of scalarity, connected indirectly to spatial meaning, without negative connotations (e.g. to overtrump); D. other. 19 If Börger’s classification scheme is applied to the prefix verbs found in the Lampeter Corpus and the FLOB Corpus, the distribution of the prefix verbs with overand underis as follows: Table 2: Type, token and hapaxes distribution of overand underacross semantic classes in the Lampeter Corpus prefix sense A B C D total overtypes 14 20 6 - 40 tokens 33 125 14 - 172 hapaxes 9 7 3 - 19 undertypes 2 5 1 2 10 tokens 6 53 19 400 478 hapaxes 1 2 - - 3 Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 57 20 As Brinton and Traugott (2005: 127) point out, prepositional rather than phrasal verbs represent the functional replacement for prefixed verbs. 21 A happy exception is Mair, who states that “verbal prefixation, though increasingly marginalized, was never quite dead” (2006: 63). Table 3: Type, token and hapaxes distribution of overand underacross semantic classes in the FLOB Corpus prefix sense A B C D total overtypes 24 13 3 2 42 tokens 37 109 3 20 169 hapaxes 15 2 3 - 20 undertypes 9 9 1 2 21 tokens 30 98 1 284 413 hapaxes 4 2 1 - 7 This semantic analysis of the prefix verbs with underand overshows that - although the metaphorical meaning of ‘excess’ (sense A) has indeed gained importance diachronically - the importance of sense B, which is more clearly still related to the original spatial meaning, has equally increased for the prefix underand that other senses are also still productive in Presentday English. However, a caveat is necessary: I am aware of the fact that the two corpora differ in structure and that a comparison of data obtained from these two corpora can only allow for some very cautious assumptions as, to some degree, I am comparing “apples and oranges” (Lindquist and Levin 2000). In addition, only two of the 8 prefixes discussed were taken as test cases. Nevertheless, I believe that the comparison has some value and produces some worthwhile results. 3. Prefix verbs from a diachronic perspective Both the results from two corpora and the investigation carried out on the basis of the OED do not suggest a complete abandonment of this derivational process, whether through the introduction of postpositional devices in phrasal and prepositional verbs 20 or through the massive influx of French and Latin borrowings and loan-translations, as claimed in a number of reference works (e.g. Burnley 1992; Kastovsky 1992; Kastovsky 2006). 21 Anne Schröder 58 22 This phenomenon is usually only described by quasi-synonyms such as for instance rise - mount - ascend or ask - question - interrogate (cf. e.g. Kastovsky 2006: 248). One explanation for the results presented might be that what I here term ‘prefixation’ may also be referred to as ‘compounding’ (see above, p.2). The prefixes described here are different from many of those, for instance, in the study by Hiltunen (1983; cf. also Kastovsky 2006: 235-237). It may be a crucial point of the investigation that the elements which can synchronically be justifiably classified as prefixes may diachronically have arisen as compounds. The synchronic delimitation between compounding and affixation with these constructions is not always straightforward, as constituents of compounds can change into affixes (Kastovsky 2006: 212). But, whatever their status diachronically, the results here clearly illustrate that in the course of history, the type of verb-formation under discussion has never become unproductive. A reason for this continued productivity may be the structural and stylistic versatility of prefix verbs. As illustrated in Figure 6, the word-formation potential of the forms investigated is greater than the one of phrasal verb constructions: Figure 6: Structural versatility of prefix verbs as compared to verb-particle constructions phrasal verb prefix verb to go under to under-perform * the going-under enterprise the under-performing work force * a goer under an under-performer ? the going under of the under-performance of Thus, while adjectives and nouns are derived easily from prefix verbs, this proves much more difficult, if not impossible, with phrasal verbs. In addition, as illustrated in Figure 7, in a number of ways these constructions hold an intermediate position between analytic, native, stylistically informal phrasal constructions on the one hand and synthetic, foreign, stylistically formal Latinate or Romance borrowings on the other, with non-Germanic prefixation falling between the latter and the native prefix verbs. Thus, prefix verbs also contribute to the stratification of the English lexicon and the complexity of lexical fields. 22 Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 59 23 Dates in brackets indicate the dates of the first attestation. 24 Outlet and underbear are considered rare in Present-Day English. 25 Outgo in the sense of ‘to outstrip in going’ is, of course, not obsolete in Present-Day English. 26 Underbear is actually first attested earlier (c950), but only in the sense of ‘to sustain’. With the sense of ‘to support’ and ‘to bear up’ it is first attested in 1382. Figure 7: Stratification of the lexicon 23 phrasal verb prefix verb (native) prefix verb (Latinate) borrowing to bear up to underbear (1382) to support (1382) to go out to outgo (†) (c825-1905) to exit (1607) to go in to ingo (†) (c900-1382) to enter (a1300) to let out to outlet (1592) to egress (1578) to set off to offset (1792) to counterbalance (1611) to print off to offprint (1895) to deprint (1909) to underlet (1819) to sublet (1766) Although some of the prefix verbs in Figure 7 are obsolete in Present-Day English (e.g. to outgo and to ingo) 24 , they have all coexisted with synonymous borrowings, sometimes for a substantial period of time. Thus outgo 25 was used side by side with exit for 300 years, and seems to have been firmly established in the English lexicon by the time the latter arrived. The same probably holds for ingo and the synonymous loanword enter. Some prefix verbs were coined simultaneously with the arrival of the corresponding Latinate borrowings, as in the case of underbear and support, both of which are first attested in 1382 in the Wycliffe Bible. 26 Others, such as to outlet and to offset, may even have been created after the arrival of the corresponding loanword. Anne Schröder 60 27 See Jones (1953: 94ff.) on the puristic movement during the Early Modern English period. 28 However, as Brinton (1988), Hiltunen (1983), and Lutz herself (1987) demonstrate, many OE prefixes nevertheless became obsolete. 29 However, see also Algeo’s comment on p.2 above. Loan-translations, such as for instance outgo imitating Latin exire (OED), have been an accepted (native) means of extending the vocabulary since the Old English period (cf. Kastovsky 1992: 300ff.; Kastovsky 2006: 217) and they were especially frequent during the Middle English period (Marchand 1969: 99). Although Hiltunen is certainly correct in pointing out that “there are so many factors involved in the study of loan-syntax that even in the case of positive correspondence it is hard to tell where they are due to the direct influence of the Latin, and where OE [Old English, A.S.] and Latin constructions just happen to overlap” (Hiltunen 1983: 139), I believe that this Latinizing practice strengthened the prefixes investigated here. They could be seen as a native alternative to foreign (and frequently opaque) loanwords, and this is why they were also resorted to by linguistic purists in the 16 th and 17 th centuries as a method of increasing lexical resources (Nevalainen 1999: 360). 27 In addition, as Lutz notes, prefix formations - irrespective of their etymological origin - also correspond to the morphological and phonological structure characteristic of the more formal registers of the English language since the Later Middle Ages. She mentions polysyllabic structures with an unaccented first element, which the rhythmical pattern of the post-specifying phrasal verbs does not produce (Lutz 1997: 285/ 286). Thus, she is presumably correct in believing that “the contribution of the Norman Conquest to the structural make-up of the Modern English lexicon is more of a preserving nature, as it has in fact stabilized prefixation as a means of verb formation for the more formal registers of English” (ibid.: 287). The evidence from this dictionary-based account confirms Lutz’s view that “[s]ome native prefixes have continued to be productive until today, in spite of massive French and Latin influence; they are combined with both native and borrowed stems” (ibid.: 260) and that “prefixing has not been abandoned altogether in English” (ibid.: 284). 28 The fact that prefix verbs, unlike phrasal verbs and other multi-word verbs, are not considered colloquial or informal and can be used in academic writing might also explain the last increase of productivity, at the end of the 19 th century, as shown in the graph. 29 Increased linguistic awareness and subsequent prescriptive tendencies during that period seem to have played a negative role in the use of phrasal verbs in writing (Claridge 2000: 199), and favoured the use of Latinate loanwords and loan-translations. This might also explain why most prefixes exhibit a recent decrease of productivity (cf. Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 61 30 Cf. Claridge (2000: 103ff.) for a discussion. As Claridge makes clear, multi-word verbs can no longer be considered unsuitable for the more formal written registers of language: these constructions seem to be used at all levels of language in Present-Day English. However, see also Biber et al. (1999: 408-412) on the register distribution of phrasal verbs in Present- Day English. According to Biber et al. (1999: 415-422), there seems to be a difference between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs with regard to register distribution, the latter being more easily accepted in academic prose than the former, and apparently having fewer informal overtones (ibid.: 415). 31 Cf. also the ‘download and to down’load, according to the OED. 32 See also Plag (2006). Figure 3 above), as the use of phrasal constructions seems to have become acceptable even in more formal registers of language. 30 Of course a full investigation of the present-day productivity of the prefix verbs requires the application of the other productivity measurements mentioned at the beginning of this article. Such investigations are not within the scope of this paper but I will briefly refer to some other studies, which are of interest in the present context. In Schröder (2007), for example, corpusbased measures are applied to investigate the productivity of prefix verbs with overand underin comparison with corresponding particle verbs. It is shown that particle verbs are not, generally speaking, more productive than the corresponding prefix verbs, as in this investigation it is only the particle over which is more productive than the verb formations with the prefix over-. The particle under is only more productive with regard to some of the measurements applied. In Scheible (2005) several measurements of productivity are applied to illustrate that prefix verbs with upand downare of moderate productivity in Present-Day English and that “the existence of a synonymous phrasal verb will generally block the coining of the corresponding” prefix form (Scheible 2005: 192), so that possible limitations of productivity as well as the relationship of stress alternations need to be taken into account. Hence the lack or the arbitrariness of stress alternation especially with later formations, e.g. to ‘output (1858) vs. the ‘output as opposed to the earlier (and possibly obsolete) to out’put (c. 1300), 31 should be systematically investigated. However, given that Plag et al. (2006) convincingly showed that a considerable amount of stress assignment in noun-noun compounds is unpredictable and that none of the commonly held hypotheses about compound stress assignment makes valid predications, similar facts may account for the stress assignment in the constructions under investigation here. 32 4. Conclusion Although the present-day productivity of prefix verbs needs to be investigated with additional measurements, on the basis of the present investigation alone Anne Schröder 62 a number of generalisations with regard to the diachronic productivity can already be made. The widespread belief that verbal prefixation weakened from the Middle English period onwards because of its gradual replacement, either by the postposition of the prefixes to form phrasal verbs, or by the adoption of Romance and Latinate loanwords, clearly needs to be reconsidered. The results of the present study show that at least the verbal patterns under investigation behave similarly to a number of other derivational patterns and methods of enlarging the vocabulary. Indeed, this type of verbal prefixation has never ceased to be a productive means of verbal word-formation in English. At this point in the study, it seems reasonable to claim that prefix verbs, as investigated and described here, are structurally more versatile than phrasal verbs and stylistically, they occupy an intermediate position between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs on the one hand and Latinate/ Romance loan words on the other. Their versatility seems to have secured the position of this word-formation process up to the present-day English period. This assumption will clearly need to be qualified in the subsequent stages of the study, on the basis of corpus data, by taking register variation into account. 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Amsterdam: Rodopi. 81-89. Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 65 Schröder, Anne (2007). “Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Productivity. Evidence from English Verbal Morphology.” In: Sabine Volk-Birke / Julia Lippert (eds.). Anglistentag 2006 Halle. Conference Proceedings. Trier: WVT. 399-411. Wermser, Richard (1976). Statistische Studien zur Entwicklung des englischen Wortschatzes. Bern: Francke. Willinsky, John (1994). Empire of Words. The Reign of the OED. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anne Schröder Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Anne Schröder 66 Figure 8: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix under- Figure 9: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix over- Figure 10: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix on- Appendix: Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 67 Figure 11: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix off- Figure 12: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix out- Figure 13: OED analysis for verbs with the prefix in- Anne Schröder 68 Table 4: OED analysis for verbs with the prefixes in- , out-, under-, over-, on-, off-, up, downupdowninoutoverunderonoff- Total before 1000 1 0 6 1 39 8 7 9 71 0.51 0.00 0.81 0.17 5.23 3.29 21.88 11.54 2.67 1000- 1049 3 0 4 2 8 4 2 10 33 1.52 0.00 0.54 0.33 1.07 1.65 6.25 12.82 1.24 1050- 1099 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.13 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.04 1100- 1149 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.56 0.08 1150- 1199 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 1 5 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.17 0.27 0.41 0.00 1.28 0.19 1200- 1249 6 0 0 0 13 7 3 15 44 3.05 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.74 2.88 9.38 19.23 1.65 1250- 1299 17 4 12 14 12 1 3 8 71 8.63 13.33 1.62 2.33 1.61 0.41 9.38 10.26 2.67 1300- 1349 18 2 17 18 21 6 3 11 96 9.14 6.67 2.30 3.00 2.82 2.47 9.38 14.10 3.60 1350- 1399 7 0 39 16 38 29 0 4 133 3.55 0.00 5.28 2.67 5.10 11.93 0.00 5.13 4.99 1400- 1449 20 0 28 12 18 5 2 3 88 10.15 0.00 3.79 2.00 2.42 2.06 6.25 3.85 3.30 1450- 1499 2 0 32 9 8 0 0 0 51 1.02 0.00 4.33 1.50 1.07 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.91 1500- 1549 10 2 82 18 29 14 3 1 159 5.08 6.67 11.10 3.00 3.89 5.76 9.38 1.28 5.97 1550- 1599 35 1 134 80 116 21 0 2 389 17.77 3.33 18.13 13.33 15.57 8.64 0.00 2.56 14.60 1600- 1649 14 3 253 146 133 35 1 2 587 Investigating the Morphological Productivity of Verbal Prefixation 69 updowninoutoverunderonoff- Total 7.11 10.00 34.24 24.33 17.85 14.40 3.13 2.56 22.03 1650- 1699 3 1 54 62 50 19 1 0 190 1.52 3.33 7.31 10.33 6.71 7.82 3.13 0.00 7.13 1700- 1749 4 0 11 30 22 8 0 1 76 2.03 0.00 1.49 5.00 2.95 3.29 0.00 1.28 2.85 1750- 1799 3 1 8 28 18 8 0 1 67 1.52 3.33 1.08 4.67 2.42 3.29 0.00 1.28 2.52 1800- 1849 25 1 20 49 52 19 0 1 167 12.69 3.33 2.71 8.17 6.98 7.82 0.00 1.28 6.27 1850- 1899 17 2 33 75 100 26 5 6 264 8.63 6.67 4.47 12.50 13.42 10.70 15.63 7.69 9.91 1900- 1949 5 6 5 22 46 10 0 1 95 2.54 20.00 0.68 3.67 6.17 4.12 0.00 1.28 3.57 after 1950 7 7 1 17 19 22 2 0 75 3.55 23.33 0.14 2.83 2.55 9.05 6.25 0.00 2.82 Total 197 30 739 600 745 243 32 78 2664 (7.39) (1.13) (27.74) (22.52) (27.97) (9.12) (1.20) (2.93) (100) 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 1 I would like to thank Christian Mair for his helpful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? Current Changes in the Use of NEED Friederike Müller Based on corpus data from the ARCHER corpus and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1800 to the present, this paper presents a syntactic and semantic analysis of the verb NEED . It will be argued that its two different forms for the expression of modal meanings can be treated as two different verbs both on syntactic and semantic grounds: While need is used with modal auxiliary syntax, need to is used as a main verb, and the two verbs express different modal meanings. Since in PDE the emerging modal need to drastically gains in frequency at the expense of central modal need, this development must be interpreted against the background of current changes in the system of English modal auxiliaries pointed out in previous studies. It will be shown that need to is not a direct rival of need but of other modals of obligation such as must and have to because the obligation expressed by need to often is more polite, implying that the action demanded is in the addressee’s own interest. 1 1. Introduction This paper will give a detailed analysis of the development and use of the verb NEED , focussing on its modal functions. These functions are realised either in main-verb syntax (in combination with a to-infinitive, e.g. does not need to) or in auxiliary syntax (needn’t and bare infinitive). As I will show below, previous research disagrees on whether in view of this syntactic inconsistency NEED should be considered a marginal modal, or whether we should distinguish two verbs NEED . Irrespective of the analysis one adopts, Friederike Müller 72 2 To avoid clumsy expressions I will refer to NEED with small capitals as a superordinate term covering all uses of the verb; I will refer to the occurrences with surface auxiliary syntax as need, and to NEED used with surface main-verb syntax as need to. That as an exponent of modality even need to has auxiliary-like functions in present-day English is understood. though, there is a clear diachronic trend in the use of NEED . As Leech (2003), Smith (2003) or Krug (2000: 202f.), among others, have shown in analyses of corpora of 20 th -century English, need in auxiliary syntax is declining in frequency while need to has been increasing sharply - and to an extent much in excess of what would have been needed to compensate for the decrease of auxiliary need. 2 The aim of the present study is to investigate the path of change for both need and need to and to determine in how far both can be regarded as two different verbs with respect to their syntax and semantics, thereby complementing recent work on NEED by Nokkonen (2006) and Taeymans (2003), the only two studies I am aware of which are entirely devoted to the investigation of modal NEED . As the title of the paper suggests, grammaticalisation theory (e.g. Hopper and Traugott 2003; Heine 2003) will provide an important theoretical frame of orientation, as will recent typological studies of the semantic development of modality (Bybee et al. 1994; Auwera/ Plungian 1998). Empirically, the analysis is based on two diachronic English corpora, the ARCHER corpus, which was used for initial exploration, and the quotation base of the Oxford English Dictionary, which - owing to its far greater size - provided the data for the detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses. Although the ARCHER corpus offers a valuable source for grammaticalisation studies and for modal auxiliaries in particular (cf. Biber et al 1994: 2ff; Krug 2000: 31), the corpus is too small to analyse less frequently occurring items such as need (62 tokens over-all) and need to (16 tokens) statistically with enough confidence. For this reason, the findings from the ARCHER corpus were complemented by an analysis of the quotation database of the OED, “the longest continuous historical record of any language available in digitised format” (Mair 2003: 123), which returns more than a thousand relevant hits. From among these, five sample decades (1800-1810, 1850-1860, 1900-1910, 1950-1960, 1994-2004), that is a total of 157 tokens of need and 180 of need to , were singled out for a detailed analysis. For advantages and drawbacks of using the OED as a corpus the reader is referred to Mair (2003) and Hoffmann (2004). 2. Theoretical background For a categorisation of modal auxiliaries it is necessary to analyse both their syntactic and their semantic characteristics. In two major reference gram- From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 73 3 Huddleston/ Pullum use the acronym NICE to summarise the major syntactic differences between lexical and auxiliary verbs; these are ‘Negation’ (He has not seen it. vs. *He saw not it.), ‘Inversion’ (Has he seen it. vs. *Saw he it.), ‘Code’ (He has seen it and I have too. vs. He saw it and I saw too.) and ‘Emphasis’ (They don’t think he’s seen it but he has seen it vs. *They don’t think he saw it but he saw it.)(Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 92f.). mars of contemporary English, the syntactic status of NEED is characterised in different ways. Quirk et al., who distinguish main verbs from modal auxiliaries on a gradient scale, with central modals at one end and main verbs at the other, regard NEED as a marginal modal which closely resembles the central modal verbs but additionally has a homomorphic main verb (Quirk et al. 1985: 137). While need is mainly used in non-affirmative contexts, the use of need to is not restricted. Blend constructions of main verb and auxiliary are cited as evidence against a completely distinct treatment of the two uses (ibid.: 138). Huddleston/ Pullum (2002: 104), in contrast, treat need and need to as two distinct verbs, a modal and a lexical verb, because almost all of the NICE 3 properties they establish to distinguish modal auxiliaries from main verbs apply to need, while need to is viewed as a lexical verb. Nokkonen points out two major characteristics of the semantics of the central modal verbs that most linguists agree on: firstly, their subjectivity, i.e. the speaker’s involvement, and secondly, their lack of subject selection (Nokkonen 2006: 31). With regard to NEED he refers to recent studies on semi-modals which increasingly show a development of grammaticalisation towards a more modal behaviour (Facchinetti et al. 2003: viii; Krug 2000: 4). Need to being one of these emerging modals, Nokkonen points out that it should be distinguished from need, since the two modal expressions also differ in meaning (Nokkonen 2000: 66). In the typological literature on modality there is general agreement that epistemic meanings of modals derive from deontic or root uses (e.g. Sweetser 1990: 49 or Bybee et al. 1994: 167). From such analyses, three pathways of change result for the expression of modality, two of them belonging to the domain of necessity and therefore being applicable to need (Bybee et al. 1994: 240). These three paths of change are used as a starting point for the study of van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), who connect and extend them in a semantic map and whose terminology will be used in the present paper. They summarise four domains for expression of modal meanings, namely those involving possibility and necessity as paradigmatic variants. These four domains are defined as follows: ‘Participant-internal modality’ refers to a “kind of possibility/ necessity internal to a participant engaged in the state of affairs” (Auwera/ Plungian 1998: 80). Thus, in the domain of necessity it includes meanings expressing the participant’s internal need. The term ‘Participant-external modality’, in contrast, is used to refer to “circumstances that are external to the participant, if any, engaged in the state Friederike Müller 74 of affairs and that make this state of affairs either possible or necessary” (ibid.), thus subsuming possibility and necessity. The third domain, ‘deontic modality’, is a special case/ hyponym of participant-external modality. It “identifies the enabling or compelling circumstances external to the participant as some person(s), often the speaker, and/ or as some social or ethical norm(s) permitting or obliging the participant to engage in the state of affairs” (ibid.: 81). Thus, permission and obligation count as deontic possibility/ necessity. The last domain, ‘epistemic modality’, refers to “a judgement of the speaker: a proposition is judged to be uncertain or probable relative to some judgment(s)” (ibid.: 81). Their research is furthermore based on a hypothesis “that associates grammaticalization with meaning change and polyfunctionality, and it is these diachronic and synchronic links that constitute the paths of the map” (Auwera/ Plungian 1998: 87). Therefore, the semantic map is meant to represent the different uses and relations between modal meanings (ibid.: 86) and sketches the development from premodal to modal and then to postmodal meanings for the notions of both necessity and possibility, assuming that this development shows a grammaticalisation chain (ibid.: 91). Thus, to prove that semantically, need and need to are examples of grammaticalisation, the different meanings of need and need to have been analysed with reference to the semantic map. Having pre-modal NEED as a source expression for necessity, the following part of the semantic map will be analysed: Figure 14: To necessity and beyond (extract from Auwera/ Plungian 1998: 96, fig. 11) ‘need’ ‘participant-internal’ ‘deontic’ necessity ‘epistemic’ necessity necessity ‘participant-external’ necessity 3. Need and need to in previous corpus-based approaches Among grammaticalisation studies on modal auxiliaries only a few deal with the differences between need and need to in more detail. Coates points out that the modal need has to be distinguished from its related verb need to (Coates 1983: 49). Warner characterises NEED as a modal verb with unclear or overlapping membership (Warner 1993: 11). Krug shows that NEED used to be a regular lexical verb in Old and Middle English but that by Shakespeare’s time auxiliary constructions clearly outnumber the main verb constructions. As his analysis of samples from the spoken BNC reveals, this From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 75 tendency is now reversed and today need to strongly dominates (Krug 2000: 202f.). Leech compares the frequencies of modal verbs in 1961 (the sampling year of the LOB and Brown corpora) and 1991/ 92 (F-LOB and Frown) and notes a number of fairly drastic shifts in frequency, among which are a decrease for need and an increase in need to (Leech 2003: 228f.). On the basis of the same data, Smith argues that need to can often function as an obligation marker in disguise, i.e. as weakened must or have to (Smith 2003). Martine Taeymans arrives at the same conclusion in her investigation of the two marginal modals NEED and DARE . As far as the semantic change is concerned, the development of need to is unidirectional and in accordance with van der Auwera and Plungian’s semantic map: “Need to combines its internal necessity meaning with external necessity/ obligation reading, and comes to be associated with functions similar to have to and must in affirmative contexts” (Taeymans 2004: 107). However, structurally need to violates the unidirectionality constraint posited in most grammaticalisation models (Taeymans 2003: 107). The most recent detailed semantic analysis of need to was undertaken by Solili Nokkonen (2006), who elaborates on the studies mentioned above. He focuses on the semantics of need to but also compares its non-affirmative instances with those of need and argues that need and need to clearly function as two distinct modal markers. Since need is mainly used as the negation of must, its decline reflects a parallel decline of must. The meanings of need to, by contrast, compete with those of have to (Nokkonen 2006: 64ff.). 4. Need and need to in the OED quotation base 4.1 Senses, functions and uses of NEED in the analysis In the Oxford English Dictionary, the history of NEED is described as follows: NEED derives from the Old English impersonal verb geneodan. After its transition from impersonal constructions with need and indirect object to personal constructions with a subject expressing the person or thing having a need and a direct object it began to combine with verbal complements (which according to the OED might have been encouraged additionally by existential-predicative uses of the noun need (need n 1 ) with or without a following infinitive and in the phrase have need to). Whereas in the case of the core modals the main-verb syntax was lost, in the case of need (and, of course, dare and ought to) modal and non-modal characteristics have coexisted since the Early Modern English period. Of the five major sense groups of NEED distinguished in the OED, the one relevant here is IV, “expressing necessity, obligation etc.” The quotations are Friederike Müller 76 structurally divided into tokens with bare and to-infinitive and into negative, affirmative and interrogative contexts in order to display the main structural distinctions which show variation throughout the centuries. In Present Day English, however, modal and non-modal uses can be regarded as being in complementary distribution (ibid.), which will be further investigated in ch. 4.3. Apart from (deontic) necessity, the OED also lists occurrences of negative need expressing epistemic necessity and of need to expressing the “desirability (or not) of a course of action” (ibid.). Complementing the meanings given in the OED by those shown on Auwera/ Plungian’s semantic map the semantic categories ‘participant-internal’, ‘participant-external’, ‘deontic’ (‘obligation’) and ‘epistemic’ necessity served as a basis for the semantic analysis. A few occurrences where the meaning expressed cannot be subsumed under any of these categories had to be characterised as ‘indeterminate’. In order to analyse the PDE complementary distribution of need and need to syntactically, the focus was on the following questions: If the verb is used in an affirmative context, does it have any inflections which are typical of main verbs (-s, -ed, -ing)? If the verb appears in negations, does it function as operator or does it display main verb syntax and use do as operator? If the verb is used in interrogative contexts, does it function as operator or does it use main-verb do as operator? Is the verb used in other non-affirmative contexts (e.g. with semi-negatives, negative adverbials)? Does a different modal verb function as operator in the clause? Whereas assigning the samples to a certain syntactic category was relatively easy in both corpora, the semantic analysis often proved difficult especially in the OED, where in contrast to the ARCHER corpus no context is available. Since the distinction between external necessity and obligation, for example, is often blurred, those cases which have been analysed as expressing an obligation must be regarded with some caution. A closer analysis of the relevant examples, however, revealed that what at first appeared to be problematic in the analysis, later turned out to be an important characteristic of need to, which might serve as an explanation of its currently increased use. 4.2 Frequencies of need and need to The following figure illustrates the frequency of need and need to in the OED from 1800 to 2004: From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 77 4 The normalised frequency was calculated with reference to Hoffmann (2004: 25), who gives an overview of the average number and length of quotations from 1000-1980. The number of quotations from the first year of each period was multiplied by ten in order to achieve an approximation of the total number of quotations during the decade in question. To calculate the normalised frequency, the total number of occurrences was divided by the number of quotations and the result multiplied by 100. Since the number of quotations for the period beginning in 1994 is not shown in Hoffmann, assuming that the definite article the occurs in almost every quotation, its frequency was regarded as representing the number of quotations for this period. Figure 2: (Normalised) frequency of need and need to in the OED 4 While need is already used at the beginning of the nineteenth century, need to only starts spreading a century later; there are only comparatively few occurrences in the OED before this time. Starting in the middle of the nineteenth/ at the beginning of the twentieth century, its frequency has been increasing until today. Even though both verbs coexist for half a century and slightly gain in frequency, need is more commonly used. The coexistence or layering of two different forms in the first half of the twentieth century is a byproduct of grammaticalisation. After 1950, however, need declines whereas need to drastically gains in frequency, which is even higher at the end of the twentieth century than was ever attested for need. Is need to taking over the role of need - maybe even to the extent that the latter form will eventually fall out of use? One remaining question is when and how need to emerges. The data suggest that it comes into regular use only at the beginning of the nineteenth century since there are very few examples of need to before this time. Later it apparently begins to gain in frequency. The OED, however, attests the first Friederike Müller 78 5 Table 5 (appendix) illustrates that need to displays the main verb and need modal auxiliary criteria. Examples of postposition of quantifier (g) are not attested in the corpora but are considered theoretically possible, illustrated by constructed examples. Due to its restriction to non-affirmative contexts, need cannot be used in emphatic positive contexts (d) and since need has not derived from a former preterite verb, it does not have an abnormal time reference in contrast to could and might. occurrences of both forms, need and need to, in the 14 th / 15 th centuries. According to Visser, by the 16 th century constructions with need (for) to by far outnumber bare infinitives (Visser 1969: 1424). Krug points out that in Early Modern English, modal constructions with need (to) were fully established and frequently used while in Present Day English, need to strongly favours main verb syntax (Krug 2000: 202). The following samples taken from the OED exemplify that until at least 1800 need + bare infinitive and need + toinfinitive are two different forms of the same verb which are used in variation with auxiliary and main-verb syntax: (1) 1719 A. BEDFORD Ser. Remonstrance 28 But I need not to transcribe any more. (2) 1641 MILTON Of Reformation 52 He that is but meanly read in our Chronicles needs not be instructed. Neither (1) - combining auxiliary negation with following to-infinitive - nor (2) - combining third-person singular -s with the bare infinitive - would be acceptable today. 4.3 Syntactic differences of need and need to Although figures 2 and 3 might suggest that need to takes over the role of need because need to gains in frequency as need loses, a detailed qualitative analysis of authentic examples of both uses lends little support to the reality of such a direct shift from need to need to. Need to evidently starts spreading in the 19th century, but not necessarily in exactly the type of context previously favoured by need. As was already pointed out, only a small number of constructions show blending between auxiliary and main verb properties. In only two quotations is the modal verb need used with third person inflections and there are only two instances of need to being negated with not. In the remaining majority of quotations, need and need to are used as two different verbs syntactically. Need displays auxiliary syntax while need to behaves as a main verb with reference to Quirk et al.’s gradient scale of modal auxiliaries. 5 Both forms are attested before the period analysed but occur in free variation rather than complementary distribution. For the explanation of the origin of the semi-auxiliary need to it is necessary to determine its possible source forms. Apart from auxiliary need, the lexical verb need + From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 79 6 The term quasi-modal is adopted from Traugott and subsumes Quirk et al.’s marginal modals, modal idioms and semi-auxiliaries (Krug 2000: 1). NP might have influenced its development and could have led to the development of two different verbs for the expression of modal meaning (cf. figure 3). Biber et al. (1998), Krug (2000) and Leech (2003), among others, demonstrate that the English central modals are declining in frequency while semi- / quasi-modals are rising correspondingly. Krug analyses the quasi-modals 6 in more detail and suggests that going to, have got to, want to, have to, need (to), ought (to) and dare (to) are changing into a new category, which he calls emerging modals. Emerging modals take to-infinitives and do support in questions and negations; they consist of two syllables with the phoneme structure/ CVC? / (Krug 2000: 230). They are listed above in the order of their centrality; thus the prototypical emerging modals are going to, have got to, want to and have to, which are frequently used in a phonetically reduced form as gonna, gotta and wanna. Need (to), ought (to) and dare (to) are peripheral members of this set. Comparing the emerging modals with the central modals, need (to), ought (to) and dare (to) oscillate between the two. Of the peripheral members, need to is syntactically and phonetically closest to the emerging modals (ibid. 237ff.). The recent increase in the frequency of need to, i.e. precisely the type of construction that is in line with the syntax of the emerging modals, brings it even closer. Krug investigates the years from 1850-1950 as the major formation period for the central emerging modals (ibid. 169). Categorizing need to as an emerging modal explains its rise in the late nineteenth century. Since the central emerging members grammaticalised first and then influenced the peripheral members of the category, the increase in frequency of need to sets in with some delay. Categorising need as a modal auxiliary and need to as an emerging modal, I suggest the following grammaticalisation path: Figure 3: Path of change for need and need to need + bare infinitive modal auxiliary need (stable or declining) lexical verb need need + to-infinitive emerging modal need to (expanding) There is further evidence for treating need + bare infinitive and need + toinfinitive as two separate modal expressions. In Present Day English, the modal need is restricted to non-affirmative contexts. It occurs in questions and negations but also in sentences with a negative implication containing semi-negatives, for instance hardly, but and only and conditionals with if and Friederike Müller 80 as. Need to, in contrast, occurs in both affirmative and non-affirmative contexts throughout the centuries. Figure 4 illustrates their development displaying interesting changes in the 1950s: parallel to the decline of need in affirmative contexts, the use of need to increases so dramatically that the reversed situation of need can be found: need to is almost completely restricted to affirmative contexts. The same tendency is revealed in the ARCHER corpus. Figure 4: Distribution of need and need to in affirmative and non-affirmative contexts (OED) Although this development might suggest that need to is the affirmative form of need, a semantic analysis will show that the two verbs are not used for the expression of the same meaning, one in affirmative and one in negative contexts. From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 81 4.4 Semantic functions of need and need to The distribution of meanings found for need and need to across the periods is illustrated in the following figures: Figure 5: Semantic functions of need to in the OED Figure 6: Semantic functions of need in the OED Friederike Müller 82 7 Note, incidentally, that this example occurs in a comparative clause and thus allows the reconstruction of two different underlying forms: (1) We needed to eat this much or - alternatively - we needed this much to eat. Obviously, such occasional contaminations are one minor contributory factor in the rise of need to. The figures above display that the most frequent meaning of both need and need to is participant-external necessity whereas participant-internal necessity occurs only in two negligible instances. Nonetheless, there are some semantic differences between the two verbs: epistemic meanings are only expressed by need whereas - apart from a few earlier instances - only need to is used for the expression of obligation. The different meanings will be explicated in more detail in the following sections. For the two different verbs, a synchronic comparison at certain points in time proves to be difficult since their frequency is reversed and therefore results of the less frequent item are less representative. For this reason, the major meanings found for both verbs will be introduced without making any distinction regarding the period but by mentioning significant shifts in the text. 4.4.1 Participant-internal necessity On modality’s semantic map, items expressing a need can develop the meaning of participant-internal necessity. As the figures demonstrate, hardly any instances of need or need to convey this meaning. There are only two out of 428 samples analysed, one of them being (3) In fact, it was fresher and less deep frozen than on the Elizabeth and quite as much as we needed to eat. 1950-90.bre\1963whit.j9 7 Although such uses are attested only in the most recent material from the corpora, they do not contradict van der Auwera and Plungian’s semantic map. Grammaticalised forms typically have overlapping senses as a result of their diachronic development and it will be pointed out that the meaning of internal necessity is still inherent in the other meanings because the external necessity and obligation expressed by need and need to typically convey that the action is in the addressee’s own interest. Including the source form need + NP might help explain the low frequency of internal necessity in the modal uses of need because it closely resembles the internal necessity expressed by need to: (4) 1978 M. AMIS Success vi. 138, I feel marvellous now; that work-out was just what I needed. For this reason, a possible explanation of the marginal use of internal necessity for need (to) is that this meaning is still expressed by the source form while the grammaticalised modal constructions have developed new meanings. Further corpus-based research on need + NP could demonstrate From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 83 8 On the role of structures such as ‘I need some food/ a pizza to eat’ see the comment on example (3) above. whether speakers prefer lexical verb constructions such as ‘I need some food/ a pizza/ some sleep’ to ‘I need to eat (a pizza)’ or ‘I need to sleep’ for the expression of internal necessity. 8 Through pragmatic inferencing, the participant-internal necessity, implying that a necessity arises out of the agent’s personal need, is extended to a necessity which is caused by outer circumstances. If the circumstances make it necessary that a certain state of affairs be the case, this meaning is characterised as external necessity. If the circumstances are compelling, need (to) expresses an obligation. If on a more abstract level certain facts make an action necessary as a logical conclusion, we can speak of epistemic necessity. The path of change indicated on the semantic map is from participant-internal necessity to obligation to participant-external necessity, thus from hyponym obligation to hyperonym external necessity. The corpus analysis, in contrast, suggests that participant-external necessity arises first and then grammaticalises into deontic necessity as a subcategory. 4.4.2 Participant-external necessity The most frequent and most stable meaning throughout the centuries of both need and need to is participant-external necessity which occurs in various syntactic environments and can be paraphrased as ‘it is (not) necessary for X to do sth./ that sth. is done’. A comparison of need and need to that could reveal in how far both need and need to are interchangeable, however, proves to be difficult. One of them being restricted to non-affirmative and the other being preferred in affirmative contexts, inevitably leads to a slight difference in meaning so that an exact comparison is almost completely limited to the relatively few non-affirmative uses of need to (cf. also Nokkonen 2006: 36). In the following examples, nonaffirmative need to is contrasted with non-affirmative need: (5) 1950 Analysis X. 79 When one is asked, ‘Is “heterological” heterological? ’ no answer need be given until the notion of heterologicality is further analysed. (6) 1860 HOLLAND Miss Gilbert i. 19 Of the gorging of fruits..that followed in the grove back of Dr. Gilbert’s house, nothing needs to be said. (7) 1904 J. P. MANNOCK Billiards Expounded 86 By this you will see that so long as you keep your cue in a horizontal line, no fears need be experienced of causing damage to the cloth, nor need there be any on the same score when a massé shot is being attempted. Friederike Müller 84 9 For convenience, no distinction between singular and plural is made; if necessary, important deviations between singular and plural uses are noted in the text. Third person occurrences are further subdivided into animate and non-animate subjects. Since a great number of the non-animate subjects are part of passive constructions, the percentage of passives is listed as well. For better comparability between the periods, the total amount of need/ need to is added. (8) 1955 Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 60 88 ‘Suffer little children to come unto me for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’ is quoted by Baptists to show that infants do not need to be baptised; it is quoted by Paedo-Baptists to justify the baptism of children. All examples express the absence of necessity, but while need and need to could be exchanged without difference in meaning in (5) and (6), there is a difference in undertone in (7) and (8). Whereas the absence of a necessity expressed by need to is part of a rule, it comes close to an assurance or a promise with need. This difference will be illustrated by a few more examples in order to show that the semantic differences are to some extent due to their different (non-) affirmative context but also display general characteristics of both verbs so that need and need to can be regarded as two different verbs both syntactically and semantically. To achieve the best comparability between the two verbs, they are divided into occurrences with the same person. Their syntactic distribution is presented in the following table. 9 Table 1: Subjects of participant-external need 1800-1810 1850-1860 1900-1910 1950-1960 1994-2004 Total 12 32 29 22 8 1 st person 4 14 4 1 1 2 nd person 1 3 6 3 - 3 rd person animate 1 4 8 4 4 3 rd person inanimate 6 11 15 14 3 Total passives 3 4 8 7 - Table 2: Subjects of participant-external need to 1800-1810 1850-1860 1900-1910 1950-1960 1994-2004 Total 3 8 5 16 65 1 st person 1 1 - 2 7 2 nd person 1 2 - - 3 3 rd person animate - - 2 6 15 3 rd person inanimate 1 5 3 8 22 Total passives - 4 3 4 10 From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 85 The semantic difference between need and need to is most evident in the second person where some good advice (9) is contrasted with an instruction (10). (9) a1903 M. A. COURTNEY in Eng. Dial. Dict. (1903) IV. 278/ 1 [West Cornwall] You need not get out of the carriage, it is only a short nip. (10) 1994 Internet World July-Aug. 92/ 3 To understand how the chip works, you need to look at what officials call its key escrow encryption method. The meaning of need illustrated in (9) is frequently used in the 19 th century. Need to was rarely used in the second person until recently; there are only very few occurrences in the earlier periods and it is not until 1994 that 32% of the uses of need to are in the second person. You need to is used in different contexts than you needn’t because it is typically not part of a conversation where a speaker gives some good advice to another person but in impersonal situations where it expresses a condition to fulfil a purpose. In (10), we neither have a concrete speaker nor an addressee but the speaker/ writer is the author of a magazine and the addressee interested readers. Need to is characterised as external necessity because it states a necessity to do something in order to achieve an aim, which is expressed by the purposive to-infinitive to understand. When no context is available, the instruction expressed by need to is sometimes hard to distinguish from obligation (cf. 4.4.4). As in the first and second person, occasionally, need contains a reassurance with third person subjects as well, for example in (11) where the speaker reassures his addressee that there is no need for the people referred to to be afraid. While need is often used with an abstract verb such as fear in (11), the absence of necessity expressed by need to is more concrete. (11) He replied: “If they think they are doing the correct thing they need not fear.”1950-90.bre\1959man1.n9 (12) ...Tulbach Browne, who, brazenly cheerful, leant on one corner of the bar with the air of a man who doesn’t need to work for some time to come, and said, [“I told you I’d make you famous, didn’t I? ”] 1950-90.bre\1956mons.f9 In (12), doesn’t need to could be substituted by doesn’t have to without a resulting difference in meaning because the necessity is based on facts. In the remaining examples, this substitution would cause a different undertone since as a general characteristic the source meaning of need + NP, internal necessity, is still implied in both verbs. This is obvious in the occurrences of need containing advice for the benefit of the addressee. However, using need to instead of have to in instructions does lead to a different emphasis, too: a manual to help the reader solving a problem, which is therefore in his own interest. By using need to in the first person plural or a passive construc- Friederike Müller 86 10 The normalised frequency of all need to increases from 5.35 to 36.5 and the frequency of need to expressing an obligation from 2.44 to 18.93. tion, the instruction is formulated in a politer way and can be understood as a recommendation. In (13), the absence of necessity expressed by need is predicated of an inanimate subject: (13) The evidence need not be direct or positive, but it must be of such a character as to make it more probable that he died at a particular time. 1900-49.bre\ 1919fann.l8 Need not could be paraphrased as ‘it is not a necessary that the evidence be direct…’. Inanimate subject constructions such as this probably gave rise to epistemic meanings which typically imply that something is not necessarily the case by logical conclusion (cf. ch. 4.4.4). In short, while need is restricted to non-affirmative contexts and typically denotes the absence of a necessity, need to states a necessity, and this inevitably leads to different meanings. Interchangeability and, if seen diachronically, mutual influence between the forms is restricted to the comparatively few cases in which need to is used in non-affirmative contexts (cf. (5) and (6) above). But, as is illustrated in (7) and (8), there may be subtle semantic differences even here. 4.4.3 Deontic necessity/ obligation In current English, obligation is only expressed by need to but not by need. This use is a relatively recent innovation. As figure 6 illustrates, apart from a single instance in the 1850 corpus, the obligation meaning is attested only from around 1950 onwards and, interestingly, it is this new meaning which largely accounts for the increase in frequency of need to. 10 Its characteristics will be discussed in more detail and compared with further modal verbs expressing an obligation, such as have to, should and must. But before turning to deontic need to, the occasional occurrences of obligation expressed by need will be discussed. The majority of deontic need occurs in the period beginning in 1850 where it is typically used in the second person and implies criticism which according to Coates can be paraphrased as ‘stop it, there’s no point’ (Coates 1983: 51). By using need instead of the imperative ‘don’t yawn so’ the utterance sounds more polite: (14) Now, you needn’t yawn so, and say, “What a tiresome letter this is! ” I’m going to tell you something about The Cup. 1850-99.bre\1881carl.x6 The following table describes the distribution of the subjects used with need to, as totals and divided by grammatical person. It contains the number of items found for each person with the percentage of all need to expressing an obligation in the respective periods. From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 87 Table 3: Subjects of need to expressing obligation 1950-1960 1994-2004 singular plural Singular Plural 1 st person 1 - 2 8 2 nd person 1 - 9 - 3 rd person animate 2 (all passive) 1 7 9 (2 passive) 3 rd person inanimate 1 (passive) 1 7 (3 passives) 9 (all passive) Total 7 51 Of the relatively few examples expressing an obligation in the period between 1950 and 1960, it occurs evenly with subjects of all persons apart from first and second person plural. From 1994-2004, need to is mainly used with third person subjects, one half of which is animate and the other inanimate. All plural inanimate subjects are part of passive constructions. Furthermore, obligation is frequently expressed by second person singular and first person plural subjects. With the speaker included, the obligation in the first person plural (15) is less face-threatening to others. In the following examples, the speaker/ writer demands that some other agent should do something: (15) 2003 Las Vegas (Nevada) Rev.-Jrnl. (Nexis) 15 May 1D, We need to stop piecemealing what we are going to allow and not allow on the Internet. (16) 1996 Voice 25 June 47/ 2 (advt.) You will need to be flexible, capable of using your own initiative everyday and be prepared to muck in with a small team of committed staff. (17) 1998 J. WEINSTEIN & T. ALSTON Baseball Coach’s Survival Guide v. 125 All backups need to be practiced. You can do this in a team situation with or without live runners and a coach fungoing. The obligation conveyed in (15) is part of a newspaper article where the writer calls for changes and indirectly criticises the current situation. In order to convince their addressees of stricter rules what to allow on the internet we need to is used. This implies that the action demanded is in the interest of both, the addressee and the speaker. Need to could be substituted by should without much difference in meaning. Nonetheless, by using need to, the obligation is expressed more carefully. In the second person (16), the obligation is stated more directly than in the first person plural (15) or in passive constructions (17). In (16), for syntactic reasons, need to cannot be substituted by must or should but only by have to. Nevertheless, through the use of need to, the obligation is imposed more tentatively. The meaning of external necessity is still implied so that the obligation expressed by need to can be characterised as a strong or inevitable necessity which is in the addressee’s interest. The examples were characterised as obligation rather Friederike Müller 88 than external necessity because the necessity is recommended more strongly and is of greater importance. Need to could be paraphrased as ‘It is absolutely necessary for you to be flexible/ practice’ or even as ‘I advise you to be flexible/ practice’ so that the obligation is understood as a recommendation which is meant to be for addressee’s benefit. As Smith, quoting similar examples, states, “it appears that the speaker/ writer is reporting a need for action in a rather vague way, as if the source of the requirement is the situation itself. But again the pragmatic interpretation of obligation imposed on others seems inferable, albeit more disguised” (Smith 2003: 61). Comparing modals of necessity and obligation in Present Day English, Smith points out that traditionally must is often compared with have to. The decline in the use of must, however, cannot be sufficiently explained by an increased use of have to. He states that while in conversation have got to displays increasing grammaticalisation and is preferred over must, it is still unpopular in printed texts. In these contexts, need to plays an important role because surprisingly, it dramatically gains in frequency. Need to is used for the expression of an obligation which is more carefully stated than an obligation by must, because it is expressed only indirectly and not as an “overt marker of power” (Smith 2003: 263f.). Explaining the increased use of need to with its recently developed meaning of obligation, which, in contrast to the obligation expressed by other modal verbs such as must and have to, is more polite, points towards more general changes. As one of the reasons for the change from central modals to semi-modals, Leech suggests a tendency towards “democratization” (Leech 2003: 237). He refers to Myhill, who compares the use of the modals of obligation before and after the American Civil War and detects significant innovation from one period to the other. While the frequency of must, should, may and shall declines, the use of got to, have to, ought, better, can and gonna increases, for which he suggests the following explanation: [T]he “old” modals had usages associated with hierarchical social relationships, with people controlling the actions of other people, and with absolute judgments based upon social decorum, principle, and rules about societal expectations of certain types of people. The “new” modals, on the other hand, are more personal, being used to, for example, give advice to an equal, make an emotional request, offer help, or criticise one’s interlocutor (Myhill 1995: 157). A similar semantic shift, as Leech points out, might have occurred in the 20 th century (Leech 2003: 237). 4.4.4 Epistemic necessity The frequency of need expressing an epistemic necessity in general is comparatively low. In the period beginning in 1950, however, when the frequency of need reaches its peak, half of the occurrences of need express From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 89 an epistemic necessity. In the other periods, there are only few occurrences, with one third of all need in the 1850 and 1994 periods and only one fifth in the 1900-1910 period. Table 4 illustrates that epistemic necessity - with two exceptions - is typically used with third person subjects, the majority of which are inanimate. The development of epistemic necessity is typical of the English central modals. Table 4: Subjects of need expressing epistemic necessity 1850-1860 1900-1910 1950-1960 1994-2004 Total 10 41 24 4 1 st person - 1 - - 2 nd person 1 - - - 3 rd person animate 2 3 2 - 3 rd person inanimate - 4 22 (3 passives) 4 In prototypical examples of epistemic necessity, the speaker draws a logical conclusion from a certain situation. Of all examples of need expressing an epistemic necessity, only few express prototypical epistemic meaning where the speaker draws a logical conclusion in a certain situation, as in the following example: (18) 1994 D. RUSHKOFF Cyberia II. v. 59 As explained by morphic resonance, the traits need not have been passed on genetically. Here, the speaker infers from morphic resonance that there is not necessarily a reason to believe that the traits have been passed on genetically. In the majority of epistemic need, however, the logical necessity does not arise from a certain fact or situation, but is rather based on general contextual knowledge. In many occurrences, need collocates with be, for example in: (19) 1853 LYNCH Self-Improv. v. 112 An unpolished man need not be an illmannered one. It can be reformulated as ‘it is not necessarily the case that an unpolished man is an ill-mannered one.’ It is clearly distinct from participant-external necessity, since it does not mean ‘It is not necessary for an unpolished man to be ill-mannered.’ While in the present analysis, only need was found for the expression of epistemic necessity, Nokkonen detects a few epistemic uses of need to as well which mainly occur in the colloquial COLT corpus (Nokkonen 2006: 59). Friederike Müller 90 This points towards even further grammaticalisation in Present Day spoken English. 5. Results of the Analysis and Conclusion It was illustrated that in Present Day English need and need to can be treated as two different verbs syntactically and to a large extent semantically as well. Since the semantic development of need and need to to a large extent corresponds to the development on the semantic map of modality, both verbs are - semantically speaking - examples of grammaticalisation. Syntactically, both of them developed from the same construction - the lexical verb need + noun phrase - and were used in free variation for several centuries. Then, as the dynamics of grammaticalisation gathered steam, each of the two forms embarked on its own course of development, in line with parallel changes in the English modal system at two different points in time. First, as part of the development of the central modal auxiliaries, need (to) began to display modal syntax in Early Modern English. The analysis of the OED quotation database and the ARCHER corpus demonstrates that at least to 1800, auxiliary syntax and blends were by far the dominant grammatical constructions found with need. Subsequently, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, need to began to establish itself as a frequently used modal form with main-verb syntax. And just as need in auxiliary syntax developed as part of the wave which resulted in the grammaticalisation of the central modal auxiliaries will, may, might, can, could, shall, should, the rise of need to is parallel to the development of some English semior quasi-modals which can be categorised as emerging modals, namely have (got) to, going to, want to, ought (to), dare (to) (Krug 2000). In other words, the historical evidence does not lend support to an interpretation in which the spread of need to is seen as an unexpected and surprising partial reversal on a developmental path which is assumed as unidirectional. Currently, the frequency of need to is increasing dramatically while the use of modal need is declining. This development corresponds to general shifts in the English modal system. As Leech (2003), Krug (2000) and Biber et al. (1998) point out, the English semi-modals are increasing in frequency at the expense of the central modals so that the system of the English modal verbs is currently changing. Need, having grammaticalised twice into two different constructions, reflects these changes. In order to explain the increased use of need to, it is necessary to compare need to not only with need but also with other modals of obligation in more detail. It was illustrated above that the obligation expressed by need to is often stated only indirectly. Speakers resort to need to instead of other modals of obligation in order to sound more polite. In some contexts, need to From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 91 is beginning to replace other semi-modals such as have to (Smith 2003, Nokkonen 2006). Further research is necessary in order to find out whether the increased use of need to for the expression of obligations mirrors general developments in society towards “democratization” (Leech 2003) because speakers do not want to seem to impose power and authority upon others but rather choose a polite way for putting their demands in order to ensure cooperation. References Auwera, Johan van der & Vladimir A. Plungian (1998). “Modality’s Semantic Map.” Linguistic Typology 2. 79-124. Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad & Randi Reppen (1998). Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: CUP. Biber, Douglas, Edward Finegan & Dwight Atkinson (eds.) (1994). “A RCHER and its Challenges: Compiling and Exploring a Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers.” In: Creating and Using English Language Corpora. Fries, Udo, Gunell Totti & Peter Schneider. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi. 1-13. Bybee, Joan L., William Pagliuca & Revere D. Perkins (1994). The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coates, Jennifer (1983). The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London & Canberra: Croom Helm. Facchinetti, Roberta, Manfred Krug & Frank Palmer (eds.) (2003). Modality in Contemporary English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi & Friederike Hünemeyer (1991). Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heine, Bernd (2003). “Grammaticalization.” Joseph, Brian & Ernst Janda (eds.). 575-601. Heine, Bernd (1993). Auxiliaries. New York, Oxford: OUP. Hoffmann, Sebastian (2005) Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions. A Corpus-Based Study. London, New York: Routledge. Hoffmann, Sebastian (2004). “Using the OED Quotations Database as a Corpus - a Linguistic Appraisal.” ICAME Journal 18. 17-30. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Traugott. (2003, 2 nd ed.). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP. Joseph, Brian D. & Richard Janda (eds.) (2003). The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. Krug, Manfred (2000). Emerging English Modals. A Corpus-Based Study of Grammaticalization. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Leech, Geoffrey (2003). “Modality on the Move: The English Modal Auxiliaries 1961-1992.” In: Facchinetti, Roberta & Krug (eds.). 224-240. Lindquist, Hans & Christian Mair (eds.) (2004). Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Friederike Müller 92 Mair, Christian (2004). “Corpus Linguistics and Grammaticalization Theory: Statistics, Frequencies and Beyond.” In: Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Meyer, Charles F. ( 2002). English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Myhill, John (1995). “Change and Continuity in the Functions of the American English Modals.” Linguistis 33. 157-211. Nokkonen, Solili (2006). “The Semantic Variation of need to in Four Recent British English Corpora.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11 (1): 29-71. Palmer, Frank (2003). “Modality in English: Theoretical, Descriptive and Typological Issues.” In: Facchinetti, Roberta & Krug (eds.). 1-17. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Smith, Nicholas (2003). “Changes in the Modals and Semi-Modals of Strong Obligation and Epistemic Necessity in Recent British English.” In: Facchinetti, Roberta & Krug (eds.). 241-266. Sweetser, Eve E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: CUP. Taeymans, Martin (2004). “An Investigation into the Marginal Modals DARE and NEED in British Present-Day English: A Corpus-based Approach”. In: O. Fischer, M. Norde and H. Perridon, eds., Up and Down the Cline: The Nature of Grammaticalization, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs (2003). “Constructions in Grammaticalization.” In: Joseph, Brian D. & Richard Janda (eds.). 624-647. - & Richard B. Dasher (2001). Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: CUP. Visser, Frederikus. Th. (1969). An Historical Syntax of the English Language III. Leiden: Brill. Warner, Anthony R. (1993). English Auxiliaries: Structure and History. Cambridge: CUP. Corpora used: A Representative Corpus of English Registers (ARCHER) Quotation database of the Oxford English Dictionary: www.OED.com (last accessed: May 2006) From Degrammaticalisation to Regrammaticalisation? 93 Appendix: Table 5: Quirk et al.’s criteria for auxiliary verbs applied to need and need to (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 137) Auxiliary Main Verb (a) 1900 POLLOK & THOM Sports Burma 262 One need not necessarily burn straight powder. 1909 P. W. BROWNE Where Fishers Go 75 He doesn’t need ‘to call the head clerk’ to know how many bundles of linnet are required to mesh a trap. (b) (…) No, my dear, it’s the truth, and you needn’t blush. 18509.bre\1863tayl.d6 - (only exceptions mentioned above.) (c) 1856 E. B. BROWNING Aurora Leigh (1898) II. 81 Need you tremble and pant Like a netted lioness? 1950 M. MEAD Male & Female xvi. 338 Floors do not need to be polished so often when there are no children’s feet to track them up. (d) - (Yes, I dò need to come.) (e) “(…) I hear a lot, but I don’t believe much of it.” “You needn’t. (…).” 1900-49.bre\1930toml.f8a - (f) 1860-1 F. NIGHTINGALE Nursing 46, I need hardly say, that [etc.]. 1957 Essays in Crit. VII. 209 One scarcely needs to pursue the poem through the Hollywoodese of ‘our hearts go round’. (g) (They needn’t all come.) (They all need to come.) (h) 1860-1 F. NIGHTINGALE Nursing 46, I need hardly say, that [etc.]. 1903 Westm. Gaz. 5 May 3/ 2,. 2 July 4/ 2 Big hats very round in shape need not be avoided, nor Breton sailors. 1998 Dancing Times Feb. 480/ 1 (advt.) Everything you need to know about stage fights, including notating them. 1857 Trans. Illinois Agric. Soc. II. 382 Where tame pasture is resorted to something more needs to be done. Modal auxiliary Main verb (j) You can take nothing greater, you need take nothing less. 1850-99.bre\1890drum.h6 2000 R. J. EVANS Entertainment xiii. 186, I need to express to Jason my deep understanding of his problems, you know? (k) - (to need to) 1999 Independent 3 Feb. II. 11/ 6 Needing to reinvest her matured certificates, she suffered quite a shock when she saw what income she would receive. 2000 G. BOYLE Cover Story 351 The guy was a Democrat, but he still needed to pull those Republican votes in to put him over the top. (l) And that there was nothing that Christopher need be ashamed of. 1900-49.bre\1926deep.f8a More, I think - but your talent for self-concealment is greater. {=m LAWRENCE.} Perhaps it needs to be. 1950-90.bre\1960ratt.d9 (m) - 1996 Database 19 80/ 1 From a Dialog user’s perspective, here’s what we needed to do. [past time] Friederike Müller 94 Criteria: (a) Op (= operator) in negation (b) Negative contraction (c) Op in inversion (d) Emphatic positive (e) Op in reduced clause (f) Position of adverb (g) Postposition of quantifier (h) Independence of subject (j) Bare infinitive (k) No non-finite forms (l) No s-form (m) Abnormal time reference Friederike Müller Englisches Seminar Universität Freiburg I would like to thank Prof. Graham Shorrocks and Prof. Sandra Clarke, who gave me advice throughout the initial stages of my research. I am also thankful to Dr. Philip Hiscock for showing me around MUNFLA and explaining to me how to access and use the material; to Patricia Fulton and Pauline Cox, who provided me with the necessary files and answered all of my questions. Furthermore, I would like to thank Prof. Hildegard L.C. Tristram and Prof. Christian Mair for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen ‘There’s after being changes’: Be after V-ing in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland Christina Bismark 1. Introduction The syntactic construction be after V-ing is well documented for the English dialect spoken in Ireland. However, there are a few other varieties of which be after V-ing is a less well documented characteristic. One of them is the dialect spoken in Newfoundland. Approximately 300 years ago Irish settlers took the construction to the island, where it developed under conditions different from those in the source country. It is the aim of the present study to show exemplarily for one area in Newfoundland that this difference in development led to a change in meaning and function of be after V-ing. Also, it will be demonstrated how the new semantics is a result of contact with the second major variety taken to Newfoundland, namely the southwestern English dialect. A final point to be discussed is the status of be after V-ing as a marker of Newfoundland identity (cf. Bismark 2006). 2. The be after V-ing construction At a pub in St. John’s, Newfoundland, the presenter of an Open Microphone Night is hit accidentally on stage. He comments on the situation by saying: I’m after getting whacked in the back and smacked in the face. The syntactic Christina Bismark 96 1 It has been shown by Sabban (1982: 155ff) that something similar holds for Hebridean English. Despite the fact, however, that Welsh too possesses a construction which could be translated as be after V-ing the feature has not been attested for Welsh English so far: dw i wedi darllen form of BE AFTER VN read ‘I am after reading’ (I have read) construction he uses to refer to the incident is the be after V-ing construction, i.e. a structure consisting of a form of be followed by the preposition after followed by a verb ending in -ing: (1) I’m after getting form of BE prep AFTER V-ING ‘I’ve just gotten’ The construction be after V-ing is found in only a few varieties of English. Most often it has been described as being an integral part of the grammar of Irish English (see e.g. Filppula 1999: 99ff). However, it has also been attested for another variety in the British Isles, namely Hebridean English (Sabban 1982: 155ff). In Canada transplanted varieties of Irish English like Newfoundland English (see e.g. Clarke 1997b: 216; Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004: 1151, 1053), Prince Edward Island English (Pratt 1988, s.v. after (1)) and the dialect spoken in the Ottawa Valley (Trudgill 1986: 150) display the feature, too. The origin of the Irish English (IrE) after construction has been explained as “a clear case of substratum transfer” (Filppula 1999: 106; see also Hartog and Hayden 1909: 933; Joyce 1910: 85; van Hamel 1912: 276; Bliss 1979: 300; Harris 1984: 319; Ó hÚrdail 1997: 193; Tristram 1999: 259; Siemund 2006: 285, etc.) as it is caused by language contact (Lehiste 1988: 15). In the 1650s the Cromwellian settlements in Ireland created a language contact situation in the course of which a shift to superstrate English took place (Ó hÚrdail 1997: 181). It led to syntactic interference, i.e. some Irish structures were carried over into English (Thomason 2001: 78f). The be after V-ing construction is based on the Irish structure tar éis (> tréis) followed by a verbal noun which translates literally into ‘be after doing’: 1 (2) Ir: Tá sé tréis imeacht IrE: is he after going StE: ‘He has just gone.’ (Filppula 1999: 101) While the origin of be after V-ing has been established quite clearly, the answer to the question of meaning is less straightforward. Early literature as well as some recent accounts state that the construction takes the function ‘There’s after being changes’ 97 of a perfect form and conveys the notion of recency. Thus, to be after doing would be interchangeable with the Standard English (StE) perfect form ‘to have just done’ (see e.g. Hume 1878: 25; van Hamel 1912: 276; Curme 1931: 361; Henry 1957: 177; Greene 1966: 49; Bliss 1984: 144; Harris 1993: 160; Ó hÚrdail 1997: 193; Hickey 2001: 15). When used with past be it was found to express pluperfect meaning as well (see, e.g. Hume 1878: 25; Joyce 1910: 84; Curme 1931: 362; Bliss 1984: 143). Next to accounts emphasizing the recency semantics of be after V-ing, there are others allowing for a broader meaning. Filppula (1999: 100) remarks “the time of speaking and the time of the event reported can be more remote from each other than what the label ‘hot news’ presupposes.” Taking into consideration the diachronic development of be after V-ing McCafferty (2006: 146) argues that the construction has never been used exclusively as a perfect of recency in IrE. According to him the construction has conveyed a range of perfect meanings (e.g. resultative, continuative; recency) throughout its history. Ronan (2005: 265f), too, opts for a broader meaning, emphasizing the predominance of resultative semantics. Whether the strong resultative component of meaning is a retention of a historical dialect pattern or a more recent development remains open to discussion. A very detailed empirical study of the use of be after V-ing in Dublin is provided by Kallen (1989, 1991). He analyzed 114 after tokens for their semantics ascribing each token one of the meanings the StE have perfect encompasses. Kallen used a model set up by McCawley (1973: 263), in which the categories of StE perfect use are defined as follows: Universal: “to indicate that a state of affairs prevailed throughout some interval stretching from the past into the present” Existential: “to indicate the existence of past events” Stative: “to indicate that the direct effect of a past event still continues” Hot News: “to report hot news” Having analyzed all examples of be after V-ing, Kallen arrives at the conclusion that the construction “is not found only in recent or completed contexts, and [that] it is well distributed across McCawley’s categories of usage” (Kallen 1989: 10). Nevertheless, Kallen’s results still show that be after V-ing is “favoured for use in contexts where the relationship between the time of the designated event/ state of affairs and the time of speaking [...] is fairly recent” (Kallen 1991: 71f). Thus, it seems that in Ireland be after V-ing is not restricted to the use as a perfect of recency, although this kind of use was found to be favored. Christina Bismark 98 3. Be after V-ing in Newfoundland 3.1 From Ireland to Newfoundland Irish immigration to Newfoundland started in the late 17 th century (Mannion 1977: 7) and reached its peak between 1715 and 1835 (Paddock 1991: 73). The immigrants were mainly fishermen attracted to the area by its prospering cod fishery. They came “from within thirty miles radius of Waterford city, specifically from southwest Wexford, south Kilkenny, southeast Tipperary, southeast Cork and County Waterford” (Mannion 1977: 8). As a place to settle they chose the Avalon Peninsula, from St. John’s to Placentia and some areas north of St. John’s to Fogo Island (Mannion 1977: 8). Here the IrE dialect came to be spoken. The Irish were one of the two main groups of settlers coming to Newfoundland. Already around 1500 fishermen from the southwest of England had started frequenting the shores of what was to become a colony in 1538 (Clarke 2004b: 242). At the beginning they came to Newfoundland on a seasonal basis, fishing in summer and leaving in the fall. This slowly changed from 1700 onwards when the first people decided to stay. Coming from Devon, Dorset, Hampshire and Somerset (Handcock 1996: 1f), these immigrants settled the northern Avalon Peninsula and the mainland of the province (Paddock 1991: 73). In the course of the following 300 years, the varieties spoken by the two groups of settlers developed under linguistically interesting conditions. First of all, the rough climate and a poor sea-based transportation system contributed strongly to cutting off communities from one another. In addition, religious tension made communication difficult between the Roman Catholic Irish and the Protestant English (Clarke 1997a: 279). Thus, the two groups of settlers tended to keep to themselves in either Irish or English settled parts of the island. This helped to preserve traditional features inherent in the source dialects (Clarke 1997b: 210). Nevertheless, isolation and the resulting linguistic conservatism were not absolute. Varieties of English spoken in Newfoundland have also been determined by “innovation and change” (Story 1967: 559), as next to well defined Irish and English settled focal areas there have always been transitional zones with less clear cut boundaries. Here the proximity of the two settler groups to one another brought IrE and southwestern English (SWE) dialects into contact and led to the mixing of the two (Paddock 1984: 94). Paddock’s (1981: 617) division of Newfoundland into focal and transitional dialect areas illustrates this fact: ‘There’s after being changes’ 99 2 The letter D denotes focal dialect areas. TA stands for transitional areas. D1 2 English-North TA1 Conception Bay and/ or St. John’s Area D2 Irishized Avalon Peninsula TA2 Placentia Bay D3 English-South D4 Southern West Coast TA3 Corner Brook Area D5 Northern West Coast Map 1: Newfoundland dialect patterns (after Paddock 1981: 617) Also, seasonal work like the seal hunt, the Labrador and Bank fisheries and the wood industry have brought together men from all parts of the province. Over the years dialect mixing has resulted in the development of new varieties characteristic of Newfoundland rather than Ireland or southwest England. These new dialects preserve many traditional features of both input varieties and at the same time display innovations (Story 1965: 130). Another factor determining the character of Newfoundland English dialects was the long standing isolation from the rest of Canada. Until the mid 20 th century the province was politically, economically and geographically cut off from North America (Shorrocks 1997: 321). Only after Confederation with Canada in 1949 did Newfoundland start opening up. However, the loss of its isolated status in connection with modernization led to the loss of dialect diversity (Shorrocks 1997: 326f). Dialect leveling and North American linguistic norms have now started to gain ground (Clarke 2004b: 247). Against the described historical background the development of be after V-ing can be summed up as follows: the construction was transported to Newfoundland by Irish fishermen in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. When immigration dried up in the mid 19 th century (Shorrocks 1997: 360) the construction developed in isolation from linguistic influences other than the dialect spoken by the second large group of immigrants from the southwest of Christina Bismark 100 3 Examples of be after V-ing stem from two different studies in different areas. 62 tokens were produced by speakers with Irish background living in St. Johns. Another 29 were collected in Burin, where speakers of English and Irish descent mix. The speaker sample is not further characterized. Thus, generalizations about the use of be after V-ing are problematic, as the question arises which speakers and areas the reported use of be after V-ing is representative for. England. Being subject to conditions of linguistic “conservatism and innovation” (Story 1967: 559) be after V-ing is likely to have undergone a different development in Newfoundland than it has in Ireland. Based on this assumption the question arises in which direction the after construction has changed and in which way it is used after 300 years in Newfoundland. 3.2 Meaning Accounts of be after V-ing as it is used in Newfoundland confirm what was to be expected. In the Canadian province the construction is used differently than in Ireland. Whereas for the IrE construction recency semantics is reported to be prominent, be after V-ing in Newfoundland is used to express the full range of StE have perfect meanings. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (DNE) lists the following: “to have (done), to have completed an action, to have already (done), to have just (done)” (DNE 1990, s.v. after). Being mentioned last, recency does not appear to be predominant. Although there is general agreement that be after V-ing is used like the StE perfect (see e.g. Story 1967: 560; Trudgill 1986: 151; Kirwin 1993: 73; Clarke 2004a: 306), this assumption has no empirical basis. Be after V-ing as a syntactic variable is not well researched just as in general “[t]here are no specialist studies devoted to the syntax of Newfoundland English” (Shorrocks 1997: 361). Accounts of Newfoundland English have so far been overviews of traditional dialect features. Such overviews merely mention be after V-ing without going into too much detail (see e.g. Paddock 1981: 620, Clarke 1997a: 280; Clarke 2004b: 252). The only more substantial study dealing with the construction on the basis of empirical data was carried out by Sandra Clarke (1997b: 216-218). However, this account is not set up as a study of be after V-ing in particular, but is again embedded in a greater discussion of several dialect features based on mixed data. 3 Given this more general nature of her study, Clarke does not go into too much detail about the meaning of be after V-ing and the categories of perfect use covered by the construction. Nevertheless, she attests meanings that go beyond the perfect of recency (Clarke 1997b: 216). All in all it seems to be beyond doubt that be after V-ing has undergone a semantic development in Newfoundland. It is generally held that it may refer to the whole range of perfect meanings. However, this assumption has not convincingly been proven by empirical studies. Thus, it is still to be estab- ‘There’s after being changes’ 101 4 For a more detailed account of the study see Bismark (2006). 5 Examples of a chosen syntactic feature do not occur in speech as frequently as examples of a phonological feature. Hence, long passages of speech are needed to obtain as many tokens as possible (Cheshire 1982: 7f). lished which categories of perfect use be after V-ing expresses most often. Also, an explanation for the semantic shift needs to be provided. The following empirical study was set up and carried out in an attempt to shed light on these issues. 4. The Placentia Bay study 4 4.1 Data collection The aim of the following study is to determine the semantics of be after V-ing in an area of Newfoundland where dialect contact might have led to changes in the meaning of the construction. The Placentia Bay region constitutes such a transition zone between IrE and West Country English based dialects (Paddock 1981: 617). Speech material from this area stems from The Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA). The archives host a collection of files set up on the basis of students’ research projects. Including tape-recorded interviews about various folklore topics complemented by transcripts of the interviews, speaker information and research papers the files are a valuable source of speech material. My choice of files was determined by two criteria. First of all I was looking for data from a transition area. Secondly, I needed material which was likely to yield many examples of a syntactic variable. Thus, I came to work with files including oral history or accounts of culture and customs as they provided long stretches of speech. 5 My source of data was an extensive file (number 70-8) compiled between December 1968 and November 1969 in the course of a folklore project. Over one year a 26 year old university student from St. John’s had conducted oral history interviews on beliefs, material culture, customs, songs and music of the Placentia Bay area. The material he collected turned out to be of great value for linguistic research, as the conditions under which it was recorded were such as to overcome the observer’s paradox common in attempts to gather natural speech. Being born and raised in the Placentia Bay area (Butler 1975: xi, 3), the fieldworker was an insider known to many of his informants. He recorded them in their homes while their friends and family were present. Thus, the interviews took on the character of informal social gatherings that involved drinking, joking, singing and playing the accordion. The material was collected for a folklore study, which is an advantage insofar as the attention of the speakers was drawn to this topic rather than to the Christina Bismark 102 6 Source of speaker information: for the most part MUNFLA files included a questionnaire filled in by the respective informant (name, age, place of birth/ residence, religion, education, profession, origin of ancestors). Nevertheless if such a form was filled in incompletely or not at all, there are gaps. Conclusive statements can of course only be made about the information available. 7 There is no equal division between female and male informants in this sample. However, such a division is not essential here as my study is not a sociolinguistic one and does not aim at correlating gender with the occurrence of be after V-ing in Placentia Bay. dialect they spoke. This way people talked freely about topics they were interested in without monitoring their speech. A final important characteristic of the data was that it stems from networks of informants which often constitute homogeneous groups of speakers with respect to non-linguistic variables like age, sex, social class and so on (Chambers 1996: 69). The disadvantage of my major source of information lies in the fact that the files are dated. Therefore I needed to check the present relevance of the older data against more recent material. Files from 1972, 1975, 1982, 1984 and 1996 provided me with this kind of data. They too included accounts of history, folk belief and folk medicine as well as tales and songs. Again the interviewers were folklore students and the interviews took place in the homes of the informants. However, the setting was a very formal one in most cases. 4.2 Area and informants Placentia Bay is an area in the southwest of the Avalon Peninsula. It was first colonized by the French in 1662. In 1713 the French lost the colony due to the regulations imposed on them through the Treaty of Utrecht (Butler 1975: 10). Their place was taken by “ethnically mixed” immigrants (Clarke 2004b: 246) coming from the southeast of Ireland and the southwest of England. As mentioned before, the Irish settled along the southern shore of the Avalon Peninsula and up to Placentia, constituting the main portion of the population (Handcock 1996: 3). The islands in the region were settled by the English (Butler 1975: 10). Although religion and dialect of the two groups of settlers differed, their way of working and living as well as their customs were similar. Consequently, a specific social character of Placentia Bay as a whole developed (ENL IV, s.v. Placentia Bay). In linguistic terms Placentia Bay was defined as a transition area by Paddock (1981: 617). Here IrE and SWE come into contact and mix, which is why the area “is naturally of linguistic interest” (Hickey 2002: 291). My speaker sample 6 consists of one woman and eighteen men 7 from communities in the Placentia Bay area. The mobility of the informants is not very high. Most of them were born and raised in the area but only six ever left and spent time somewhere else. With the exception of two younger speak- ‘There’s after being changes’ 103 8 See the Appendix for a complete list of examples and their semantic classification. 9 The numbers are an approximation based on the following calculation: the total of words is the number of pages every transcript consisted of times an average number of 320 words per page. 10 70 tokens in 219,000 words. ers, who were 19 and 26 years old at the time of recording, the informants’ ages lie between 56 and 84, concentrating in the 65 to 76 range. Information as to the level of education was only given by six speakers. Four of them received higher education (i.e. grade nine or eleven and a degree of some kind), one person had three months of schooling and another one received education till the age of twelve. Among the twelve speakers who gave details about their jobs there were a teacher, a university student, a person working in business, one working in an office, a self-taught engineer, a fish inspector, a maid and five fishermen. With respect to the ethnic origin of the speakers a strongly English background can be attested. Nine out of ten Protestants could trace their ancestors back to the southwest of England. The two Roman Catholic speakers are very likely to be of Irish descent. Another seven stated that their parents are Newfoundlanders from the Placentia Bay area. Regarding the speaker sample as a whole, it has to be taken into consideration that information is often incomplete. Therefore it appears to be difficult to make general statements. On the other hand, at least in the case of the main source of examples, the group of speakers constitutes a close-knit and apparently homogeneous social network. Thus, I make the general assumption that the informants are for the most part non-mobile, older, rural males (NORMS) with an English background. 4.3 Analysis and findings The selected MUNFLA files yielded 96 examples 8 of be after V-ing in an estimated total of 290,000 words. 9 All of these examples were to be classified in terms of the meanings the StE have perfect can express. As a prerequisite for such a categorization some kind of model is needed which categorizes the various have perfect meanings. Following Kallen (1989, 1991), who had applied McCawley’s model in his Dublin study, I chose to analyze my material according to McCawley’s categories of perfect use as well. My major data base, file 70-8, was analyzed separately from the more recent material and yielded 70 tokens 10 of be after V-ing. They included examples of all four of McCawley’s categories: Christina Bismark 104 11 26 tokens in 69,000 words. Universal: “to indicate that a state of affairs prevailed throughout some interval stretching from the past into the present” (3) He’s after doin’ good now since Confederation (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C654, ts p. 7) Existential: “to indicate the existence of past events” (4) one of em out on Jude now, he got a couple a months out of it now the winter he’s after bein’ out there before (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 8) Stative: “to indicate that the direct effect of a past event still continues” (5) but I don’t know the names of ... you know, I’m after forgettin’ you know (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C771, ts p. 11) Hot News: “to report hot news” (6) I said I’m after insultin your wife (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C687, ts p. 12) The additional files included 26 tokens 11 of be after V-ing which this time only covered three of the semantic categories: (7) Universal: no examples (8) Existential: Charlie said I’m after learnin’ a French song while I was in there (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2052, ts p. 2) (9) Stative: Government is after taking a lot of those things from men (MUNFLA Tape 82-214/ C9803) (10) Hot News: They were after breaking into the liquor store (MUNFLA Tape 96-577/ C-16380, ts p. 22) ‘There’s after being changes’ 105 12 These results skew the overall distribution as 8 of the 13 tokens stem from the same informant using the be after forgetting phrase eight times in a row. 13 Examples in this category could not clearly be characterized in terms of one category of use. Due to lack of contextual information two readings are possible in these cases: a) Universal or Existential where it is unclear whether a repeated event/ ongoing state in the past persists into the present b) Hot News or Existential where the length of time span between the moment of speaking and the event spoken about cannot be determined. The tokens were distributed as follows: Category File 70-8 Add. Files Total Tokens % Tokens % Tokens % Universal 4 6 0 0 4 4 Existential 41 58 7 27 48 50 Stative 13 19 13 50 12 27 28 Hot News 8 11 3 11,5 11 11 Not classified 13 4 6 3 11,5 7 7 The numbers show that for the examples drawn from file 70-8 existential meaning is predominant, accounting for half of the tokens. Stative semantics is expressed by one fifth of them, whereas hot news and especially universal uses are lowest in frequency. The results for the additional files have to be treated with caution as the percentage for the stative category is not representative. Considering that it should have been lower (see footnote 12), the additional material then confirms the present relevance of the tendencies established for the older data. All in all existential meaning is the most prominent semantic category, followed by stative use, while hot news and universal semantics fall behind. 4.4 Discussion of findings From the speech material I analyzed I drew examples of be after V-ing for every of McCawley’s four categories. The results show hot news meaning to be one possible category of use. However, in contrast to the construction as it is reported to be used in Ireland, reference to recency is not prominent. About half of the examples were classified as conveying existential semantics. Thus, be after V-ing as it is used in Placentia Bay tends to express mainly existential meaning, i.e. it denotes the existence of past events. In some examples this kind of reference is emphasized formally by the use of existential there, e.g.: Christina Bismark 106 14 I refers to Charlie, who reports what happened to him on the ship. 15 See the initial example in chapter 2 where the presenter comments on something that just happened to him on stage (I’m after getting whacked in the back and smacked in the face). (11) there’s some women after shiftin’ out (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C664 ts p. 11) (12) there’s different people after askin’ me (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C658 ts p. 27) In terms of use, another assumption can be made, namely that in some cases existential be after V-ing is applied in a past-tense-like manner. According to Quirk et al. (1985), past tense is defined by two main criteria. First of all, “[t]he event/ state must have taken place in the past with a gap between its completion and the present moment” (Quirk et al. 1985: 183). This condition holds for several examples in the corpus which were classified as existential, e.g.: (13) Oh there’s after bein’ divers over there about that (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 20) (14) He was after haulin me house for me (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C692, ts p. 8) (15) Charlie said I’m after learnin’ a French song while I was in there 14 (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2052, ts p. 2) In these examples be after V-ing tends to refer to events that are usually completed with a longer time span between completion and the moment of speaking. The second characteristic of the past tense is that “[t]he speaker or writer must have in mind a definite time at which the event/ state took place” (Quirk et al. 1985: 183). In the corpus there is a token of existential be after V-ing which is specified in this respect by the momentary adverbial in mid-winter: (16) I’m after coming across the bay in mid-winter in my skiff to Little Harbour (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C662, ts p. 6) Another observation supports the past tense hypothesis. One informant uses be after V-ing in the sentence I’m after learnin’ the Crabfish song now (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C674, ts p. 7). This sentence triggers the reply: “Oh, did ya? ” (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C674, ts p. 7), which indicates a past tense understanding of the first sentence. In contrast to the high frequency of existential semantics, examples of be after V-ing with hot news reference are few. This finding could be interpreted as a complete change of meaning. However, it has to be taken into consideration that the tokens of be after V-ing are drawn mainly from narrative contexts. In such contexts speakers do not tend to bring up things that just happened. Spontaneous speech, however, that refers to the situation the speaker is in 15 would very likely have produced more hot news examples. ‘There’s after being changes’ 107 16 Tense locates the verb action in time relative to the moment of speaking (Quirk et al. 1985: 175). 17 The stative and hot news categories classify the event spoken about as news or still relevant with respect to the moment of speaking. Thus, an aspect like characterization of the verb action takes place (Quirk et al. 1985: 188). 18 Philip Hiscock teaches Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and used to be head of MUNFLA. Thus, I do not interpret the results as a complete change of meaning. Instead I suggest that existential semantics is predominant being complemented by solid stative and hot news uses. I further suggest that be after V-ing splits semantically. In existential contexts it develops a tense 16 component while stative and hot news categories remain related more strongly to aspect 17 . The last important point to be mentioned is that be after V-ing has in the course of time lost its status as being an exclusively IrE dialect feature. My study shows that the majority of speakers in the sample are of West Country English origin. This means that the construction has spread to become part of the grammar of all speakers in the area irrespective of their ethnic background. 4.5 Explaining the changes The analysis of my Placentia Bay data led to the conclusion that be after Ving is used somewhat differently in this area of Newfoundland than in the source country. Also, the originally IrE dialect feature is used by speakers with a West Country English background. In explaining these phenomena two points are of importance. As mentioned before, Placentia Bay is a transition area (Paddock 1981: 617), i.e. immigrants from southwest England and southeast Ireland settled there close to one another. Proximity and shared work experience eventually led to interaction so that in contrast to other regions in Newfoundland Irish and English settlers mixed well (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, 647). The second important factor contributing to the development of be after V-ing is that in Newfoundland IrE has been more prestigious than SWE, as it is the kind of English spoken in the capital city of St. John’s (Philip Hiscock 18 , p.c. 2005). According to Peter Trudgill (1986: 6), in a dialect contact situation interaction of two groups of dialect speakers is likely to lead to transfer of linguistic features from one variety to the other. What Trudgill terms linguistic accommodation then gives rise to interdialectal forms “which were not actually present in any of the dialects contributing to the mixture” (Trudgill 2004: 86). There are different possibilities as to how exactly these forms develop. One of them is hyperadaptation. In the course of this process a feature of a more prestigious variety is adopted and used according to the understanding of the speakers who take it over. Misor reanalysis then leads to the feature Christina Bismark 108 being applied in a different way than in the source dialect (Trudgill 2004: 87, 94). Based on this model the development of be after V-ing in Placentia Bay can be summarized as follows: in the course of dialect contact between speakers of SWE origin and speakers of IrE origin the former took over the be after V-ing construction from the more prestigious IrE variety. They started to use the construction as they understood it, i.e. they added the semantics of the general have perfect, which is part of their own dialect. The result of this process of hyperadaptation is the interdialectal form be after V-ing with StE perfect meaning. Thus, my empirical study confirms for one region of Newfoundland a so far unproven assumption by Trudgill (1986) about be after V-ing in Newfoundland as a whole: […] this construction has spread, through dialect contact, from basically Irish dialects to others which are basically English English in origin [...] In acquiring this form, however, these dialects have extended its function to include relatively remote past events as well as hot-news. That is, they use the Irish English form in a hyperadaptive, non-Irish-English manner (1986: 152). However, the study of be after V-ing as it is used in one region of Newfoundland can at best be a starting point. My findings are representative for Placentia Bay and it may be expected that the characteristics of the construction are basically the same throughout the province. Nevertheless, replication studies of other regions are definitely necessary in order to arrive at a general conclusion. As my research focused on a transition area it might be reasonable to study the semantic properties of be after V-ing in regions with a solely Irish or a solely English background. Results similar to those of my study would further support the tendencies I established and constitute additional evidence for Trudgill’s general assumption. 5. Be after V-ing and identity According to Trudgill (2004: 27), “colonial dialect mixture situations involving adults speaking many different dialects of the same language will eventually and inevitably lead to the production of a new, unitary dialect.” The development of such a dialect or rather several varieties of this kind has been described for Newfoundland (cf. Widdowson 1964: 46, Story 1965: 130, Story 1967: 562, Paddock 1981: 616). Especially in transition areas like Placentia Bay SWE and IrE blend to form varieties that display characteristics of their own. At the same time they include retentions of the two source dialects (Story 1965: 130). The same holds for the way Newfoundlanders perceive themselves. When settlement started in the 17 th century, the population consisted of people who were either Irish or English. Over the 300 years, ‘There’s after being changes’ 109 19 See Eckert (2005) for a similar approach. however, a sense of belonging to the province developed and brought with it the concept of an independent Newfoundland identity. The way people speak is one way to express this identity. In being used by Newfoundlanders throughout the province irrespectively of their ethnic background (Clarke 1997b: 216) be after V-ing is part of their linguistic identity. It is a feature of a general Newfoundland English dialect and as such it indicates belonging to the province or, as Philip Hiscock (p.c. 2005) put it, it is “a flag people are waving” in order to show that they are Newfoundlanders. Indeed, be after V-ing at least in Placentia Bay does not appear to be stigmatized as, according to Filppula (2004: 76), it is in Ireland. This assumption is based on two observations. Firstly, the construction is used by all speakers in the sample. In this respect young, educated, mobile informants do not differ from NORMS. Also, people with an English background use be after V-ing just the same as speakers of Irish origin. Secondly, examples of the after construction were numerous in the files, i.e. they occurred in short intervals during the conversation. Thus, it can be assumed that in Placentia Bay be after V-ing is used frequently by all speakers regardless of social constraints. However plausible the concept of be after V-ing as a marker of Newfoundland identity might appear, it has so far just been an assumption. Further research in this area needs to provide evidence of how much substance there is to this idea. Attitude studies might help to find out whether be after Ving really bears a positive marking. Another possible approach to the identity aspect of the construction would be to follow the model recently established by Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson (2006). Their study describes a development in the status of dialect features caused by increasing geographic mobility. It is shown how unnoticed linguistic variables come to be used and heard first as markers of socioeconomic class and then linked to place, so that they become part of a vernacular termed ‘Pittsburghese’ (2006: 77). 19 This idea is very much in keeping with what has been suggested for the development of be after V-ing and might therefore constitute a valuable pattern for further research. 6. Conclusion The subject of the present paper has been the syntactic feature be after Ving. This IrE construction was taken to Newfoundland by Irish settlers beginning in the late 17 th century. The question was raised whether the characteristics of be after V-ing might have changed in the course of its development in the New World. In order to answer this question an empirical case study Christina Bismark 110 on the semantics of the feature was carried out. The results of the study led to the following insights about be after V-ing in the Placentia Bay area of Newfoundland. Firstly, its use is not restricted to the perfect of recency category, which is traditionally associated with the IrE source construction. Rather, be after Ving in Placentia Bay was found to convey all four StE perfect meanings with an emphasis on existential semantics. In connection to the change of meaning it was suggested that in existential contexts be after V-ing displays specific past tense characteristics. A second conclusion drawn from the findings is that the new characteristics of the feature are a result of processes caused by dialect contact between the IrE and SWE varieties in a transition area. Based on the results of this study perspectives for future research were opened. Additional studies will have to test the representativeness of my findings for the whole of Newfoundland. Further research should also take a new angle by approaching the notion of be after V-ing as an identity marker. References Bismark, C. (2006). “Two hundred years after going west: The be after V-ing construction in the Placentia Bay area of Newfoundland”. Unpublished M.A. thesis: Potsdam University. Bliss, A. (1979). Spoken English in Ireland 1600-1740. Dublin: The Cadenus Press. Bliss, A. (1984). “English in the South of Ireland”. In: Trudgill, P. (ed.). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: CUP. 135-151. Butler, V. (1975). The Little Nord Easter: Reminiscences of a Placentia Bayman. 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(2004b). “The Legacy of British and Irish English in Newfoundland”. In: Hickey, R. (ed.). Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transplanted Dialects. Cambridge: CUP. 242-261. Curme, G.O. (1931). A Grammar of the English Language in Three Volumes. Vol. III: Syntax. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company. DNE: Dictionary of Newfoundland English (1990, 2 nd edn.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ‘There’s after being changes’ 111 Eckert, P. (2005). “Variation, convention, and social meaning”. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Oakland CA, January 7, 2005. ENL: Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador (1981-1994). St. Johns NL: Newfoundland Book Publishers. Filppula, M. (1999). The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style. London & New York: Routledge. Greene, D. (1966). The Irish Language. Dublin: The Three Candles, Ltd. Hamel, A.G. van (1912). “On Anglo-Irish Syntax”. Englische Studien 45. 272-292. Handcock, W.G. (1996). “Patterns of English Migration to Newfoundland with Special Reference to the Wessex Area”. Paper presented to the Newfoundland Historical Society-Newfoundland History Conference, October 1996. Harris, J. (1984). “Syntactic Variation and Dialect Divergence”. Journal of Linguistics 20. 303-327. Harris, J. (1993). “The Grammar of Irish English”. In: Milroy, J. & L. Milroy (eds.). Real Englishes: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. New York: Longman Publishing. 139-186. Hartog, M. & M. Hayden (1909). “The Irish Dialect of English: Syntax and Idioms”. Fortnightly Review 85: 933-947. Henry, P.L. (1957). An Anglo-Irish Dialect of North Roscommon. Aschmann & Scheller: Zürich. Hickey, R. (2001). “The South-East of Ireland: A Neglected Region in Dialect Study”. In: Kirk, J.M. & D.P. Ó Baoill (eds.). Language Links: The Languages of Scotland and Ireland. Belfast: Queen’s University. 1-22. Hickey, R. (2002). “The Atlantic Edge: The Relationship between Irish English and Newfoundland English”. English World-Wide 23: 2. 283-316. Hume, A. (1878). Remarks on the Irish Dialect of the English Language. Liverpool: Thomas Brakell. Johnstone, B., J. Andrus & A.E. Danielson (2006). “Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese’”. Journal of English Linguistics 34. 77-104. Joyce, P.W. (1988/ originally 1910). English as We Speak it in Ireland. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. Kallen, J.L. (1989). “Tense and Aspect Categories in Irish English”. English World-Wide 10. 1-39. Kallen, J.L. (1991). “Sociolinguistic Variation and Methodology: After as a Dublin Variable”. In: Cheshire, J. (ed.). English around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: CUP. 61-74. Kirwin, W.J. (1993). “The Planting of Anglo-Irish in Newfoundland”. In: Clarke, S. (ed.). Focus on Canada. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 65-84. Kirwin, W.J. (2001). “Newfoundland English”. In: Algeo, J. (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 6. Cambridge: CUP. 441-455. Kortmann, B. & B. Szmrecsanyi (2004). “Global synopsis: Morphological and syntactic variation in English”. In: Kortmann et al. (eds.). 1142-1202. Kortmann, B., et al. (eds.) (2004). A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lehiste, I. (1988). Lectures on Language Contact. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mannion, J. (1977). The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography. St. John’s NL: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Memorial University of Newfoundland. McCafferty, K. (2006). “Be After V-ing on the Past Grammaticalisation Path: How far Is It after Coming”. In: Tristram (ed.). 130-151. Christina Bismark 112 McCawley, J.D. (1973). Grammar and Meaning: Papers on Syntactic and Semantic Topics. Tokyo: Taishukan Publishing Company. MUNFLA website: http: / / www.mun.ca/ folklore/ munfla/ index.php; accessed: 04.08.06; 19: 04. Ó hÚrdail, R. (1997). “Hiberno-English: Historical Background and Synchronic Features and Variation”. In: Tristram (ed.). 180-200. Paddock, H.J. (1984). “Mapping Lexical Variants in Newfoundland English”. In: Zobl, H. (ed.). Papers from the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistics Association. Moncton: University of Moncton. 84-103. Paddock, H.J. (1991). “Linguistic vs. Non-Linguistic Conditioning of Linguistic Variables”. Journal of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association 13. 71-83. Pratt, T.K. (1988). Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English. Toronto. Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, J. Svartvik & G. Leech (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Ronan, P. (2005). “The After-perfect in Irish English”. In: Filppula, J., et al. (eds.). Dialects Across Borders. Selected Papers from the 11 th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI), Joensuu, August 2002. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 253-270. Sabban, A. (1982). Gälisch-englischer Sprachkontakt: Zur Variabilität des Englischen im Gälischsprachigen Gebiet Schottlands. Groos: Heidelberg. Shorrocks, G. (1997). “Celtic Influences on the English of Newfoundland and Labrador”. In: Tristram (ed.). 320-361. Siemund, P. (2006). “Independent Developments in the Genesis of Irish English”. In: Tristram (ed.). 283-305. Story, G.M. (1965). “Newfoundland Dialect: An Historical View”. Canadian Geographical Journal 70: 4. 126-131. Story, G.M. (1967). “The Dialects of Newfoundland”. In: Smallwood, J.R. (ed.). The Book of Newfoundland. St. John’s NL: Newfoundland Book Publishers. 559-563. Thomason, S.G. (2001). Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tristram, H.L.C. (ed.) (1997). The Celtic Englishes. Heidelberg: Winter. Tristram, H.L.C. (1999). “‘The Celtic Englishes’ - Zwei grammatikalische Beispiele zum Problem des Sprachkontaktes zwischen dem Englischen und den keltischen Sprachen”. In: Zimmermann, S., R. Ködderitzsch & A. Wigger (eds.). Akten des zweiten deutschen Keltologen-Symposiums, Bonn, 2.-4. April 1997. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 254-276. Tristram, H.L.C. (ed.) (2006). The Celtic Englishes IV. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag. Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford, New York: Blackwell. Trudgill, P. (2004). New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Widdowson, J.D.A. (1964). “Some Items of a Central Newfoundland Dialect”. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics 10: 1. 37-46. Christina Bismark Universität Freiburg Englisches Seminar ‘There’s after being changes’ 113 Appendix: List of examples (I) F ILE 70-8 Universal 1. Well, we’re after goin’ through a good bit aren’t... (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C769, ts p. 13)U 2. … said their [they’re CB] after gettin’ right “high brow” (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C688, ts p. 13) 3. Well here I am I’m after dealing a good bit in the 45 year (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C647, ts p. 32) 4. He’s after doin’ good now since Confederation (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C654, ts p. 7) Existential 5. You sang a lot a songs though last summer but you never, that’s two you’re after singin’ tonight you never sung for me before (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C776, ts p. 3) 6. I daresay you’re after hearin’ this yourself (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C664, ts p. 5) 7. [There’s CB] Some awful queer stuff after happening isn’t it? (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C668, ts p. 12) 8. I’m after learnin’ the Crabfish song now. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C674, ts p. 7) 9. Good many fellers after tellin me stuff like that (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C708, ts p. 4) 10. one of em out on Jude now, he got a couple a months out of it now the winter he’s after bein’ out there before (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 8) 11. And I was after gettin’ it from me father and from the old people where twas too (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 17) 12. and this machine what he had, you’re after seein’ these fer findin’ out about where there’s water [...] (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 18) 13. something like a fountain pen, you’re after seein’ them, isn’t ya? (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 19) 14. Oh there’s after bein’ divers over there about that (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 20) 15. and they’re after bein’ there two or three times (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 20) Christina Bismark 114 16. But any rate, they were pretty much interested in it, they’re after bein’ over there divin’ (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 20f) 17. they’re after bein’ out off a the lower end a the Island between Emberley’s Island, (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 21) 18. [they’re after bein’ CB] back of Emberley’s Island (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 21) 19. and they’re after bein out there the other way (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 21) 20. this is the story [that CB] was handed down to me, you know, I’m after gettin’ it pretty good from different old fellers. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C647, ts p. 2) 21. I knows the routine of it pretty good, I’m after being up agin it, but I never done any smuggeling. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C647, ts p. 27) 22. that’s how twas always, after arguin’ pretty good with a good many, specially with these cod net men and the jigger men (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C648, ts p. 10) 23. - Why is that - I’m after, I always kept up that end and I’m always going to and I think I’m after, after reading it on the papers there now too (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C648, ts p. 10) 24. [...] when you get in on the Southern Shore [...] and you were after bein’ into St. Pierre on the way along (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C770, ts p. 12) 25. I’m after havin a dozen letters from different places people wanted me (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C683, ts p. 1) 26. I: Dey sing that very often? S: Oh, I’m after hearin’ it a lot of times. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C766, ts p. 9) 27. I’m after hearin’ it a lot of times. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C766, ts p. 9) 28. Oh, I’m after hearing a lot of ol’ fellers sing it. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C766, ts p. 9) 29. Yes boy, … got them, I’m after hearin’ dat. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C766, ts p. 19) 30. I’m after hearin ? at it. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C766, ts p. 19) 31. Oh I forgits it now but I’m after hearin it a dozen times on da tape recorder (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C767, ts p. 9) 32. I’m after coming across the bay in mid-winter in my skiff to Little Harbour (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C662, ts p. 6) ‘There’s after being changes’ 115 33. and [after CB] contactin’ Doctor … (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C662, ts p. 6) 34. but I’ll tell ya there’s some women after shiftin’ out of Davis’ Cove and Prowseton and Clattice Harbour and St. Kyrans that never saw the sun rise over St. John’s in their lives. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C664, ts p. 11) 35. there’s different people after askin’ me (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C658, ts p. 27) 36. I: Can’t sing it. S: I don’t know ah you’re after hearin’ it anyway. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C672, ts p. 15) 37. Sure in Harbour Buffett sure that’s after changin’ hands sure a dozen times (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C660, ts p. 10) 38. I’m after hearin’ a lot of those songs (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C689, ts p. 11) 39. after learnin a lot of em, (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C689, ts p. 11) 40. pose [suppose CB] after singin a lot of them (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C689, ts p. 11) 41. He was after haulin me house for me (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C692, ts p. 8) 42. I said you might be after doing twice as much fuckin’ as … (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C677, ts p. 8) 43. I asked her one morning what was she at, what was her work, She said borning babies sir. I don’t know how many she told me then she was after borning. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C645, ts p. 15) 44. Well, I thought he was after tellin’ ya dat one (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C773, ts p. 4) 45. S: You heard that one sure. I: No, I never heard that one. S: Yes, you did, I’m after tellin’ you about six times (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C773, ts p. 9) Stative 46. What about the fishery there, now in the old days of course there’s big changes after takin’ place in the kind of boats people used... (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C768, ts p. 19) 47. [...] but I don’t know the names of ... you know, I’m after forgettin’ you know. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C771, ts p. 11) 48. I’m after forgettin’ an awful lot a songs. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C775, ts p. 19) Christina Bismark 116 49. Look you’re after forgettin’ ten times as much as you remembers now. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C775, ts p. 19) 50. He’s after forgetting so much of it you know. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C664, ts p. 19) 51. But there’s one principle thing I’m after losin’ (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C646, ts p. 27) 52. Now I don’t know whether anybody knows, somebody do I suppose cause I’m after tellin’ em (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C647, ts p. 10) 53. I’m after forgettin’, so long since, I never sung dat (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C766, ts p. 14) 54. he’s goin’ to git credit, he says, fer what dis man is after doin’ (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C658, ts p. 10) 55. I said, … what’s funny? I said, are you after hearin’ something? I said, you’re laughin’ (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C658, ts p. 13) 56. A good many a the people is after leavin’ the Island now (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C659, ts p. 10) 57. Dere is a couple I’m after forgettin’. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C671, ts p. 14) 58. I don’t know what they’re done with yer church in Harbour Buffett, they’re after wreckin’ that up. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C644, ts p. 20f) Hot News 59. But … said once too you know, Jesus the wind is after changin’ right around. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C679, ts p. 24) 60. He was after asking, telling me to bring over some picketts he had (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C647, ts p. 22) 61. There was after raining you know there was puddles of water all over the ice (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C681, ts p. 3) 62. Somebody come down and siad [said CB] to me my lard, your after cuttin all th[e] stuff around the grave yard. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C682, ts p. 8) 63. this is where basterd was after goin up and got this and put it on this boom (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C682, ts p. 9) 64. Well, how much did he laugh when he found out he was after gettin it off on us. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C682, ts p. 9) 65. I’m after insultin her. [...] (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C687, ts p. 11) ‘There’s after being changes’ 117 66. I said I’m after insultin your wife. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C687, ts p. 11) Not classified 67. Well I’m tellin’ you, I’m after speakin’ about them. (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C655, ts p. 8) 68. I was after, I was after usin’ up me grammer a lot in that length a time (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C664, ts p. 16) 69. Now Jack got in wit his heart’s desire, Sure he could please her as well as a squire De squire come dere fer to pull de string, And Jack was after haulin’ it in (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C672, ts p. 12) 70. ...and when they told me they were after takin’ the doors out of it... (MUNFLA Tape 70-8/ C644, ts p. 21) (II) A DDITIONAL F ILES Existential 71. do you have any little stories that your father is after passing on down to you (MUNFLA Tape 84-191/ C11340, ts p. 15) 72. How many songs would you say he’s after makin’ up to you (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 73. Oh yea when did Maritime Packers come to Buffett, and I’m after asking Tom and he’s not able to tell me. (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2047, ts p. 4) 74. Charlie said I’m after learnin’ a French song while I was in there (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2052, ts p. 2) 75. and she said, look, I’m after readin’ your stories (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2053, ts p. 1) 76. We were after bein’ that way for twenty two hours (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2056, ts p. 5) 77. He’s after hearing all this old trash (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13776) Stative 78. and here was five or six big doughballs floating about [...] After washing down the drain and got out of the garden out on the road (MUNFLA Tape 96-577/ C16379, ts p. 24) 79. I don’t know what band it was or anything like that. I did know but I’m after forgetting. (MUNFLA Tape 96-577/ C16380, ts p. 23) Christina Bismark 118 80. We’re after going, I suppose, to hell the other way [...] (MUNFLA Tape 82-214/ C-9803) 81. We’re after going too far (MUNFLA Tape 82-214/ C-9803) 82. Government is after taking a lot of those things from men (MUNFLA Tape 82-214/ C-9803) 83. [But] I’m after forgettin’ (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 84. I’m after forgettin’ that (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 85. But I’m after forgettin’ (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 86. I had every goddamn bit but I’m after forgettin’ (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 87. I’m after forgettin’ (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 88. I’m after forgettn (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 89. I’m gonna try [? ? ? ] I’m after forgettn (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) 90. I’m gonna sing it to you ‘f course I’m after forgettn (MUNFLA Tape 74-91/ C13774) Hot News 91. But now the water was after rising (MUNFLA Tape 84-191/ C11340, ts p. 16) 92. they are after callin’ the police (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2051, ts p. 1) 93. They were after breaking into the liquor store (MUNFLA Tape 96-577/ C16380, ts p. 22) Not classified 94. I went to Argentia so … her brother, was home, see his father, his father wadn’t very well, he was after havin’ operation and he be goin’ back to St. John’s (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2053, ts p. 2) 95. I was after meetin’ the girl, that was kind of a... [end of tape] (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C2053, ts p. 10) 96. Well now, … he was a businessman there for years and he was after leavin’ it up on the point you know the place there (MUNFLA Tape 75-127/ C-2054, ts p. 1) Aus Anlass von Verena Olejniczak Lobsien (1999). Skeptische Phantasie. Eine andere Geschichte der frühneuzeitlichen Literatur. Nikolaus von Kues, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Burton, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Anne Conway. München: W. Fink; Verena Oleniczak Lobsien/ Eckhard Lobsien (2003). Die unsichtbare Imagination. Literarisches Denken im 16. Jahrhundert. München: W. Fink; Eckhard Lobsien (2003). Imaginationswelten. Modellierungen der Imagination und Textualisierungen der Welt in der englischen Literatur 1580-1750. Heidelberg: Winter. (Neues Forum für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft. 19). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionsartikel Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’. Zu Genealogie und Funktion des Literarischen in Früher Neuzeit Andreas Mahler Die Entstehung des Literarischen in den westlichen Kulturen bedarf der Erklärung. Der vorliegende Rezensionsaufsatz greift die von Verena Olejniczak Lobsien und Eckhard Lobsien in drei umfangreichen, ineinandergreifenden Bänden vorgetragene These vom Zusammenhang philosophischer Skepsis und literarischen Imaginierens auf, indem er zunächst den Gedankengang der Einzelbände eingehend würdigt und ihn sodann auf andere Phänomene und Theorien literarischer Emergenz zu öffnen sucht. 1. Der Frühneuzeitforschung ist ein Triptychon geschenkt. Es ist ein Triptychon der Möglichkeit. Der linke Flügel zeigt die Geburt der Literatur aus dem Geist der Skepsis; der rechte behauptet ihre Apologie aus den unabweisbaren Belegen ihrer Potenz; das Zentralbild feiert die Apotheose der ihr zugrunde- Andreas Mahler 120 1 Ich benutze im Folgenden die Sigel SP (Skeptische Phantasie), UI (Unsichtbare Imagination) und IW (Imaginationswelten). liegenden Kraft der Imagination. Seine Existenz verdankt sich den Bemühungen eines schreibenden Paars. Dessen Projekt nimmt seinen Ausgang in einer im Umkreis des Tübinger Graduiertenkollegs zu ‘Pragmatisierung/ Entpragmatisierung’ entstandenen Schrift seines weiblichen Parts; es fundiert sich in den gemeinsam niedergelegten (Teil-)Ergebnissen einer in Bochum verankerten Forschergruppe zu ‘Imagination und Kultur’; es kanalisiert sich in achtzehn einer Donnerstagsrunde im Berliner Lokal Diener zugeeigneten Textanalysen frühneuzeitlicher Imaginationswelten beim männlichen (Wider-)Part samt einem Versuch ihrer Systematisierung. Gemeinsamer Fluchtpunkt ist ein engagiertes Plädoyer für eine Literatur - und eine Literaturwissenschaft - “mit großem L” (UI 9) 1 : funktionsgeschichtlicher Ausweis beider unabdingbarer Notwendigkeit. 2. Verena Lobsiens Geschichte einer frühneuzeitlichen skeptischen Phantasie gliedert sich in zwei Blöcke. Der erste zeichnet eine Genealogie philosophischer Skepsis (SP Kap. I + II); der zweite unternimmt die im Untertitel vermerkte ‘andere’ Geschichte der frühneuzeitlichen - vornehmlich englischen - Literatur entlang der ebendort ein wenig ungelenk aufgeführten Linie von den Anfängen bis hin zu Anne Conway (SP Kap. III-VII). Beider Verbindung stellt die Grundthese: Die Skepsis als Ort diskursiver Infragestellung welterklärender Systeme des Denkens und Argumentierens eröffnet einen Raum grundständiger Alterität, den die Literatur in den autoritätsdestabilisierenden Pluralisierungswirren der frühen Neuzeit funktional füllt. “Ermuntert”, so Lobsien, “die Skepsis zu einem ‘tropischen’ Denken, für welches eines auch stets ein anderes sein könnte, so kann sie etwa ab der Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts einer frühmodernen Literatur den Weg bereiten, die in einer bewusstseinsgeschichtlichen Situation des Geltungsverlusts der großen philosophischen und theologischen Systeme Erfahrungen der Kontingenz, Unbestimmtheit und Unabgeschlossenheit bearbeitet, indem sie diese zugleich strukturell vermittelt.” Und zuspitzend fährt sie fort: “Als eine der Grundformen menschlichen Denkens und Handelns findet die Skepsis den ihr kongenialen Ort in der Literatur.” (SP 47) Dies gründet in ihrem “Meta- Charakter” (SP 10, 49). Der Skeptiker trifft nicht wie alle anderen Aussagen über Inhalte, sondern Aussagen über Aussagen; als “Weltzuschauer” (SP 23; Blumenberg) nimmt er primär nicht Stellung zur Welt, sondern zu Weltdeutung. In diesem Sinne ist sein Tun sekundär, parasitär, reflexiv; es zielt auf den Zustand der Schwebe: nicht auf das positive (oder negative) Dogma, Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 121 sondern auf den Ausgleich, das Aushalten der Aporie, auf ‘Isosthenie’. Erst der Verzicht aufs Urteil, auf Wahrheit, auf die Konklusion (SP 21, Anm. 1) erbringt die Seelenruhe der Ataraxie: wo andere bereits verzweifelt finden, bleibt der Skeptiker weiterhin zweifelnd auf der Suche; gelassen stellt er sich der Kontingenz; ihn prägt ein “Leben im Provisorischen”, ein “Sich-Halten im Als-Ob”, beständige Anerkenntnis der Möglichkeit, “dass alles auch ganz anders sein könnte” (SP 35). Hierin liegt die Verbindung zur Phantasie. Die Vorstellbarkeit schlechthinniger Andersheit etabliert eine zweistellige Relation - eine Struktur -, deren weltentgegengesetzter anderer Pol in früher Neuzeit zusehends nicht-häretisch besetzbar wird durch konkretisierende Imagination von Alternativen, durch die Fiktion, wie es denn anders sein könnte. Die skepsisgeleitete “Anerkennung der Konstruiertheit der Wirklichkeit” (SP 27) gebiert die Möglichkeit setzender Gegen-Konstruktion und mit ihr das Hin und Her der reinen Vorstellung, die Kipp-Bewegung alterierender Verwerfung, beständige Oszillation. So setzt sich Imagination in Gang, so entstehen (und verlöschen) fiktive Imaginationswelten. Dies trägt in nuce das Gesamtprogramm. “Die frühneuzeitliche Imagination macht die Literatur zum Medium eines nicht-propositionalen Denkens, das sich als Performanz, Transformation oder Transgression vollzieht und nie zu einem Ende, einem Resultat gelangt.” (UI 9) Skepsis wie Imagination sind also reiner Prozess: greifbar nur an anderweitigen Ergebnissen, deren sie sich parasitär bedienen und die sie transformieren, ohne dass sich dort je substantiell ihr Wesen sehen lässt. Ihre ‘Wirte’ sind Diskurse oder Welten: so wie skeptisches Denken geronnenes Wissen in den Gedankenfluss zurücktreibt, überführt Literatur die vermeintliche Gewissheit geltender Weltvorstellung in die freie Imagination von Alternativen; ist Skepsis ständiges Umdenken des Denkens, so betreibt Literatur ein stetes Umimaginieren gesellschaftlicher Imaginate; das eine ist Denken des Denkens, das andere (De/ Re)-Konstruktion von Konstrukten, hie “Metaphilosophie”, da “sekundäre Modellierung” (SP 10, vgl. 45). Hieraus entfaltet sich das Gesamtprojekt: die Skeptische Phantasie stellt den ideengeschichtlichen Rahmen für die Ausprägung frühneuzeitlicher Literatur; die Unsichtbare Imagination verfolgt die anthropologischen Grundbedingungen freien Imaginierens; die Imaginationswelten kartieren Typen seiner fiktiven Auskristallisierung. 3. Die Rekonstruktion skeptischen Denkens ist prekär: seine Prozesshaftigkeit widersetzt sich der Verschriftung, die Negativität widersteht dem Dogma, seine Texte sind rar. Verena Lobsien profiliert die pyrrhonische Variante der Skepsis anhand des Grundrisses des Sextus Empiricus als “Struktur ohne Substanz” (SP 27): als grundständigen epistemologischen Relativismus, der Andreas Mahler 122 2 Zu Begriff und Konzept siehe die nach wie vor grundlegende Studie von Richard H. Popkin (1979). The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley, CA/ Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. im Gegensatz zur akademisch-sokratischen Variante nicht einmal mehr im Nicht-Wissen Gewissheit findet, sondern das Wissen selbst als Möglichkeit wiederum nicht ausschließt (SP Kap. I). Operationale Grundfigur pyrrhonischer Skepsis ist der unstillbare Regress, ihre Wahrheit liegt, wenn überhaupt, alleinig “in der Suche” (SP 17, Anm. 1). Dies gewinnt Virulenz in schwindendem Glaubensoptimismus; dem noch bei Thomas von Aquin autoritativ erneuerten Regressverbot (Summa theologica I, 2.1ff.) begegnet im ausgehenden Mittelalter, namentlich in der “negativen Theologie” (SP 61, vgl. 53) des Nikolaus von Kues, von dem aus Lobsien ihre “Reihe frühneuzeitlicher Konfigurationen literarischer Skepsis” (SP 51) in Gang setzt, eine zweifelnd explorative Haltung, welche transgressiv ins Unbestimmte hinausdenkt, um das eingestandenermaßen Unzugängliche unter Umständen aus Versehen vorstellbar werden zu lassen. Gegen augustinisch geprägte Disziplinierung zu Innerlichkeit wird Erkenntnis außenorientiert, reflexiv, ‘exzentrisch’: der (theo-)logische Gottesbeweis wird ersetzt durch konjekturale textuelle Imagination eines deus absconditus; das nicht erreichbare Transzendente inszeniert sich in subjektgeprägter verbaler Performanz; die Illusion göttlicher Wahrheitsschau ist kontingent-spekulatives Werk prozessual eingesetzter docta ignorantia, erkenntnisoffenen Nicht-Wissens (SP 53ff.). “Der Text”, so Lobsien, “macht im Exerzitium des Unvermögens das Unmögliche zum Erlebnis, die coincidentia oppositorum in einem ‘Sagen’, das tatsächlich eine Dimension ‘Anders-als-Sein’ eröffnet, zur Leseerfahrung.” (SP 65) Dies ist der paradoxe Effekt eines skeptischen Platonismus: der Cusaner fingiert das Unvorstellbare als unmöglich-mögliche Idee, er inszeniert das prinzipiell Unsagbare als nicht ausschließbares, blitzhaft aufscheinendes Produkt performativer Rede (SP Kap. II). Solches Anders- Sehen, Anders-Sagen, solch skeptisches Erhoffen eines redegeleiteten, evidenzenthüllenden, ‘literarischen’ “Umspringens der Optik” (SP 46) dynamisiert - und säkularisiert - sich in der sogenannten crise pyrrhonienne 2 . Zwischen optimistischem Wahrheitsglauben und aporetischer Wahrheitsnegation eröffnet sie den “dritte[n] Weg” (SP 9) eines eigenständigen literarischen Denkens: aus den theologischen und philosophischen Diskursen emergiert eine frühmoderne “Ästhetik” (SP 53, 74 u.ö.). Positiver Angelpunkt hierfür scheint die 1562 von Henri Estienne in Paris veröffentlichte lateinische Übersetzung der Pyrrhonischen Hypotyposen des Sextus Empiricus (SP 11); sie führt über Montaigne auf den “Königsweg” (SP 87) der Rezeption skeptischen Gedankenguts in die englische Frühmoderne. Hieraus speisen sich die folgenden Lektüren: sie erkunden das differentiell über die Instanz eines projizierten/ supponierten Anderen laufende neue ‘literarische’ Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 123 3 Den Rekurs auf Florio erklärt Lobsien, wenn auch das Hin- und Herspringen zwischen englischer, französischer und häufig auch deutscher Version zuweilen irritieren mag, plausibel aus der “Kongenialität und Verbreitung” seiner Übersetzung, die es durchaus rechtfertige, seine Version der Essais “als Teil der englischen Renaissanceliteratur” (SP 87) anzusehen. 4 Mit der Vorstellung einer (in Gott verbürgten) ‘Wirklichkeitsgarantie’ im Gegensatz zu der von ‘Wirklichkeit als dem Resultat einer (vom Menschen erzielten) Realisierung’ bezieht sich Lobsien auf Hans Blumenberg (1964). “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans”. In: Hans Robert Jauß (Hg.). Nachahmung und Illusion, München: Eidos. 9-27, S. 11ff. (vgl. SP 108, Anm. 1, und 127), auf dessen Schriften zur Epochenschwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit sie sich generell anerkennend stützt: “Eine Überbietung vor allem der Blumenberg’schen Rekonstruktion ist weder vorgesehen noch scheint sie erforderlich.” (SP 52) Zum Begriff der hypotyposis als einer evidenzerzeugenden Gewissheitsfiktion, als Ort der Schaffung möglicher Alternativen zu einer - stets ausbleibenden - Evidenz siehe SP 104ff.; zu Hamlet als einer “Art ausgedehnter hypotyposis” SP 105. Denken, sie erkunden das tentative performative Erschreiben unvordenklicher Wahrheit im frühmodernen Text. Skepsis wie Literatur erweisen sich so als alteritätsabhängige Denkwie Schreibagenturen des Neuen: sie überführen die Teleologie heilsgewisser Antwort in die affirmationslos bleibende Kontingenz offener Fragen. Lobsien liest dementsprechend zunächst die Florio-Version von Montaignes Apologie de Raimond Sebond (Essais II.12) 3 wie auch Shakespeares Hamlet nicht als bloß darstellende Thematisierungen des Zweifels, sondern als Texte struktureller Erfahrbarmachung des relativistischen Horizonts endlosen Fragens: als vermeintliche Wahrheiten ausbalancierende “branloire perenne” (SP 86, Anm. 1) beim einen; als mögliche Alternativen ausspiegelnde Spur unendlicher Semiose beim anderen (SP Kap. III). Hierin emergiert ‘Literatur’ als Ort unabschließbaren Nachdenkens, ihre “Entpragmatisierung” (SP 21, vgl. 101): statt der Apologie - oder auch Widerlegung - der weltgerichteten natürlichen Theologie des Sebundus entsteht bei Montaigne eine Apologie des endlos imaginierenden schreibenden Ich, statt analogiegeleiteter Findung verlässlicher Wahrheit im Hamlet die Ausstellung analogistischen Findungswissens als epistemologisch wertlose “Endlosigkeit gleichwertiger Interpretationen” (SP 107). Der Verlust der Illusion garantierten Wissens “befreit” (SP 102) die Imagination zur - skeptisch immer schon durchstrichenen - Realisierungsagentur nurmehr und gleichwohl potentieller Erkenntnis: zu weltparallelen Konstrukten kreativer “Phantasie” (SP 101), zu gleichwertig nebeneinanderstellenden hypotypotischen Serien “mimetischen Imaginierens” (SP 104) 4 . Die ‘literarische’ Transposition der Isosthenie von der Inhaltsauf die Vermittlungsebene, die homologe Überführung dargestellter thematischer Skepsis in darstellende strukturelle, in die Erfahrbarmachung eines steten Anders-Sein- Könnens, bestimmt sodann die Folgekapitel. Sie entfalten einzelne Konfigurationen frühmoderner literarischer Skepsis. Die melancholische nutzt die humoralpathologische Charakterdisposition steten Schwankens zwischen Andreas Mahler 124 5 Mit dem Bild des Möbius-Bandes rekurriert Lobsien auf die Melancholie-Konzeption bei Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (1997). Die Melancholie der Literatur. Diskursgeschichte und Textfiguration. Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler (vgl. SP 137, Anm. 1, und 148, Anm. 3); zum Begriff der eine Sache für eine andere erscheinen lassenden tropelia bei Cervantes siehe SP 144, zu ihrem Effekt der “wechselseitigen Relativierung simultan präsenter Muster” SP 137, Anm. 2. 6 Der Gedanke der Umstellung von Finalität auf Kausalität, von einer ‘Motivation von hinten’ auf eine ‘Motivation von vorn’ findet sich bei Clemens Lugowski (1976). Die Form der Individualität im Roman (1932). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp; zum Konzept der ‘Vorahmung’ siehe Hans Blumenberg (1957). “‘Nachahmung der Natur’. Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen”. In: H.B. (1986). Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben. Aufsätze und eine Rede. Stuttgart: Reclam. 55-103, S. 93, es ist wiederaufgenommen und weiterentwickelt bei Wolfgang Iser (1991). Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. S. 430ff. (dort auch das Begriffspaar ‘Symbolisierung’/ ’Imitation’). Dys- und Euphorie, zwischen welt(ver)zweifelnder Depression und wirklichkeitsüberschießender Manie, zur relativierend nebeneinanderstellenden Modellierung skepsistypischer “gleiche[r] Geltung des wechselseitig Ausgeschlossenen” (SP 178): so im manisch-depressiven Doppel Jaques/ Touchstone in Shakespeares As You Like It, im möbiusbandhaften Hin und Her zwischen topischer Findungsleere und tropischer Erfindungsfülle in Burtons copia-produzierender Anatomy oder den tropelianischen Verschiebungen des cervantinischen Quijote 5 , in der Doppelperspektive melancholischen Weltverlusts und manischer Restitutionssehnsucht in Herberts selbstbewusst poesiefeierndem Figurengedicht “Easter-Wings” oder auch im Zwischenraum gegenläufig grenzverwischender Selbstwidersprüchlichkeit von Miltons Doppelportrait von “L’Allegro” und “Il Penseroso” und deren dämpfender Verkehrung in kontemplative Innerlichkeit bei Margaret Cavendish (SP Kap. IV). Solch manisch-melancholische Auflösung ungewisser res in immer auch noch mögliche verba findet ihr Komplement im Versuch frühneuzeitlicher - ‘ästhetischer’ - Verankerung der durch diese verba bezeichneten res im imaginierenden Subjekt. Auf diese Weise zeigen sich, so Lobsien, “die Konturen einer Subjektivitätsvorstellung, die ihren Transzendenzverlust kompensiert, indem sie das imaginativ begabte Selbst bei sich einkehren und damit [...] produktiv werden lässt. Mit dieser autoreflexiven Wendung wird die melancholische Imagination zunehmend zu einem Positivum. Sie wandelt sich, ins Manische gewendet, von einem bloßen Reservoir bei Gelegenheit aufzurufender Erinnerungen zu einer genuin kreativen Instanz, die nicht nur Reichtümer birgt und hortet, sondern selbst hervorbringt.” (SP 178) Dies ist der Wandel von einem in Gott verbürgten Finalitätsglauben zu einem im menschlichen Cogito verankerten Kausalitätsdenken, der Wechsel von wiederholender Imitation zu erschaffender Symbolisierung, von - mit Blumenberg zu sprechen - Nachahmung zu ‘Vorahmung’ 6 . Sein Resultat sind neue Welten. Geht es in der melancholischen Konfiguration literarischer Skepsis um subjektgebundene Erspielung von Überschüssigkeit, so orientie- Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 125 7 Zur Idee ästhetischer Positivierung von Negativität siehe die Arbeiten von Rainer Warning, insbesondere (1974). Funktion und Struktur. Die Ambivalenzen des geistlichen Spiels. München: W. Fink, und (1975). “Komik und Komödie als Positivierung von Negativität (am Beispiel Molière und Marivaux)”. In: Harald Weinrich (Hg.). Positionen der Negativität. München: W. Fink. 341-366. Warning findet bei Lobsien keine Erwähnung; auch nicht Aleida Assmanns einschlägige Untersuchung (1980). Die Legitimität der Fiktion. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der literarischen Kommunikation. München: W. Fink. 8 Den vierten Wirklichkeitsbegriff Blumenbergs von der “Realität als das dem Subjekt nicht Gefügige” (Blumenberg. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans” [wie Anm. 4], S. 13; Hervorh. H.B.) nutzt Lobsien, obwohl er ihr sehr gut zupass käme, erstaunlicherweise nicht. ren sich die Folgekonfigurationen am erspielten Überschüssigen. Die pastorale entwirft entsprechend offensichtlich inexistente Schäferwelten zur autoreflexiven Erkundung der aporetischen Bedingungen ihrer Herstellung, der Erzielung inhaltlicher Simplizitäts- und Authentizitätseffekte mit Verfahren hochgradig intertextuell vermittelter poetischer Artifizialität: so in der die Gattungsgrenze sichtbar machenden Konversion der Pastorale in eine zur Perfektion getriebene und darin merkwürdig welt- und ichlos verbleibende “totale Textualität” (SP 192) in Miltons “Lycidas” wie späterhin bei den die Grenze selbst- und damit zunehmend auch geschlechterbewusst in unabschließbare Ich-Erkundung und skeptische Selbstrepräsentation überschreitenden Sprechern der Schäferlyrik Marvells und Aphra Behns bis hin zu Grays Abgesang auf die Pastorale in der “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (SP Kap. V). Demgegenüber erfindet sich die (bei Lobsien so nicht bezeichnete) xenotope Konfiguration in die Fremde projizierte andere Welten zur phantasiegeleiteten Austarierung skepsisspezifischen Immer- Auch-Anders-Sein-Könnens: ausgehend von Montaignes programmatisch Alterität als Unverfügbarkeit ausstellendem Essay “Des Cannibales” (Essais I.30) über die theatral relativierende Inszenierung solcher Entzogenheit in Shakespeares Tempest hin zu ihrer narrativen Nutzung für listig dissimulierende weibliche Autorschaft in Aphra Behns Oroonoko (SP Kap. VI). Darin entbirgt sich nunmehr die frühneuzeitliche “Rechtfertigung der Fiktion” (SP 254), ihre epistemologische wie kommunikative Legitimität: die emergierende ‘Literatur’ findet ihren funktionsgeschichtlichen Ort in der Exploration des Entzogenen, im Hereinholen des Ausgegrenzten, in der Positivierung von Negativität 7 . Erst im Erfinden vermag der Mensch das Andere zu erkennen, erst die realisierende Schaffung eines Doppels ermöglicht die Illusion der Bewältigung einer zunehmend als unverfügbar erfahrenen Realität 8 : “Die Wahrheit und das Wunder des anderen”, so Lobsien, “können nur ‘gemeistert’ werden, indem wir sie erfinden. Sei es das, was uns in der Begegnung mit einer Neuen Welt entgegentritt; das andere der Bosheit, der Grausamkeit oder auch und vor allem das des Ideals; die Alterität einer anderen Kultur oder des anderen Geschlechts: Wir werden damit nur fertig in der Erfindung neuer Welten - in Fiktionen, deren Komplexität und be- Andreas Mahler 126 9 Dies gemahnt an das bekannte Wittgenstein-Wort aus dem Tractatus (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”; Pkt. 7) und dessen skeptisch alterierendes Gegenteil (“Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische”; Pkt. 6.522, Hervorh. L.W.); vgl. SP 82, Anm. 5. Transitiv ist dieses Schweigen, insofern es sich nicht als bloßes Stummsein/ Stummbleiben, sondern als gegenstandsbezogenes, epistemologisches, ‘wissendes’ Verstummen begreifen lässt. 10 Dieser die Einzelkapitel nicht immer zur Gänze treffenden nicht-systematischen Liste fügt Eckhard Lobsien noch die von ihm so genannten ‘Parallelwelten’ (IW Kap. III) und die ‘Stadt- und Landwelten’ (IW Kap. VIII) hinzu. Die Lektüren erfassen dementsprechend den Kanon frühneuzeitlicher literarischer Texte vom 16. bis ins 18. Jahrhundert. stürzende Einfachheit uns erleben lassen, dass wir mit ihnen nicht fertig werden.” (ebd.) In ihrer Emergenz transformiert ‘Literatur’ Sprache von einem in der Welt seienden primären Findungsinstrument verbürgter Wahrheit zum sekundären welterfindenden Medium paralleler Konstruktion: von topologischer Eigentlichkeit zu tropologischer Uneigentlichkeit, von geglaubter Substanzhaftigkeit zu imitierender/ symbolisierender Funktionalität. Alltäglicher Sprachgebrauch muss sich folgerecht fortan die Fiktivität der Konstrukte, das Faktum des bloßen Doppels, umgehend verbergen, um den Illusionscharakter sprachlich realisierter Weltbewältigung verdeckt zu halten; literarischer hingegen stellt dies explorativ, alterierend, ‘skeptisch’ aus. Hierüber kommt das sich wandelnde Medium selbst in den Blick: in der manisch-euphorischen Variante in aus “mimetischen Fesseln” (SP 288) entlassener, endlos neu erfindender Rede, welche in “Verklammerung des Entgegengesetzten” (SP 262) das Unverfügbare sekundär, metaierend, ‘literarisch’ zu erschreiben sucht wie in den ausgreifenden Texten der Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; in der dysphorisch-melancholischen - oder womöglich skeptisch-gleichmütigen - Variante tentativ bei Henry More und vor allem bei Anne Conway in einem “die verborgenen Dinge auf sich beruhen” lassenden (SP 319), gelehrt unwissenden, beredt transitiven Schweigen (SP Kap. VII). 9 4. Die Geburt frühneuzeitlicher ‘Literatur’ aus dem Geist radikal alterierender Skepsis stellt die Frage nach der Imagination. Deren sichtbare Erscheinung sind die Imaginationswelten: als Vorstellung eines entzogenen Ideals wie dem des Schäfer- (UI Kap. II; IW Kap. II) oder Hoflebens (UI Kap. III), als Entwurf unverfügter Räumlichkeit wie der der Fremde (UI Kap. IV) und des Kosmos (IW Kap. V), als Projektion unzugänglicher Zeitlichkeit wie Zukunft (UI Kap. V) oder Vergangenheit (IW Kap. IV), als Produkt unergründeter Medialität wie der des Reims, des Dialogs, der Schrift (IW Kap. VI+VII). 10 Sie sind das Resultat pastoraler (höfischer, heterotoper, transgressiver, instrumenteller, melancholischer, textueller) Imagination, Produkte der Verschie- Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 127 11 Die Reihung der Imaginationstypen entbirgt die - vom Autorenpaar bewusst in Kauf genommene - Schwäche einer an den Phänomenen ansetzenden Theoriebildung; sie ignoriert offensichtliche Relationen der Inklusion und riskiert so die Gefahr begrifflich produzierter Tautologie. Ähnliches begegnet beim Begriff der Allegorie; wer Skepsis vorderhand als ‘’Anders-Reden’ und Imagination als sein Vermögen sieht, ist nicht zurecht verblüfft über einen als Ergebnis entdeckten “Zusammenhang von Imagination und Allegorie” (UI 9). 12 Die Referenz ist auf Harry Berger jr. (1963). “The Renaissance Imagination. Second World and Green World”. In: H.B.jr. (1988). Second World and Green World. Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making. Hg. v. John Patrick Lynch, Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press. 3-40. Demnach ist Gottes Schöpfung die erste Welt (W 1 ), die des Dichters die zweite (W 2 ), das vorgestellte Ideal die dritte (W 3 ), wobei die Besonderheit rinascimentaler Kunstauffassung darin besteht, die beiden Seiten des Kunstwerks - die der Darstellung und die des Dargestellten, die Imaginationswelt und die des Imaginierten - “interferieren zu lassen, so dass nicht einfach ‘normale’ und ‘ideale’ Welt in eine binäre Beziehung der Ähnlichkeit und Unähnlichkeit treten, sondern das Artefakt - Objekt unter Objekten - selber schon den Rang einer ‘zweiten’ Welt im Verhältnis zur ‘ersten’ erlangt und so auf die ideale ‘dritte’ hinführt” (UI 53, vgl. ebd. Anm. 49). In diesem Sinn erscheint die Textwelt als “Heterokosmos” (IW 29ff.). Lobsiens Etikettierung schwankt zwischen W 1 / W 2 / W 3 und W 1 / A/ W 2 , wobei ‘A’ das textuelle Artefakt bezeichnet; ich folge der ersten. 13 Zu dieser Unterscheidung siehe Berger. “Renaissance Imagination” (wie Anm. 12), S. 14 (Hervorh. H.B.jr.). 14 Hierin erscheint nochmals der Meta-Charakter solcher Anders-Rede: Literatur ist “Imagination der Imagination”, “Medium einer Selbstbewegung des Geistes”, “Alterierung, Transformation, Meta- und Anamorphose, Transition, Rhetorisierung, semiotische und hermeneutische Unruhe” (IW 25 u. 26). bung, Übersetzung; wo Skepsis dem Verdacht nachgeht, ‘dass alles auch ganz anders sein könnte’, erkundet Imagination solch ‘Anders-Sein’ in projektiver ‘Anders-Rede’: Allegorie 11 . Solch Anders-Reden ist mimetisches Imaginieren, sprachliche Vorahmung, Nachahmung des Nicht-Existenten, Entzogenen, Auch-Möglichen: es ist das dichterische Privileg prospektiver Signifikation. Dies ist systematisierbar über die Relationalität dreier Welten. Folgt man einer von Harry Berger jr. bereits in den frühen sechziger Jahren vorgeschlagenen Einteilung rinascimentaler Welten in die reale, trügerische, offene ‘erste’ (brazen) und realisierte, geschlossene, mögliche ‘zweite’ (green bzw. golden), in (gelebte) Realwelt (W 1 ), (erdachte) Textwelt (W 2 ), (entzogene) Idealwelt (W 3 ) (UI 52ff.; IW 28ff. und 293ff.) 12 , so bezeugt dies die Zwischenstellung des poetischen Werks als Teil der diesseitigen Welt und Teil des jenseitigen Ideals und damit seine Relationierbarkeit einerseits gegen die Realwelt allein (W 2 / W 3 vs. W 1 ) wie andererseits gegen Real- und Idealwelt zugleich (W 2 vs. W 3 / W 1 ): als hergestelltes Werk, als formbestimmte “second world as a fiction”, hat es teil an der Idee perfekter Schöpfung; als dargestellte Welt, als inhaltliche “second world in a fiction” 13 , sucht es diese Perfektion zu zeigen oder inszeniert in sinnfälligem Scheitern gerade deren Entzogenheit (IW 31ff.). In keinem Fall jedoch geht es um Mimesis zeitgenössischer Realität: frühneuzeitliche imaginative ‘Anders-Rede’ ist “Präsentation [...], nicht Repräsentation” (UI 58, Anm. 59), sie ist prozessuale schöpferische Arbeit am Text, beständige Performanz. 14 Darin unterscheidet sie Andreas Mahler 128 15 Dies wäre der (gleichfalls nicht genutzte) erste Wirklichkeitsbegriff Blumenbergs von der “Realität der momentanen Evidenz” (Blumenberg. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans” [wie Anm. 4], S. 10, Hervorh. H.B., zur potentiellen Simultaneität von Wirklichkeitsbegriffen siehe S. 12, Anm. 5; zur Verknüpfung von enargeia und Evidenz vgl. UI 20). Hierin liegt zudem eine Ahnung hoffnungsvoller Hintergehbarkeit der Erbsünde, denn als ein Neues, als ein Ideal, unterliegt solchermaßen Imaginiertes nicht den irdischen Bedingungen des Sündenfalls und ist somit frei von dessen Folgen. Vor diesem Hintergrund erklären sich frühneuzeitliche Euphorismen wie die des Thomas Traherne: “The World within you is an offering returned. Which is infinitely more Acceptable to GOD Almighty, since it came from him, that it might return unto Him. Wherein the Mysterie is Great: For GOD hath made you able to Creat Worlds in your own mind, which are more Precious unto Him then those which He Created [...]. Besides all which in its own Nature also a Thought of the World, or the World in a Thought is more Excellent then the World, because it is Spiritual and Nearer unto GOD.” (Thomas Traherne [1958]. Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings. Hg. v. H.M. Margoliouth. 2 Bde. Oxford: Clarendon. Bd. 1, S. 14 [I, 26]; vgl. IW 26f. u. UI 52, der unmittelbare Bezug ist nochmals Berger. “Renaissance Imagination” [wie Anm. 12], hier S. 11) 16 Zum Begriff der ‘kognitiven Matrix’ siehe Andreas Mahler (2004). “Semiosphäre und kognitive Matrix. Anthropologische Thesen”. In: Jörg Dünne/ Hermann Doetsch/ Roger Lüdeke (Hg.). Von Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten. Raumpraktiken in medienhistorischer Perspektive. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 57-69; zum dort diskutierten (ternären) Bild von Sprache als gegenwendiger Struktur zweier amorpher “Nebelwolken” (verso: Lautlichkeit; recto: Vorstellung) und eines formgebenden Mechanismus der Stanzung vgl. Ferdinand de Saussure (1985). Cours de linguistique générale (1916). Hg. v. Tullio de Mauro. Paris: Payot. S. 155ff. sich vom Mimesistyp eines weltabbildenden ‘Realismus’. Rinascimentale Textwelten (W 2 ) reproduzieren nicht vermeintlich Vorgängiges, sie projizieren Vorstellungen; sie sind nicht rückgebunden an Realität (W 1 ), sondern nach vorn gerichtet auf ein imaginiertes, imaginäres Ideal (W 3 ). Hieraus produzieren sie momentane, ahnungsvolle Evidenz; sie nutzen die sprachliche Kraft der enargeia zur epistemologisch-epiphanischen Herstellung von Neuem und in seiner Unabgenutztheit ‘Wahrerem’ 15 . Eine solche “Supplementierungsleistung” (IW 36) entspringt einem Vermögen - oder Defizienz - des menschlichen Gehirns; sein Funktionieren imaginiert zeitgenössisches medizinischphilosophisches Denken als Zusammenspiel von fünf/ drei Vermögen in drei Kammern (UI Kap. 1), demzufolge die erste Kammer registriert/ konzeptualisiert, die zweite klassifiziert/ relationiert, die dritte memoriert; d.h. sprachbezogen prägt die erste Hirnkammer ein, indem sie (über die Sinne wahrgenommene) res in verba transformiert (näherhin in Signifikate), die mittlere ordnet, indem sie diese zu (realitätsbezogenen, verstandesgemäßen) Vorstellungen organisiert, die letzte bewahrt, indem sie für deren Abrufbarkeit sorgt. Dementsprechend erscheint Imagination zum einen als Vermögen der Konzeptualisierung (vis imaginativa) und zum anderen als Vermögen abschätzender Kombination (vis cogitativa/ estimativa): die kognitive Matrix stanzt amorphe Vorstellung und Lautlichkeit in diskrete, res und verba verbindende sprachliche Einheiten, der Verstand selegiert und kombiniert zu weltdeutender, welterklärender Fiktion 16 . Damit erweisen sich erste und Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 129 17 Im Gebrauch des Diskursbegriffs als System des Denkens und Argumentierens folge ich der Definition bei Michael Titzmann (1989). “Kulturelles Wissen, Diskurs, Denksystem - Zu einigen Grundbegriffen der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung”. Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 99. 47-61, v.a. S. 51f. 18 Imagination operiert demnach genau an der Schnittstelle zwischen Körper und Geist; sie bleibt unsichtbar, solange Körperlichkeit/ Materialität in Geist/ Vorstellung aufgelöst wird, d.h. solange die Fiktion Geltung hat, als gäbe es nur Geist. Das Mittelalter löst dies analogisch (über Ähnlichkeit), die Neuzeit löst es digital (über Transparenz). Erst die den Sinnen tatsächliches Registrieren vorgaukelnde Verkehrung ihrer “normale[n] Verlaufsrichtung” (UI 14) “nach ‘vorne’” (UI 15), d.h. von den verba zu vermeintlichen res, zeigt ihre (paradoxale, gegenwendige) Teilhabe an beidem, die gleichwohl nie zugleich sichtbar werden kann: “Da der Ort der Imagination definiert ist zwischen Körper/ Sinnlichkeit und Verstand/ rationaler Seele, kann immer nur die eine oder die andere dieser sie umgebenden Kräfte auf ihre Arbeit einwirken; das Intervall, in dem die Imagination arbeitet, definiert sich durch die beiden, es limitierenden Grenzen. Die Imagination ‘selber’ in diesem Zwischenraum kann immer nur eine Mixtur aus beidem sein, weil sie den Vorgaben der Sinne folgt und/ oder die Bedürfnisse des Verstandes antizipiert.” (UI 28) Genau diese inverse bi-polare Einheit der Imagination - der kognitiven Matrix - aber ermöglicht einerseits eine stete Überschüssigkeit an Vorstellungen und bedingt andererseits die Notwendigkeit ständiger Kontrolle. - Der Begriff des Intervalls erscheint bereits bei Pico della Mirandola (UI 27, Anm. 63); zu seiner verblüffend ähnlichen heutigen Nutzung, etwa bei Deleuze, vgl. Hermann Doetsch. “Intervall. Überlegungen zu einer Theorie von Räumlichkeit und Medialität”. In: Dünne/ Doetsch/ Lüdeke. Von Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten (wie Anm. 16). 23-56; zu seiner Bedeutung als einer das Lobsien’sche Paar-Projekt entscheidend prägenden Denkfigur vgl. das von Giordano Bruno stammende, gleichursprünglich wechselseitige Abhängigkeit wie Stützung bezeichnende Motto des Gemeinschaftsbandes: mutuo fulcimur (UI 7 u. 393f.). zweite Kammer als Ort der oben beschriebenen ‘Erfindung’, als Ort realisierender Herstellung epistemologischer Doppel zur imaginären Bewältigung von Welt. Beider Tätigkeit ist allerdings auch gegenläufig nutzbar: in normaler (funktionaler) Vorordnung der res vor die verba und der Welt vor die Vorstellung stellen Konzeptualisierung und Kombination realitätskompatible Einstellungen auf die Welt und bilden welterfassende, weltkonstruierende, ‘diskursive’ Systeme affirmierenden Denkens und Argumentierens 17 ; in Nachordnung hingegen produzieren sie - wie schon in der negativen Theologie des Nikolaus von Kues - unratifizierte res und unabhängige Welten und stellen die Systeme (dysfunktional) aus. Solch dekonstruierende Re-Konzeptualisierung und Re-Kombination zeigt sich etwa im Traum (UI 14), sie zeigt sich aber auch und vor allem in bewusst produzierter, ‘gemachter’ Literatur: dort entbirgt die vektorielle Verkehrung des Kognitionsprozesses genau jenen “Widerstreit” (UI 33) eröffnenden “Spielraum” (ebd.), den “Zwischenraum” (UI 28), genau das mediale “Intervall” (ebd.), das es für diskursive Nutzung zu verdecken gilt 18 . Dies zu bearbeiten ist Aufgabe des Dichters: ihm obliegt nicht eine nochmalige Behauptung des Gegebenen (W 1 ), sondern die poetische Erschaffung (poein) des Auch-Möglichen (W 2 ). Solches meint das boccacceske suum officium, non ut fallat, sed ut fingat (UI 56), solches meint auch das Sidney-Wort aus der Defence: “Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” (UI 57) Die frühneuzeitliche poeti- Andreas Mahler 130 19 Zur (archäologischen) Ableitung von ‘Kultur’ aus dem Gedächtnis siehe die Arbeiten im Umkreis wie in der Folge Jan Assmanns, insbesondere (1992). Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. München: C.H. Beck; zur (anthropologischen) Ableitung von ‘Kultur’ aus den strukturalen Beziehungen ihrer Repräsentanten siehe, im Bezug auf Lévi-Strauss, entsprechend Michael Oppitz (1975). Notwendige Beziehungen. Abriss der strukturalen Anthropologie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. sche Imagination ist keine Falsch-Rede, sondern Anders-Rede: sie eröffnet einen Blick ins Mögliche, sie supplementiert die Welt um das von ihr in jedem Moment (kontingent, akzidentell) Verdrängte, Ausgegrenzte, Nicht-Realisierte. Genau dies macht den Dichter zum vates - zur Instanz alteritätsbewusster Hinsichtnahme - und sein Werk zur Agentur möglichkeitsreichen Erprobens. “Phantasia”, so der Schluss der Imaginationsdiskussion beider Lobsiens, “kann sowohl inneres Bild, bildhafte Repräsentation eines real Wahrgenommenen, Bildproduktionskraft sein, aber auch die spezifische Einstellung auf eine Sache, also ein Sehen-als, eine Hinsichtnahme. [...] Dieses Sehen-als ist nun aber genau das, was in der Literatur und Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit in so überwältigender Weise sich ereignet. Es ist gerade die unersetzbare Funktion frühneuzeitlicher Kunstwerke, neue Hinsichtnahmen auf die Welt zu vermitteln, die Welt in alternativen Ansichten zu pluralisieren, zum innovativen Sehen anzuleiten, eine Transformationsdynamik zu erzeugen, die den Leser in einen offenen, widerspruchsreichen, uneindeutigen Prozess verstrickt” (UI 31). Solch (ideologisches) Einräumen eines Anders- Sehens - nicht verbürgte Repräsentation des (in Gott) Gegebenen, sondern realisierende Präsentation alternativer (menschlicher) Perspektiven - weitet den Möglichkeitsrahmen des kulturell Denk- und Vorstellbaren und schafft auf diese Weise eine andere - frühneuzeitliche - Kultur. ‘Kultur’ ist demnach nicht allein aus dem Vergangenen gezogene Gedächtnissumme der memoria noch einzig präsentische Konstellation notwendiger Beziehungen, sondern auch und vor allem Produkt zukunftsgerichteter Imagination, die Weite ihres Vorstellbaren 19 . “Die Imagination”, so die Leitthese der Untersuchung, “bildet Kultur” (UI 32), d.h. erst die in der kognitiven Matrix gründende Vorstellungskraft macht den Mensch zum kulturellen Wesen, erst das einer Gemeinschaft kollektiv Vorstellbare macht diese zu ‘einer’ Kultur. Dies Vorstellbare ist dynamisches, in jedem Moment performativ neu hergestelltes Produkt einer im Verborgenen wirkenden wie dort zu haltenden ‘unsichtbaren’ Imagination: “Die Imagination”, so das Zitat entsprechend weiter, “bildet Kultur in ihren konkreten vielfältigen Erscheinungen, indem sie sich in den durch sie ermöglichten kulturellen Diskursen zugunsten der jeweils verhandelten Gegenstände zum Verschwinden bringt. Ihre Omnipräsenz ist verschränkt mit ihrer Unsichtbarkeit, ihre Abwesenheit ist die paradoxe Bedingung ihrer Präsenz, ihre Universalität erzwingt ihre Limitation. Die kulturellen Diskurse und Gebilde sind Medien einer Modellierung der Imagi- Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 131 20 Von daher kann auch keine Textwelt (W 2 ) je den Status einer Idealwelt (W 3 ) erreichen, denn dies implizierte die Arretierung des Stroms der Imagination und damit die Annullierung der antreibenden Kraft: “Etwas Vollkommenes aber wäre nur im Stillstellen der Imagination gegeben, in ihrem Selbstdementi.” (UI 256) nation, und dies heißt nichts anderes, als dass sie zu Örtern des widersinnigen Seins und Nichtseins der Imagination werden.” (ebd.) ‘Kultur’ ist also nichts anderes als konkrete Auskristallisierung der sie unterspannenden ungreifbaren Imagination: sichtbares (kontingentes, willkürliches) Zeichen eines kontinuierlichen kollektiven Stroms unsichtbarer Vorstellung - ‘eine’ Kultur entsprechend die Summe all dessen, was sich deren Mitglieder in aller Konvergenz und Divergenz gemeinschaftsbildend vorzustellen vermögen. Aufgabe einer Literatur (und Literaturwissenschaft) mit großem ‘L’ ist folgerecht, diesen gesellschaftlich im Verborgenen zu haltenden kulturbildenden Mechanismus der Imagination nicht allein zu greifen und thematisch darzustellen (‘thematische Imagination’; UI 33f.), sondern ihn vielmehr auszustellen und strukturell erfahrbar zu machen (‘symptomatische Imagination’; UI 34f.). Frühneuzeitliches (und auch schon mittelalterliches) Schrifttum wird also erst in dem Maß zu ‘Literatur’, wie es die es antreibende Imagination nicht immer schon funktional auflöst in imaginierte res/ Imaginationswelten, sondern das Spiel der Imagination, ihr prozessuales Hin und Her, das Intervall zwischen imaginierten res und imaginierenden verba selbst in den Blick nimmt. Das Literarische zeigt sich demnach nicht schon in Textwelten, sondern im ‘Machen’ von Textwelten, nicht im imaginierten Resultat, sondern im Prozess der Imagination 20 . “Die Literatur”, so das Fazit der Textanalysen zu den Leitimaginationen des Pastoralen und des Höfischen, “ist nicht dort Imagination der Imagination, wo sie ein Konzept der Imagination bebildert (wie es Spenser mit der Personifikation des Phantastes tut), sondern wo sie mit der performativen Kraft ihres Diskurses Imaginationstätigkeit ist. [...] Erst mit dem Status einer [...] Imagination der Imagination erfüllen literarische Texte die neue emphatische Funktion des Literarischen.” (UI 257; Hervorh. V.O.L./ E.L.) In diesem Sinn ist das Lobsien’sche Projekt ein gegen den gegenwärtigen Strom gerichtetes dezidiert literaturwissenschaftliches; sein Interesse gilt nicht den kontingenten kulturellen Resultaten kollektiver Imagination, sondern der allein in Literatur (wie Kunst) gründenden reflektierten Sichtbarmachung ihres Funktionierens, d.h. es geht nicht um die fragwürdige Legitimierung der Literatur (und ihrer Wissenschaft) über die trügerische Relevanz einer sie umgebenden, vereinnahmenden Kultur (und deren Wissenschaft), sondern umgekehrt um die epistemologische Einzigartigkeit von Literatur für die (Selbst)Erkenntnis von Kultur. Nicht also ist Literatur Produkt von Kultur, sondern Kultur ist Produkt einer einzig in Literatur sichtbar werdenden Imagination. Hierin liegt neben aller Gelehrsamkeit und Lektüregenauigkeit die eigentliche Brisanz - und Provokation - des Projekts: in der Andreas Mahler 132 21 Dies invalidiert nicht, wie der allerletzte Teilabschnitt (IW 297ff.) verdeutlicht, kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeit; wohl aber warnt es vor vorschneller Flucht in den vermeintlich sichereren Hafen eines vordergründig faktischer Relevanz verpflichteten “banausischen Konzept[s] von cultural studies” (IW 298). 22 Mit Milton wird die Anders-Rede autonom. Vor dem Hintergrund frühneuzeitlich proliferierender Rede über andere Welten transformiert er Literatur zum “perfekt abgezirkelte[n] Artefakt”, das in seinem “outrierten Gemachtsein” - in seiner ostentativen Insistenz auf Nicht-Existenz - auf Eigenständigkeit besteht: “Wenn Milton diese Signifikation negativiert, also die Nicht-Bezeichenbarkeit fremder Welten durch seinen Text markiert, dann treibt er die Funktion des Literarischen mit einem Schlag auf den höchsten Gipfel. Es wird weit mehr als hundert Jahre dauern, bis dieser Vorlauf der Literatur auch theoretisch eingeholt sein wird.” (IW 295f.) - Für romantische und nachromantische Konzeptualisierungen von Imagination siehe Eckhard Lobsien (1999). Kunst der Assoziation. Phänomenologie eines ästhetischen Begriffs vor und nach der Romantik. München: W. Fink, sowie ders. (2005). Die Phantasie des Ulysses. Lektüre. Heidelberg: Winter. Fixierung eines unabweisbaren wissenschaftstheoretischen Orts der Literaturwissenschaft mit deutlich gegen gegenwärtige kulturwissenschaftliche Praxis gerichteter Stoßrichtung. Dies erklärt das große ‘L’ (kein ‘K’) im Zentralbild des Triptychons; dies erklärt die Verbannung des scheinbaren Kerns der Untersuchung - einer differenzierten, hoch aufschlussreichen synoptischen Überlegung zum Verhältnis von Kultur und Imagination - gegen den expliziten Willen des Verlagslektors in einen fußnotenhaften Exkurs (UI 9 und 258ff.); es erklärt auch das das Triptychon beschließende programmatische Plädoyer für eine selbst- und sich ihrer selbst bewusste Literaturwissenschaft, den vehementen engagierten “Einspruch [...] gegen eine allzu modisch gewordene Depotenzierung der Literatur zum bloßen Archiv kulturhistorischer Materialien”, Einspruch “gegen die Banalisierung der Literaturwissenschaften zu bloßen Hilfsdisziplinen einer ebenso allgemeinen wie unkonturierten Kulturwissenschaft” (IW 297) 21 . 5. Die These von der Entfesselung der Imagination durch eine überbordende Skepsis und der Versichtbarung ihrer kulturstiftenden Kraft durch eine zeitgleich emergierende, frühneuzeitliche Literatur besticht. Ihre Durchführung speist sich aus einer bestaunenswerten Tiefe differenzierter historisch-philosophischer Textkenntnis von Sextus Empiricus bis zum Cusaner, von Platon und Aristoteles bis hin zu Pico della Mirandola und Giordano Bruno; sie findet ihren überzeugenden Beleg in eindrucksvollen Textlektüren von Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Dante, Cervantes, aber auch Chapman, Cudworth, Aphra Behn, und immer wieder Milton; sie leistet für die frühe Neuzeit den angestrebten fundamentalen Beitrag zu “einer systematischen und historischen Phänomenologie der Imagination” (IW 297) 22 . Das Projekt ist - vielleicht ein wenig wider Willen - beste ‘Konstanzer Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 133 23 Allenthalben finden sich terminologische Anleihen von den funktionsgeschichtlichen Anfängen bis zur geeinten Theorie; siehe Wolfgang Iser (1975). “Die Wirklichkeit der Fiktion. Elemente eines funktionsgeschichtlichen Textmodells der Literatur”. In: Rainer Warning (Hg.). Rezeptionsästhetik. Theorie und Praxis. München: W. Fink. 277-324; (1976). Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. München: W. Fink; (1983). “Akte des Fingierens. Oder: Was ist das Fiktive im fiktionalen Text? ” In: Dieter Henrich/ W.I. (Hg.). Funktionen des Fiktiven. München: W. Fink. 121-51; Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre (wie Anm. 6). Angesichts solcher Verpflichtetheit - allein im Gemeinschaftsband ist ohne weiteren Beleg gängige Rede vom ‘Außer-Geltung-Setzen’ von Diskursen, vom ‘Supplementieren’ von ‘Defiziten’‘, von ‘Bilanzierung’, ‘Textspielen’, ‘fortwährendem Kippen’ (UI 34, 50, 228, 254, 374) - wirken die seltenen expliziten Bezugnahmen wie die auf Isers frühe Spenser-Lektüre mit dem Vorwurf der Historizität und Funktionalität (UI 120) oder auf die Pastorale als Grundmuster von Literatur mit dem Vorwurf der A-Historizität und Unterschätzung des Funktionalen (UI 229f.) - auch wenn damit nichts Unrichtiges gesagt sei - ungnädig, wie überhaupt Isers anthropologische Grundthese vom auf Kosten seiner Phantasie lebenden Menschen dem Gedanken von der kulturstiftenden Kraft der Imagination nicht völlig unähnlich ist. Vergleichbares ließe sich im Ansatz auch für die an der frühneuzeitlichen ‘Krise der Zeichen’ orientierten Arbeiten Robert Weimanns formulieren. 24 Iser. Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre (wie Anm. 6). S. 20. 25 Zur Gefahr einer unterschwelligen Ontologisierung des Imaginären siehe die Kritik bei Elisabeth Ströker (1983). “Was ist das Imaginäre in Isers Fiktionalitätstheorie? ”, und die abwehrende Replik von Wolfgang Iser. “Das Imaginäre: kein isolierbares Phänomen”. Bde. in: Dieter Henrich/ Wolfgang Iser (Hg.), Funktionen des Fiktiven (wie Anm. 23). 473-478 und 479-486. Aus diesem Grund scheint bei den Lobsiens der Begriff des Imaginären stets zugunsten desjenigen der Imagination vermieden. Für kreative Applikationen und Weiterentwicklungen der Iser’schen Triade siehe Winfried Fluck (1997). Das kulturelle Imaginäre. Schule’. Angesichts der Leistung geht es in der Folge nicht um kleinliche Beckmesserei, sondern um Konvergenzen, Anschlüsse, Perspektiven. Einziger Schönheitsfleck scheint mir der Umgang mit Wolfgang Iser. Dies betrifft im Wort wie in der Sache den funktionsgeschichtlichen Ansatz, es betrifft vor allem Isers Fiktionstheorie 23 ; die von ihm gegen den vorherrschenden Binarismus von Fiktion und Wirklichkeit entwickelte triadische Struktur, derzufolge der (literarische) Fingierensakt darin zu sehen sei, dass dieser “die Wiederkehr lebensweltlicher Realität im Text bewirkt und gerade in solcher Wiederholung das Imaginäre in eine Gestalt zieht, wodurch sich die wiederkehrende Realität zum Zeichen und das Imaginäre zur Vorstellbarkeit des dadurch Bezeichneten aufheben” 24 , scheint mir systematisch genau die Relation zu formulieren, welche beim frühneuzeitlichen Imaginieren das Verhältnis von Realwelt, Textwelt, Idealwelt regiert, wonach die jeweilige Textwelt (W 2 ) in eigener Rekombination Elemente der Realwelt (W 1 ) wiederholt und diese so zum Zeichen für eine noch nie bezeichnete Idealwelt (W 3 ) werden lässt. In diesem Sinn erscheinen frühneuzeitliche Imaginationswelten als Fiktionen - bezeichnenderweise ist an einer Stelle unvermittelt auch die Rede vom “Spielraum des Fingierens” (UI 195), nicht des Imaginierens - Fiktionen, die das unsichtbare kulturbegründende Imaginäre derart in eine Gestalt ziehen, dass es für den Moment des Texts uneigentlich, supplementär, kontrafaktisch sichtbar wird 25 . Hierüber bietet sich ein möglicher Andreas Mahler 134 Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, sowie K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (1999). Das Mediale und das Imaginäre. Dimensionen kulturanthropologischer Medientheorie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 26 Siehe Cornelius Castoriadis (1999). L’institution imaginaire de la société (1975). Paris: Seuil; Castoriadis begreift das radikal Imaginäre als ein dem Spiegelstadium voraufliegendes unbestimmtes und unbestimmbares intransitives Vermögen: “L’imaginaire n’est pas à partir de l’image dans le miroir ou dans le regard de l’autre. Plutôt, le ‘miroir’ lui-même et sa possibilité, et l’autre comme miroir, sont des œuvres de l’imaginaire, qui est création ex nihilo. Ceux qui parlent d’‘imaginaire’ en entendant par là le ‘spéculaire’, le reflet ou le ‘fictif’ ne font que répéter, le plus souvent sans le savoir, l’affirmation qui les a à jamais enchaînés à un sous-sol quelconque de la fameuse caverne: il est nécessaire que (ce monde) soit image de quelque chose. L’imaginaire dont je parle n’est pas image de. Il est création incessante et essentiellement indéterminée (social-historique et psychique) de figures/ formes/ images, à partir desquelles seulement il peut être question de ‘quelque chose’. Ce que nous appelons ‘réalité’ et ‘rationnalité’ en sont des œuvres.” (S. 7f., Hervorh. C.C.) Zu einer knappen Zusammenfassung der Castoriadis’schen Gedanken und einer einlässig applizierenden Darstellung der darin beschlossenen Dialektik von Aufbau und Zerstörung mit Blick auf Flauberts komisches Doppel von Bouvard und Pécuchet, die prinzipielle Unabschließbarkeit ihrer Projekte wie die gleichermaßen prinzipielle Unversehrtheit ihrer Träger, siehe Ulrike Sprenger (1997). “Die Früchte des Wissens. Agronomie und Imagination in Bouvard et Pécuchet ”. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 48. 84-119, v.a. S. 115ff. 27 Eine solche Bestimmung des Ästhetischen findet sich beispielsweise bei Jorge Luis Borges (1980). “La muralla y los libros” (1950). In: J.L.B. Prosa completa. 3 Bde. Barcelona: Emece. Bd. 2. 131-33, hier S. 133: “esta inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce, es, quizá, el hecho estético”. Borges kommentiert dort die Geschichte vom chinesischen Kaiser Shih Huang Ti, der die chinesische Mauer errichten und zugleich alle Bücher verbrennen ließ, als Emblem für eine blitzhafte Erahnung supplementhafter Vollständigkeit des Universums: als Gewahrung einer ‘Form’ jenseits aller konkret zugänglichen Inhalte, als Prinzip beständigen Kon- und Destruierens: “Acaso Shih Huang Ti amuralló el imperio porque sabía que éste era deleznable y destruyó los libros por entender que eran libros sagrados, o sea libros que enseñan lo que enseña el universo entero o la conciencia de cada hombre. Acaso el incendio de las bibliotecas y la edificación de la muralla son operaciones que de un modo secreto se anulan.” (ebd.) Anschluss an den etwa von Cornelius Castoriadis entwickelten Imaginationsbegriff und darüberhinaus an den bei den Lobsiens merkwürdig unterbelichtet bleibenden Begriff der Latenz. Der bei Castoriadis verfolgte Gedanke vom (radikal) Imaginären als einem nicht-substantiell gedachten, ständig im Fluss begriffenen, prozessualen kreativen Magma, welches ein je spezifisches gesellschaftliches Imaginäres instituiert (und wieder löscht) 26 , scheint mir zu konvergieren mit der Vorstellung vom unstillbaren, ungreifbaren Produktionsvermögen einer stets im Verborgenen bleibenden, stets entzogenen Imagination. Der Literatur/ dem Ästhetischen eignete demnach die fundamentale Funktion, dies möglichkeitsreiche Magma des radikal Imaginären - der unergründlichen, vorgängigen Antriebskraft allen menschlichen Agierens - epiphaniehaft, evidenzartig erahnbar werden zu lassen 27 . Die Konzeption des Imaginären als dem Menschen angeborenes unerschöpfliches intransitives Vermögen, welches unaufhörlich unabschließbare singulative wie kollektive Vorstellungen vom Ich wie von der Gesellschaft instituiert und in ihrer Instituierung modifiziert, verdeutlicht zum einen die Notwendigkeit seiner Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 135 28 Der Sache nach durchzieht das Konzept der Latenz alle drei Bände (vgl. etwa SP 100, 319; UI 8, 32ff., 62, 86, 95, 175, 183, 253; IW 21ff.); an nur wenigen Stellen allerdings findet es sich dem Wort nach thematisiert. Zum Gedanken, “dass menschliches Handeln sich Teilaspekte seiner sozialen Wirklichkeit verdecken müsse, um Orientierbarkeit und Motivierbarkeit nicht zu verlieren”, siehe am bündigsten Niklas Luhmann ( 4 1974). “Soziologische Aufklärung” (1970). In: N.L. Soziologische Aufklärung. Aufsätze zur Theorie sozialer Systeme. Bd. 1. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 66-91, hier S. 69, und ausführlicher Niklas Luhmann (1995). Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft (1980-1989). 3 Bde. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, insbes. Bd. 1, S. 63ff., und Bd. 2, S. 24ff., sowie ( 3 1999). Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (1995), Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, S. 136ff. Zum Zusammenhang von Latenz und Kunst vgl. näherhin auch Anselm Haverkamp (2002). Figura cryptica. Theorie der literarischen Latenz. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 29 Hierin liegt zudem eine zwar thematisierte, aber nicht weiter systematisch angegangene Affinität zwischen Literatur und Metamorphose, derzufolge die frühneuzeitliche Zurichtung von Imagination der Literatur in ihrer Emergenz eine eigenständige Funktion zuwachsen lässt: “die einer unabschließbaren Transformation, einer unendlich produktiven Metamorphose all dessen, was je gesagt, gezeigt, gesetzt werden kann. Fallen die restringierenden Eingriffe der Vernunft fort, dann kann alles gesagt und immer auch anders gesagt werden. Etwas sagen heißt dann: unendlich weiter und anders reden zu können; etwas sehen heißt hier: immer auch noch als etwas ganz anderes zu sehen; etwas oder jemand sein heißt: auch noch das andere sein zu können; sich in einem Raum orientieren heißt: zugleich in einem anderen Raum zu sein, usw.” (UI 66f.) Zu Metamorphose und Literatur siehe etwa Pascal Nicklas (2002). Die Beständigkeit des Wandels. Metamorphosen in Literatur und Wissenschaft. Hildesheim: Olms. 30 Locus classicus hierfür ist in jüngerer Zeit die knappe Skizze analogistischen Sprachdenkens bei Michel Foucault (1992). Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966). Paris: Gallimard, S. 32ff.; Bezug hierauf findet sich an einigen wenigen Stellen in SP 47, Anm. 2, 80, 117, 137ff. oder 241, Anm. 1. Für eine fundierte, Foucault kritisierende wie präzisierende Darstellung eines über sprachliche Analogien geführten mittelalterlich-frühneuzeitlichen Findungswissens siehe insbesondere die Arbeiten von Stephan Otto (1992). Das Wissen des Ähnlichen. Michel Foucault und die Renaissance, Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Lang, und (1984). Renaissance und frühe Neuzeit. Geschichte der Philosophie in Text und Darstellung. 3. Stuttgart: Reclam, v.a. S. 87ff. Dessen Insistenz auf der die zeitgenössische Sprachauffassung kennzeichnenden Formel ‘res et verba’, wonach dauerhaften Verdeckung zum Erhalt der Illusion individueller wie gesellschaftlicher ‘Realität’: dies ist das Phänomen der Latenz, und frühneuzeitliche Literatur erschiene folgerecht als religionsablösende, säkularisierte Latenzagentur 28 . Zum anderen verdeutlicht sich hierüber die dem Imaginären immer schon eingeschriebene historische Dimension. Seine ununterbrochene Prozessualität - seine beständig scheinbar Eigenes (re-)instituierende und modifizierende Performanz - erklärt die stete Möglichkeit der Veränderung von ‘Welt’, den offenen Gedanken, ‘dass alles auch ganz anders sein könnte’, die prinzipielle Denkbarkeit von Alterität und kultureller Differenz 29 . Solches angesichts der Vorstellung einer in Gott verbürgten Wirklichkeit latent zu halten, scheint Aufgabe mittelalterlich-vorreformatorischer Religion, und ihr Verdeckungsinstrument ist eine die gottgegebene garantierte Wahrheit über Ähnlichkeit findende und darin immer wieder neu affirmierende analoge Sprache 30 . Erst die skeptische, erkenntnisoffene, affirmationslose Andreas Mahler 136 gilt: “Allein durch Sprache wird Seiendes für den Menschen wirklich” (Renaissance und frühe Neuzeit, S. 112, Hervorh. St.O.), konkordiert mit der einvernehmlich aus Cave zitierten Einsicht “that ‘things’ can only become apparent by virtue of language” (Terence Cave (1979). The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, S. 21; vgl. SP 142, Anm. 4, zum Findungswissen auch 106f.). - Wirksamstes manifestes Verdeckungsinstrument ist natürlich die Abstempelung der curiositas zur Todsünde (vgl. auch UI 378, Anm. 19). 31 Der Begriff des ‘Spiels’ als Freiraum wie als uneigentlicher Gebrauch wird in den drei Bänden nicht systematisch genutzt, wenngleich er sich bei Harry Berger jr. bereits zentral angelegt findet: “The second world is the playground, laboratory, theater, or battlefield of the mind, a model or construct the mind creates, a time or place it clears in order to withdraw from the actual environment. It may be the world of play or poem or treatise, the world inside a picture frame, the world of pastoral simplification, the controlled conditions of scientific experiment. Its essential quality is that it is an explicitly fictional, artificial, or hypothetical world. It presents itself to us as a game which, like all games, is to be taken with dead seriousness while it is going on. In pointing to itself as serious play, it affirms both its limits and its power in a single gesture. Separating itself from the casual and confused region of everyday existence, it promises a clarified image of the world it replaces.” (Harry Berger jr. “The Renaissance Imagination” [wie Anm. 12], S. 11f., vgl. IW 29) Zum Gedanken des Spiels als Lockerung des oben beschriebenen Intervalls, als Entfaltung des Zwischenraums, als heterotope Kluft, siehe nochmals Mahler. “Semiosphäre und kognitive Matrix” (wie Anm. 16); zu einer Applikation des Spielbegriffs auf frühneuzeitliche (spanische) Literatur, mit einer ausführlichen Rekonstruktion zeitgenössischer Spielkonzepte, vgl. Wolfram Nitsch (2000). Barocktheater als Spielraum. Studien zu Lope de Vega und Tirso de Molina. Tübingen: Narr. 32 Mit anderen Worten: erst die sympathieaufkündigende, analogieungläubige Dissoziation von Zeichen und Bezeichnetem ermöglicht einen Sprachgebrauch, welcher - nochmals mit Iser - die Wiederkehr lebensweltlicher Realität im Text bewirkt und so das Imaginäre in eine Gestalt zieht, dass dies überhaupt zur Vorstellbarkeit des durch die vermeintlich wiederkehrende Realität Bezeichneten werden kann: zur Fiktion. Demgegenüber zieht analogistisches Findungswissen alles Vorstellbare immer schon in die alleinige Bestätigung genau der lebensweltlichen Realität. - Zum Gedanken frühneuzeitlicher Sprachveränderung, vor allem mit Blick auf Fischarts Rabelais-Übersetzung, siehe Thomas Rathmann (1991). “… die sprach will sich ändern”. Zur Vorgeschichte der Autonomie von Sprache und Dichtung. München: W. Fink (dort auch bereits ein sprachbewusstes Kapitel zum Cusaner). 33 Zum Transparenzmodell sprachlicher Repräsentation ausschließlicher Bedeutung siehe nochmals Foucault. Les Mots et les choses (wie Anm. 30), S. 72ff. Ähnliches ließe sich formulieren für die zweite - nunmehr auch begriffliche - Erfindung des Literarischen um 1800, wo die Umstellung der Sprache vom zweigliedrig starren Transparenzmodell auf ein organisches sich einer nicht mehr in der Latenz zu haltenden Materialität zu verdanken scheint, bevor das Literarische in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, etwa bei Mallarmé, als Ausstellung sprachlicher Medialität erneut seinen eigenen Raum findet. Befragung des analogistischen Sinnversprechens, erst die sich aus gängigem Sprachrealismus lösende Dissoziation von Zeichen und Bezeichnetem, verba und res, eröffnet den Möglichkeitsraum prospektiver Anders-Rede: das ‘Spiel’ frühneuzeitlicher Literatur 31 . Hierin verändert die Sprache die Rede und die Rede die Sprache 32 ; die Rede findet nicht mehr über Sympathien Gegebenes, sondern erfindet Neues, welches sie als Sprache sogleich hinter der durch sie repräsentierten ‘Wirklichkeit’ verbergen wird: fortan stellt sie ein Doppel und macht sich unsichtbar 33 . Vor solchem Hintergrund lässt sich die These von der Geburt der Literatur aus dem Geist der Skepsis präzisieren Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 137 34 Auf den Einfluss nominalistischer Sprachauffassung wird vereinzelt verwiesen (vgl. etwa UI 404, Anm. 15, 405 und SP 146, Anm. 1, dort mit Weiterverweis auf ein schon bei Boccaccio beobachtbares Aufreißen einer “Kluft zwischen Wörtern und Sachen” bei Kurt Flasch (1992). Giovanni Boccaccio. Poesie nach der Pest. Mainz: Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, S. 17). Zu einem Versuch programmatischer Verknüpfung von Nominalismus und Literatur siehe die Beiträge in Hugo Keiper/ Christoph Bode/ Richard J. Utz (Hg.) (1997). Nominalism and Literary Discourse. New Pespectives. Amsterdam/ Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, und darin vor allem die ausführliche Einleitung von Hugo Keiper. “A Literary ‘Debate over Universals’? Perspectives on the Relationships between Nominalism, Realism, and Literary Discourse”. 1-85. Wie alle Phänomene dieser Art kennzeichnet auch die Sprachveränderung eine merkliche Kluft zwischen Genese und Geltung, also zwischen der ersten Artikulation des Verdachts eines Anders-Seins und seiner allgemeinen Anerkennung. 35 Siehe hierzu in jüngerer Zeit vor allem die diesbezüglichen Studien von Bernhard Teuber, welche sich am Paradigma des San Juan de la Cruz zusammengefasst finden in (2003). Sacrificium litterae. Allegorische Rede und mystische Erfahrung in der Dichtung des heiligen Johannes vom Kreuz. München: W. Fink; zum dort vorgeschlagenen Konzept einer sich als unabschließbare Ersetzungsbewegung zu erkennen gebenden, die Opposition von theologischer Wahrheit und (theo)poetischer Erfindung endlos in supplementären Versichtbarungen des Unsichtbaren dekonstruierenden ‘Theopoetik’ vgl. insbes. S. 23ff. 36 Zu Verweisen auf die Moralistik vgl. etwa SP 90, Anm. 3, und 247, Anm. 2; zur Moralistik allgemein siehe knapp Hugo Friedrich ( 3 1993). Montaigne (1949). Tübingen/ Basel: Francke, S. 167ff.; zum Gedanken einer nicht moralisch wertend, sondern genau im Sinne von Entzogenheit zu verstehenden ‘negativen Anthropologie’ und ihrer kompensatorisch ausspiegelnden Supplementierung in dergestalt ‘funktionaler’ Literatur vgl. Karlheinz Stierle (1985). “Die Modernität der französischen Klassik. Negative Anthropologie und funktionaler Stil”. In: Fritz Nies/ K.S. (Hg.). Französische Klassik. Theorie, Literatur, Malerei. München: W. Fink. 81-128. Zu Florio/ Montaigne als Teil der englischen Literatur siehe oben Anm. 3; zum Zusammenhang von skeptischer Grundhaltung und Imagination bei Montaigne (UI 40ff.) vgl. in letzter Zeit auch die Untersuchungen von Karin Westerwelle (2002). Montaigne. Die Imagination und die Kunst des Essays. München: W. Fink, und Martina Maierhofer (2003). Zur Genealogie des Imaginären. Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau. Tübingen: Narr. und flankieren: die Emergenz des Literarischen verdankt sich demnach auch und vielleicht vor allem der Aktivierung des imaginativen Alteritätspotentials eines einschneidend sprachverändernden Nominalismus 34 ; zudem speist sie sich - wie schon das Wittgenstein-Zitat (vgl. oben Anm. 9) bezeugt - nicht unbeträchtlich aus den in einer unversehens häresieverdächtigen ‘Theopoetik’ gipfelnden (skeptisch-euphorischen) Hoffnungen mittelalterlich-frühneuzeitlicher Mystik 35 ; und schließlich sieht sie sich parallel gestützt durch eine zeitgleich vornehmlich in der Romania Geltung erlangende ‘negative Anthropologie’ der Moralistik und deren Folgen 36 . Nicht zuletzt aber hat Anders- Reden/ Anders-Handeln seinen institutionellen Ort immer auch schon im Karneval; die für Skepsis wie Imagination gleichermaßen bemühte Rede, ‘dass alles auch ganz anders sein könnte’ (vgl. SP 35, 270; IW 15, 25f., 41f., 44f.), hat ihr Pendant in der von Bachtin für das rituell wiederkehrende Fest diagnostizierten “Möglichkeit einer anderen Welt”: der Karneval, so seine bekannte Funktionsbestimmung der ‘karnevalesk-grotesken Form’, “erlaubt einen anderen Blick auf die Welt, die Erkenntnis der Relativität alles Seien- Andreas Mahler 138 37 Michail Bachtin (1987). Rabelais und seine Welt. Volkskultur als Gegenkultur (1965). Hg. v. Renate Lachmann. Übers. von Gabriele Leupold. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, S. 99 und 85 (Hervorh. M.B.). 38 Zu solcher Begrifflichkeit mit Blick auf den Karneval und die dort so genannte Karnevalisierung der Literatur siehe vor allem auch Michail Bachtin (1985). Probleme der Poetik Dostoevskijs (1963). Übers. v. Adelheid Schramm. Frankfurt a.M./ Berlin/ Wien: Ullstein, S. 113ff.; vgl. auch Formulierungen wie etwa die von einer “kommunikationsfreien Suada in bester Rabelais’scher Tradition” (UI 330). Die wenigen expliziten Verweise auf Bachtin beziehen sich auf dessen Beitrag zur Romantheorie (siehe UI 213f., Anm. 29). 39 Der Iser’schen Triade vom Realen, Imaginären und einem vermittelnden Fiktiven ließe sich so eine weitere Triade von (positivem) Topos [+a], (negativem) Utopos [-a] und vermittelndem Heterotopos [±a] zur Seite stellen. Zum Karneval als Äquivalenzagentur siehe Andreas Mahler (1993). “Komödie, Karneval, Gedächtnis. Zur frühneuzeitlichen Aufhebung des Karnevalesken in Ben Jonsons Bartholmew Fair”. Poetica 25. 81-128, v.a. S. 94ff.; Ähnliches scheint mir Eckhard Lobsien zu bezeichnen, wenn er von der Textwelt (W 2 ) formuliert, sie müsse “in ironischer Gleichzeitigkeit als Faktum von W 1 und als Dementi aller solcher Fakten fungieren” (IW 33). Zu Heterotopoi als tatsächlich realisierten Utopien, als ineinssetzenden “contre-emplacements, sortes d’utopies effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements réels, tous les autres emplacements réels que l’on peut trouver à l’intérieur de la culture sont à la fois représentés, contestés et inversés”, siehe Michel Foucault (1994). “Des espaces autres” (1967). In: M.F., Dits et écrits. Hg. v. Daniel Defert/ François Ewald. 4 Bde. Bd. 4, Paris: Gallimard. 752-762, das Zitat S. 755. Von hier aus böte sich ein Anschluss an die im Schlussbild des Triptychons nurmehr gestreifte hochsuggestive Formel einer allen indoeuropäischen Kulturen eignenden, in sich geschlossenen und zugleich offenen Dreiheit von ‘1, 2, 3/ 4’; siehe Reinhard Brandt (1998). D’Artagnan und die Urteilstafel. Über ein Ordnungsprinzip der europäischen Kulturgeschichte (1,2,3/ 4) (1991). München: dtv, v.a. S. 15 (vgl. IW 293f., Anm. 41). 40 Zum Doppelcharakter der Fiktion siehe Rainer Warning (1983). “Der inszenierte Diskurs. Bemerkungen zur pragmatischen Relation der Fiktion”. In: Henrich/ Iser (Hg.), Funktionen den und der Möglichkeit einer grundsätzlich anderen Weltordnung” 37 . Auf eine solche Funktionsübereinstimmung verweist die stete Wiederkehr ‘Bachtin’scher’ Wendungen wie derjenigen von der “Relativierung simultan präsenter Muster” (SP 137f., Anm. 2), der “Vorstellung festlicher Überfülle” (SP 141), des “Suspenses” (SP 148), der ‘Exzentrizität’ (SP 156), der ‘Doppelweltlichkeit’ und “Profanierung” (SP 199) oder auch des “Synkretismus” (SP 264) 38 . Was in der Skepsis als (prozessual-aufschiebende) Alterierung des Denkens (und damit als Suspension von ‘Wahrheit’) und in der Imagination als (dauerhaft-chimärenhafte) Alternative zum Gegebenen (und damit als Suspension von ‘Welt’) erscheint, feiert der Karneval immer schon konkretrituell als temporär vom Ernst ‘realer’ Lebenswelt entlastendes zyklisches Fest. Funktional fallen mithin Skepsis, Imagination und Karneval ineins; als Orte lizenzierter Kookkurrenz des wechselseitig Ausgeschlossenen sind sie (paradoxale) Agenturen der Äquivalenz: ‘dritte’ Räume zwischen positiver Geltung und ausgegrenzter Negativität 39 . Im gleichberechtigt nebeneinanderstellenden Hereinholen des Ausgegrenzten, in solcher ‘Positivierung von Negativität’ liegt ihre fundamentale Doppelung: skepsistypische Isosthenie, das Això era y no era der Fiktion, doppelweltliche Ineinssetzung [±a] des Karnevals 40 . Dies ist emphatische Setzung eines kontrafaktischen ‘und’: Skepsis - Imagination - ‘Kultur’ 139 des Fiktiven (wie Anm. 23). 183-206; das dort erwähnte, das Prinzip der Äquivalenz in exemplarischer Weise auf die Achse der Kombination projizierende Això era y no era (‘So war es und war es nicht’) des mallorkinischen Märchenanfangs (S. 193) geht zurück auf Roman Jakobson (1960). “Linguistics and Poetics”. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (Hg.). Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 350-77, hier S. 371. Die Jakobson’sche Formel von der (poetischen) Paradigmatisierung der syntagmatischen Achse ist eine der klassischen Einsichten in das Prinzip der Äquivalenz. 41 Ein solches Konzept scheint an etlichen Stellen greifbar, auch wenn es nirgends so bezeichnet wird: so etwa im Befund widerstreitender Positionen, die “in einer Balance gehalten [werden], die so nur im literarischen Diskurs möglich ist” (SP 148), oder in der Rede von “Kippfiguren, die bei der Lektüre ein dynamisches Sowohl-als-Auch erfahrbar zu machen vermögen”, welches “nur im Medium der Fiktion möglich” erscheint (SP 265f.), u.ö. 42 Zum Begriff des ‘contre-discours’ siehe Foucault. Les Mots et les choses (wie Anm. 30), S. 58f. u. 312f.; zu seiner Theoretisierung aus einer - wie das Lobsien’sche Projekt - dominant literaturwissenschaftlich interessierten Sicht siehe Rainer Warning (1999). “Poetische Konterdiskursivität. Zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Umgang mit Foucault”. In: R.W. Die Phantasie der Realisten, München: W. Fink. 313-345. 43 Diese Dialektik von Aufbau und Zerstörung, von (kontextualer) “Einbettung und Ausbettung”, von der Instituierung eines gesellschaftlichen Imaginären und seiner Rücknahme, ist zentrales Signum von Konterdiskursivität, wie dies Rainer Warning herausgestellt hat (“Poetische Konterdiskursivität” [wie Anm. 42], S. 317f., das Zitat S. 318); sie zeigt sich etwa im unabschließbaren Hin und Her von machtvoll setzender Strukturgewinnung und entropischem Zerfall bei Bouvard und Pécuchet (wie Anm. 26) wie in der Errichtung der chinesischen Mauer (mit ihrem potentiellen Zerfall) und der Verbrennung aller Bücher (und der potentiellen Wiedergewinnung des in ihnen artikulierten Wissens) bei Borges (wie Anm. 27), sie zeigt sich in der branloire perenne Montaignes wie in den Hamlet’schen Hypotyposen (SP 85ff.; siehe oben). Ein solcher Gedanke der (De-)/ (Re-)Konstruktion findet sich bei den Lobsiens an mehreren Stellen; vgl. UI 63, 104, 259, 411. normalweltlicher Notwendigkeit oppositiver Ausschließung ([+a] vs. [-a]) kontrastiert irrealisierend möglichkeitsreiche gegenweltliche Äquivalenz ([+a] [-a]). Von hier eröffnet sich als letzter Anschluss Begriff und Konzept des Konterdiskursiven, von Konterdiskursivität 41 . Fasst man - wie oben - ‘Diskurs’ als System des Denkens und Argumentierens, so ist Skepsis kein Diskurs, kein System philosophischen Denkens und Argumentierens, sondern suchendes Denken anhand und außerhalb jeden Systems: radikale Systembefragung; gleichermaßen ist Imagination nie vollständige Einlösung von Diskursen, sondern bestenfalls deren Inszenierung, Relativierung, Alterierung, nie resultathaft erstarrende Affirmation, sondern beständiger Aufschub: unendlicher Prozess. In diesem Sinne sind sie beide ‘konterdiskursiv’ oder besser: ‘nicht-‘, ‘a-diskursiv’ 42 ; ihr Sprachgebrauch dient nicht der Artikulation von Wahrheit oder Wissen, er zielt auf suspendierende Befragung, auf Befreiung der Sprache aus den Fesseln scheinbar vorgängiger Bedeutung. Beide jedoch tun dies je anders: skeptisches Denken operiert genau am Rande des Diskurses, indem es jeweils in dem Moment, da es zum System gerinnt, in neuen Zweifel kippt; literarisches Denken hingegen operiert in einem (fiktiven) Gegenfeld, in welchem es in ständiger Kippbewegung Wissenspositionen zitieren, wenden, aufbauen und zerstören kann, sie aber niemals ganz ratifiziert 43 . So ist Montaigne ‘skeptisch’ dort, wo Andreas Mahler 140 44 Dies deutet sich an bei Milton (siehe oben Anm. 22), es gewinnt Momentum in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und erreicht zunehmende Geltung ab den Dreißiger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts; Foucaults Referenzautoren sind bekanntlich Hölderlin und Mallarmé (Les Mots et les choses [wie Anm. 30], S. 59), zur Rede von einer literarischen “intransitivité radicale” siehe ebd., S. 313. Zum zweiten Reflexionsschub und einem damit einhergehenden Ausstieg aus der Mimesis vgl. Andreas Mahler (2006). “Sprache - Mimesis - Diskurs. Die Vexiertexte des Parnasse als Paradigma anti-mimetischer Sprachrevolution”. Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 116. 34-47, v.a. S. 44ff. 45 Auf solches zielt Jonathan Culler, wenn er theoriebewusste literaturwissenschaftliche Arbeit als “a source of intimidation” bezeichnet, als “a resource for constant upstagings: ‘What? you haven’t read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject? ’ [...] ‘Spivak? Yes, but have you read Benita Parry’s critique of Spivak and her response? ’”; Jonathan Culler (1997). Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, S. 15f. er sich (noch) an Systemen abarbeitet, und ‘literarisch’, wo er (bereits) frei mit ihnen spielt. Wo also ‘Skepsis’ Denken aus seiner (diskursiven) Objektbindung an ein Wissen löst und auf sich selbst zurückbiegt, reflexiviert, ‘metaiert’, stellt ‘Literatur’ alles Denken als auch möglich und nicht möglich aus: in solcher Intransivierung liegt die frühneuzeitliche Emergenz des Literarischen; wo sodann ‘Literatur’ in einem weiteren Schub der Reflexion die sie tragende Sprache von jeglichen Objektbezügen löst, stellt sie sich selber aus, wird sie radikal intransitiv, alleinig konterdiskursiv: dies ist ihr Ausstieg aus der Mimesis um 1850 44 . All dies sind keine Monita, vielmehr Bekundungen zum Dialog. Literaturwissenschaftliches Denken - nicht ungleich literarischem - scheint unabschließbar, uferlos: statt abhakbaren Antworten gebiert es stets nur neue Fragen, es ist beständiger Prozess. 45 Das in wechselseitiger Stützung erstellte Triptychon der Lobsiens ist ein großer Wurf; es gilt ihn einzuholen. Andreas Mahler Institut für Englische Philologie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen Monika Fludernik, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Birgit Neumann Kaum ein anderer Teilbereich der Literaturwissenschaft erfreut sich seit gut einem Jahrzehnt einer ähnlichen Beliebtheit wie der der Erzähltheorie. Eine veritable Flut von Forschungsbeiträgen hatte jüngst entscheidenden Anteil daran, die Erzähltheorie z.B. durch die Hinwendung zu den soziokulturellen Kategorien der feministischen Literaturwissenschaft, der Kulturgeschichte oder postkolonialen Literaturkritik weiterzuentwickeln und neue Konzepte für die Analyse von Erzähltexten vorzuschlagen. Angesichts der schier unüberblickbaren Zahl von Publikationen in diesem Bereich, der inzwischen selbst für Fachleute kaum noch überschaubar ist, sind Einführungen, die zentrale Einsichten der Narratologie gebündelt vermitteln, ein ebenso notwendiges wie lohnenswertes Unterfangen. Die zusammenfassende Darstellung der narratologischen Forschung ist auch das erklärte Ziel der Monographie der Freiburger Anglistin Monika Fludernik. Ihr Band will “Erstsemestrigen” (S. 7) eine Einführung in erzähltheoretische Analyseinstrumente bieten und sie mit aktuellen Fragestellungen der Narratologie vertraut machen. Doch damit noch nicht genug: Die Monographie ist überdies als innovativer Forschungsbeitrag konzipiert, der englischsprachige Standardwerke wie Rimmon-Kenans Narrative Fiction oder Mieke Bals Narratology durch die Berücksichtigung kontextueller, thematischer und historischer Aspekte produktiv ergänzen will. Die Ziele dieses 190 Seiten starken Bandes sind somit hoch gesteckt. Am Anfang von Fluderniks tour de force durch die narratologische Forschungslandschaft steht die grundlegende Frage, was denn eigentlich eine Erzählung sei und wie sie sich von anderen verbalen Darstellungsformen, wie etwa dem Bericht oder der Beschreibung, unterscheiden lasse. Zu Recht weist sie darauf hin, dass sich Narrationen v.a. durch ihre Zeitlichkeit, d.h. die Darstellung einer Ereignissequenz, sowie durch anthropomorphisierte Erzählfiguren auszeichnen, die den dargestellten Ereignissen erst Intentionalität und Finalität unterstellen. Außerdem, so Fludernik, weisen Erzählungen in der Regel eine Vermittlungsinstanz auf, die die erzählte Welt auf der Darstellungsebene kreativ und individuell gestaltet (vgl. S. 15). Diese Definition - die sicherlich nicht falsch, aber angesichts der Möglichkeit von Geschichten ohne Erzählinstanz doch voraussetzungsreich ist - bietet Fludernik eine Grundlage, Rezensionen 142 um in den folgenden Kapiteln komplexere erzähltheoretische Kategorien wie die des Erzählers, des Plots oder der Fokalisierung einzuführen. Bevor sich Fludernik allerdings diesen textinternen Kategorien und damit dem klassischen Gegenstand der Narratologie zuwendet, lenkt sie in dem aufschlussreichen Kapitel zum ‘Erzählwerk’ den Blick auf die kontextuellen Bedingungen der Textproduktion, denen die bisherige erzähltheoretische Forschung kaum Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt hat: Hier geht um die Rolle des Autors, den Einfluss von Zensur, um Vertriebs- und Vermarktungsbedingungen sowie um paratextuelle Phänomene wie den Klappentext oder das Umschlagbild, die die Rezeption des Texts präfigurieren. So wichtig und innovativ dieses Kapitel ist, so bedauerlich ist es, dass die hier diskutierten Konzepte für die weiteren Ausführungen der textuellen Strukturen kaum noch Beachtung finden. Sicherlich wäre es lohnenswert zu fragen, wie dieses ‘äußeren’ Faktoren in den Text hineinwirken und auch narrative Formästhetiken mitbestimmen. Das folgende Kapitel zu den ‘Erzählstrukturen’ bietet einen anschaulichen Überblick über die zentralen Analysekategorien, die die klassische Narratologie hervorgebracht hat (Erwähnung finden v.a. die Ansätze von Franz Stanzel, Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman und Mieke Bal), und erläutert anhand zahlreicher Beispiele den Nutzen der vorgestellten Grundbegriffe für die Textinterpretation. Es verdient besondere Erwähnung, dass sich Fludernik nicht damit begnügt, bestehende Ansätze bloß zu rekonstruieren. Vielmehr setzt sie die oftmals heterogenen Forschungsbeiträge in einen vergleichenden Bezug, entwickelt sie weiter - so z.B. die kontrovers diskutierte Frage nach verschiedenen Fokalisierungsarten - und überführt sie in innovative, auf Vermittlung angelegte Modelle. Auch wenn man diesen Neukonzeptualisierungen nicht unbedingt in allen Details folgen muss, besitzen sie dennoch einen hohen Erkenntniswert, denn sie machen narratologische Problemstellungen an konkreten Beispielen nachvollziehbar und sensibilisieren Studierende für die Herausforderungen erzähltheoretischer Forschung. Das Kapitel zur ‘Erzähloberfläche’ setzt sich zum Ziel, die Projektion der fiktionalen Welt im Text zu erläutern, also zu zeigen, wie aus Wörtern und Sätzen fiktionale Welten werden. Um dies zu leisten, stellt Fludernik narratologischen Kategorien wie z.B. der Raum- und Zeitdarstellung linguistische Überlegungen, etwa zur Deixis und zur Struktur räumlicher Präpositionalphrasen, zur Seite. Durch den Rückgriff auf linguistische Kategorien gelingt es ihr, narratologische Konzepte methodisch zu operationalisieren und überzeugend darzulegen, wie gerade linguistische Details zur Bedeutungsdimension des Textes beitragen. Das darauf folgende Kapitel zu ‘Realismus, Illusionismus und Metafiktion’ illustriert, wie verschiedene textuelle Merkmale zusammenwirken können, um rezipientenseitig z.B. die ästhetische Illusion zu erzeugen, dass eine vorgängig bedeutsame Wirklichkeit bloß abgebildet wird. Roland Barthes’ Überlegungen zum effet de réel finden in diesem Zusammenhang ebenso Erwähnung wie Werner Wolfs Konzept der ästhetischen Illusion und Ansgar Nünnings Ausführungen zur Metanarration. Etwas bedauerlich ist bei dieser ansonsten sehr gelungenen Darstellung allein der Umstand, dass der Historizität der genannten Konzepte - abgesehen von gelegentlichen Verweisen auf die Postmoderne - kaum Beachtung geschenkt wird. Die gerade für eine kulturgeschichtlich ausgerichtete Literaturwissenschaft zentrale Frage, mittels welcher Strategien etwa die ästhetische Illusion oder die Suggestion von Authentizität in unterschiedlichen Epochen und Kulturen erreicht werden, bleibt ausgeklammert. Rezensionen 143 In dem Kapitel zu ‘Sprache als Rede und Stil in der Erzählung’ wendet sich Fludernik stilistisch-rhetorischen Aspekten des Erzählberichts zu, die in der traditionellen Narratologie bislang kaum Berücksichtigung gefunden haben. Spannend und innovativ ist dieses Kapitel vor allem deshalb, weil es zeigt, wie Metaphorik und Metonymik, die für die Semantik und Pragmatik von Texten von herausragender Bedeutung sind, konsequent in die erzähltheoretische Diskussion eingebettet werden können. So plädiert Fludernik dafür, die Bildlichkeit des Erzählerdiskurses “in der Theorie als separate fakultative Ebene einzubeziehen” (89). Metaphorik kann demnach, aber muss nicht, narratologisch relevant sein. Wie Fludernik zu Recht herausstellt, eröffnet diese Integration zahlreiche lohnenswerte Perspektiven auf Erzähltexte. Sie kann nämlich nicht nur dazu beitragen, die oftmals allzu leichtfertig vorgenommene Differenzierung zwischen fiktionalen und nicht-fiktionalen Texten zu problematisieren, sondern auch eine integrative Grundlage für die vergleichende Analyse von Lyrik, Dramen und Erzähltexten schaffen. Nachdem in den ersten acht Kapiteln einzelne narratologische Konzepte und Forschungsfelder vorgestellt und elaboriert wurden, werden im neunten Kapitel ‘Erzähltypologien’ zentrale Kategorien von Stanzels und Genettes Erzähltheorien systematisch zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt. Kurze Zusammenfassungen neuerer Erzähltheorien wie die von Bal, Chatman, Susan Lanser, Marie-Laure Ryan, David Herman, Nünning und Fludernik selbst runden das Kapitel ab, indem sie demonstrieren, wie die klassische Narratologie in den letzten Dekaden z.B. aus feministischer, kognitionswissenschaftlicher, transmedialer oder kulturhistorischer Perspektive weiterentwickelt wurde. Den Abschluss des theoretischen Teils bildet ein kurzer Überblick über die ‘Geschichte der Erzählformen’, in dem einige textuelle Besonderheiten (z.B. der erlebten Rede oder des unzuverlässigen Erzählens) exemplarisch historisiert werden und das Potential einer diachronen Erzählforschung aufgezeigt wird. Darüber hinaus skizziert Fludernik, wie die Erzähltheorie auch für die Analyse solcher Gattungen und Medien fruchtbar gemacht werden kann, die lange Zeit als nicht-narrativ (wie z.B. Film und Computerspiele) eingestuft wurden. Sie spricht damit einen Bereich an, der gerade in jüngster Zeit verstärkt ins Zentrum des wissenschaftlichen Interesses gerückt ist und maßgeblich zur produktiven Weiterentwicklung der klassischen Erzähltheorie beigetragen hat. Die abschließenden Kapitel, die sich dezidiert an den Bedürfnissen der Zielgruppe orientieren, zeigen beispielhaft, wie die Systematik narratologischer Begriffe für die Textinterpretation fruchtbar gemacht werden kann, und geben Studierenden zahlreiche Ratschläge für die weitere Beschäftigung mit der Narratologie an die Hand: Nicht nur zentrale Einführungen in die Erzähltextanalyse, Nachschlagewerke, Zeitschriften und Homepages finden hier Erwähnung; auch die wichtigsten “Don’ts for Narratological Beginners” (S. 155) werden diskutiert. Eine kleine ‘Fibel erzähltechnischer Termini’, in der die vorgestellten Konzepte noch einmal knapp definiert werden, sowie eine kurze Bibliographie beschließen diesen gelungenen Band. Fluderniks Einführung in die Erzähltheorie bietet Studierenden einen sehr guten, leicht verständlichen und wissenschaftlich fundierten Einstieg in zentrale narratologische Problemfelder. Sicherlich wäre es wünschenswert, so genannten postklassischen Narratologien, wie etwa der kulturhistorischen, feministischen oder postkolonialen Erzähltheorie, größere Beachtung zu schenken und damit auch die dialogische Beziehung zwischen Texten bzw. narrativen Strukturen und ihren kulturellen Kon- Rezensionen 144 texten zu fokussieren. Und sicherlich mag man bedauern, dass Fludernik die Erzähltheorie fast ausschließlich für die Analyse fiktionaler Erzähltexte heranzieht und das Drama, aber vor allem die Lyrik nahezu unhinterfragt als nicht-narrative Gattungen ausschließt. Gerade transgenerisch und transmedial ausgerichtete Forschungsbeiträge haben der Erzähltheorie jüngst wichtige Impulse verliehen und dürften durch ihr interdisziplinäres Anwendungspotential maßgeblich zur Renaissance dieses schon totgesagten Forschungsansatzes beigetragen haben. Aber Fluderniks Monographie will vor allem als Einführung verstanden und gelesen werden, und als solche stellt sie zweifelsohne einen ebenso gelungenen wie wichtigen Beitrag dar. Der Band kann angehenden Literaturwissenschaftlern, die einen Einstieg in die Narratologie suchen, daher nur wärmstens empfohlen werden. Birgit Neumann Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Gießen Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Ulf Schulenberg One of the most scandalous claims of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry was certainly that it would be possible to imagine a world not shaped by the thought of philosophers such as Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau, but that it was impossible to imagine what the moral condition of the world would have been without the work of poets such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Milton. Richard Rorty’s texts always sought to underscore that in order to understand a culture, and to imagine the possibility of changing it, it is important to ask who its heroes are: the priests, the philosophers, the scientists, or the poets. Rorty, who died in June 2007, at least since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) had felt closer to the poets, those innovative, creative, and imaginative redescribers who, as anti-Platonists and antifoundationalists, introduce new vocabularies and new and stimulating sets of metaphors. For Americanists and English Studies scholars it is crucial to see that Rorty always tried to present literary scholars and literary critics in a positive light because they contribute to what he termed a literary or poeticized culture. As a selfproclaimed neo-sophist, neo-Hegelian, nominalist, and leftist intellectual, Rorty fought on numerous fronts - against Platonists, realists, rationalists, positivists, Kantian moral philosophers, (some) analytic philosophers, and in general against those unreconstructed metaphysicians who look for the solidity, reliability, and purity of what is more than another human invention. In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, the final volume of his Philosophical Papers, Rorty once more makes it unequivocally clear that he sees philosophy not as an autonomous and esoteric discipline, but that he wants it to play an important role as AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 145 far as cultural change and the development, or invention, of new social practices are concerned. This above all signifies that philosophy ought to contribute to the establishment of new vocabularies which are then used in moral and political deliberation. Suggesting new ways of speaking, imaginative new sets of metaphors, to Rorty is a means of intervening in cultural politics. In the preface to his final collection of papers an idea can be found which was already central to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, namely, that of philosophy being a part of the conversation of mankind. In his new book, Rorty maintains: “Philosophers should choose sides in those debates with an eye to the possibility of changing the course of the conversation. They should ask themselves whether taking one side rather than another will make any difference to social hopes, programs of action, prophecies of a better future” (x). It is important to grasp that the Rortyan idea of philosophy as cultural politics means that he wants philosophy to become useful and relevant to the problems of men in a Deweyan sense. He writes. “The more philosophy interacts with other human activities - not just natural science, but art, literature, religion and politics as well - the more relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful. The more it strives for autonomy, the less attention it deserves” (x). In one of the essays, which discusses the main differences between analytic philosophy and what he calls conversational philosophy, Rorty contends that he does not think it necessary to put philosophy on the secure path of a science and that he is thus “content to see philosophers as practicing cultural politics” (124). They do this “by suggesting changes in the uses of words and by putting new words in circulation - hoping thereby to break through impasses and to make conversation more fruitful” (124). In many of the papers collected in Philosophy as Cultural Politics it becomes obvious that Rorty’s antirepresentationalism is not only an epistemological position, but that it also ought to be considered a political gesture. Rorty’s antirepresentationalism, antirealism, and antifoundationalism only do the dirty work necessary for the act of calling attention to the possibility of new vocabularies, new ways of speaking which will eventually lead to cultural change and progress: “The point of philosophy, on this view, is not to find out what anything is ‘really’ like, but to help us grow up - to make us happier, freer, and more flexible. The maturation of our concepts, and the increasing richness of our conceptual repertoire, constitute cultural progress” (124). Philosophy as Cultural Politics is divided into three parts. Part I is called “Religion and Morality from a Pragmatist Point of View”. It contains the following papers: “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God”, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism”, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty”, and “Honest Mistakes”. The second part of Rorty’s book, which is the most important for literary scholars, is entitled “Philosophy’s Place in Culture”. Four essays belong to this part: “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude”, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre”, “Pragmatism and Romanticism”, and “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy”. The third and final part is called “Current Issues within Analytic Philosophy”. It contains the following papers: “A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy”, “Naturalism and Quietism”, “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn”, “Holism and Historicism”, and “Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation in Moral Philosophy”. Most of these thirteen papers were written between 1996 and 2006, and three of them have not been published before: “Pragmatism and Romanticism”, “Naturalism and Quietism”, and “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn.” Rezensionen 146 1 In this context, see “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance” and “Religion as Conversation-stopper” in Rorty’s (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. New York and London: Penguin, as well as Rorty and Gianni Vattimo (2005). The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia UP. 2 Morris Dickstein (ed.) (1998). The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham: Duke UP. One of the consequences of the much-debated renaissance of pragmatism is a renewed interest in the relation between pragmatism and religion. Rorty, together with other pragmatists like Cornel West and Giles Gunn, for instance, has played an important role in this context 1 . Does a pragmatist understanding of religion necessarily have to go back to William James? Or should it rather offer a new interpretation of Dewey’s A Common Faith (which is one of his weakest texts)? Arguing for the contemporary significance of Mill’s version of liberalism as developed in On Liberty, Rorty consigns religion to the private sphere. In other words, his contention is that the increasing privatization of religion during the last 200 years has been a good thing and that one ought to be highly critical of organized religion (e.g., churches). Rorty calls this position anticlericalism. Furthermore, he advances the argument “that we should substitute the question of the cultural desirability of God-talk for the ontological question about the existence of God” (24-5). In “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” originally the first essay in the important volume The Revival of Pragmatism, Rorty illustrates his idiosyncratic use of the term polytheism 2 . On his account, [y]ou are a polytheist if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs. [. . .] To be a polytheist in this sense you do not have to believe that there are non-human persons with power to intervene in human affairs. All you need do is abandon the idea that we should try to find a way of making everything hang together, which will tell all human beings what to do with their lives, and tell all of them the same thing. (30) Whether one speaks of polytheism, antifoundationalism, poetic pragmatism, or romantic utilitarianism, it becomes obvious in this piece that Rorty uses his discussion of religion to once more draw attention to his idea of a postmetaphysical and postepistemological, democratic liberal culture in which problems of men are (creatively) solved by men and in which human happiness is all that matters. A clear distinction between projects of individual self-creation, self-renewal, or self-development, on the one hand, and projects of social cooperation or experimentalist tinkering, on the other, would be of utmost importance for such a culture. Rorty’s notorious privatepublic split has of course been the topic of countless discussions. Following Rorty, the substitution of poetry for religion as a source of ideals began with the Romantics. Concerning the Rortyan pragmatist framework, the importance of Romanticism and its understanding of the task the Shelleyan ‘unacknowledged legislators’ have to fulfill cannot be overestimated. As regards the priority of imagination over reason, Rorty avers that [a]t the heart of both philosophy’s ancient quarrel with poetry and the more recent quarrel between the scientific and the literary cultures is the fear of both philosophers and scientists that the imagination may indeed go all the Rezensionen 147 way down. This fear is entirely justified, for the imagination is the source of language, and thought is impossible without language. (106-7) Further below in the essay on “Pragmatism and Romanticism”, he formulates even more pointedly: “No imagination, no language. No linguistic change, no moral or intellectual progress. Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play” (115). Yet Rorty is much more than a postmodern Romantic. What makes his (anti-)theoretical endeavor truly stimulating is that he seeks to creatively bring together the Romantic anti-Platonism, in its Shelleyan, Emersonian, and Nietzschean versions, with the work of various twentieth-century analytic philosophers such as Sellars, Davidson, and Brandom. Especially Robert Brandom, an analytic philosopher strongly influenced by Hegelian historicism (a very rare combination), has come to play a crucial role in Rorty’s texts. It is in “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude” that Rorty most clearly warns against the danger of simply identifying pragmatism with Romanticism. It was the Romantic poets, together with strong poets like Hegel, Darwin, and Freud, who initiated the radical change that would eventually offer the possibility of imagining a postmetaphysical literary culture. However, Rorty maintains that “it is important to emphasize the difference between a pragmatist and the kind of Romantic who buys into the Platonic reason-passion distinction and then exalts passion at the expense of reason” (76). At the center of his critique is “the Romantic metaphor of descent to the very bottom of the human soul” (80). Rorty holds that this metaphor of descent inevitably has to be seen in connection with the Romantic ideas of depth, profundity, the infinite, and the ineffable. In other words, even Romanticism is still governed by the Platonist appearance-reality distinction, or by the poet’s desire to penetrate through appearance to the really real and thereby to discover the uttermost depths of the human soul. According to Rorty, what adds to pragmatism’s contemporary significance is that most Western intellectuals have become commonsensical finitists and materialists, people to whom the infinite and the ineffable have been losing their charm (with the possible exception of deconstructionists like de Man and Derrida, of course). The secularization of high culture, as Rorty argues, “has put us in the habit of thinking horizontally rather than vertically - figuring out how we might arrange for a slightly better future rather than looking up to an outermost framework or down into ineffable depths” (88). The idea of a post-Philosophical culture has preoccupied Rorty since his introduction to The Linguistic Turn (1967). It was central to many of the essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and it played a decisive role in the last chapter (“Philosophy without Mirrors”) of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In its most fully developed form the idea of a post-Philosophical culture as literary or poeticized culture is one of the primary aspects of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). It is interesting to see that in his description of his ideal poeticized culture most of the crucial elements of his neopragmatist thinking come together: his antifoundationalism and antiessentialism, Davidsonian and late-Wittgensteinian nominalism, Hegelian historicism, Darwinian naturalism, Nietzschean and Proustian perspectivism, as well as his Freudian conception of the human self. Rezensionen 148 In “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” Rorty states a thesis which he often repeated: “It is that the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature” (91). According to Rorty, we live in a (not fully realized) literary culture. The transition from a philosophical to a literary culture began with Hegel. It was with Hegel that philosophy reached its most ambitious and presumptuous form which almost instantly turned into its dialectical opposite, that is, the Hegelian system eventually turned out to be a kind of utterly unironical selfconsuming artifact. Hegel’s system was serious in its desire to depict things as they really were and it sought to fit everything into a single context. Rorty contends: “Since Hegel’s time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy. This amounts to losing faith in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs” (92). In today’s literary culture (in the Rortyan sense), philosophy and religion have become marginal, they appear as only optional literary genres. This also means that the search for God was replaced by the striving for Truth, and that the latter has finally been replaced by the search for novelty and by the recognition that redemption can only be found in human creations and artifacts and not in the escape from the temporal to the eternal or transcendental. It seems that Rorty’s suggestion that (Western liberal) intellectuals should contribute to the establishment of a literary or poeticized culture is one of his most important legacies. It is a very pleasant side effect, as I have already pointed out above, that it makes professors of literature and literary critics, who are often regarded as rather wimpy, anemic, or otherworldly figures, look good. Throughout the final part of his book, which discusses some issues within analytic philosophy, Rorty underlines that philosophy has to redefine and rethink its purpose lest it will further degenerate into technical problem-solving and esoteric scholasticism. The first sentence of “Naturalism and Quietism,” for instance, reads as follows: “Philosophy is an almost invisible part of contemporary intellectual life” (147). Rorty’s idea of a conversational, historicist, or hermeneutic philosophy offers a solution to this problem. He proposes that philosophers, seeking to escape from Platonist and Kantian presumptions, should see themselves as storytellers, as people offering creative redescriptions and narratives about cultural evolution. Following Rorty, “[i]f we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self-understanding” (181). What is urgently needed is a new understanding of the history of philosophy in which it becomes clear that, contrary to the high expectations of Platonists, Kantians, and most analytic philosophers, “philosophers, like other intellectuals, make imaginative suggestions for a redescription of the human situation; they offer new ways of talking about our hopes and fears, our ambitions and our prospects. Philosophical progress is thus not a matter of problems being solved, but of descriptions being improved” (133). Rorty’s way of thinking might, of course, be seen as an unbearably frivolous and decadent philosophie informelle, governed by the nonchalant gestures of a languid Proustian aesthete. The fact that this kind of critique has been repeatedly advanced in the confrontation with Rorty’s texts does not make it less nonsensical. What most of these critics overlook is that the real ‘foundation’ of the radical antifoundationalist Rorty was a certain sadness, or rather, melancholy. A melancholy, and profound disappointment, of the young and aspiring philosopher because Platon- Rezensionen 149 3 See Rorty’s autobiographical piece (1999). “Trotzky and the Wild Orchids”. In: Philosophy and Social Hope. ism had not kept its promise 3 . Throughout his lifetime, this melancholy accompanied him and turned him into one of the most elegant and original philosophers of the twentieth century. Ulf Schulenberg Hochschule Vechta Institut für Anglistik und Germanistik Christoph Henry-Thommes, Recollection, Memory and Imagination: Selected Autobiographical Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, vol. 132). Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. Flutur Troshani Henry-Thommes argues that Nabokov’s version of life-writing is a “secularized” embodiment of St. Augustine’s theory of recollection, memory, and imagination. By revisiting Augustine’s interpretation of these concepts, he argues, Nabokov emphasizes not only their synthesis but also their potential to give symbolic meaning to particular events that have been narrated in the text. Hence, Nabokov puts forth a sophisticated formulation of life-writing whose mission is to create ‘a true reality’ that is ‘creative, perceptive, and subjectively artistic’ (11). Henry-Thommes has developed the following strategy to look into the problem. He begins by locating two constituent dimensions - investigating if there exist stable links between Augustine and Nabokov’s oeuvres, and inspecting the role that recollection, memory, and imagination play inside Nabokov’s autobiographical paradigm. Each of these dimensions corresponds to a separate part of the book. In the first part, “Structural Analogies in the Works of Augustine and Nabokov,” Henry-Thommes examines Augustine’s Confessiones, Books Ten and Eleven, Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, and “The Texture of Time,” a philosophical essay that Van Veen, Ada’s fictional autobiographer, includes in the fourth part of the novel. Going through these texts, Henry-Thommes examines the periodic resurfacings of a number of structural analogies, which are points of contact between Augustine and Nabokov’s paradigms. They are sense perception, recollection, forgetting, memory, and imagination. It should be noted in addition that they are intended by the author as criteria towards formulating what he calls a “grammar of autobiography.” His purpose is to sketch a list of sustainable features that autobiographical writing reveals, regardless of the dominant paradigm. AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 150 In Augustine and Nabokov’s understanding, sense perception is programmatic. We imprint in our mind “incorporeal images of the objects perceived.” They in turn are “stored in the memory and when we call something to mind, it is an image that we recollect.” If we are unable to retrieve an image, it means that its imprinting has not been performed (59-60). Henry-Thommes differentiates voluntary and involuntary acts of recollection, all of which are dynamic and riveting processes. He sets the context by insisting on voluntary recollection, because forgetting or “a failure to recollect something may be due to a lack of will to do so” (75). This positioning seems to almost inevitably lead him into a more detailed discussion of the role that will plays in the process of recollection. Augustine and Nabokov set well-defined premises about the relation between memory and recollection. They argue that recollection is fundamentally a “reactivation of memory-images,” thus a deliberate gesture to dig out images that have been stored in our minds. However, Nabokov is correct when he cautions that “our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory” (68-69). Memory can only be explained as a “form of imagination,” which is not only reproductive but also creative (80). It is, in fact, “in our minds [that] we also make up things which we have never seen or been through” (81); as Augustine put it, our mind “by increasing, or diminishing, or changing, or connecting at will what has not been forgotten, […] often imagines something as if it were of such a kind of which it knows that it is not or of which it does not know whether it is so.” (82). These considerations serve to set the context for a more detailed analysis of memory, because of its central function inside the autobiographical paradigm. Henry- Thommes proceeds in three steps. He begins by investigating how Augustine and Nabokov endeavor to put “order” into the “mass of recollections,” which David Hume defined as “the chief exercise of memory.” Then, he examines how Augustine’s theory of memory has evolved into a broader and “more general theory of consciousness” and investigates the resonating effects that this theory has had upon the (re)definition of memory, self, and life-writing in general (87). Finally, he discusses the seminal role that memory plays in the perception of time. Augustine and Nabokov think of memory as the “locale” where the segments of time - past, present, and future - merge. Indeed, time, on the one hand, seems to be able to transcend the limitations of its own segmentation. Memory, on the other, turns into a synthesizer of “the present memory of past events, the present contemplation of present events and the present hope of future events.” In this sense, “time [has] become a plaything of the imagination” (88). In the second part, “Nabokov’s Autobiographical Works,” Henry-Thommes extends the theoretical perspective to individual narrative accomplishments, including “The Texture of Time,” the autobiographical novel Mary (Mashen’ka), and the fictive autobiographies The Gift (Dar), Lolita, and Ada. In “The Texture of Time,” Nabokov presents a “strictly secularized version of the theory of time and memory,” which as a matter of fact sets the tone for his interpretation of the historical self. This is an important point of reference for Henry-Thommes to anchor his argument, because memory in Nabokov’s understanding plays a significant role. Memory is a “guarantor of identity,” thus it secures the individual’s Rezensionen 151 “continuity of [conscious] being across time.” It ensures “the only liaison […] between past experience and present consciousness” (189). In Mary (Mashen’ka), Henry-Thommes’ investigation focuses upon Lev Glebovich Ganin’s attempts to “recollect his past.” By synthesizing his memories of the time when he was still in Russia before migrating to Berlin and his recollections of his first great love for Mary, whom he affectionately called Mashen’ka, and by using his imagination “creatively,” Ganin searches to revive his past. Although he tries very hard, he never succeeds and thus cannot re-live the past in his present. He fails in his endeavors, because he is unable to “recover the meaning of his past life” through art (227). In The Gift (Dar), Nabokov meditates with greater subtlety and sophistication the tension between the present and the past. He splits Count Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev into Fyodor, the character, and Fyodor, the author of his own autobiography. It is impossible for Nabokov at this point to maintain an independent profile and resist the obsessive pull of fictionalization. And as a matter of fact, fictionalization leads into (re)creating “his past” and that of “the other characters participating in it” (272). Henry-Thommes argues that Nabokov’s greatest achievement in The Gift (Dar) is to have shown how the author risks to “turn [himself] into fiction” (272). He confirms that de-emphasizing the polar identity and centeredness of the self leads into dealing with the author’s hopes and fears, his authenticity, and his sins of the past. Humbert Humbert in Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male “lives entirely in the past” (297). Obsessed by his love for Annabel, he shuts out the twists and turns of the present to live in his past. As he realizes that there is no possibility to completely reconcile the past with the present, Humbert remains tied to his recollections of 1923, “the year [when] he met, loved, and lost Annabel” (298). So far, he has lived in a Hegelian spiral, Henry-Thommes explains, which “represents a constant upward movement consisting of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” “And, because [Humbert] unremittingly spirals around in the closed circle of that fateful year, he gets caught up in a vicious circle.” He lives in this circle until the end when his whole mental and emotional system is detonated and “the novel [finally] restores the balance between the past, present and future” (298). The construction of a specifically unstable autobiographical self lies at the heart of the novel, which oscillates, as Henry-Thommes reminds us, “between recollection, governed by reproductive imagination, on the one hand, and free creative artistic invention guided and inspired by the creative imagination, on the other.” Thus, at the end, Humbert Humbert is an “intricate blend of fact and fiction” (311). As Van puts his and Ada’s story into a “book,” Henry-Thommes also notes the disquieting effect of the “otsebyatina (what one contributes oneself).” Memory does not remain flat and unchanged; on the contrary, it is a constant source of reference whose “‘elements’ [are] appropriated by the imagination, and this synthesis enters into further combinations that include not only ‘inventions’[,] but also recollections” (327). This says much about the desire to tailor life-writing after the autobiographer’s needs and demands. The gaps and “discrepancies” of memory are abolished by negotiating between “the real world” and its “artistic correction.” The overall effect is cumulative, because artistic correction “includes slides from English, French, and Russian novels, Italian and Dutch painters and Nabokov’s previous novels” (330-31). Rezensionen 152 ‘Mind pictures’, in Van’s case, Henry-Thommes argues, are intensely private and public at the same time, cutting across the “fine arts,” and “combining literary imagery and painting.” Rather than simple replicas of the past, ‘mind pictures’ reveal the author’s intellectual engagement with life-writing. And, in fact, it seems that genres transcend one another to culminate in “turn[ing] mental images of the past into pieces of fine arts” (330-31). Indeed, they seem to confirm the importance and priority of creative imagination, Henry-Thommes argues. The bibliography of this book is divided into four sections, two of which are further divided into subsections. At the end, the reader is presented with a brief summary and a list of abbreviations of the titles of the texts that Henry-Thommes has used through his study. An index is missing. Also, a few quotations have been cited more than once and some spelling mistakes could have been avoided. In the footnotes, Henry-Thommes presents the Latin or Russian version of the quotations from Augustine or Nabokov’s texts, respectively. Flutur Troshani University of Shkoder “Luigj Gurakuqi” Department of English and American Studies Shkoder, Albania Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Markus Hünemörder, Meike Zwingenberger, eds., Europe and America: Cultures in Translation. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, 139). Heidelberg: Universitäts-Verlag Winter, 2006. Daniel Leab This collection of heterogeneous but in the main attractive essays grew out of a conference held in Tutzing, Bavaria in October 2005. The conference was convened to “examine the state of transatlantic affairs” (ix) in what the editors have cogently described as “an interdisciplinary and nuanced manner” (ix). A group of renowned German and American scholars from various points of view discussed - often presciently and intelligently, at times however too elliptically - a diverse range of topics touching on relations between the U.S. and Germany, including contemporary politics, the impact of religion, ethnicity, and immigration, and manifestations of what is perceived to be U.S. cultural imperialism in the arena of popular culture. The authors of the essays in the volume under review, whether Germans or Americans, are not anti-American in a simplistic form. They do, however, not forgo a critical skepticism which echoes widespread European and American comments about the foreign policy of the U.S. since the horrors of September 11, 2001, as well as domestic developments in that country since then. The current Bush administration, however generously one views its overseas policies (and not just in the Middle East) as well as its domestic approach, has used AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 153 up a great deal of the positive capital built up among all kinds of people both in the U.S. and elsewhere since the heyday of the Vietnam War over a generation ago. And in most of this volume’s essays what is happening now - probably right now, as you are reading these lines - underscores the authors’ attitudes and arguments. Duke Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy Michael Allen Gillespie puts it very well when he touches on “the Manichean fantasies of fundamental difference that have gained a foothold on both sides of the Atlantic” (25). His concern is that currently running against George Bush would be an effective and successful election strategy in Germany. Two perceptive veteran German policy wonks (Heinrich Oberreuter and Saskia Hieber, both employed by Tutzing think tanks) are more optimistic about “rebuilding bridges” between the U.S. and Germany, yet the bulk of their essay is concerned with the differences that have evolved as the Bush Administration is “shaking the formerly huge confidence in Washington’s rule of law” (32). One of the editors of the collection, Markus Hünemörder, a historian of American Culture at the University of Munich, also believes that it may be possible to heal the “trans-Atlantic rifts” by “looking beyond the U.S. presidential election of 2008” (49); the hope is that the policies of the current administration will not be continued by Bush’s successor, but as the electoral process unrolls in the U.S. we do not know whether this will actually be the case, and the professor does not offer any alternatives to that hope. Nor are those dealing with religion more optimistic. Paul Boyer, a well regarded scholar of American intellectual history, and now a Professor Emeritus, in a comprehensive essay reviews the general U.S. response to organized religion over the years and concludes somewhat pessimistically that recently there has been an “upsurge and political mobilization of fundamentalist beliefs and literalistic biblical interpretations” which have and continue to play “a profound role […] in shaping contemporary American popular culture, politics, and foreign affairs” (63). Jürgen Gebhardt, a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg, and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, who teaches American Cultural History at the University of Munich and is one of the book’s editors, both offer thoughtful reflections on the German and American responses to secularization. Gebhardt’s essay deals more with the German theocratic response; Waldschmidt- Nelson rather forcefully touches on America’s civic religion, which was built on the belief by most Americans that “their country is God’s chosen nation” (84). Both authors, although in a way more concerned than Boyer with developments in Germany, are also worried about the rise of Christian fundamentalism in contemporary America. The general attitude of Germans towards the United States, and its development over the past few decades is the topic of the contribution by Christian Schwaabe, who teaches Political Science in Munich; Gebhard Schweigler, a Professor of International Relations at the National War College in Washington, DC; and Philipp Gassart, a University of Heidelberg historian currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. They deal with what the editors call “‘the phenomenon of Anti-Americanism” (xi). Schwaabe carefully plots the demise of Anti-Americanism in post-war Germany and its revival on both the Right and the Left sides of the political spectrum. Schweigler focuses on differing stereotypes of Marianne and Rambo, personifying France and the U.S., respectively, and utilizes them to discuss German misunder- Rezensionen 154 standing of the American political scene. Gassart, building on the well-known question “what then is the American, this new man” raised by the transplanted Frenchman de Crevecouer in his 1782 Letters From An American Farmer, calls his essay “What then is the Anti-American, this new man” and most convincingly lays out “the paradoxical attitude” which has resulted in “anti-Americanism […] forced to adopt an American accent” (128). The impact of that American accent as practiced by the poet William Carlos Williams on German literature is the subject of an essay by the now emeritus Americanist Heinz Ickstadt. The specific influence of the poems of Williams on post- World War II German poetry is laid out by Peter Schneck, currently teaching American literature at the University of Munich, in a response to Ickstadt’s paper and to one presented by Werner Sollors, who teaches literature at Harvard University. Sollors details the polyethnicism to be found in the U.S., notwithstanding consistent attempts at Americanization, and also points out that even though Germany in the past was not an “Einwanderungsland”, it has more of a polyethnic past than is usually assumed. Another one of the editors, viz. Meike Zwingenberger, in a comprehensive but brief essay “takes a critical look at how Germany and the United States deal with migrant workers and other transnational phenomenon” (xi-xii). Immigration, ethnicity and similar themes are also dealt with in a series of further essays. Ruth Mayer, the holder of a chair in American Studies at the University of Hannover, in detail critiques the “Black Atlantic” thesis of the British sociologist Paul Gilroy, who maintained that the ocean was “a rhizomatic structure complicatedly interlinking black communities worldwide” (177); she maintains that it is hard to ignore the “underlying economic realities and intricate hierarchies organizing the contact zones” (182) of the Black Diaspora. Graham Huggan, who teaches at the University of Leeds, in his view of the post-colonial world convincingly rejects the ideas inherent in the word “intercultural,” which he attacks as “at best, a self-serving Western-liberal project” (189). Iris Schmeisser, who teaches American Cultural History at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, in her keen comments on the Mayer and Huggan articles agrees with their somewhat contradictory views on the “problems entailed in antiessentialist concepts such as transculturality or diaspora” (xii) but, in the words of the editors, points up the risk Mayer and Huggan take in attempting “to conceal the contradictions and discontinuities that define the reality of scattered cultural enclaves” (xii). The text concludes with a series of “sketches” by Ian Chambers, who teaches Cultural Studies in Naples at the Universita “L’Orientale.” They are mostly concerned with California, and even though often impressionistic, they are overall well-written, interesting, contain fascinating nuggets of personal and scholarly information, and make a happy coda to the more serious preceding essays. In fine, this book is a good read. The essays are thoughtful and thought-provoking, opinionated but not dogmatic, relatively free of jargon, a clever reworking of papers presented at a conference (all too often not the case). There are substantial and useful bibliographies appended to most of the essays. Readers can learn a lot from dipping into these pages and certainly will benefit from a more thorough perusal. Perhaps the sub-title should not have referred to “translations” but to “transitions,” a function of many of these essays. Rezensionen 155 This book is dedicated to Berndt Ostendorf, aptly characterized by the editors as “one of Europe’s most important […] trailblazers in the study of the American cultural landscape” (xiii). He is a dedicated and prolific scholar perhaps best known for his study of African-Americans, but he also has contributed to the study of American music and religion as well as cultural nationalism, to name just a few areas of his interest and expertise. Many of the essays in this volume are penned by his friends, colleagues, and former students. He has been and still is one of the leading German Americanists. He has also really been one of the “good guys”. This collection seems to me, moreover, to be a tribute to the American practioners of public diplomacy; there was a willingness, in the words of Patricia H.H. Guy, Consul for Public Affairs, U.S. Consulate General Munich, “to provide financial support for this volume” (xv), even though it must have been clear that not everyone in her bailiwick would be happy with the themes of at least some of the essays with their less than positive response to current U.S. policies. Still, although this book is slim (only 210 pages), it is rich in content and ideas; it and the conference from which it is spawned, as she points out, not only happily “fête” Berndt Ostendorf and his “grand legacy,” but also “enhance the scholarship of transatlantic relations and […] contribute greatly to improving mutual understanding on both sides of the Atlantic” (xv-xvi). Daniel Leab Department of History Seton Hall University New Jersey, USA Nieves Pascual, Laura Alonso-Gallo and Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, eds., Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. (Anglistische Forschungen Band 373). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Patrycjia Kunjatto-Renard As Julia Kristeva put it, “‘A ‘fixed identity’ [is] a fiction, an illusion’” (106). This lack of stability moved her to create the term “subject-in-progress”. A subject is always a temporary result of becoming, a constantly evolving and unstable flux. Identity is multiple, a sum of various elements whose relative importance depends on the situation of the subject at a given moment in his or her development. Western culture posits identity questions in either/ or terms: one is either male or female, from here or from elsewhere, a stranger or familiar, etc. Some subjects will accept these dichotomies and seek to construct their self in agreement with them, while others will resist them. But those who resist, even if they face more difficulties and existential angst, enjoy greater freedom. Such are some premises underlying the essays comprised in AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 156 Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. While the title of the book insists on the gender dimension of identity, and while this dimension does provide cohesion to the book, other elements such as race, ethnicity, place, nationality, and the loyalty to a group (or groups) are also subjects of the essays collected in this volume. Some scholars would say that Kristeva’s instability results from the post-modern revolution in thinking and conceptualizing the self, that is to say, while everyone in the USA belongs to a hyphenated space, this is a relatively recent development. However, the essays in the volume generally show that the awareness of the composite nature of identity, inviting a continuous invention of the self, is far from being a new phenomenon: indeed, it may even date back to pre-Columbian societies, as suggested in Sylvia Martinez Falquina’s interesting text on the berdache, or two-spirit people (233). Thus, the volume helps to root this concept and place it in a wide historical context. The editors of the book, composed of eighteen papers originally written for the 2005 International Conference of the Spanish Association for American Studies, should be given credit for selecting insightful essays looking at gender from a wide variety of angles. The texts address the issues of the human condition, and the editors’ aim is to propose a heuristic tool which will help readers make sense of the public debates regarding the state of Western civilization and gendered identities in a globalized world. It does so by providing analyses of narratives created at different points in American cultural history. The tool is a linguistic one, which is problematic, given that language is “declaratory and, therefore, discriminating” (5), but this can hardly be avoided. The book also sees itself as more optimistic than certain other contributions to the field and intends to free its readers from “traditional and categorical binaries” (4). The contributors invite the readers to look at gender performance and at hybridity in a wide array of contexts, as the articles deal with literary texts, theater, socio-cultural activism, social practices, womanhood and masculinity paradigms, cinema, as well as literary and cultural theory. The essays are divided into three parts: “Femininities”, “Masculinities” and “Cultural and Gender Borderlands”. The editors draw the readers’ attention to the fact that such a division is ironic, given that the first two categories cannot really be neatly separated. Indeed, it is easy to notice how porous the boundaries between the two categories are: many essays would just as well fit into another section than the one they have been put in. For instance, one of the contributions to the first part of the book deals with the social and political activity of Charlotte Cushman, whose benefit performances of Macbeth during the Civil War along with her earlier brilliant career helped modify 19 th century ideals of womanhood and improve the status of one group of working women: actresses. But although she seemed to be the epitome of the respectable woman of her time, Cushman transgressed gender borders not just by proving the women’s value in the war effort and by actively struggling to modify the way her profession was perceived at that time, but also because she performed both female and male roles on stage and was praised for the androgynous talent to play both genders with equal perfection. Likewise, part two, “Masculinities”, opens with a text celebrating the values and profits of androgyny in approaching fiction as well as everyday situations. Its authors, Maria Goicoechea de Jorge and Asuncion Lopéz- Varela, remind the reader that androgynous subjects seem more adaptive, claiming Rezensionen 157 that the individuals who adhere closely to the paradigms of either gender cope less well with the challenges of literary texts and of life than do more androgynous-minded people. Christelle Maury’s text (part two) examines the artistic and technical means used to endow masculine characters of the 1940s and 1950s films noirs with feminine and animal characteristics, which creates a complex representation of gender. In short, the classification of many essays is consciously arbitrary, which reflects the problematic nature of terms such as masculinity and femininity, and ultimately strives to show the way out of the realm of binary oppositions, which is the aim of deconstructive feminism. As “performance […] effectively articulates the debates in feminism between performative identity strategies and the material presentation of performic flux” (Gamble 1999: 294), it is not surprising that a large number of essays examines narratives linked to theater or cinema. Acting is a profession dramatizing the ease with which boundaries can be crossed, and linked to the notion of performance. Both theater and film are media which typically require a high degree of social consensus, given that many persons and institutions are involved in their production, that they are the product of negotiations between filmmakers, censors and the audience’s taste, and that their reception is a matter of communal viewing. Finally, “the theatre is a repository of cultural memory, a memory that can be continually adjusted and modified” (Huff, 38), which could also be said about the cinema. Therefore, these media help shape communal and national consciousness and at the same time provide gender paradigms which are easy to emulate, thus participating in the reflection on identity. The group of contributions in this thematic domain includes the abovementioned essay on Charlotte Cushman by Helen Huff, as well as Amelia Howe Kritzer’s analysis of early American women playwrights’ texts (part one), Barbara Lewis’s article on William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom (the first extant African American play; part one), Hilaria Loyo’s interesting text examining two film versions of An American Tragedy and the models of masculinity which they propose (part two), Cristelle Maury’s study of postwar American film noir (part two), Milette Shamir’s brilliant analysis of the trope of interracial fraternity (part two) and, last but not least, Ignacio Guijarro Gonzalez’s study of multicultural history and the construction of a viable community feeling by means of education in John Sayles’ Lone Star (part three). With the exception of the last text, all these essays approach various models of gendered identity and look at the ways in which film makers, playwrights, and actors seek to subvert existing paradigms of womanhood and masculinity. The last of the essays mentioned above focuses less on gendered models than on the coexistence of different ethnic groups within a single community in the context of the “culture wars”, on the nature of knowledge, and on the problems of monolithic education. An issue appearing in several essays is the problem of allegiance to a given group. ‘”To what nationality should a writer pledge literary allegiance? ”’ is a question asked by Régine Robin in the afterword to The Wanderer, the English translation of La Québecoite (55). Her novel presents three possible lives of the narrator, whose potential loyalties differ considerably: to her new host country, to her European past, and to political radicalism, arguably the suitable political option for a member of an oppressed minority. Heinz Ickstadt shows how in this novel, the narrator’s three lives are differentiated by the choice of partner and the place to live. To deal with the issue Rezensionen 158 of allegiance, the narratives offer models of citizenship or focus on an ethnic or religious group, further qualified by gender and sexual orientation. Some contributors have chosen to work on narratives which aim at proposing new models of the national community and analyze the roles to be played by men and women. For instance, Kritzer discusses “national identity as a compact based on values and choice” (75). Groups based on sexual preference seem to be given a less hopeful treatment. Thus, Stephan Brandt analyzes the representation of the homosexual community in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and his text is somewhat grimmer than the plays analyzed by Kritzer, given that this community ultimately fails to sustain its members. In fact, Baldwin’s text shows the impossibility of building a viable community due to the social climate informing the homosexuals’ perception of themselves. American culture can also be seen as a community of thought, and some scholars seek to demonstrate its unity: certain essays tend to background the wide time gaps separating the publications of the narratives examined, studying works from different periods and genres so as to demonstrate the vitality of certain tropes in American culture. A number of essays study narratives which problematize fragmentation and disruption of community and/ or national bonds. However, fragmentation is not necessarily a bad thing, as it may be a source of a renewed identity. Heinz Ickstadt hints at the value of dissolution in his essay entitled “Finding Voice in Fragmentation”, which analyzes novels by four immigrant women writers: Bharati Mukherjee, Régine Robin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Gail Scott. The idea of “constructed family” transcending class lines and race divides appears in Kritzer’s interesting analysis of early nineteenth century plays by women. In these plays, family, marriage and citizenship result from active and rational choice: dissolving passive family, personal, and national bonds is shown to lead to building up new ties which are better because they are consciously constructed. A similar idea can be found in the insightful essay by Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, which investigates Chuk Palahniuk’s writing to discover, behind the veil of fiction, an ethical call to reconstruct community bonds. Palahniuk is shown here to invite the creation of new sustaining communities, made possible through the characters’ earlier isolation. M. Aichih Wehbe Herrera works on fragmentation in Ana Castillo’s fiction, inviting Chicana women to construct a multiple identity by accepting the coexistence of various and sometimes diverging elements, which hints at the provisional nature of their identity. Nieves Pascual’s article is somewhat less optimistic. This interesting essay deals with autobiographic narratives by anorexic women. Pascual argues that while writing may provide these women with a temporary respite from their condition and help them connect with others, it offers no permanent cure for it. A minor weakness - or what may seem like one - is the lack of cohesion of certain essays. Thus, “Androids, Gynoids and Cyborgs: Applying Bem’s Theory of Psychological Androgyny to CyberFeminist Reader-Response Criticism” (part two) begins with a discussion of reader-response theory and psychology, moves to a presentation of the concept of androgyny through the ages, and finally discusses several works of science fiction. However, to the reader it seems as if this choice of subject matter reflects the postulate voiced in the final paragraph of the essay, i.e. that in the new state of our civilisation it has become necessary to accept “a higher degree of ambiguity, inconsistency, and chaos, than has ever been the case” (126). Rezensionen 159 To sum up, the real strength of this volume lies in the wide variety of topics, works, and genres discussed in overall interesting and well-documented essays. The editors have successfully struggled to allow ample room for various representations of gender, and their choice reflects and enriches the current discussions in the field. References Gamble, Sarah (ed.) (1999). The Icon Critical Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism. Cambridge: Icon Books. Patrycja Kurjatto-Renard Independent scholar France Marc Priewe, Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/ o Narratives. (American Studies: Vol. 140). Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Ewa Antoszek Writing Transit is an insightful study of the development and the status quo of Chicana/ o works devoted to “cultural representations of urban spaces and the changing roles of national narratives,” as Marc Priewe states himself. In the introduction the author explains the shifts in the interpretation of those two concepts that are crucial for the study: the nation (or the nation-state, as he sometimes refers to it) and the border. His study thus focuses on those changes and refigurations depicted in Chicana/ o texts, films, music, and selected cultural productions from the Southwest. Priewe admits that despite some recent interest in urban Chicana/ o works, the research on the refigurations of national imaginaries and the concept of border in Chicana/ o cultural productions is relatively scarce. Therefore, he attempts to provide new interpretations of national representations in selected Chicana/ o works and to incorporate them in the current debate on the re-mapping of cultural positions “beyond the nation.” Priewe’s study contributes greatly to a discussion of those issues and, what is more, it tries to avoid polarizations or implementing binary oppositions not infrequently deployed in various analyses, such as the juxtapositions between us vs. them or between the U.S. vs. Mexico. Thus his analysis provides the reader with new perspectives on these issues. As Priewe does not want to limit the scope of his analysis, the spectrum of voices he deploys in his study ranges from earlier literary productions, including Oscar Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) or Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) to more contemporary works, like The Rag Doll Plagues by Alejandro Morales (published in 1992). He also examines works that reflect “gendered perspective of mobility” - John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amanda AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 160 Gómez (1991), and Mariá Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1999), together with its film adaptation Santitos (2000). In addition to the last title, Priewe allows more room for other representations of popular culture and includes in his study the analysis of performances by El Vez and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Such a selection of works acquaints the reader with various kinds of Chicana/ o cultural productions and complements the current debate on new tendencies and trends in Chicana/ o studies. Priewe’s study is systematic and well structured. The author not only analyzes, examines, and provides examples for “border and resistance paradigms,” but he also contextualizes the changes and transformations. With Priewe’s study the reader will be able to find answers to questions “that revolve around the relation between nation and narration in a time and space in which the nation is increasingly losing its influence on cultural representations.” In order to facilitate/ systematize these processes, the author divides his study into two parts which complement each other. Part I - “Socio-Cultural Fields & Discursive Formations” - consists of two chapters which provide some background information indispensable for the understanding of the postulates he expounds in the subsequent chapters while analyzing particular Chicana/ o cultural productions from/ of/ about the Southwest. Chapter 1 is an overview of “the region’s contemporary history from a Chicana/ o perspective.” In this historical survey the author discusses the specificity of the Chicana/ o experience in the Southwest as juxtaposed with other regions of the U.S. He focuses on several aspects of this experience, linking them to the contemporary status quo of Chicanas/ os and their cultural productions dealing with the concepts of the nation and the border. Referring back to the 1960s and 1970s and the Chicano Movement with its nationalist character and “proliferation of the concept of Aztlán,” Priewe discusses in detail the contradictory nature of the movement. He points to the movement’s significance for the creation of the foundations of Chicana/ o identity and cultural heritage but, at the same time, he acknowledges its restrictive power, which propagated chicanismo and thus discriminated against Chicanas. He argues that cultural nationalism and the concept of Aztlán contributed to the development of the new idea of the nation which postulated opposition to the assimilation to the Anglo- American culture and society, but at the same time “was marked by unresolved tensions between its social and cultural polarities.” The limiting polarities were subsequently challenged by Chicanas, whose intervention, according to Priewe, “can be regarded as a postnationalist interrogation of the formation of group cohesion and identity based on nationalist premises.” Here Priewe emphasizes the fact that this new approach to the concept of the nation laid foundations for its development as well as its treatment in contemporary Chicana/ o productions (together with “neo/ ultranationalisms and fundamentalisms” which are still present “also among Chican/ os”). In the second part of Chapter 1 Priewe refers to other aspects that influence contemporary conditions of the Chicana/ o nation, which, as Priewe maintains, may well be described as people who live “in transit.” In this part he analyzes various “migratory movements” focusing on new patterns of migration allowing for new types of nationality that “undermine the dichotomy between assimilation and alienation” and sanction a transcending of spaces both in the physical and metaphorical sense. Since these processes are part of globalization, the author acknowledges its significance by distinguishing two types of globalization, namely “globalization from below” and “globalization from above.” He claims that these two processes complement Rezensionen 161 each other and affect the nation, leading to what Habermas calls “postnational constellations.” In the last part of Chapter 1 Priewe presents Los Angeles, which is the setting in most of the productions described by him in subsequent chapters. The author depicts the city as an “urban transfrontera” - the global metropolis whose heterogeneity makes it “less controllable by the nation-state.” Such characteristics of L.A., together with its closeness to the physical border between the U.S. and Mexico, allow it to function as a city of transit. Focusing on the Los Angeles-Tijuana zone, Priewe discusses the development of the concept of the border as well as various kinds of borders and their numerous roles. Calling upon the critics analyzing the concept of the border - both Western and Chicana/ o ones - he depicts the development of the research, accompanying it with the analysis of both advantages and drawbacks of different approaches. In this way the reader not only gets acquainted with the research but is able to develop his/ her own perspective on this issue. Combining theorizations of Mary Louise Pratt, José David Saldívar, and Michel Foucault, Priewe proposes a “‘new urban model,’ marked by transnational interconnections and heterotopic spaces” and “accompanied by a shift from national to postnational alignments.” In order to analyze the functioning of this model in cultural productions by Chicana/ o authors, Priewe provides a theoretical framework for his analysis in Chapter 2. This theoretical structure is based on two key concepts “salient in recent American Studies projects,” the postnational and the transnational. Priewe examines both approaches, explaining his understanding of the terms and the way he deploys them in the subsequent parts of the study. Providing some general definitions of those paradigms coined by various theoreticians, he also clearly states his opinions and presents his approaches. He considers postcolonial theories inadequate to describe “the on-going neocolonial practices of the United States” and complements them with “research paradigms from the New American Studies,” emphasizing the fact that such a step “does not constitute a colonial gesture that subsumes Chicana/ o literature and culture into a possible new hegemonic U.S. narrative of the postcolonial.” Instead, he argues, it “acknowledges and accentuates the mutual influences and interactions between Anglo-American and Chicana/ o cultures,” which in turn, allows to “further theorize intercultural transit and disciplinary border crossings.” In a similar way he combines the concepts of the diaspora and borderland in order to create “a useful conceptual grid for analyzing and understanding representations of contemporary displacements and movements of people, capital, [etc.] in the urban transfrontera.” In this chapter Priewe also addresses the problem of defining ethnicity and ethnic writings as well as the issue of reading and interpreting such writings. He also offers advice to the reader so that s/ he can avoid essentialist reading of the Chicana/ o productions he examines. The last part of Chapter 2 may help the reader to interpret Chicana/ o works, since it is devoted to the notion of “transculturation” - the concept Priewe deploys in his study, preferring it to mestizaje or hybridity as more accurate and precise. Having set the theoretical parameters of his research, Priewe implements them in Part II - “Textual Practices.” This part consists of three chapters (excluding the conclusion) whose aim is to “identify and compare representations of transit between Rezensionen 162 national, postnational and transnational discourses in literary and cultural texts from Southern California.” The texts he examines deal with various denotations of “transit” - both physical and metaphorical. In addition to examining those different interpretations of transit, Priewe also identifies the techniques used by the authors to represent transit. He starts his survey chronologically, starting with texts that were published earlier in the 20 th century. Chapter 3 begins with the analysis of Oscar Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). Priewe locates the texts in the tradition of corrido, re-interpreting it also as a “postnational narrative.” In the analysis of this novel he concentrates on the examples that make The Revolt a “postnational narrative.” He examines how nationalism was deployed in the earliest stages of the Chicano Movement. On the basis of this novel, Priewe also analyzes various ways of what he calls “performing ethnicity.” He refers to this process while talking about Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975). This work, according to him, “allegorizes the demise of cultural nationalism in Los Angeles and beyond.” Finally, the last work analyzed in Chapter 3 - The Rag Doll Plagues by Alejandro Morales (published in 1992) - exemplifies “the transit from national to postnational imaginaries”, which not infrequently involves the emergence of what he calls “contamiNation.” Chapter 4 refers to “gendered perspectives of mobility,” as mentioned at the beginning of this review. Here Priewe refers to transit urban spaces frequented by Chicanas. The first novel he examines is John Rechy’s The Miraculous Day of Amanda Gómez (1991), which talks about “carving out and maintaining a transcultural subject position” without either assimilating to or totally rejecting the space in which identity is being formulated. This text enables him to talk about the specificity of Los Angeles and to analyze the accounts about this city that have been published so far. The author also endeavors to track down “transcultural practices” and evidence of transit in the text by Mariá Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1999), together with its film adaptation Santitos (2000). These works are also regarded as texts that “articulate ‘post-chicanisma’ subject positions” - the new stances which, unlike previously published works, do not base their agenda on the criticism of machismo. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses “the work of two Chicano performers,” El Vez and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Introducing popular culture to the discussion about the shifts in the perception of the nation and the border not only broadens the scope of analysis but also points to the fact that such voices (of popular culture) are becoming more and more significant in scholarly debates. What is more, productions of popular culture contribute greatly to those discussions. Therefore, while talking about El Vez, Priewe concentrates on the artist’s contribution to “transfrontera cultural formations that move beyond the constraints of the nation.” Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s art, in turn, supports Priewe’s conclusions about the broadening of the meaning of the concept of the border as well as the shift in the notions of nationality. Priewe’s conclusions can be found in Chapter 6, which works as an overview of the postulates he proposes in the previous chapters. This chapter is also an attempt to answer the questions about the current status quo of Chicana/ o works dealing with urban transfontera. As Priewe maintains, such cultural productions “open up and negotiate new sites of resistance” and “they also tend to redefine, and even provisionally reintroduce, national imaginaries for counter-hegemonic purposes in a Rezensionen 163 globalized contact zone.” They also prove how provisional and changeable some suppositions about these works are. Writing Transit by Marc Priewe is a comprehensive study of nation and border paradigms in Chicana/ o works which follows the recent changes and introduces new approaches to these issues. Readers who are interested in Chicana/ o studies will appreciate the research and the analyses offered by Priewe. For those who are just beginning to deal with Chicana/ o productions, the study - with its thorough theoretical background and numerous references that encourage the reader to conduct further research - will be a great opportunity to explore the current trends and tendencies in Chicana/ o literature and culture put into context of earlier Chicana/ o productions. Ewa Antoszek Department of American Literature and Culture Maria Curie-Sk odowska University Lublin Till Kinzel, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens: Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Manfred Kopp Till Kinzel, der mit Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika: Studien zu Allan Blooms ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ (2002) und Nicolás Gómez Dávila: Parteigänger verlorener Sachen (2003) zuvor bereits zwei recht kenntnis- und materialreiche Bücher veröffentlicht hat, unternimmt mit dem vorliegenden Werk den - wenn auch mit gewissen Einschränkungen - insgesamt als gelungen zu betrachtenden Versuch, eine literaturbasierte Kulturdiagnose der amerikanischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft vorzulegen. Zu diesem Zweck wendet er sich den drei durch die Erzählerfigur Nathan Zuckerman verbundenen neueren Romanen Philip Roths American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) und The Human Stain (2000) zu. Dass Kinzels Analyse und Interpretation dieser Texte als einigermaßen erfolgreich bezeichnet werden kann, bezieht sich indes ausschließlich auf den Inhalt seiner als Habilitationsschrift an der Technischen Universität Berlin angenommenen Studie, keinesfalls jedoch auf deren sprachliche bzw. formale Gestaltung. Dabei mögen gelegentliche Satzkaskaden, unbegründete Kursivsetzungen, fehlende Seitenangaben bei Zitaten, die häufige Verwendung von Lieblingswörtern (z.B. ‘schlechterdings’ oder auch ‘Kristallisationspunkt’) und Tautologien (so schreibt Kinzel beispielsweise über die “Einfachheit der einfachen Menschen” (84) oder spricht ganz ernsthaft von “der kritischen Kritik” (164), der sich Coleman Silk ausgesetzt fühlen mag) noch verzeihlich erscheinen, die mehrere Dutzend (! ) Rechtschreibfehler, grammatikalischen Ungenauigkeiten und sonstigen sprachlichen bzw. typographischen Nachlässigkeiten sind es nicht mehr. Der traurige Höhepunkt dieser das Leseinteresse doch erheblich beeinträchtigenden Problematik befindet sich etwa in der Mitte des Buches, AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 164 auf Seite 152, wo allein 8 Fehler unterschiedlichster Art zu beklagen sind. Und Schwierigkeiten scheint in diesem Zusammenhang nicht nur die deutsche Sprache zu machen, auch englische Zitate werden in teils grotesker Weise verfälscht wiedergegeben (z.B. “lage” (37) anstatt ‘large’; “know’s” (57) anstatt ‘knows’; “weekness” (78) anstatt ‘weakness’; “an impregnable house that could ever burn to the ground” (153) anstatt, wie es in American Pastoral auf Seite 190 korrekterweise heißt, “an impregnable house that could never burn to the ground” [meine Hervorhebungen]; etc.). An einer anderen Stelle im Roth’schen Romanwerk - und hiermit soll dieser Aspekt der Kritik dann aber auch beendet sein - scheint, falls Kinzel dies tatsächlich so, wie er es ausgedrückt hat, auch gemeint haben sollte, schließlich sogar ein Fall für den Staatsanwalt vorzuliegen, oder was sonst mag es wohl bedeuten, wenn er recht umstandslos von “der zweiten Ehe Levovs mit drei phantastischen Jungen” (137) berichtet? Dass es sich bei all diesen Mängeln um Probleme handelt, die zweifellos auf die von Kinzel in seinem Vorwort erwähnten widrigen Rahmenbedingungen beim Erstellen der Arbeit zurückzuführen sind, ergibt sich nahezu zwingend aus der inhaltlich deutlich höheren Qualität seines Werkes. Obgleich auch auf dieser Ebene einige wenige sachliche Unrichtigkeiten vorliegen - so identifiziert er beispielsweise den als ‘Johnny Appleseed’ in die amerikanische Geschichte eingegangenen Baumgärtner John Chapman (1774-1845) fälschlicherweise als “John Chambers” (132) - ist hier positiv festzuhalten, dass Kinzels Gedankenführung als insgesamt nachvollziehbar und auch weitgehend verständlich präsentiert zu bewerten ist. Besonders interessant werden seine Ausführungen immer dann, wenn er Roths Romanfiguren zu anderen fiktionalen Charakteren der Weltliteratur, wie z.B. Herman Melvilles Billy Budd (140), Harriet Beecher Stowes Simon Legree (147-48) oder Thomas Manns Gustav von Aschenbach (201-02), gekonnt in Beziehung setzt. Dass Kinzel überdies auch noch über einen soliden klassischen Bildungshintergrund verfügt, hatte er bereits in seiner Dissertation über Allan Bloom gezeigt; im vorliegenden Band stellt er dies erneut eindrucksvoll unter Beweis, wenn er den zu behandelnden Ausschnitt des Roth#schen Romankosmos im Kontext antiker Gedankengebäude, wie beispielsweise der Consolatio philosophiae des Boethius (151-52) oder der Nikomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles (157-58, 198-99) betrachtet. Dementsprechend kann abschließend auch festgestellt werden, dass Kinzels Buch eine alles in allem immer noch lesenswerte Diskussion des, so der Klappentext, “Drama[s] der Selbsterkenntnis auf der Suche nach dem guten Leben” in Roths Amerika-Trilogie darstellt, weshalb es letztlich auch bedauerlich ist, dass die Rezeption dieser Studie wohl auf den zahlenmäßig doch recht begrenzten Personenkreis der deutschsprachigen Roth- Leser beschränkt bleiben wird. Manfred Kopp Paderborn Rezensionen 165 Bernhard Kettemann und Georg Marko (eds.), Planing, Gluing and Painting Corpora. Inside the Applied Corpus Linguist’s Workshop. (Sprache im Kontext, 24). Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006. Ute Römer Over the past few years, we have witnessed the publication of a number of research monographs and edited collections that show the power of corp ora use in Applied Linguistics (see e.g. Ädel 2006; Aston, Bernardini & Stewart (eds.) 2004; Gavioli 2006; Hidalgo, Quereda & Santana (eds.) 2007; Römer 2005; Sinclair (ed.) 2004). The eleven papers in Planing, Gluing and Painting Corpora. Inside the Applied Linguist’s Workshop (henceforth PGPC), too, are concerned with applications of corpus tools and methods in fields such as discourse analysis and language teaching, and prospective readers might ask what the present collection adds to the existing range of publications in the field and whether yet another volume that demonstrates the impact corpora can have on linguistic theory and pedagogical practice is actually needed. The editors of PGPC, Bernhard Kettemann and Georg Marko, directly address this issue in their introduction entitled “Overhearing a Conversation in the Applied Corpus Linguist’s Workshop: An Introduction”. By means of a staged (but still lively) dialogue between two corpus linguists, Kettemann and Marko sketch the scope of the volume and demonstrate why the book is well worth reading - even for informed readers who think they have “had it all” (p. 7). As the editors explain, the volume brings “together corpus linguistic veterans, rookies and in-betweens from different academic backgrounds” and different European countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Italy). The authors of the individual chapters all take an applied linguistics approach to constructing and working with corpora of different types (large and small, general and specialised) and languages (English, Czech, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). They take “turns in telling their own ‘stories’ about their most recent experiences with corpus work.” (p. 8) Five of the chapters are written in German, the remaining six in English. All papers have English abstracts. In the first paper Daniele Bellini and Stefan Schneider introduce the reader to the online database Banca dati dell’italiano parlato (BADIP), which provides free webbased access to different collections of spoken Italian, the central one being the 490,000-word LIP corpus (Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato). From what the authors state about corpus mark-up, possible corpus searches, and planned project developments it becomes clear that BADIP is clearly a useful resource that Italianists who are interested in analysing spoken registers should know about. The second paper, by Tomáš Ká a and Hana Peloušková (written in German), also introduces a new corpus resource: the Czech-German parallel corpus CNPK, a well-documented, aligned and POS-tagged 6.5-million word collection of a range of written texts (Czech or German originals and their German or Czech translations). Ká n a and Peloušková first describe the corpus query syntax, then give examples of CNPK-based research that has been carried out at the University of Brno, and finally list some tasks for the future development of the project. Moving on from resources to research, the next two papers in PGPC focus on concrete corpus analyses with implications for linguistic theory. Bernhard Kettemann AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 166 in his chapter uses German language data from the written components of COSMAS II to examine the question whether or not (and if so how) anglicisms in German are morphologically integrated. Basing his structural and semantic analyses on a large set of well-chosen lexical items, the author nicely demonstrates that English loan words are, in fact, “systematically integrated into German” (p. 51), and that they “enrich rather than impoverish the German language.” (p. 47) Another problem of theoretical linguistic interest in tackled by Gunther Kaltenböck in a paper entitled “Zur Verwendung von that und Asyndeton in extraponierten Subjektsätzen des Englischen: Eine korpuslinguistische Untersuchung”. Kaltenböck draws on data from ICE-GB (the British component of the International Corpus of English) to investigate what conditions the use or non-use of the that-complementizer in extraposed subjectclauses (e.g. It was said (that) there was blood on British coal). He finds that the omission of that is mainly influenced by the (in)formality of the text type, the information value of the complement clause, and the type of matrix verb, and makes suggestions for an empirically improved account of the use of zero that as the marked variant in spoken and written English. However intriguing these findings may be, they are based on a collection of only 76 zero that-clauses. It would hence probably be advisable to subject a larger corpus than the 1-million word ICE-GB to a similarly detailed and thorough analysis and collect further evidence in support of Kaltenböck’s claims. The following four chapters in the volume then deal with questions in pragmatics and discourse analysis, addressed to different types of small and specialised corpora. First Ingrid Lefebvre (in a German-language paper) looks at paraphrastic reformulations in French (such as veut dire que or (ou) autrement dit), their forms and central pragmatic functions. Her qualitative analysis, based on a 14,000-word transcript of a 70-minute TV programme (France Europe Express, a political discussion forum), is strictly speaking not a corpus study, at least not in a modern sense (although Lefebvre refers to her transcript as a corpus), but rather a textlinguistic analysis, since no use is made of corpus-analytic tools, such as concordancers or collocation extractors. Still, the study leads to some interesting findings and indicates promising avenues for expanding this kind of approach to a larger scale. Next Christiane Brand examines high-frequency content words and their use in two small and specialised corpora of texts dealing with the SARS epidemic in 2003 - one consisting of medical journal articles, the other one of general newspaper articles on the topic. Through a comparison of the lexical content of both text types, including collocation analysis, Brand demonstrates how the popular and scientific worlds are intertwined and how the study of science popularisation can profit from corpus methodology. Ute Leipold in her paper then uses the theory of social constructionism as a background for a study on constructions of gender identities in a corpus of 1,200 personal ads (600 posted by women, 600 by men) taken from British online newspapers and internet dating sites. Leipold shows how a CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) approach can profit from corpus work. The paper also demonstrates that, apparently, authors of personal ads do not manage to (or perhaps do not want to) “escape the vicious circle of stereotyping” (p. 172), so the gender identities created in the corpus texts correspond to traditional gender stereotypes. Also focussing on gender constructions and also adopting a CDA position, Georg Marko in the next chapter looks at descriptors for men and women (e.g. slim, handsome, young) in a POS-tagged Rezensionen 167 680,000-word corpus of pornographic short stories. Marko stresses the importance of using corpus resources in CDA but also discusses some methodological problems related to the retrieval of the most relevant data for a particular research question. The final three papers in PGPC illustrate and critically assess the potential of different types of specialised corpora in language pedagogy. Joybrato Mukherjee and Jan-Marc Rohrbach sketch “new departures in learner corpus research” (p. 205) by outlining the merits of getting teachers involved in the compilation and use of local learner corpora (LLCs), which consist of their own language learners’ output. The authors discuss how learners can profit from the application of a corpus of this kind (the Giessen-Göttingen Local Learner Corpus of English) and how work based on LLCs can nicely complement traditional learner corpora research. Next Ute Smit and Julia Hüttner describe an innovative course taught at Vienna University and tailored to the needs of students of English who aim to enter the teaching field at secondary or tertiary level and who may have to teach courses in ESP (e.g. Business English) although they have not had a business or technical training. The paper (written in German) offers practical advice on how future teachers of ESP could compile small and specialised corpora of the text type or sublanguage they are required to teach, and discusses how such homemade corpora can help with decisions about what lexical-grammatical phenomena particular groups of ESP learners should be presented with. In the final paper in this collection (also written in German), Hugo Kubarth and Mercedes Jódar Álamo give an outline of Vocambás, the “vocabulario americano básico” project, launched by researchers at the Department of Romance Studies at Graz University. Vocambás is a hands-on project by and for students of Spanish in which the students combine corpus-searches and web questionnaires to collect items for a dictionary of European Spanish and Latin-American Spanish. Going back to the initial question “Haven’t we had it all? ”, I would now reply with a clear “No, we haven’t,” and say that we probably needed a volume like this to tell us even more than we already know about the impact corpora can have on linguistic theory and pedagogical practice. What I liked in particular about Planing, Gluing and Painting Corpora was that it focuses on the actual “craft of corpus linguistics” (p. 8, my emphasis) and that it puts an emphasis on corpus methodology and on what it can do for researchers and practitioners (in that respect it is in line with Sinclair’s 2004 volume, which is very much a “how to” collection). Planing, Gluing and Painting Corpora is a book that makes you want to get your scissors, brushes and canvases out and join the group of corpus builders and explorers. References Ädel, Annelie (2006). Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Aston, Guy, Silvia Bernardini & Dominic Stewart (eds.) (2004). Corpora and Language Learners. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gavioli, Laura (2006). Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hidalgo, Encarnación, Luis Quereda & Juan Santana (eds.) (2007). Corpora in the Foreign Language Classroom. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Römer, Ute (2005). Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy. A Corpus-driven Approach to English Progressive Forms, Functions, Contexts and Didactics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rezensionen 168 Sinclair, John McH. (ed.) (2004). How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ute Römer Leibniz Universität Hannover Englisches Seminar Gabriele Link e , Populärliteratur als kulturelles Gedächtnis: Eine vergleichende Studie zu zeitgenössischen britischen und amerikanischen popular romances der Verlagsgruppe Harlequin Mills & Boon. (American Studies, 104). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003. Eva Kuntschner In dieser umfassenden vergleichenden Studie beschäftigt sich Linke mit einem populärkulturellen Phänomen, dessen Erforschung nach Ansicht der Autorin in der Vergangenheit durch “die Fixierung auf ästhetische oder ideologiekritische Wertungen” (7) geprägt war. Linke versucht, dem mit einem “neue[n] Ansatz in der Trivialliteraturbzw. Populärliteraturforschung aus der Sicht anglistischer und amerikanistischer Kulturwissenschaft in Deutschland” (7) zu begegnen. Die Einbeziehung eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansatzes in der Form einer Theorie von Literatur als kulturellem Gedächtnis soll dabei helfen, ebendiese Fixierung, “von der die deutsche Forschung zu diesem Gegenstand in der Vergangenheit geprägt wurde” (7), zu durchbrechen. Dieses Konzept, das in der Kulturgeschichte als “institutionalisierte Kommunikationsform […], durch die vorrangig ‘schicksalhafte Ereignisse der Vergangenheit’ (Assmann 1988: 12) wachgehalten werden” (15), definiert wird, wird von Linke hierbei dazu verwendet, die so genannten popular romances der Verlagsgruppe Harlequin Mills & Boon sowohl einem transatlantischen Vergleich als auch einer Analyse bezüglich der Darstellung und Verwendung der darin vorkommenden Kulturthemen und Mythen - wie z.B. “Das Fremde” (89), “Koloniales” (93) oder “Klassenbewusste und klassenlose Gesellschaft” (158) - zu unterziehen. Hierbei geht Linke davon aus, dass “popular romances Texte [sind], die objektivierte Kultur darstellen und Wissensbestände vermitteln, die zum kollektiven Wissen einer Gruppe gehören und Identität stiften, die Handeln und Erleben steuern und über Generationen weitergegeben werden.” (16) Potentiellen Einwänden der Überbewertung des Stellenwerts von so genannter ‘Trivialliteratur’ in einem kulturellen Diskurs wird durch das exemplarische Heranziehen von Leserinnenbriefen aus der Verlagszeitschrift Harlequin Magazine entgegengetreten, die den kulturellen Stellenwert dieser Art von Literatur belegen: “I have three children, and I am trying to teach them that between a man and a woman in love the real side of real love is beautiful and normal and healthy. […] I feel that in no way was that book [ein Roman the Harlequin Mills & Boon Autorin Anne AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 169 Mather, Anm. E.K.] against the code I am trying to teach my children. […] In fact, I can’t wait for my eldest daughter to grow up a little more and start reading my collection of Harlequin.” (19) Solche und ähnliche Aussagen von Leserinnen beweisen, wie zentral die Rezeption von popular romances in Bezug auf die Diskursbildung bei gesellschaftlich relevanten Themen wie z.B. Sexualität oder ‘die Beziehungen zwischen den Geschlechtern’ zu sein scheint. Was hier auffällt ist die hauptsächliche Beschränkung auf heteronormative Lebenskonzepte, sowohl in den Primärtexten als auch in der Auswahl der untersuchten Themen in diesem Zusammenhang. Mag dies einerseits der Häufigkeit des Vorkommens ‘anderer’ Konzepte in den ausgewählten Romanzen entsprechen (popular romances für und über z.B. Schwule und Lesben existieren als Sub-Genres in eigenen romance-Linien), so wäre eine genauere Abgrenzung des Themas in diesem Fall wünschenswert gewesen. Linkes Fokus richtet sich in dieser Studie allerdings dezidierter Weise auf andere kulturwissenschaftliche Themen. Besonders interessant sind die Vergleiche zwischen britischen und amerikanischen Darstellungsformen in Bezug auf Konzepte wie z.B. Kolonialismus. So stellt sich beim Vergleich von popular romances aus den USA und Großbritannien u.a. heraus, dass die Verortung der Auseinandersetzung mit “nichtweißen Anderen” (93) eine sehr unterschiedliche ist. Die sich selbst als in einer multikulturellen Gesellschaft lebend definierenden amerikanischen Autorinnen empfinden ‘Nicht-Weiße’ als Teil ihrer Kultur und lassen ergo die Begegnung ihrer (meist) weißen Heldinnen mit ‘nicht-weißen’ Helden im eigenen Land stattfinden. Britische romances hingegen sehen sich noch fest in der Tradition des britischen Kolonialreichs, wo ‘nicht-weiß’ als Synonym für ‘außerhalb Großbritanniens’ verstanden wird. (93) Durch die vergleichenden Analyse von britischen und amerikanischen popular romances stellt Linke in diesem Zusammenhang fest, dass Autorinnen beider Nationalitäten “ähnliche Strategien des Erinnerns” (347) anwenden, wobei hier auffällt, dass der kleinste gemeinsame Nenner jener der Ambiguität zu sein scheint. So meint auch Linke: “Die ideologische Ambiguität des romance-Genres macht Verallgemeinerungen über eine ideologische Richtung oder eine bestimmte Weltsicht des Genres als Ganzes unmöglich; sie wird sowohl durch die Verschiedenheit der romances als auch durch das Nebeneinander widersprüchlicher Werte in der einzelnen romance erzielt.” (347) Doch genau diese Feststellung macht Linkes Ansatz nachvollziehbar: Ebenso wie im individuellen Gedächtnis gibt es also anscheinend auch im kulturellen Gedächtnis ein Nebeneinander von Widersprüchlichkeiten, die in ihrer potentiellen Unlösbarkeit den Reiz des (kulturellen) Erinnerns ausmachen. Eva Kuntschner Universität Graz Institut für Amerikanistik Rezensionen 170 Michele Bottalico and Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa, Borderline Identities in Chicano Culture. Venezia: Mazzanti Editori, 2006. Stipe Grgas Even a cursory review of recent titles in literary and cultural studies clearly reveals that space, both as theme and metaphor, has become a paramount issue on their agenda. Some argue that the waning persuasiveness of the historical has been marked by a shift from a temporal to a geographical imagination, from the dialectics of time to the dialectics of space. Within this spatial turn the practice of mapping has become one of the central theoretical terms, providing a way of charting both physical and mental space. However, one ought to be wary of its frequent appearance in much recent critical work because of the proclivity to ignore the differences between the metaphorical and the material. This is one of the contexts in which the book under review ought to be read. Within the disciplinary field of American studies, the volume edited by Michele Bottalico and Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa partakes in that move which has worked to subvert the essentialist conceptualization of the United States as a culture, a polity, and a historical project. At the present moment, one way this is being done is to position the United States within a framework wherein the distinct territoriality of the polity has been enmeshed in broader, global flows and processes. It can be said that the geographical broadening of scope within American Studies is signified by the very image on the cover of this book, which shows the mass of the two continents of North and South America without state borders incorporated into a mesh of latitudes and longitudes. The other approach which has worked to subvert the essentialist readings of American identity displaces its focus on the center and approaches its subject from the margins, whether these be regional, racial, or ethnic. It is on the background of this juncture of the theoretical reappraisal of the spatial and the latest interrogations of the subject matter and methodological procedures of American Studies that one can assess the collection of papers in Borderline Identities in Chicano Culture. Between the introduction by Michele Bottalico and the afterword by Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa, the book is composed of eight chapters dealing with different aspects of Chicano literature and culture. In addition to providing brief summaries of what awaits the reader in the individual chapters, the title of Botallico’s introduction, “Towards a Poetics of Liminality”, indicates that the main focus of this book is “the diversity and the manifold cultural identity of Chicanos/ as” which the collected contributions are to examine by dealing with issues such as post-coloniality, gender, genre, nationhood, citizenship, transnationalism, mobility in space and individual and collective identity (14). The introductory note summarizes the content, argumentation, and interpretative procedures of the later chapters. Michel Feith’s reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s pioneering text Borderlands questions its transgressiveness by showing its balancing procedures which, on the one hand, reject the masculine orientations of Chicano identity and the Western subject, and yet, on the other, require the positing of a firm Chicano identity, empowered by the Aztlán homeland, to voice an antipodal option. To cite the author: “Borderlands reestablishes an asymmetrical relationship, a reversal of dominance rather than an abolition of it,” (39) evincing the paradox of a “transnational nationalism, a vision of AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 171 hybridity that promises multiple, subversive boundary-crossings, yet reifies one border as the site of a privileged mixture of traits defining a rather stable identity” (40). Marc Priewe charts the current transformations of Aztlán by focusing on its reinscription in John Rechy’s novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez and in El Vez’s Transfrontera performance. Taking as its target the “reterritorializing discourse of Aztlán nationalism” (47), the analysis shows how these authors “intervene in the national imaginary by construing previously marginalized positions marked by gender, sexual preference, and ethnic allegiance” (50). The point of the article is to show how the “diasporic switching points” of urban Southern California articulate a postnational experience that reveals “the exclusionary constructedness of both Chicana/ o and Anglo-American national discourses and identity formations” (61). Astrid M. Fellner’s paper consists of a theoretical exposition of notions such as citizenship, nation, community, border, and “other spaces,” followed by a reading of two novels, Ortiz Taylor’s Faultline and Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters. According to the author, writings by Chicanas provide interesting examples of “shifting identities and political agency” (68). Although at the end of her readings of the two novel she writes that the political reality of border identity may only be a future possibility, she opines that “the reconceptualizations of identity, citizenship, and nationhood emerging from the Chicana community are important points of departure for a discussion of issues of transterritoriality” (75). The chapter by Pascale Smorag, “Spanish Place Names Beyond the US-Mexican Border: From Colonial to Mainstream,” is the first of the remaining five chapters which are more focused on a specific phenomena or a particular author. Pascale Smorag, on the basis of a set of toponyms, reconstructs a history of naming places as a practice of land appropriation but shows how the political border in the American Southwest does not coincide with the linguistic frontier. As she writes: “If the American-Mexican border is an arbitrary line, the toponymy keeps breaking and blurring these barriers” (97). In her reading of Ana Castillo’s novel Sapogonia, Angelika Köhler demonstrates how the main protagonist’s “hybrid concept of the self, encompassing European, U.S.-American, and Native American dimensions,” never reaches completion or finality because in rejecting the notion of a monolithic community he is able “to maintain his claims to subjectivity in a cultural borderland in which the concepts of unity and difference interfere with each other” (113). In Carmen Flys- Junquera’s reading of Lucha Corpi’s detective fiction we are familiarized with the role of codes and conventions in formulaic fictions and we are shown how these are subverted, altered, transgressed upon by the Chicano writer. The author examines how Lucha Corpi appropriates the American hard-boiled detective tradition while at the same time undermining some of its set conventions with the purpose of promulgating a “deliberate aesthetic strategy to portray alternative worldviews to the dominant Anglo-American one” (117). The first part of Sophia Emmanouilidou’s contribution deals with Miguel Méndez’s autobiographical novel From Labor to Letters as a social act for “communal identification,” exploring the questions how and why Méndez himself becomes the object of his study. The second part reads the novel through Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. Although Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer, David Harding justifies her inclusion in this volume because her novel Almanac of the Dead foregrounds the twin themes of place and identity and “ques- Rezensionen 172 tions the very legitimacy of the whole European system of government in the Americas” (159). In so doing she keeps faith “with the legacy of suppressed native history” (160) but, in addition, in this novel she undermines “the separate construction of Indian and mestizo identities,” reminding the reader that “constructions are just that, constructions, and not the absolutes they are seen as by many” (167). The afterword can be read as a summing up of the basic tenets of the book. Salah el Moncef bin Khalifa reiterates the centrality of Gloria Anzaldúas teachings, particularly her two seminal concepts of hybridity and in-betweenness. She underscores that the political, socio-cultural, and esthetic forces which the previous chapters had explored espouse a self-critical sense of identity. As such, the contextualization of various Chicano stories of both the self and the community within the experience of hybridity and interstitiality “reflects an emphatic reappropriation of narrative toward shifting redefinitions of history and the subject of history from a dominant, monolithic, Euro-American “master-narrative” to a plurality of narratives” (173-4). Although readers might welcome the way that the contributors to this volume steer clear of the often obfuscating impact of theory-laden discourse, I find that many of the problems dealt with here demand a more theoretically informed approach. Since the authors, amongst other things, deal with a spatial entity, I think that the notion of Aztlán as a site and its positioning within the borders of the United States demand a more discriminating geographical explanation. I am of the opinion that such an account would have something to add to the too easy subversion of the national identity in Chicano narratives when these are compared to other American identities. In addition, such a spatial grounding would reflect the retentive power of national boundaries both as a geopolitical reality and as the framework of various disciplinary procedures. However, whatever perspective one opts for in supplementing the findings of this volume or in challenging their implicit value system, it will be necessary to implement the “close attention to textual analysis,” which characterizes the papers gathered in this book. Stipe Grgas University of Zagreb Department f English Winfried Herget and Alfred Hornung, eds., Religion in African- American Culture. (American Studies - A Monograph Series, 83). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Page Laws In these particular times that try men’s souls - when, in the words of editors Winfried Herget and Alfred Hornung “fundamentalist religion and politics [are] commensurate with the convictions of the Bush administration” (vii) - it is a blessing to have this new anthology of essays on the role of religion and spirituality in Black culture. Neocon AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 173 Bible-thumping (the impetus for, but not the subject of this volume) has, at least, had the unintended positive consequence of attracting new scholarly interest in American religion - an interest comparable to that lavished on the concepts of “race, class, gender, and nation” (viii). This frankly “revisionist” (x) approach to the study of Black religion takes its modest place among great standard works such as Carter G. Woodson’s The History of the Negro Church (1921), Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion (1978) and Milton Sernett’s African-American Religious History (1985, expanded 1999), all cited in Herget and Hornung’s preface. Those classics were the first to deal with the “syncretistic” [sic] (ix) nature of American Black spirituality. These new essays - the proceedings of a Fest conference for Karl Wilhelm Dietz - add the newer Atlantic or diasporan perspective. But the real difference is a red (or perhaps liberal blue) shift away from historical approaches towards the literary end of the spectrum. Eight of the eleven essays center on literary texts, and the other three allude to them. The result is a ‘blessed mess,’ the kind of interdisciplinary daube that today’s Americanists relish. There’s some history, of course, plus big chunks of literary criticism. There’s a seasoning of philosophy, art history, musicology, and theology. The title “Religion in African-American Culture” may, however, be misleading to the casual diner. This is NOT the book for someone trying to learn about Black churches in America. The alphabet soup of acronyms such as COGIC (Church of God in Christ), AME (African Methodist Episcopal), CME (Colored Methodist Episcopal), etc. will likely remain just as obscure to someone who has read this book as to someone who has not. When all is said and done, maybe the chief reason to prize this volume is that it represents perhaps the last published work of master French critic Michel Fabre, who passed away this summer of 2007. While not necessarily the pièce de résistance of Fabre’s long career (which includes the book The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright - 1973/ 1993 - and his 1991 volume From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980), this is a characteristically skillful essay about Creoles in New Orleans entitled “Between Catholicism and Voodoo.” Fabre is interested in the “complex network of distinctions” (3) that Creoles maintained among themselves based on their parents’ dates of freedom, their preferred language, etc. But he concludes that their Catholicism surpassed all other factors in shaping their way of life. Fabre’s ‘New Historicist’ inspired samplings from period newspapers unearth heart-felt, minor religious poems and surprising details on church integration and segregation. Fabre waits 14 pages to bring in the Voodoo promised in his title. But then we get a double helping of Marie Philomene Laveau and her daughter - the two most renowned (and most confused with one another) priestesses of the era. For readers interested in learning more about Fabre’s career, there is fortunately a Festschrift that was produced by GRAAT: Groupe de Recherches Anglo-Américaines de Tours in 2003. Fabre is also survived by his wife, the prominent and gifted Americanist Geneviève Fabre. Having noticed a spate of Black Obeah characters in recent 21 st century British horror and science fiction, Kristen Raupach explores their precursors in 18 th century fiction. Her notion is that the first wave of scary practitioners of the ‘black arts’ reflected whites’ “national insecurity and loss of imperial control during the revolutionary period of the 1790’s; ” while their current incarnations similarly reflect today’s anxieties Rezensionen 174 about destabilized “class, race and gender hierarchies” (21). As in Fabre’s essay, it takes too long (in Raupach’s case, 5 pages) for the author to define Obeah and describe its practices, but her thesis is compelling. Volume co-editor Winfried Herget follows suit with a feminist perspective on American women preachers, who likewise tended to stir up political trouble wherever they did roam. Herget’s study of Jarena Lee, whose autobiography predates Frederick Douglass’ by 9 years, points out that the writing and promoting of religious conversion tracts was one of the few outlets women - and certainly women of color - had in early America. Herget’s classical close reading of passages from Jarena’s narrative (pp. 67ff.) is particularly impressive. Though perhaps most famous for his ‘sermons in verse’ (along with the Black national anthem ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’) James Weldon Johnson was, surprisingly, an agnostic. This is Manfred Siebald’s starting point for his helpful study of God’s Trombones, Johnson’s “fusion of Biblical images and contemporary metaphors” (81). Kerstin Schmidt follows with an essay on commonly lesser known but still interesting texts, two didactic religious folk dramas from the Harlem Renaissance that are also steeped in Africanisms. The first play is Plumes, a poignant, even bathetic story about a Black mother’s determination to bury her child with what seem to her the proper rites. The other play analyzed is called Sahdji: An African Ballet. Schmidt calls it “a fusion of dance, pantomime, musical and spoken drama” (103), and it, too, blends African with American spirituality. Alfred Hornung’s essay “Religion and Afro-Modernism: Claude McKay’s Transatlantic Syncretism” - the fulcrum essay of this collection - is one of the all-too-rare attempts to place Black writers into a larger context: here, the period of Modernism. Hornung’s expertise is clear from footnotes (e.g. p.112) that could easily serve as syllabus for a graduate course in World Modernism. Hornung goes on to analyze religious themes and the idea of “religious hybridity” (122) in a number of McKay’s poetic and prose writings. Thadious M. Davis’ essay “Mapping and Mirroring: Nella Larsen’s and Ralph Ellison’s Critiques of African American Religion” is a useful reminder that Black churches - like white ones - house hypocrites, often right in the Amen Corner. Larsen pioneers the theme of hypocrisy in the Black Middle Class. Ellison, without acknowledging her, mirrors Larsen’s suspicions of the Black Church and - its contender for power in the Black public sphere - the Black College. Both Larsen and Ellison are devastatingly on target in their attacks on pseudo-religion and corrupt, anti-intellectual preachers in Black America. Davis is equally on target with this essay. Robert G. O’Meally provides a second, good essay about Ellison for this collection - this one devoted to a reading of Juneteenth, with music and spirituality foremost in mind. Christopher Mulvey contributes a slightly preachy but very informative essay comparing Dubois’ Souls of Black Folk, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, and Cornel West’s Race Matters. Mulvey obligingly states the “main curve” of his argument in seven numbered points, something students are bound to appreciate. Mulvey’s tone is tellingly British when it comes to his description of America’s separation of powers as “a tough, brutal, resilient system which enables the whole enterprise to operate while whole sections of it are failing” (191). Mulvey’s titillating essay Rezensionen 175 title, by the way, is “The Limits of Religion and History: The African American Intellectual in the Twentieth Century.” Nassim W. Balestrini has studied the poetry of Robert Hayden in the light of the latter’s Bahá’í religious beliefs. Only nine of Hayden’s 100 poems allude to this religion, but one-third deal with the African American experience in general and all, according to Balestrini, reflect Hayden’s belief that art is “intrinsically religious” (195). There is again a useful comparison made with T.S. Eliot’s brand of religious Modernism. The final essay in the collection, Frank Kelleter’s “The Nation of Islam as an American Religion” may smack a bit of tokenism - the editors’ desire to be inclusive of at least one (besides Bahá’í) non-Christian group. Kelleter’s Hegelian approach, however, leads us right back to the centrality of Christianity for Black America. He explains, “‘American Islam’ is first and foremost a dialectical antithesis of African American Christianity, an antithesis which, in its tenets and rituals, still echoes the conventions of the religious community it has set out to confront” (220). As one proof of his own thesis, Kelleter points out that Louis Farrakhan in his Million Man March speech of 1995 quoted the Bible 30 times and the Koran only five times (221). Or could it be that Farrakhan just knew his audience? Kelleter is not, of course, alone in his insistence that the Nation of Islam lives in symbiosis with the Black church. He quotes Henry Louis Gates’ statement that the NOI is “a kind of Reformation movement within the black church - a church that had grown all too accommodating to American racism” (221). That last negative remark about the modern Black church in America simply echoes a suspicion that is virtually coeval with the founding of slave-holding America by Bible-patting (if not thumping) Anglican Virginians. This collection of essays provides a very useful critique of Black religion. Though it calls for supplementary reading if one really wants to learn about Black denominational practices, it also should inspire supplementary research across the various cultural studies disciplines. Page Laws Norfolk State University Department of English and Foreign Language Patrick Duffley, The English Gerund-Participle. A Comparison with the Infinitive. Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Lang, 2006. Tünde Nagy Patrick Duffley’s book is a study of the English gerund-participle. As the book compares the use and function of the gerund-participle to that of the to-infinitive, it can also be considered an analysis of infinitival constructions. The book consists of six chapters. The first is an overview of the different uses of -ing constructions and the meanings and functions that can be attributed to them. These meanings and functions are then compared to those of the to-infinitive, which are analysed in chapter AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 176 two. Chapters three and four compare gerunds and to-infinitives as complements of another verb and as subjects of a clause respectively. Chapter five gives an account of the progressive construction and other adjective-like uses of the -ing form, while the final chapter proposes a unified analysis of the -ing form. Duffley presents the different uses of the -ing form (adjective-uses as well as noun-like uses) and at the same time also criticizes previous approaches which treat the -ing as an imperfectivizing operator (e.g. Freed 1979, Wierzbicka 1988, Brinton 1988). The author thus argues throughout the book that the -ing gerund-participle cannot be given an inherently imperfective value. He defines the value of the -ing according to semiological principles, where the form-meaning relation results in the same form expressing both a perfective and an imperfective meaning. In his analysis of the -ing form Duffley follows Langacker’s concept of schematicity, permitting a unified account of the different functions of the gerund-participle. In the case of the -ing form, the main dimension of the generalized schema is that of interiority, with the different uses of the gerund-participle form depending on how the schema of interiority is evoked. In a progressive interpretation, the gerund-participle is supposed to evoke an inherently perfective process upon which it imposes an immediate temporal scope blanking out the endpoints (this view of -ing corresponds to Langacker’s definition). When the -ing expresses a perfective event, the latter is seen as an abstract entity - a process called “reification”. In this case the endpoints are integrated into the interiority of the event. Duffley presents detailed analyses of the -ing form as complement of another verb and as subject, and also examines its progressive and adjective-like usages. He argues that when -ing appear as a verb complement or as subject, its meaning is usually atemporal, so that semantically it simply behaves as a direct object, i.e. something which is V-ed. Duffley draws upon both syntactic and semantic criteria to define the direct object function of the -ing form, emphasizing, however, the primacy of the semantic criteria. These syntactic criteria comprise the appearance of the -ing form in the subject position of passive clauses with the same verb, the possibility of pseudo-clefting, as well as the substitution by a pronoun in an objective case. Regarding the semantic criteria, the main reason state for treating the -ing form as a direct object is its temporal relation to the main verb. Duffley argues that in many cases there is no such relation and gives examples where the -ing simply expresses a general fact. In cases where there is a temporal relation between the verb and the -ing this can, according to Duffley, be attributed to the logical implication of the verb’s lexical meaning. The temporal relation between the -ing construction and the main verb is then one of anteriority, posteriority or simultaneity. Duffley relates the function of the -ing to semantic classes of verbs, in particular verbs of effort, verbs of liking, verbs of positive and negative recall, and also instances where -ing appears as complement of aspectual verbs. Except for a few cases (e.g. keep, go on) where the -ing functions as a subject complement, the function and meaning of -ing is seen as that of a direct object. By defining the -ing as having a direct object value in complement function, Duffley stresses its atemporal value. The book rejects the idea that the -ing is always temporal, being defined in most cases as an imperfectivizing operator. The only cases where the -ing clearly receives an imperfective value are those where it appears in progressive constructions (functioning as a subject complement) and also when it is a complement to the direct object (sentences (1.) and (2)): Rezensionen 177 1. He was brooding. 2. I found him brooding. However, even in such cases, the -ing does not always produce an imperfective reading. When it appears as a subject, this will for instance result in a perfective meaning. In the last chapter, Duffley gives a unified account of all the uses of the -ing gerund-participle. He does this by drawing a comparison between, on the one hand, the internal semantic structure of a verb (which can be dependent on an event originator [subject] and an event-conditionee [direct object]) and the verbal use of ing, and between the structure of a noun (which is not dependent on an eventconditionee) and the nominal and adjectival uses of -ing, on the other. Thus, while the verbal use of the -ing evokes a dynamic temporal relation between two participants in an event, this relation is missing from the nominal and adjectival realizations. The nominal and adjectival uses of the -ing are then also distinguished by the fact that while nominal -ing corresponds to the reification of an event, the adjectival uses do not take the event as a whole, but rather “evoke the potential for a position within the event’s interiority”. Duffley states that the nominal use of -ing and the verbal gerundive use are semantically very close, yet he leaves open the question of under what circumstances the gerundive use acquires a dynamic relation in time. An important strength of Duffley’s theory is that the functions and meanings of the -ing - as well as those of the to-infinitive - are defined in relation to the meaning of the main verb in the sentence. In other words, the aspectual meaning expressed in the sentence is regarded as compositional. There is a strong interaction between the verb and the complement form (-ing/ to-infinitive) so that in many cases the choice of the latter depends on the semantic value of the main verb. The exact nature of the interaction between the verb and the complement form, i.e. whether the verb and the complement equally contribute to the meaning of the sentence and also if there is conceptual overlap between them, remains unclear. The extent of the compositionality is also not explicit, being either total (Is the meaning of the sentence fully predictable from the meanings and functions of its component structures? ) or partial (Do the component structures contribute to the overall meaning to a high degree without defining it completely? ). Treating the function and meaning of -ing as if it were a direct object also disregards some problems such as whether to accept the -ing with eventuality types and whether the restrictive use or unacceptability of a certain eventuality type is attributable to the meaning of the verb, the meaning of -ing or both. Throughout the book the meanings and functions of -ing are contrasted with those of the to-infinitive, which, according to Duffley, does not have a direct object value, but can often be defined as an adverbial goal circumstantial, expressing a movement leading up to a point. Besides the fact that the to-infinitive does not meet the syntactic and semantic criteria necessary for a direct object function Duffley mentions other differences between the -ing and the to-infinitive form, for example with regard to control (when functioning as complement of another verb the to-infinitive usually requires coreferentiality, while the -ing form does not) or with regard to temporality (in many cases the to-infinitive expresses a subsequent or prospective temporal relation to the matrix, whereas -ing is temporally indifferent). Rezensionen 178 Duffley assumes that the to-infinitive is more complex than the -ing form, consisting of two parts, the stem and to, and that the function of to is to portray the represented event as the endpoint of the situation expressed by the matrix. In certain cases the to infinitive can also have a direct object function when it meets the syntactic criteria necessary for a direct object. In such cases, however, to does not express a relation between the bare infinitive and the main verb but rather denotes a movement towards the end of the event expressed by the bare infinitive. Though the distinction between -ing and the to-infinitive seems to work well for the cases in which they appear as objects of a matrix, the distinction is not as obvious when they occur in the subject position. Both -ing and the to-infinitive can express a fact, with no real difference in meaning. How these cases should be treated, and what different values the -ing and the to-infinitive can be given in these cases, remain open to debate. In cases where the two forms are not substitutable, this is explained as being due to certain additional meanings of the to-infinitive (that of expressing goal, desire and purpose) which the -ing lacks. Overall, Duffley’s book is an interesting and valuable study of the -ing gerund participle. It raises many relevant issues and also gives its own internally coherent account of how the values and functions of the -ing could be treated. For the present reviewer, an important insight frequently expressed and documented in the book is that the aspectual meaning of the sentence is not attributable solely to the meaning of the matrix verb, but rather the outcome of an interaction of multiple factors. The variety of values that have been attributed to the to-infinitive and -ing constructions over the years (in terms of factivity, modality, temporality, etc.) have shown that complementation is a complex phenomenon and in order to account for all the phenomena involved, a close interrelation between the matrix and subordinate clause must be presupposed. Duffley’s approach is a plausible one, since he gives a schematic meaning to the to-infinitive and -ing construction, and, at the same time, defines the meaning of these constructions with respect to the meaning and function of the matrix. Tünde Nagy KLTE University of Debrecen & University of Freiburg Roy Goldblatt, Jopi Nyman, and John A.Stotesbury (eds.), Close Encounters of an Other Kind. New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and American Studies. (Studies in Literature and Culture, 13). Joensuu: Univ. of Joensuu, 2005. Larisa Mikhaylova On the cover of this book we see a snake plaited into a braid, a highly ambiguous image. A tame snake? A snake hiding in order to bite? Or a snake willingly becoming an ornament? Hardly. Snakes don’t do that kind of things. However, people can … It does not often happen that most of the articles included in a book of conference proceedings turn out to be not only well organized (which might be work of the AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 179 editors) but also represent material in depth studied from original angles and thus filling a previously undeveloped territory, or at least one of its regions. The territory itself - ethnic cultures within American culture - can hardly be considered to be unexplored; starting from the early 1990s, literature and culture have been increasingly analyzed along these lines. But ethnic components had been neglected for so long that there remained and still remains much to be said and understood, especially in the current situation where Europe is ceasing to be based only on the cultural traditions of the “titular nations”. A conference on new perspectives on these issues was therefore held at the University of Joensuu, Finland, in June 2003, with participants from several universities in Finland and from 11 other countries - the United States, Turkey, Austria, Greece, Italy, France, Poland, Great Britain, Macedonia, Sweden, and Norway. The volume under review brings together the papers given on this occasion. The book is divided into four parts, starting with the active Asian component (Asian Americas), then elaborating on African American perspectives, then dealing with several groups called Emerging Ethnicities - Arab Americans, Chicanos, Creoles - and interactions between, for example, the Jewish and Oriental tradition, with the final section being dedicated to Conflicts of Whiteness. I have already praised the consistency and analytical soundness of most articles, which makes this book a good resource for any course in contemporary American Culture (in fact, I have already used it in seminars on multiculturalism at the Moscow State University, Department of Journalism). I will therefore start with those pieces which I have found particularly useful in class, and then proceed to the others, highlighting their strong points. The Asian Americas section is concerned with the experiences of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, and Sri Lankan writers, taking into consideration not only US but also Canadian cultural contexts. Although authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston or Bharati Mukherjee have already received considerable attention, other Asian American writers remain much less studied. One of the recurrent questions for ethnic consciousness these days is “What am I? ”, thus opening the book with the article addressing this question “‘What Am I Anyhow? ’ Ethnic Consciousness, Matrilineage, and the Borderlands-Within in Maxine Hong Kingston’s and Rebecca Walker’s Autobiographies” by Sylvia Schultermandl (Austria) is very appropriate. The author uses the concept of borderlands as developed by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) as a place/ territory for the characters where they constantly try to locate “their hyphenated identities outside the realms of ethnic boundaries” (p.3). Kingston and Walker also challenge contemporary concepts such as multiculturalism, hybridity and multiple subjectivity. Schultermandl takes mother-daughter conflicts over cultural affiliations as a focal point of her study, and suggests that a mestiza needs to claim her matrilinear heritage instead of being claimed by it. Native Speaker (1995) by Chang-rae Lee serves two researchers - Klara Szmanko (Poland) and A. Noelle Brada-Williams (USA) - as material for analysis of interethnic relations and tensions which do not become a focus of study very often and thus have a tendency to be ignored, namely relations between Korean Americans and African Americans. In addition, Williams discusses Birthmates by Gish Jen, and Szmanko Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston, both as a way for ethnic Rezensionen 180 writers to learn to listen to one another, thus getting to know their side of the American experience. Though not very extensive, these two pieces cover an essential theme, giving a voice to minorities “striving for visibility” to each other. Serena Fusco’s (Italy) contribution “Beyond Minority Discourse: Asian-American Reading,” provides a review of a “diasporic shift” based mainly on Chinese-American literature. She takes Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (1981/ 1998) by Nieh Hualing as the central text “claimed by various critical and literary traditions - American, Asian, and Asian-American” (p.32). Problematizing the very concept of “Diaspora”, the novel, whose heroine struggles to encompass the entire historical span of her personal past, American and Chinese, presents immigration and Diaspora “as fundamentally interconnected” (p.40). Similar close readings of a single novel where the protagonist takes the brunt of race, class, and gender in various combinations are given in Minna Niemi’s (Finland) “Challenging Psychoanalysis: A Black Woman’s Experience of Race , Class and Gender in Alice Walker’s Meridian,” and in Sophia Emmanouilidou’s (Greece) “Border-Crossing and the Subject in Abeyance in Irene Beltran Hernandez’s Across the Great River”. “Possibilities and limits are the two keyitems directing us to transcendence and the projections of self across borders” (p.161) is the main conclusion of this article, full of step-by-step depictions of how the girl Kata moves through the process, accompanied by insightful discussions of Anzaldúa and Gerard Delanty’s Modernity and Postmodernity. Though perhaps a little too long for an average class, it is an excellent means to develop analytical abilities of promising students. The Chicana/ o topic is further enhanced by Marc Priewe’s (Germany) article on Performance Art. The section on Black perspectives is opened by a pertinent essay on Martin Luther King’s rhetoric by Swedish scholar Fredrik Sunnemark, showing in detail how different concepts of identity, viz. “The Negro”, “My People”, “We and Us”, have developed and which functions they play in King’s rhetoric. Though one of the least engaging pieces in the book, it does illuminate important stages in the “struggle to be able to establish a new dominating paradigm” (p.71), and thus is important not only for African American cultural history, but also for scholars of public communication in general. The impact of the section is further enhanced by Anne Urbanowsky’s (France) article on different visions within the African American community, including Black middle-class values, and S. Kärkkäinen Terian’s “Images of Desired Environments in African-American Communities”, in which the Finnish-born social scientist, who has been living in the USA for 35 years, presents the study of a Midwestern town in an economically depressed area using Marx’s theory of alienation and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as basis of her research. She concludes that basic deficiencies prevent higher aesthetic needs from developing, and as “cultural identity and pride of place go together, thus there is no sense of place in a ‘home’ that is not home” (p.121). A senior lecturer at the University of Turku (Finland), Marja-Leena Hakkarainen, who is working at present on a book project about German migrant writing, gives the section a unique perspective, comparing African American experience and that of Continental European Black German writing, mainly through the analysis of Ika Hügel-Marschall’s autobiographical novel and May Ayim’s poetry. Interesting insights can also be found in the essays on the subject of Whiteness, given depth by the historically oriented articles “Gendered Transactions in the Conquest and Settlement of America” by Felicia Smith-Kleiner (UK) and “The Need for Rezensionen 181 Strangeness: Captivity Narratives and Issues of Race and Gender in Early America” by Christopher Cairny (Turkey). A substantial part of the material analyzed is taken from the Creole and Caribbean traditions reflected in Michell Cliff’s (Kaisa Ilmonen) and Jean Rhys’ novels (Sara Eeva, Finland). Italians and Jews were not always considered white in America, as Cheryl Alexander Malcolm (Poland) demonstrates in “The Show’s Not Over until the Schlemiel Sings: When Jewish Comedy Meets Puccini,” and Stephano Luconi (Italy) in “How Italian Americans Became White,” with the most extensive bibliography on the subject; while Salah Questrati’s (France) article suggests that Arab Americans are also not considered White. I have not mentioned a couple of contributions which did not strike me as particularly original or consistent, but the book as a whole is a very satisfying collection which should receive more recognition. Larisa Mikhaylova Moscow State University Journalism Department Encarnación Hidalgo, Luis Quereda, Juan Santana (eds.), Corpora in the Foreign Language Classroom. Selected papers from the Sixth international Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC 6). University of Granada, Spain, 4-7 July, 2004. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007 Georg Marko The book under review is the collection of selected papers presented at the 6 th TaLC (“Teaching and Language Corpora”) conference held at the University of Granada, Spain in the summer of 2004. It contains 20 contributions (+ foreword) by 28 authors from (or working in) Ireland, Norway, Germany, Japan, China, the UK, New Zealand, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Zimbabwe. Even though the conception of TaLC would allow for a wider range of topics, the editors have decided to limit the volume to research into the application of corpus analysis to foreign language teaching, which - as so often - actually means the teaching of English as a foreign language. The contributions are divided into four sections, two minor ones - “Setting the scene” (two articles) and “Afterword” (just one article) - and two major ones - “Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom” (seven articles) and “Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom” (ten articles). “Setting the scene”, supposed to present ideas running through all contributions in the volume, starts with Angela Chamber’s review article on studies of the benefits and pitfalls of monolingual corpus use by EFL learners. Although advantages clearly outnumber disadvantages, Chambers thinks that in order to realize the former, corpus-based approaches to language learning need to extend beyond the circles of researchers practicing and promoting them in academia at the moment. AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 182 The main point of Stig Johansson’s contribution is that in corpus analysis, the distinction between learning and studying a language blurs, with newly gained awareness of phenomena also influencing the learner’s language competence. Johansson illustrates how this combination of research and learning can be achieved with examples of tasks to be done with a bilingual English-Norwegian corpus and a learner corpus. The first article in section II, “Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom”, is Sabine Braun’s “Designing and exploiting small multimedia corpora for autonomous learning and teaching”. According to the author, students can better benefit from corpora if they are familiar with the situational and cultural context of the texts included, i.e. if the corpora are ‘authenticated’. This can be accomplished by a stronger focus on content, composition and annotation in the compilation process. As an example, Braun presents ELISA, a video-based interview corpus produced at Tübingen, Germany. Students can read the texts linearly or vertically (as concordances), they also have quick access to the film material, and annotations drawing upon content, text-structural and formal categories also allow them to see connections between form, meaning and function. Kiyomi Chujo, Masao Utiyama and Chikako Nishigaki in their contribution propose criteria for categorizing texts and thus by extension also corpora according to different levels of difficulty using data from a parallel corpus of English and Japanese. They additionally try to determine the correlations between these features, also across languages, so that we can, for instance, predict the problems Japanese learners will have with an English text on the basis of the difficulty of the Japanese equivalent. Peter Y.W. Lam presents a thorough, strictly corpus-driven analysis of the register of tourism, with a strong emphasis on the semantic domains exhibited by keywords and their collocations, e.g. city often appears connected to descriptions of importance (capital, main, historic), age (old, modern, ancient, new), or ranking (largest, second, oldest). The author argues that this is the kind of information at the centre of mastering a particular genre and it should therefore represent the core of teaching and learning with the help of corpora. Xiaotian Guo’s article argues that learners’ deviations from the target language are misconceived as errors and should rather be regarded as indices of the dynamic processes involved in the progression towards full acquisition. To underline the point, she presents data from a diachronic learner corpus-based case study (of a Chinese learner of English) on the development that certain forms necessarily undergo in acquisition. In “To weep perilously or W.EAP critically: the case for a corpus-based critical EAP”, Josta van Rij-Heyligers questions the role of the corpus as a prescriptive authority in the area of English for Academic Purposes not allowing learners the liberty to deal with generic conventions more creatively and critically. The author argues - with the help of some practical examples - that work with self-compiled corpora - preferably from the WWW - in combination with more social forms of learning (more groupand activity-based) may help learners to overcome these negative sides of corpora. Fanny Meunier and Céline Gouverneur analyse five general EFL textbooks and the emphasis the latter place on phraseology, a topic that has gained particular Rezensionen 183 prominence through corpus linguistics. The authors concentrate particularly on metalinguistic references to phraseology, i.e. on how and whether at all the books highlight multi-word units in their self-descriptions, section headers, and exercise instructions, and how this relates to the pedagogical presentation of this area. They come to the conclusion that even though there seems to be a growing awareness of the importance of phraseology for foreign language competence, this could be made more visible in the books, with a common theoretical and terminological framework being a desideratum. The teaching and learning of spoken communication is the main topic of Carmen Pérez Basanta and María Elena Rodríguez Martín’s article. According to the authors, typical features of oral conversations such as speech acts, politeness, implicatures, discourse markers, or turn-taking can be learned best if indirect (i.e. with teacher intervention) and direct (mostly data-driven) methods are combined in a corpusbased approach. They illustrate this by practical examples of work with a corpus of scripts of popular films. The section entitled “Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom” starts with Stephen Coffey’s description of a project in which students learn about words belonging to general semantic domains, illustrated with metals in the contribution. By combining corpus work and more traditional classroom activities (the pedagogical procedures are detailed in the article), teachers can make students find out about such diverse things as figurative meanings of words, relations between base words and their derivatives and compounds, correlations between formal and semantic features, etc. Sara Gesuato focuses on English near-synonyms normally translated by a single word in Italian with respect to semantic nuances, collocations, and usages and suggests that work with corpora can help students of language to see and experience these differences. She illustrates this with practical work involving teacher-prepared selections of concordances from the Bank of England corpus and word pairs such as island vs. isle, gratefully vs. thankfully, or adore vs. worship. David Minugh’s contribution “George Bush and the Last Crusade or the fight for truth, justice and the American way” examines the distributions of expressions such as crusade (whose use by George W. Bush provides the starting point), iron curtain, brave new world, or holocaust in their original - historic or literary - and their extended sense in a corpus of the Los Angeles Times of 1990 and the British National Corpus. The analysis shows that while words such as iron curtain or holocaust tend to be used in their original senses, crusade or brave new world often occur in different contexts. Corpus analysis can, according to Minugh, thus be employed to make students aware of the political dimensions of developments of expressions. Szilvia Papp’s article argues that the capability for self-correction by Chinese speakers, who are believed to exhibit greater inhibitions concerning learner autonomy, can be promoted through the use of reference corpora and learner corpora in combination with other pedagogical measures, e.g. requirement to regularly produce output, explicit training in inductive learning and error correction, teacher feedback, etc. “Pattern-learning and pattern-description: an integrated approach to proficiency and research for students of English” by Nele Olivier, Lieselotte Brems, Kristin Davidse, Dirk Speelman, and Hubert Cuyckens describes how students are intro- Rezensionen 184 duced to pattern learning and pattern recognition via a corpus-based learning environment at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in the early stages of their studies and how the competence acquired there proves to benefit their ability for pattern descriptions as required in their linguistic courses. The article uses the process of grammaticalization of size nouns (expressions such as bunch of, piles of, etc. may be turning into quantifiers) as an example. As the respective unit in the learning environment is based on research done by a student (Lieselotte Brems), the example also serves to show the circular relevance of the approach (better language awareness and competence through the learning environment leads to better language research, which in turn leads to an improvement of the learning environment). Julia Lavid sets out to show that students can learn a lot about lexico-grammatical patterns in English and Spanish by exploring general corpora and parallel corpora in combination with dictionaries. The main linguistic field her article is concerned with are mental process verbs and the question whether they occur in transitive or ergative patterns and which complements they can take. The author discusses results from different corpora with respect to the word pairs observe/ observar, convince/ convencer, want/ querer, and depress/ deprimir, showing similarities and differences of importance to learners of either language. In “Past progressive or simple past? The acquisition of progressive aspect by Polish advanced learners of English”, Agnieszka Leñko-Szymañska examines a learner corpus (extracts of the PELCRA learner corpus) to see how advanced Polish learners of English use the past progressive, a structure of relevance due to the complex correspondences and differences between the two languages. Len´ ko- Szyman´ ska’s data indicate that Polish learners tend to overuse the past progressive in comparison to native speakers (represented by an extract of the FLOB corpus). But as the patterns of usage (with respect to particular process types, e.g. activities, states, etc.) do not differ significantly, the former result remains difficult to interpret. The author thus primarily suggests that students should be made aware of the stylistic effects of the difference between the preterite and the past progressive. The main aim of Andy Cresswell’s article is to study the potential benefits of datadriven learning (DDL), an approach which in his view so far has been more a set of claims than a thoroughly-researched theory. For this purpose, he examines the use of certain cohesive devices by Italian advanced learners of English, with one group taking a communicative data-driven learning approach (involving group work and discussions) and the other being taught in more traditional ways. Although the measurable differences between the two groups are not extreme, there seems to be a positive effect in the DDL group, even though this sometimes also amounts to an underuse of particular devices due to a growing awareness of the problematic nature of some items. But the author admits that more research is needed to learn more about the criteria benefiting DDL, e.g. right choice of topic, better involvement of holist learner types not appreciating inductive approaches, etc. Christopher Tribble’s “Managing relationships in professional writing” deals with the correlations of social relations in business communication and linguistic features such as contraction, ellipsis, vagueness, lexical density, etc., illustrating his main point with a thorough analysis of the verb hope and its co-texts in a self-composed corpus of personal business texts such as faxes, letters, etc. Even though the connections of aspects such as horizontal social distance between interactants and the Rezensionen 185 frequency of certain items are hardly surprising from a sociolinguistic point of view, Tribble thinks that the fact that he can provide visible evidence will help sensitize students of business English more effectively to the former. The main hypothesis of Alejandro Curado Fuentes’ article is that corpus-based activities with corpora of tourism ads should improve students of tourism’s reading comprehension. He tested this assumption with an experimental group doing corpusbased work for two weeks and a control group without any such practice (being exposed to more traditional teaching instead). As the former group did significantly better in a post-test examining their understanding of content, context, function and vocabulary, the hypothesis receives substantial support. Bill Louw’s “Truth, literary worlds and devices as collocation” - appended to the volume as an “Afterword” - argues that corpus linguistics, in particular through the concepts of collocation, semantic prosody, and delexicalization, will eventually lead to a paradigm shift in language studies (also in the area of literary studies) in the shape of a rigid data orientation and a reconceptualization of mentalist notions in textual/ formal terms. Whether this actually amounts to neo-neopositivism is difficult to tell as the polemical tone of the essay makes it at times difficult to follow Louw’s argumentation. In the following evaluation, I will try to assess the value of the volume as a whole, refraining from passing judgements on individual contributions. Suffice to say that the quality of the papers - as can probably also be seen from the brief descriptions above - occasionally differs quite dramatically. Even though the editors thematically constrain the book to the use of corpora in EFL, thus passing other fields of teaching and learning also covered by TaLC conferences (and other TaLC volumes), the articles included bear evidence to the amazingly wide range of connections between language learning/ teaching and the use of corpora. Readers thus, for instance, get good insights into the many different types of corpora that can prove beneficial in EFL, i.e. monolingual vs. parallel, large and systematically-compiled vs. small and ‘dirty’, raw vs. annotated, general vs. (genre/ register-)specific, native speaker vs. learner, etc. Readers are also provided with an excellent overview of the different types of pedagogical approaches and objectives in corpus-based EFL, ranging from the learner corpus-based analysis of learner language, over the teacher-mediated use of corpora in class, to data-driven learning, i.e. the relatively unconstrained exploration of corpora by students, some of these being presented in primarily descriptive accounts from first-hand practice, others more as methodologically-sound studies in their own right. Even though the focus of the book is on English as the target language, the fact that the authors as well as the learners researched come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds adds to the colourfulness and multi-facetedness of the volume. As regards general weaknesses of the book, I see an apparent problem with its structure. The distinction between the two main sections “Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom” and “Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom” does not appear self-evident to me and is, unfortunately, not defined or explained by the editors in the introduction. The contributions assigned to the two categories do not allow any (inductive) conclusion either. Since the categories thus seem vague and the assigning somewhat arbitrary, they do not serve to guide interest and interpretation, as they normally do in edited volumes. The book therefore would fare fairly well without them. Rezensionen 186 The second problem that I see applies not only to contributions in this book but to previous collections, too - and to the TaLC conferences in general, for that matter. The main - but rarely discussed - question in this respect is how and to what degree the pedagogical and the corpus linguistic dimensions are to be integrated with each other. As Chambers (in the volume reviewed) rightly observes, corpus linguistics is still a field largely restricted to certain academic circles and has not yet spread as widely as desired to those actually involved in teaching (which is not to deny the significant numbers of EFL practitioners attending TaLC conferences). It is my impression that most of the contributions depart from a corpus linguistic centre to see how the possibility of this method can be of practical use in language teaching and learning rather than from an analysis of language pedagogy and its problems in order to find which methods offer solutions to the latter. Although this may just be an abstract characterization of the status quo of TaLC, it concretely shows in some articles (here and elsewhere), particularly in what I call the “Do this in class! ” approach: the pedagogicalization (in this context regularly appended to the article in a chapter entitled “Pedagogical implications”) of often very good, thoroughly conducted and highly relevant corpus linguistic research amounts to - overstating the point a bit - saying that students should do this kind of analyses themselves because the results are interesting and could thus benefit their foreign language competence. I do not doubt or question these implications, but my point is that this approach suggests that corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning - or any other form of teaching and learning - are two independent modules with the former feeding into the latter and that the interaction and the mutual benefits are not as extensive and substantial as might be assumed. Of course, there are also areas where these connections are shown more clearly, e.g. in the area of data-driven learning and in all learner corpus-based research. Even though this aspect has to be seriously discussed in the context of TaLC conferences and elsewhere, it does not - in my view - reduce the overall quality of the present volume, which I recommend to anyone interested in the applications of computer corpora in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. Georg Marko Institut für Anglistik Universität Graz