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Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Wolfgang Riehle Werner Habicht zum 80. Geburtstag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Susanne Ehrenreich Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen: Stand der Forschung und Zwischenbilanz eines Forschungsprojekts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Anne Schröder und Susanne Mühleisen New ways of investigating morphological productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Florian Niedlich “The Times Are the Times of a Black Split Heart”: The ‘Post-War’ in Stevie Smith’s The Holiday . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Alan Burton Victim (1961): Text and Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Andreas Mahler Performing Arts. ‘New Aestheticism’ and the Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Rezensionen: Corinna Weiss Jeremy J. Smith, Sound change and the history of English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Page Laws André Hahn, Family, Frontier and American Dreams. Darstellung und Kritik nationaler Mythen im amerikanischen Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts. . . . . . . . . . 129 Jan Alber H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (second edition) . . . . . 131 Alwin Fill Richard Alexander, Framing Discourse on the Environment. A Critical Discourse Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 33, 2008 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 Wissenschaft und Forschung 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 78,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser 56,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft 44,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 2009 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5, D-72070 Tübingen E-mail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Werner Habicht zum 80. Geburtstag Werner Habicht feierte vor wenigen Monaten seinen 80. Geburtstag. Er studierte Anglistik und Romanistik in München, Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University), Paris und Bristol, legte 1954 das Staatsexamen ab, promovierte 1957 und habilitierte sich 1965. Er kann auf ein höchst erfolgreiches akademisches Wirken in Heidelberg (1966), Bonn (1970) und Würzburg (1978 bis zu seiner Emeritierung im Jahre 1995) und als Gastprofessor an den Universitäten in Austin/ Texas, Boulder/ Colorado; Columbus/ Ohio; Nikosia/ Zypern) zurückblicken. Die ihm entgegengebrachte Hochschätzung spiegelt sich auch in der ordentlichen Mitgliedschaft bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Werner Habicht begann seine Forscherlaufbahn noch bei Levin L. Schücking mit einer ebenso einsichtsvollen wie ergiebigen Dissertation über die ‘Gebärde in englischen Dichtungen des Mittelalters’, die Schücking bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Drucklegung einreichte (1959). In profunder Kenntnis alt- und mittelenglischer Literatur - und lange vor dem heutigen Interesse an der Semiotik von Gesten und Gebärden - bietet diese Arbeit eine Typologie der Gebärdenvielfalt in narrativen Texten und fragt nach ihrer Bedeutung für Szenenaufbau, Handlungsverzahnung und dramatische Spannung. Zugleich verrät sich dadurch bereits Habichts großes Interesse an der Performanz, dem wir später wichtige theaterorientierte Beiträge aus seiner Feder verdanken. Da Habicht noch einer Tradition von Anglisten angehört, von denen die Vertretung des Faches in seiner gesamten Breite erwartet wurde, wandte er sich für seine Habilitation bei Wolfgang Clemen dem Übergang vom Mittel- Wolfgang Riehle Wolfgang Riehle 4 alter zur Renaissance zu und wählte das vorshakespearesche Drama, auf das Shakespeare als sein Hauptgebiet folgen sollte. In seinem Werk ‘Studien zur Dramenform vor Shakespeare. Moralität, Interlude, romaneskes Drama’ (1968) hat er eine enorme Fülle von dramatischen Texten in einen geordneten, typologisch gegliederten und spannend zu lesenden Zusammenhang gebracht. Indem er vor allem aufzeigte, wie in dieser experimentierfreudigen Zeit dramatische Mischformen erprobt wurden und sich das spezifische romaneske Drama allmählich herausbildete, hat Habicht den Weg zu einem wesentlich vertiefteren Verständnis dramatischer Literatur geebnet, an die Shakespeare anknüpfen konnte. Trotz des äußerst umfangreichen Materials wirkt die Arbeit nie überladen, sondern repräsentiert die spezifische Qualität des Wissenschaftsstils ihres Autors: “immense scholarship lightly worn” (Peter Holland). Es zeichnet Habicht weiter aus, daß er sich bei seiner anschließenden Konzentration auf das Werk Shakespeares auch sehr die Shakespeare- Pflege einer breiten Öffentlichkeit angelegen sein ließ und sie entscheidend zu fördern suchte. Dazu bot ihm seine Präsidentschaft der Deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft (West) von 1976 bis 1987 reichlich Gelegenheit. Vor allem suchte er die internationale Profilierung der deutschen Shakespeare-Forschung, die sein Lehrer Wolfgang Clemen geleistet hatte, durch beeindruckend vielfältige Aktivitäten zu erweitern und zu vertiefen, von denen speziell seine intensive Mitarbeit bei Planung und Gestaltung der Tagungen und Kongresse der International Shakespeare Association und der Shakespeare Association of America zu erwähnen ist. Als Folge davon wurde ihm die Ausrichtung des Shakespeare Weltkongresses in Berlin in Jahre 1986 übertragen - ein glanzvollen Höhepunkt seiner Arbeit für die Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft (West). Dafür wurde er in sehr verdienter Weise durch die Würde eines Honorary Vice President der International Shakespeare Association geehrt. Größte Arbeitsbelastung nicht scheuend, fungierte er während der letzten sechs Jahre seiner Präsidentschaft auch als Herausgeber bzw. Mitherausgeber des Shakespeare Jahrbuches (West). Er hat diese Tätigkeit unter der neuen Präsidentschaft Dieter Mehls bis 1995 weitergeführt und zur Bewältigung der schwierigen Phase der Wiedervereinigung der beiden Shakespeare-Gesellschaften mit Sitz in Bochum und Weimar und zur “Verschmelzung” der Shakespeare Jahrbücher im Jahre 1993 mit großem Einsatz und Geschick beigetragen. Auch seine Verbundenheit mit der Shakespeare Bibliothek München mit ihren zahlreichen Symposien sind hier speziell zu nennen, an deren Erfolg Habicht maßgeblich beteiligt war, vor allem durch die Herausgabe (mit Ina Schabert) eines vielbeachteten Symposium-Sammelbandes ‘Sympathielenkung in den Dramen Shakespeares.’ Ein solcher Zugang setzt die heute immer mehr schwindende Bereitschaft zu intensiver Einlassung auf einen Text voraus, über die Habicht in hohem Maße verfügt und der wir auch Werner Habicht zum 80. Geburtstag 5 zahlreiche, äußerst gründliche und stilistisch brillante Werkinterpretationen und Einzeluntersuchungen, insbesondere auch zur Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, verdanken. Dies erklärt ferner sein intensives Engagement für literarische Lexikographie in dem acht Bände umfassenden Literatur-Brockhaus, an dem er als Mitherausgeber und Mitautor wesentlich beteiligt war (1986; 2 1995). Sodann sorgen bei Habicht immer wieder besondere “Spotlights” für Überraschung, wenn es ihm etwa in einem recht originellen Ansatz darum ging, Texte in ihre unmittelbaren Kontexte zu stellen (‘Texte und Kontexte der englischen Literatur im Jahr 1595’). Habichts Verständnis von Wissenschaft als Dienst am Text schlägt sich auch in seiner texteditorischen, neue Wege beschreitenden Arbeit nieder So war er 1974 Mitbegründer (mit Ernst Leisi und Rudolf Stamm) der ‘Englisch- Deutsche[n] Studienausgabe der Dramen Shakespeares’, in der mit Hilfe einer neuartigen Prosaübersetzung eine größtmögliche Erfassung des Originals in semantischer und topographisch-zeitgeschichtlicher, kultureller Hinsicht gegeben wird und in der ein fortlaufender Szenenkommentar der dramatischen Kunst gewidmet ist. Habicht selbst hat die Ausgabe von A Midsummer Night’s Dream übernommen und sie, wie man hört, inzwischen fertiggestellt. Da sie ihm ein besonderes Anliegen ist und er an ihr mit größtem Einsatz gearbeitet hat, darf man auf sie besonders erwartungsvoll gespannt sein. Mit der Sammlung, Übersetzung und Kommentierung von im Besitz der Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington, D.C.) befindlichen Briefen deutscher Gelehrter nahm sich Habicht eines allzu lang vernachlässigten Forschungsgegenstandes an. Dieses Material für Shakespeare-Studien öffentlich zugänglich zu machen, ist eine ebenso selbstlose wie sehr verdienstvolle Leistung, für die künftige Benützer Habicht sehr dankbar sein werden. Zu seiner editorischen Innovationsbereitschaft gehört sodann seine Aufgeschlossenheit gegenüber den neuen Möglichkeiten, die die elektronische Textverarbeitung und das Internet gerade auch für eine Edition der Werke Shakespeares bieten. Da diese Ausgabe wesentlich erweiterte und verfeinerte Mittel für die Forschung und Textanalyse bereithält, ist er an dem großen Projekt der ‘Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE’) beteiligt. Wollte man sich für einen Begriff entscheiden, der einen Großteil von Habichts wissenschaftlicher Aktivität auf einen knappen Nenner bringt, so ist es sein Interesse an der vielfältigen ‘Vermittlung’ Shakespeares durch ‘Translation’ und ‘Rezeption’ besonders im Hinblick auf den deutschen Sprachraum. Er suchte beispielsweise Antwort zu geben auf Fragen wie: “How German is Shakespeare in Germany…? ”, oder worin besteht eigentlich das Romantische des Schlegel-Tieck-Shakespeare? Noch weiter ausgreifend suchte er zu eruieren, worin überhaupt die befruchtender Funktion Shakespeares für die deutsche Romantik und die “German Imagination” zu sehen ist (Shakespeare and the German Imagination, 1994; International Wolfgang Riehle 6 Shakespeare Association Occasional Paper, 5). So versteht sich gleichsam von selbst, daß Habicht sich auch an dem großen Projekt der Erarbeitung der Geschichte der deutschen Shakespeare-Übersetzungen im 19. Jahrhundert beteiligt. Doch auch aktuelle Aufarbeitungsbemühungen unserer jüngsten Vergangenheit kommen bei ihm nicht zu kurz, stammt doch etwa von ihm ein Artikel zum Thema: ‘Shakespeare und der deutsche Shakespeare-Mythus im Dritten Reich’. Zudem ist sein Blick auch auf die globale Rezeption Shakespeares und die nationalen Identifikationsversuche mit dem Barden gerichtet. Auch dieses Thema darf Aktualität beanspruchen, gehört es doch zur Begegnung der Kulturen, einem Aspekt, der für das erhoffte Zusammenwachsen Europas von großer Relevanz ist. Habichts Interesse an der ‘Vermittlung’ erwies sich indes schon in seiner bereits 1968 erfolgten Gründung der English and American Studies in German (EASG): Summaries of Theses and Monographs. A Supplement to Anglia. Es ist dies ein Organ, das sich zum Ziel setzte, den wissenschaftlichen Ertrag einer auf deutsch verfaßten Monographie durch ein englisches Summary der internationalen ‘academic community’ zur Kenntnis zu bringen. Jede Anglistin und jedem Anglisten ist diese äußerst nützliche, ja dringend notwendige ‘Institution’ bestens vertraut. Es ist nicht übertrieben zu sagen, daß Habicht damit einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Erhaltung des Deutschen als Wissenschaftssprache geleistet hat. Wir gratulieren Werner Habicht von Herzen und wünschen ihm eine gedeihliche Fortsetzung seiner vielfältigen wissenschaftlichen bzw. kulturellen Aktivitäten bei guter Gesundheit. Mögen uns sein eindrucksvoller Elan, seine ungetrübte Blickschärfe und sein kritisches Bewußtsein noch lange erfreuen und bereichern. Wolfgang Riehle (Graz) AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen: Stand der Forschung und Zwischenbilanz eines Forschungsprojekts Susanne Ehrenreich International business is one of the main domains in which English is used in its function as today’s global lingua franca. However, despite a significant increase over the past few years in empirical studies investigating various aspects of English as a lingua franca communication in a number of contexts, research in the business domain is still scarce. This is a gap which I seek to fill with my research project on the role of English in German multinational companies. Employing an ethnographic approach, the linguistic realities as experienced by mid-to-top-level managers are explored using in-depth interviews, participant observation and shadowing of individual managers, as well as recordings of spoken and written data. In this paper recent developments in the nascent field of English as a lingua franca studies are surveyed bringing together a range of linguistic approaches as well as perspectives from intercultural business communication. Against this backdrop preliminary findings of my study are presented. I will describe a number of contexts of language use and look at the attitudes of this specific group of language users towards English as a lingua franca (ELF). Above all, the study reveals the high degree of linguistic, intercultural and strategic flexibility which is required of ELF users in international business contexts. Highly complex interactions have to be managed with speakers of English as a second or foreign language of varying linguistic proficiencies as well as with native speakers of English from almost all “Inner Circle” countries (cf. Kachru 1982/ 1992). The establishment of potential pedagogical implications of the observations made in the world of international business promises to be an interesting, worthwhile, and challenging task. Susanne Ehrenreich 8 1 Der Begriff English as a lingua franca hat sich in der aktuellen Forschung gegenüber dem häufig synonym verwendeten, in manchen Kontexten jedoch auch weiter gefassten Begriff English as an international language (EIL) weitgehend durchgesetzt (vgl. Jenkins 2006: 159f.). 1. Einleitung “Englisch als Lingua franca” (ELF) beschreibt die Verwendung des Englischen als gemeinsames Kommunikationsmedium von Sprechern unterschiedlicher Muttersprachen 1 . Die Zahl derjenigen, die Englisch in dieser Lingua franca-Funktion nutzen, übertrifft seit geraumer Zeit bei weitem die Zahl der Sprecher des Englischen als Muttersprache in den englischsprachigen Ländern des so genannten Inner Circle (z.B. Großbritannien, USA, vgl. Kachru 1982/ 1992) und die Zahl derjenigen Sprecher in den ehemaligen britischen Kolonien, die Englisch als Erst- oder Zweitsprache sprechen (z.B. Indien, Hongkong, Ghana). Dies ist ein Topos, der regelmäßig in Einleitungen wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen zum Thema ELF, sozusagen als Legitimitätsausweis, aufgeführt wurde. Bis vor einiger Zeit folgten in der Literatur zu ELF auf diesen Topos häufig der Hinweis auf die bestehende Forschungslücke sowie der Aufruf, sich dem Phänomen ELF endlich auch empirisch - über die bis dato schwerpunktmäßig konzeptuellen Diskussionen hinaus - anzunähern. An dem Mehrheitsverhältnis, was die Größe der Sprechergruppen der unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen des Englischen angeht, hat sich wenig geändert. Der zweitgenannte Punkt aber muss heute neu formuliert werden, denn in die ELF-Forschung ist gehörig Bewegung gekommen. In den letzten drei bis vier Jahren erschien eine stattliche Anzahl an Arbeiten, die sich der eingeforderten empirischen Untersuchung des Englischen als Lingua franca zuwenden. Zahlreiche weitere Projekte sind in Arbeit. Kaum eine Konferenz im Bereich der englischen Sprachwissenschaft kommt inzwischen ohne das Thema aus, die Zahl der Publikationen steigt stetig, allein fünf linguistische Zeitschriften widmeten sich in den Jahren 2005 bis 2009 dem Thema ELF in Form von Themenheften. Im Jahr 2008 fand in Helsinki die erste internationale ELF-Konferenz statt (vgl. Mauranen & Ranta 2009), die zweite folgte 2009 in Southampton. Diese Entwicklungen unterstreichen in eindrücklicher Form, dass die ELF-Forschung im Begriff ist, sich als eigenständiger Forschungszweig zu etablieren (Mauranen 2006). Die Forschung zu ELF wird zunehmend zur Kenntnis genommen, wenn auch noch lange nicht von allen akzeptiert und wenn auch in der Regel höchst kontrovers diskutiert (Seidlhofer 2007, 2009). Der wissenschaftliche Diskurs zu den (sozio-)linguistischen sowie angewandt-didaktischen Aufgaben und Fragestellungen, die sich aus der Untersuchung des Phänomens ELF ergeben (Sprachkontakt, Sprachwandel, Spracheinstelllungen, Standard(s), Normen und Varietäten sowie Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 9 2 Mollin (2006) untersucht als Teil ihrer Studie zu Euro-English die Einstellungen europäischer Hochschuldozenten aus den drei Fachbereichen Physik, Soziologie und den jeweiligen Nationalphilologien, analysiert ihre Daten aber ausschließlich nach Nationalität und nicht nach Fachrichtungen (vgl. dazu Ehrenreich 2009a: 25f.). 3 Für diesen Beitrag wurde Literatur inhaltlich bis Mitte 2008 berücksichtigt. englischdidaktische Implikationen), erreicht damit die Reichweite und Qualität, die dem Thema angesichts seiner globalen Bedeutung angemessen ist. Der Anfang ist gemacht, doch es bestehen trotz der skizzierten Entwicklungen nach wie vor große Forschungsdesiderate. Die Untersuchungsbereiche und Fragestellungen, denen ich mich in meinem Forschungsvorhaben “Englisch als lingua franca der internationalen Kommunikation in deutschen Unternehmen” widme (Ehrenreich 2005), gehören dazu. Ziel dieses Forschungsprojekts ist die Analyse von Anwendungskontexten des Englischen in global agierenden Unternehmen sowie die Erhebung der Einstellungen der Beteiligten zu den dadurch bedingten sprachlichen Notwendigkeiten im Beruf. Der genaue Blick auf die Forschungslandschaft zeigt: 1. Nach wie vor gibt es kaum empirische Untersuchungen, deren Fokus auf dem Bereich Wirtschaft - eine der quantitativ und qualitativ wichtigsten Domänen des Englischen als Lingua franca - liegt. Ein Umstand, der angesichts der großen Herausforderungen des Feldzugangs zu Wirtschaftsorganisationen keineswegs überrascht. 2. Die systematische Erhebung von persönlichen Einstellungen zu ELF (language attitudes) erfolgte bislang weitgehend ohne Gender-Differenzierung und häufig in Kontexten, die das Bild einer ‘linguistischen Nabelschau’ nahelegen. D.h. oft wurden weibliche Untersuchungsteilnehmerinnen aus den Bereichen Anglistik und Englischunterricht befragt (vgl. Jenkins 2007 u.a.). Die Spracheinstellungen von männlichen ELF- Sprechern in nicht-philologischen Tätigkeitsbereichen wurden bislang kaum berücksichtigt 2 . 3. Der Ruf nach ethnographisch-mehrmethodischen Untersuchungen mit einem klaren Kontextbezug ist nicht neu (vgl. Harris & Bargiela-Chiappini 2003), doch nach wie vor aktuell (Seidlhofer et al. 2006: 21). In diesem Beitrag sollen erste Ergebnisse einer solchen ethnographischmehrmethodischen Untersuchung der Verwendung des Englischen als Lingua franca im Kontext international agierender Unternehmen vorgestellt und diskutiert werden. Zur Einordnung des Forschungsprojekts und dessen Fragestellungen in die aktuelle Forschungslandschaft erfolgt dafür zunächst in einem ersten Schritt eine Darstellung der jüngsten Entwicklungen in der ELF-Forschung seit 2005 3 . In einem zweiten Schritt werden das Forschungsdesign und -vorgehen kurz skizziert, anschließend erfolgt ein Überblick über ausgewählte Zwischenergebnisse des Projekts. Susanne Ehrenreich 10 2. Englisch als Lingua franca - Der Stand der Forschung Bis zum Jahr 2005 wurde die Forschung zum Thema Englisch als Lingua franca (ELF) hauptsächlich von konzeptuellen Beiträgen bzw. Kontroversen bestimmt (vgl. Ehrenreich 2005). Was die datenbasierte, empirische Forschung angeht, war die Lage recht übersichtlich und wenige zentrale Arbeiten bestimmten das Bild. Dazu gehören beispielsweise für die Phonologie Jenkins (2000) und für die Pragmatik Firth (1990, 1996), Lesznyák (2004), Meierkord (1996) und House (1999). Von Seidlhofer (2001, 2004) lagen erste vorläufige Ergebnisse zur Lexikogrammatik vor. Der Ruf nach einer soliden Datengrundlage wurde gehört und es wurde mit der Kompilierung der beiden großen ELF-Korpora VOICE (Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English, vgl. Seidlhofer 2001) und ELFA Corpus of academic discourse (Mauranen 2003) begonnen. Im Bereich der Lehrerbildung gab es erste empirische Erhebungen zur Einstellung von Lehrern (Decke-Cornill 2003; Seidlhofer 1999) und angehenden Lehrkräften (Grau 2005). Die Mehrzahl der Erörterungen möglicher Auswirkungen des Englischen als Lingua franca auf den Englischunterricht ging über mehr oder weniger konservative konzeptuelle Überlegungen nicht hinaus. Ein Bereich, der schon seit vielen Jahren wichtige Einsichten in die Anwendung des Englischen in globalen Kontexten liefert - auch wenn die entsprechenden Untersuchungen selten spezifisch auf ELF ausgerichtet sind -, ist die Wirtschaftslinguistik (vgl. Harris & Bargiela-Chiappini 2003). Als wegweisende Arbeiten sind hier zu nennen Charles (2007), Charles & Marschan-Piekkari (2002), Louhiala- Salminen (2002), Louhiala-Salminen et al. (2005), Poncini (2004), Spencer- Oatey & Xing (2002) (vgl. auch Vollstedt 2002). Nicht nur theoretisch gearbeitet, sondern auch empirisch geforscht wird schon seit längerer Zeit im Bereich der Outer Circle Englishes (New Englishes, Postcolonial Englishes, World Englishes) (vgl. Schneider 2007). Trotz aller historischen und soziokulturellen Unterschiede zu Englisch als Lingua franca sind die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeiten für die ELF-Forschung von großer Bedeutung (z.B. Bamgbose et al. 1995; Kachru 1986; vgl. Jenkins 2006; Seidlhofer 2002). Dass die ELF-Forschung von einigen Vertretern der World Englishes-Forschung eher kritisch zur Kenntnis genommen wird, ist den verwandten Forschungsanstrengungen wenig förderlich (vgl. Seidlhofer 2006, 2009). Seit 2005 zeichnet sich ein deutlicher Wandel ab. Bezeichnend ist allein die Zahl der Themenhefte zu ELF bzw. zur Lingua franca-Kommunikation, die in den letzten Jahren herausgegeben wurde. Den Anfang machte English for Specific Purposes (Nickerson 2005). Im Jahr 2006 folgten die Zeitschriften International Journal of the Sociology of Language (Meierkord 2006), Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (vgl. Seidlhofer et al. 2006) und das Nordic Journal of English Studies (Mauranen 2006). Ein weiteres Themenheft ist bei der Zeitschrift Languages and Intercultural Communication Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 11 erschienen (Gu 2009). Ein zusätzliches Signal ist die Aufnahme einer Überblicksdarstellung zu ELF im Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary/ OALD (Seidlhofer 2005). Die Zahl der Arbeiten nimmt stetig zu, das Forschungsfeld differenziert sich zunehmend aus und das Bewusstsein für die Kontextbezogenheit bzw. -abhängigkeit einzelner Untersuchungsergebnisse wächst. Frühere, häufig sehr global und pauschalierend formulierte Ergebnisse zu den Charakteristika von ELF werden einer kritischen Überprüfung unterzogen. ELF ist wie eingangs erwähnt dabei, sich als eigenständiger Forschungszweig der Englischen Sprachwissenschaft zu etablieren (Mauranen 2006), auch wenn dies bisweilen weiterhin mit großem Vorbehalt betrachtet wird (Seidlhofer 2007). Die zunehmende Emanzipation von tradierten Vorstellungen und Konzepten zeigt sich in der Zahl der Arbeiten, die ELF ‘in its own right’ und nicht als defizitäre Form des Englischen im Vergleich zum muttersprachlichen Englisch (ENL/ English as a Native Language) betrachten. Dabei wird auch deutlich, dass bei einem solchen Ansatz große methodische und konzeptuelle Herausforderungen zu bewältigen sind. Im Folgenden werden zunächst die wichtigsten Entwicklungen nachgezeichnet, die sich im Rahmen aktueller sprachwissenschaftlicher Beschreibungen des Englischen als Lingua franca ‘in its own right’ ergeben. Darauf folgt ein Blick auf die soziolinguistischen und angewandten Themenkomplexe Spracheinstellungen und Lehrerbildung; ein weiterer Abschnitt ist der Forschung zum Themenbereich ‘Englisch in der internationalen Wirtschaft’ gewidmet. Abschließend wird die aktuelle Diskussion darüber, welche (sozio-)linguistischen Konzepte und Modelle sich für eine adäquate Beschreibung von ELF eignen, zusammengefasst. 2.1 Linguistische Beschreibungen von Englisch als Lingua franca - ‘in its own right’? In ihrem jüngsten Forschungsbericht bieten Seidlhofer et al. (2006) neben einer Analyse des funktionalen Profils von ELF in Europa einen umfassenden Überblick über die bis 2006 entstandenen empirischen Arbeiten zu ELF. Hilfreich ist die vorgeschaltete forschungsmethodologisch begründete Unterscheidung von exonormativ und endonormativ ausgerichteten Arbeiten. Nach Seidlhofer et al. (2006: 9ff.) hält exonormative ELF-Forschung weitgehend an der englischen Hochsprache (English as a Native Language/ ENL) als Bezugsnorm fest und führt vorwiegend quantitative Analysen auf der Formebene durch. Vertreter des endonormativen Ansatzes hingegen verfolgen schwerpunktmäßig folgende Fragestellungen: “How do ELF speakers communicate? What seems important/ useful to them? ” (Seidlhofer 2006 et al. 2006: 9) Hier steht also stärker das qualitative Verstehen der Kommunikationsprozesse im Zentrum des Interesses. Es überrascht nicht Susanne Ehrenreich 12 weiter, dass die Mehrzahl der deskriptiven ELF-Studien von Vertreterinnen und Vertretern eines vorwiegend endonormativen Ansatzes vorgelegt wurde. Im Rahmen des VOICE-Projekts, das von Barbara Seidlhofer in Wien geleitet wird, entstanden etliche Magisterarbeiten und Dissertationen, die sich folgenden linguistischen Schwerpunkten zuordnen lassen. Ein Großteil der Arbeiten untersucht die jeweils ausgewählten ELF-Sprachdaten aus der Perspektive der Diskursanalyse und der interkulturellen Pragmatik. Lichtkoppler (2007) befasst sich mit der Funktion von Wiederholungen im Diskurs dyadischer ELF-Gespräche, Keitsch (2004) untersucht ad-hoc-Konversationsstrategien, Wagner (2005) metalinguistische Strategien in der beruflichen Ausbildung. Die phatische Kommunion (phatic communion) wird von Kordon (2006) am Beispiel von feststehenden Wendungen (agreement tokens), die dem Beziehungsaufbau dienen, untersucht; der Humor als ein weiteres Mittel zur Etablierung einer positiven Gesprächsatmosphäre steht im Zentrum der Arbeit von Brkinjac (2005). Pölzl und Seidlhofer (2006) widmen sich dem so genannten Habitat-Faktor und der Frage, inwiefern der in-/ direkte Einfluss der Muttersprache in ELF als eine Funktion des Ausdrucks der eigenen kulturellen Identität zu sehen ist. Häufigkeit und Funktion von Code-switching als einem ausgesprochen ELF-spezifischen Phänomen werden von Klimpfinger (2007) analysiert. Der Schnittstelle zwischen Pragmatik und sprachlichem System widmet sich Hülmbauer (2007), indem sie der Frage nachgeht, wie sich kommunikative Effizienz und sprachliche Korrektheit zueinander verhalten. Breiteneder (2005) greift aus diesem Komplex eine Detailfrage heraus und analysiert auf der Formebene die (Nicht-)Realisierung des Flexionsmorphems -s der dritten Person Singular im ELF-Sprachgebrauch. Die Sprachdaten der genannten Studien entstammen dem privaten, informellen Kontext der Forscherinnen bzw. wurden im universitären Umfeld gesammelt. Dem Bereich Wirtschaft widmen sich vier Arbeiten zu den folgenden Themen: Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten in Besprechungen (Pitzl 2005), Gesprächspausen (Böhringer 2007), sprachbasierte Machtverhältnisse zwischen Muttersprachlern und Nichtmuttersprachlern (Šimic 2005) und ELF in einer österreichischen Firma (Strasser 2004). Die meisten der genannten Arbeiten sind methodisch sauber gearbeitet. Zwei Vorbehalte betreffen jedoch den Umstand, dass ein Großteil der Daten Gesprächssituationen mit relativ wenigen Gesprächsteilnehmern abbildet und dass die jeweiligen Autoren und Autorinnen häufig selbst an den aufgezeichneten Gesprächen beteiligt waren. Überzeugend ist die durchgängig endonormative Perspektive, die erfrischende Einsichten in die ELF-Kommunikation bietet. Erst aus dieser, von der English as a Native Language- Bezugsnorm losgelösten Warte wird deutlich, wie wenig wir bislang über die Kriterien für Effizienz und Angemessenheit von ELF-Kommunikation wissen. Wodurch wird gegenseitiges Verstehen in der ELF-Kommunikation erleich- Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 13 tert bzw. ermöglicht und welche Normen können als angemessen gelten (Pölzl & Seidlhofer 2006: 171)? An einigen Stellen wird jedoch die endonormative Perspektive über den spezifischen Untersuchungskontext hinaus generalisierend überhöht. Dies betrifft unter anderem die Auffassung, ELF- Gespräche zeichneten sich typischerweise durch einen hohen Grad an Konsensorientierung und Kooperation aus, sowie die Setzung, ELF-Sprecher seien stets ‘kompetente’ Sprecher des Englischen. Doch es gibt auch Arbeiten, in denen wiederholt und zu Recht auf die hohe Kontextabhängigkeit der jeweiligen Daten und deren Interpretation hingewiesen wird (Hülmbauer 2007 mit Bezug auf Leung 2005; Seidlhofer & Pölzl 2006: 154f.). Aus dieser Beobachtung ergibt sich die methodische Einsicht, dass Sprachdaten allein nicht ausreichen, um die multifaktoriell bedingte und häufig multimodale ELF-Kommunikation angemessen zu erfassen, und folgerichtig der Ruf nach “clearly situated qualitative studies with a strong ethnographic element.” (Seidlhofer et al. 2006: 21) Nur so erfahren wir mehr über ELF und dessen “actual use” (Mauranen 2006: 145). Simulationen, wie sie in einer Vielzahl der frühen ELF-Studien zur Datengewinnung durchgeführt wurden, sind hier nicht ausreichend. Äußerst wertvolle Hilfestellungen für die scientific community bieten der Beitrag von Breiteneder et al. (2006), in dem die Kriterien, die bei der Kompilierung des VOICE-Korpus maßgeblich waren, vorgestellt und diskutiert werden, sowie die Veröffentlichung der spezifisch für die Transkription spontansprachlicher ELF-Daten entwickelten Transkriptionsregeln (VOICE Transcription Conventions [2.1]). Die Herausforderungen des Feldzugangs zu Anwendungskontexten jenseits der privaten und universitären Sphäre werden jedoch kaum thematisiert. Die Arbeiten am VOICE-Korpus sind inzwischen abgeschlossen, im Mai 2009 wurde das eine Million Wörter umfassende Korpus frei geschaltet. Auch im Umfeld von Jennifer Jenkins (vgl. Jenkins 2000, 2007) in England entstanden sprachdatenbasierte Arbeiten aus endonormativer Perspektive. Cogo (2005) widerlegt die oft aufgestellte These, ELF sei ein kulturfreies Kommunikationsmedium, das rein instrumental, jedoch nicht in identifikatorischer Funktion eingesetzt werde. Konsequent endonormativ geht auch Dewey (2007a) vor, indem er ausgehend von seinen Daten “innovative features” der ELF-Lexikogrammatik und die diesen zugrundeliegenden Prozesse beschreibt, welche er wiederum als charakteristisch für sich entwickelnde Regelhaftigkeiten einstuft. These processes can be described as exploiting redundancy, enhancing prominence, increasing explicitness, and reinforcement of proposition […], all of which reflect not so much conscious decisions on the part of ELF speakers but rather a natural tendency for effective communication to involve enhanced salience and efficiency. (Dewey 2007b: 339, Hervorhebung im Orig.) Susanne Ehrenreich 14 Wie andere ELF-Forschende vor ihm, so kommt auch Dewey (2007b: 344) zu dem Schluss, dass Flexibilität - auf verschiedenen Ebenen - eines der entscheidenden Kriterien für funktionierende ELF-Kommunikation sei: What is required is a more flexible view of language, a more pluralistic approach to competence (see Leung 2005), and an understanding of the need for multiple proficiencies in the communication of linguistic resources. (Dewey 2007b: 346.) In einem gemeinsamen Beitrag legen Cogo und Dewey (2006) dar, inwiefern sich einzelne pragmatische und lexikogrammatische Entscheidungen in der konkreten Sprachverwendung gegenseitig bedingen. Einige der Detailinterpretationen erscheinen dabei etwas weit hergeholt, doch ein großes Verdienst des Beitrags liegt darin, dass hier erstmals die methodischen und interpretatorischen Unzulänglichkeiten von ELF-Studien der ersten Generation explizit herausgearbeitet und einer kritischen Überprüfung unterzogen werden. Dies betrifft u.a. die häufig künstlich konstruierten Rahmenbedingungen der Datenerhebung sowie die daraus abgeleiteten Ergebnisse, die ihrerseits vielerorts unhinterfragt perpetuiert werden. So zum Beispiel die Behauptung, ELF werde nur für sehr begrenzte und ausschließlich transaktionale Zwecke eingesetzt und sei nicht mehr als ein kulturfreies Kommunikationswerkzeug (Hüllen 1992; House 1999), sowie die oben angesprochene Auffassung, ELF-Kommunikation sei immer konsensorientiert und Nicht-Verstehen werde durch das so genannte “let it pass”-Prinzip (Firth 1996) kaschiert. Die exemplarische Darstellung der eigenen Untersuchungen von Cogo und Dewey zur Lexikogrammatik von ELF und dessen Pragmatik wiederum erscheint streckenweise abgehoben und so sehr einer ‘ELFtoleranten’ politischen Korrektheit verpflichtet, dass der konkrete ELF-Sprecher meines Erachtens dabei aus dem Blick zu geraten droht. Auf der Basis des von Anna Mauranen erstellten ELFA-Korpus (Mauranen 2003) untersuchen Metsä-Ketelä (2006) sprachliche Vagheit (vague language) und Ranta (2006) Häufigkeit und Funktion der -ing-Form. Im asiatischen Raum wird derzeit von Kirkpatrick und Deterding ein ELF-Korpus erstellt (Deterding & Kirkpatrick 2006). In den USA hat die ELF-Forschung noch nicht Fuß gefasst (vgl. Jenkins 2006). Aus exonormativer Perspektive wurde von Mollin (2006) eine Studie durchgeführt, in der auf der Grundlage eines selbst erstellten Korpus geprüft wird, ob “Euro-English” gemessen an den tradierten Kriterien (Form, Funktion, Einstellungen) als English as a Second Language-Varietät bezeichnet werden kann. Mollin kommt - wenig überraschend - zu einem negativen Ergebnis. Bemerkenswert ist diese Arbeit insofern, als sich Mollin einem Thema, nämlich ELF, widmet, das nicht wenige andere Vertreter einer exonormativen Perspektive von vornherein als nicht untersuchenswert deklarieren und schlicht übergehen. Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 15 2.2 Soziolinguistische und angewandte Perspektiven: Spracheinstellungen und Lehrerbildung Am Anfang meines Forschungsvorhabens stand die Beobachtung einer Diskrepanz. Verschiedene Personengruppen zeigten auffallend unterschiedliche Einstellungen zu Englisch als Lingua franca. In anglistischen Publikationen, auf Konferenzen, in der eigenen Forschung (vgl. Ehrenreich 2004) und in universitären Lehrveranstaltungen in der Anglistik war eine stark ablehnende und oft hoch emotionale Haltung ELF gegenüber nicht zu übersehen. In Seminardiskussionen mit Anglistikstudierenden verhielten diese sich (anfänglich) häufig äußerst abwehrend, ähnlich lösten Vorträge von Barbara Seidlhofer und Jennifer Jenkins auf Konferenzen regelmäßig höchst aufgeregte Debatten mit der Zuhörerschaft aus. Eine auch nur annähernd vergleichbare Aufregung oder gar Ablehnung ließ sich bei Vertretern aus der Wirtschaft im Rahmen informeller Gespräche über das Thema Englisch (als Lingua franca) in internationalen Unternehmen nicht feststellen. Die grundsätzliche sprachideologische Aufregung war ihnen fremd, ihre Haltung schien sehr viel pragmatischer. Die Notwendigkeit der Kommunikation auf Englisch war gegeben, also musste man - egal wie - damit zurechtkommen. Diese von mir vor Beginn meiner Untersuchung nur gefühlte Diskrepanz kann mittlerweile mit Hilfe einiger Studien für die eine der beiden Positionen, d.h. für die Personengruppe der Philologen (Anglisten, Englischlehrkräfte und -studierende), empirisch belegt werden. Jenkins’ aktuelle Studie (2007) untermauert, was schon in Decke-Cornill (2003) sichtbar und bei Grau (2005) bestätigt wurde. Anglistische Philologen sind ELF gegenüber sehr skeptisch eingestellt. Diese Einstellung erklärt auch eine denkwürdige Leerstelle in meiner eigenen Arbeit zu Auslandsaufenthalten und Englischlehrerbildung (Ehrenreich 2004). In den Interviews mit ehemaligen Fremdsprachenassistentinnen und -assistenten war die eigene Erfahrung der Lingua franca-Kommunikation auf Englisch während eines Auslandsaufenthaltes schlicht ‘nicht der Rede wert’ (Ehrenreich 2008). Anglisten und Anglistinnen sind - egal ob native speaker oder nicht - in der Regel Anhänger und Verfechter des Englischen als Nationalbzw. Kultursprache. Die aktuell zu beobachtenden Prozesse und Produkte des Sprachkontakts und des Sprachwandels im Kontext von Lingua Franca Englishes werden also gerade bei denjenigen mit großen Vorbehalten betrachtet, die sich hauptberuflich mit der englischen Sprache befassen (Seidlhofer 2007). Ein weniger monolithisches Bild ergibt die Studie von Erling (2005). Hier finden sich wertvolle Hinweise darauf, wie sowohl Studierende der Anglistik und Amerikanistik als auch Studierende nicht-philologischer Fächer die verschiedenen Optionen - British English, American English, Lingua Franca English - beurteilen. In Erlings Untersuchungsgruppe gibt es interessanter- Susanne Ehrenreich 16 4 Siehe oben die Anmerkung zu Mollin (2006). weise sogar unter den Anglistik- und Amerikanistikstudierenden einige, die aus (ausbildungs-)biographischen oder berufsbezogenen Gründen statt muttersprachlicher Varietäten des Englischen eine ‘neutrale’ ‘Lingua franca- Varietät’ des Englischen bevorzugen. Weiter gehende und nach Fachgebieten differenzierende Untersuchungen dazu, welche Einstellung zu ELF Personengruppen haben, in deren (Berufs-)Leben Englisch zwar eine wichtige, aber keine zentrale Rolle spielt, liegen nicht vor 4 . Diese Lücke will mein Forschungsprojekt zu schließen beginnen. Die Auswertung der von mir erhobenen Daten gibt unmissverständlich zu erkennen, dass die communities of practice, denen international agierende Manager und Führungskräfte angehören, eine von Anglisten bzw. Philologen klar zu unterscheidende Einstellung zu ELF haben. In diesem Zusammenhang soll eine wichtige konzeptuelle Fragestellung vorweggenommen werden. Können Anglistinnen und Anglisten heuristisch gewinnbringend als ELF-Sprecher kategorisiert werden? Entstanden aus der Abgrenzung zur Kategorie des Lerners (learner), wird die Kategorie Sprecher bzw. Anwender (speaker/ user) in der ELF-Forschung häufig lediglich in der Funktion dieser Opposition verwendet. Eine weiter gehende theoretisch-konzeptuelle Auslotung, beispielsweise unter Bezugnahme auf die persönlichen Überzeugungen, das Wertesystem und Selbstverständnis der jeweiligen Sprechergruppen, fand in der ELF-Forschung bislang nicht ausreichend statt. Eine solche Auslotung und in der Konsequenz eine konzeptuelle Differenzierung beispielsweise zwischen philologischen und nicht-philologischen Berufsbzw. Sprechergruppen ist jedoch dringend erforderlich (vgl. Ehrenreich 2005; Ehrenreich 2009b). Anglistische Philologen können in bestimmten Kontexten auch ELF-Sprecher (ELF speakers) sein, sie bleiben parallel dazu aber gleichzeitig immer, mehr oder weniger prominent, pädagogisch oder akademisch mit Englisch befasste Englischlehrkräfte, Anglistikstudierende, Anglistikprofessoren etc. Andere Gruppen von ELF-Sprechern sind parallel zu dieser Kategorie, bzw. dieser Kategorie entscheidend vorgeordnet, Manager, Führungskraft, Ingenieur, Naturwissenschaftler u.a., d.h. beruflich nur sekundär mit Englisch und primär mit anderen Inhalten befasst. Diese wichtige konzeptuelle Unterscheidung wird in Jenkins (2007) nicht getroffen, was ihrer Studie Englisch as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity eine gewisse Schieflage verleiht, da sie ausschließlich Englischlehrende untersucht, diese aber, ohne weitere Differenzierungen vorzunehmen, als ELF users konzeptualisiert. Über die Einstellungen von nicht-philologischen ELF-Sprechergruppen können die Ergebnisse dieser Studie daher - entgegen mancher Aussage der Autorin - keine Auskunft geben. Als Studie, Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 17 die die tendenziell konservative Haltung von ELT professionals aufdeckt, liefert sie nichtsdestoweniger wichtige Hinweise auf die Herausforderungen, denen sich eine zukunftsorientierte, d.h. das Phänomen ELF integrierende Englischlehrerbildung gegenübergestellt sieht. Vor diesem Hintergrund erscheint es nicht überraschend, dass sich die Mehrzahl der programmatischen Publikationen zum Englischunterricht und zur Englischlehrerbildung vorwiegend zurückhaltend-konservativ positioniert, was pädagogische Implikationen der globalen englischsprachigen Realitäten angeht (vgl. dazu einige Beiträge in Gnutzmann & Intemann 2005 sowie Hüllen 2007; Mollin 2006; Trudgill 2005 u.a.). Nicht selten werden dabei empirisch nicht überprüfte Setzungen wie beispielsweise, die englische Hochsprache (Standard English) sei international am einfachsten zu verstehen, als Argumente ins Feld geführt. Plädoyers für eine stärkere Berücksichtigung der Pluralität des Englischen in der Lehrerbildung finden sich bei Canagarajah (2006), Ehrenreich (2009a), Grau (2005), Jenkins (2006), Seidlhofer (2004, 2007), Seidlhofer et al. (2006), Sifakis (2007) und Snow et al. (2006). Einig ist man sich darin, dass die Frage nach den pädagogischen Implikationen der ELF-Forschung äußerst vielschichtig und niemandem mit vorschnellen Ratschlägen gedient ist. So weist Seidlhofer, die in dieser Hinsicht nicht immer korrekt rezipiert wird (vgl. Seidlhofer 2006), ebenso unermüdlich wie unmissverständlich darauf hin, dass es der sprachwissenschaftlichen ELF-Forschung um die Deskription (sozio-)linguistischer Prozesse und Produkte und eben gerade nicht um die Präskription von Detailergebnissen dieser deskriptiven Forschung für pädagogische Kontexte geht. Dies bedeutet im Gegenzug jedoch nicht, dass es keine Ansatzpunkte für grundsätzliche didaktisch-methodische Überlegungen gibt. Welche Ansatzpunkte dies sein können, beschreibt Seidlhofer in einem Interview mit dem Schulspiegel wie folgt: Wichtiger als […] Einzelbefunde ist aber folgendes: Was wir versuchen, durch unsere deskriptive Forschung zu verstehen, sind die allgemeineren Prozesse, die in der Lingua-Franca-Kommunikation ablaufen, nicht nur simpel die Tatsache, dass die Leute auch sehr gut ohne “third person -s” oder ohne th-Laute auskommen. Eher solche Dinge: Wie stellen sich Sprecher auf das sprachliche Niveau ihrer Gesprächspartner ein - in sozialpsychologischer Terminologie: die wichtige Rolle der Akkommodation? […] Wie geben Sprecher einander Orientierungshilfen […]? Ich denke, es wäre eine gute Investition, den Englisch- und den Fremdsprachenunterricht überhaupt - oder noch besser: Sprachbewusstseins-Unterricht im Sinne von Language Awareness - nach diesen Kriterien zu überdenken. […] Der springende Punkt ist, dass wir für Englisch in seiner heutigen globalen Rolle ein neues Konzept zulassen müssen, das sich von anderen Fremdsprachen grundlegend unterscheidet, mit ganz anderen Schwerpunkten im Unterricht. (Seidlhofer im Interview mit Schmundt 2008) Susanne Ehrenreich 18 Ausgehend vom Wissen um die Wirkmächtigkeit persönlicher Einstellungen von Lehrkräften (vgl. Appel 2000) birgt meines Erachtens allein schon die Berücksichtigung der Pluralität des Englischen in der Lehrerbildung den Keim für eine grundsätzliche und viel versprechende Umorientierung des zukünftigen Englischunterrichts. 2.3 Englisch - und andere Sprachen - in der internationalen Wirtschaft Die internationale, globalisierte Wirtschaftswelt kommt ohne Englisch nicht aus, die Notwendigkeit zur englischsprachigen Kommunikation ist schlicht “a fact of life for many business people.” (Nickerson 2005: 368) Für die sprachwissenschaftliche Forschung stellt dieser Kontext zweifelsohne ein äußerst spannendes und ertragreiches Untersuchungsfeld dar. Doch man sieht sich hier in besonderem Maße vor das schon oben benannte Problem des Feldzugangs gestellt, da man es soziologisch (und damit auch soziolinguistisch) gesehen mit “influential frameworks” (House 1999: 74) zu tun hat, nicht selten ist der Gebrauch des Englischen “associated with high status and elite situations and users.” (Leung 2005: 135) Die Linguistin muss sich damit auf ein hierarchisches Verhältnis zwischen Forscherin und Beforschten einlassen, das von der Anthropologin Nader (1988) als “studying up” bezeichnet wird. Es ist daher keineswegs “paradoxical that so little is known about language in the workplace” (Truchot 2003: 308), sondern liegt auch in der Natur der Sache, dass für die Domäne Wirtschaft nur wenige Studien zu Wirtschaftsenglisch bzw. ELF vorliegen: A main barrier to research in business discourse is the proprietary and private nature of, and therefore restricted access to, writing and speaking inside corporations. (Yunick 2006: 622, vgl. auch Charles 2007: 270) So verwundert es im Blick auf die Forschungsarbeiten zum Thema ‘Englisch in der internationalen Wirtschaft’ nicht, dass auch hier eine Vielzahl von Studien nicht auf authentischen Daten basiert, sondern auf Daten, die in Simulationen - häufig mit Studierenden der Wirtschaftswissenschaften - gewonnen wurden. Im Themenheft “Business English as a lingua franca” der Zeitschrift English for Specific Purposes (Nickerson 2005) ist dies bei zwei von vier Forschungsberichten der Fall (ähnlich Deneire 2008). Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 19 5 Weitere mögliche Bezeichnungen für diesen Bereich sind Wirtschaftskommunikation, Unternehmenskommunikation, Corporate Communication, (International) Business Communication u.a. Die begriffliche Vielfalt spiegelt nicht nur die Heterogenität des Feldes ‘Sprache und Kommunikation in der Wirtschaft’ (Kleinberger Günther 2003: 24ff.) wider, sondern auch die daraus resultierende Notwendigkeit eines in hohem Maße interdisziplinären Zugriffs (Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson 2003). Inhaltlich scheinen die Wirtschaftslinguistik (Business Discourse) 5 bzw. Englisch als Wirtschaftsfachsprache (English for Specific Purposes) und der darunter subsumierte Zweig der Business English as a lingua franca-Forschung (BELF) mit der ELF-Forschung wenig gemeinsam zu haben. Auf den zweiten Blick ergeben sich jedoch entscheidende Impulse, die der ELF- Forschung als wichtiges Korrektiv dienen können. Anhand eines schulischen Beispiels lässt sich dies verdeutlichen. So wie im Englischunterricht der Fokus auf der englischen Sprache liegt, hat die ELF-Forschung bislang primär die Sprache im Blick, Inhalte und Kontexte sind nachgeordnet. Hält eine schulische Lehrkraft eine Stunde im Rahmen des bilingualen Sachfachunterrichts, sind Inhalte und Kontexte vorgeordnet, die (Fremd-)Sprache spielt in diesem Unterricht nur eine sekundäre, dienende Rolle. Sie ist das Kommunikationsmedium, nicht mehr und nicht weniger. In vergleichbarer Weise liegt in der internationalen Wirtschaftslinguistik der Fokus auf der Geschäftstätigkeit (business activity), und da diese in Zeiten der Globalisierung häufig nicht in der Muttersprache ausgeführt werden kann, wird dazu eine Verkehrssprache benötigt. Zurzeit ist das Englisch. Die Wirtschaftslinguistik (und Englisch als Wirtschaftsfachsprache oder Business English) konzentriert sich daher auf “the ways in which language and business strategies interact.” (St. John 1996: 15) Aus diesem Grund stehen in der entsprechenden Literatur nicht so sehr rein sprachliche Aspekte des Englischen, sondern die Strategien effizienter (Wirtschafts-)Kommunikation im Vordergrund. Viele Beiträge in diesem Bereich sind forschungsbasierte Bedarfsanalysen (needs analyses) (Charles & Marschan-Piekkari 2002; Chew 2005; Connor et al. 2005; Rogerson-Revell 2007), die der Frage nachgehen, wie Englisch in unterschiedlichen Anwendungsbereichen in der mündlichen und schriftlichen Kommunikation in unterschiedlichen Textsorten (Besprechungen, E-Mails, Verhandlungen) verwendet wird und welche Schwierigkeiten in diesen Zusammenhängen auftreten. Man hat erkannt, dass die in der Wirtschaftskommunikation relevanten Textsorten nicht abstrahierend, sondern stets als ‘Sprache im Kontext’ (“contextualised communicative genres”, Nickerson 2007: 352) zu betrachten sind, die von einer Fülle inhaltlicher, betrieblicher und kultureller Faktoren beeinflusst werden. Eine entscheidende Beobachtung in der BELF-Forschung ist zudem die Tatsache, dass BELF-Kontexte immer mehrsprachige Kontakt-Kontexte sind, in denen Susanne Ehrenreich 20 über reine Sprachkenntnisse des Englischen hinaus eine Vielzahl von zusätzlichen Sprachmanagement-Kompetenzen erforderlich sind (Nickerson 2007: 353; Poncini 2004; Louhiala-Salminen 2002; vgl. auch Klimpfinger 2007). Im Vergleich zur English as a lingua franca-Forschung, deren Fokus vorwiegend auf den Sprechern des Expanding Circle liegt, fällt in der Business English as a lingua franca-Literatur eine gewisse Unschärfe auf, was die Unterscheidung der Englishes gemäß des geopolitischen Three Circles-Modells von Kachru (1982/ 1992) bzw. die funktionale Kategorisierung in English as a Native Language, English as a Second Language und English as a Foreign Language (vgl. McArthur 1998) angeht. Sieht man von den rein ENL-EFL-kontrastiven Studien ab (in denen die sprachlich-diskursive Ausgestaltung von Textsorten in Großbritannien bzw. den USA als gültiger Maßstab für Lerner des Wirtschaftsenglischen weltweit dient), entspricht diese Unschärfe jedoch ganz einfach den globalen englischsprachigen Realitäten in der Wirtschaft. Englischsprecher unterschiedlicher nationaler und regionaler Varietäten und unterschiedlicher Kompetenzniveaus treffen aufeinander und müssen jeweils das Beste aus der Situation machen. Ob sie im Englischunterricht darauf vorbereitet wurden oder nicht: “the realities of the business context are often considerably more complex than the simple label of English as a lingua franca would imply.” (Nickerson 2007: 354) Terminologisch kann die große sprachliche und kulturelle Vielfalt, durch die die verschiedenen global-lokalen Anwendungskontexte des Englischen geprägt werden, angemessen in der Pluralform Lingua Franca Englishes zum Ausdruck gebracht werden (Dewey & Cogo 2006: 62, vgl. auch Kim 2008). Angesichts dieser Komplexität ist der Wunsch nach einem globalen Standard (vgl. Yunick 2006: 630f.) ebenso nachvollziehbar wie realitätsfern. Hierin sind sich BELF- und ELF-Forschung einig. Auch die Wünsche der BELF-Forschung an einen zeitgemäßen Business English-Unterricht entsprechen dem, was in der ELF-Forschung als mögliche angewandte Perspektive aufgezeigt wird (Jenkins 2006; Seidlhofer 2004; Seidlhofer et al. 2006). Der Fokus des Englischunterrichts sollte über die Sprachbeherrschung (language proficiency) hinaus sehr viel stärker die strategischen Kompetenzen fördern, die für eine effiziente Kommunikation in komplexen interkulturellen Anwendungssituationen erforderlich sind. Insbesondere im Hinblick auf das Einüben von Akkommodationsstrategien sind hier als Zielgruppe eines Bewusstmachungs- und Kommunikationstrainings englische Muttersprachler mitzudenken (Connor et al. 2005; Rogerson-Revell 2007; vgl. auch Smith 1987: xi in Brutt-Griffler 1998: 390). Eine Analyse der Unterrichtsmaterialien für Business English zeigt allerdings, dass dessen Konzepte teils zehn bis zwanzig Jahre alt sind und sich auf diesem Sektor in der Praxis wenig bewegt (Nickerson 2005: 375f.). Diese Beobachtung Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 21 lässt sich entsprechend für nicht-fachsprachliches Unterrichtsmaterial anstellen. Die für mein Forschungsprojekt relevanten Arbeiten stammen von Nickerson, Louhiala-Salminen und Poncini. Nickerson (2005, 2007) bietet in regelmäßigen Abständen eine Zusammenfassung der aktuellen Entwicklungen in der BELF-Forschung, Louhiala-Salminen (2002) kann als ‘study closest to my own’ bezeichnet werden. In ihrer Untersuchung “The fly’s perspective: discourse in the daily routine of a business manager” wird die mündliche und schriftliche Kommunikation eines finnischen Managers dokumentiert und analysiert. Diese Studie bietet neben wertvollen methodischen Anregungen (insbesondere zur ethnographischen Beobachtung) ertragreiche Impulse für eine kontrastive Analyse skandinavischer und deutscher Kontexte, in denen Englisch als Lingua franca genutzt wird. Poncini (2004, 2007) verfolgt einen konsequent kontext-spezifischen Ansatz und macht jenseits der in der ELF-Forschung noch dominanten ‘bottom-up’- Analysen sprachlicher Daten auf die entscheidende Rolle aufmerksam, die neben dem nationalen und kulturellen Hintergrund der Sprecher die berufsspezifischen Wertvorstellungen und das gemeinsame sprachliche und nichtsprachliche Repertoire der jeweiligen communities of practice (Wenger 1998) spielen. Bei meinem Blick über den linguistischen Tellerrand in die Wirtschaft steht für mich ähnlich wie in der BELF-Forschung nicht so sehr das domänenspezifische (Wirtschafts-)Englisch im Zentrum, sondern die Analyse derjenigen strategisch-diskursiven Prozesse, die zu beobachten sind, wenn eine (Fremd-)Sprache als Kommunikationsmedium genutzt wird, um Inhalte - die im Vordergrund stehen - auszuhandeln. Anders als bei Philologen (Anglisten, Studierenden und Lehrkräften) - und genau deswegen handelt es sich hier um klar zu unterscheidende Sprechergruppen des Englischen - liegt der Fokus bei (B)ELF-Sprechern gerade nicht auf der Sprache. Es ist diese Unterscheidung zwischen inhalts- und sprachfokussierter Kommunikation, die - wie weiter oben ausgeführt - eine konzeptuelle Unterscheidung der jeweiligen Sprechergruppen des Englischen erfordert. Zusätzlich zur Erhebung und Analyse des ELF-Diskurses in einem nicht-philologischen Kontext geht es in meiner Studie ganz wesentlich auch um die Reaktionen und Bewältigungsstrategien der Beteiligten angesichts der Allgegenwart des Englischen im Beruf. Es geht um “the effect that the use of English may have on those that are obliged to use it in order to get their work done.” (Nickerson 2007: 351) Susanne Ehrenreich 22 6 Vgl. dazu die berühmte English Today-Kontroverse zwischen Quirk (1990) und Kachru (1991) zur Frage, ob Outer Circle Englishes lediglich unzulänglich erworbene Performanzvarietäten (interlanguage) oder eigenständige nationale bzw. regionale (Standard-)Varietäten seien. 2.4 (Sozio-)Linguistische Konzepte und Modelle neu denken [N]ew conditions require new conceptual frameworks, and unprecedented conditions may require unprecedented conceptual reframing. (Seidlhofer 2007: 310) Dass viele der herkömmlichen Terminologien, Konzepte und theoretischen Modelle, die sich im Rahmen der Beschreibung der englischen Sprache und deren Verwendung über Jahrzehnte bewährt haben, das Phänomen Englisch als Lingua franca nur unzureichend fassen können, war schon mit Beginn der ELF-Forschung erkennbar. Die Notwendigkeit, Begrifflichkeiten, Konzepte und Modelle zu adaptieren und neu zu denken, ist heute ein dringendes Anliegen. Zentrale Grundlage ist die konzeptuelle Unterscheidung von Englisch als Nationalbzw. Kultursprache (English as a Native Language) und Englisch als Lingua franca (ELF). Diese beiden Ausprägungen des Englischen werden von unterschiedlichen Sprechergruppen in unterschiedlichen Anwendungssituationen in je spezifischen Funktionen genutzt. Sprecher des Englischen als Nationalsprache orientieren sich dabei an etablierten sprachlich-diskursiven Normen und Konventionen. Aus der Warte der ELF-Forschung sind dies nicht die Normen und Konventionen, an denen sich ELF-Sprecher orientieren (müssen). An welchen Kriterien sich ELF-Kommunikation ausrichtet, ist eine offene Frage und Gegenstand aktueller Forschungsbemühungen (vgl. Seidlhofer 2001; Seidlhofer et al. 2006). Auch die Loslösung von der defizitären Modellierung der Sprecher als lebenslange learners, wie sie in der Zweitsprachenerwerbsforschung (Second Language Acquisition) üblich ist, hin zur Neukonzeptualisierung als users und damit als potentielle change agents von Sprache (Brutt-Griffler 2002) hat sich in der ELF-Forschung weitgehend durchgesetzt. Einher geht damit in der Regel eine Neufassung weiterer Begrifflichkeiten wie beispielsweise innovations bzw. variants an Stelle von errors (Cogo & Dewey 2006). Zur Verdeutlichung und Legitimation des grundsätzlichen Neuansatzes der ELF-Forschung war die kategorische Abgrenzung der Konzepte Lerner vs. Sprecher/ Anwender sicherlich hilfreich. Sie erinnert an den Kampf um Anerkennung, den die New Englishes bzw. Outer Circle Englishes inzwischen weitgehend gewonnen haben (vgl. Jenkins 2006: 162) 6 . Empirisch ist von der ELF-Forschung nun zu überprüfen, inwieweit die genannte Unterscheidung tragfähig ist bzw. in welchem Verhältnis Sprecher-/ Anwender- und Lerneridentitäten bei ELF-Sprechern stehen (vgl. auch Kohn 2007). Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 23 In ähnlicher Weise muss das Konzept ‘Kontext’ für ELF-Anwendungssituationen empirisch aus emischer Perspektive neu ausgelotet und in seiner Relevanz aufgewertet werden (Pölzl & Seidlhofer 2006, vgl. auch Leung 2005). Die in Pölzl & Seidlhofer (2006) aufgeworfenen Fragen, wie kommunikative Kompetenz in ELF-Situationen zu definieren ist und was aus der Innenperspektive der Beteiligten ‘kommunikativen Erfolg’ und ‘Angemessenheit’ (appropriacy) ausmacht, müssen dringend weiter eruiert werden. Fest steht, dass eine Reihe von ENL-Normen in der ELF-Praxis weitgehend bedeutungslos wird. Weitere Konzepte, die angesichts veränderter (Sprachgebrauchs-)Bedingungen neu gedacht werden müssen, sind beispielsweise Sprachbzw. Sprechergemeinschaft (speech community) und Varietät (variety) (vgl. Seidlhofer 2007). Es ist wenig erkenntnisfördernd, wenn tradierte Konzepte samt der entsprechenden Kriterien an ein modernes Phänomen angelegt werden und dann der Schluss gezogen wird, wie dies Mollin (2006) und Gnutzmann (2007: 326) tun, Euro-English bzw. Englisch als Lingua franca könne nicht der Status einer Second Language-Varietät zugeschrieben werden bzw. eine ELF-Sprechergemeinschaft gebe es nicht. ELF ist eine empirische - auch soziale - Realität, und für Millionen von Sprechern ist der kommunikative Umgang mit den unterschiedlichsten Ausprägungen des Englischen ‘a fact of life’. Dieser Tatsache sollte auch die anglistische Sprachwissenschaft unerschrockener ins Auge sehen. Seidlhofer (2007: 314) schlägt vor, Varietät hinsichtlich ELF stärker mit dem Fokus auf Gebrauch (use), d.h. stärker im Sinne von Register denn Dialekt zu denken (vgl. Widdowson 1997). Ein solcher Vorschlag sollte allerdings nicht dazu führen, ELF funktional verengt zu fassen und dabei die Person des Sprechers bzw. der Sprecherin aus dem Blick zu verlieren. Geographische und soziale Faktoren spielen auch beim ELF-Gebrauch, wenn auch in anderer Weise als bei Inner Circle und Outer Circle Englishes, eine zentrale Rolle. Hinsichtlich der ELF-Sprechergruppen wird vielerorts das Wenger’sche (Wenger 1998) Konzept der community of practice diskutiert. Die Praxisgemeinschaft (community of practice) beschreibt eine Ebene der sozialen Organisation, auf der Menschen - am selben Ort oder virtuell vernetzt - gemeinsam an einer Sache arbeiten, kontinuierlich interagieren und dabei miteinander und voneinander lernen. Diese Interaktion (mutual engagement) ist durch eine gemeinsame Aufgabe im weitesten Sinne (jointly negotiated enterprise) motiviert, welche mit Hilfe eines gemeinsamen sowohl sprachlichen als auch nicht-sprachlichen Repertoires (shared repertoire) ausgehandelt wird (vgl. Wenger 1998: 72ff.). Als Alternativkonzept für die Sprachgemeinschaft (speech community) ist das Konzept der community of practice als “mid-level category” (Wenger 1998: 174) für die Gesamtgruppe der ELF-Sprecher und -sprecherinnen jedoch nicht geeignet. Dies liegt zum Susanne Ehrenreich 24 einen an der unterschiedlichen Reichweite der beiden Konzepte (vgl. Meyerhoff 2002: 526). Zum anderen konstituiert allein die Nutzung des Kommunikationsmediums ELF - entgegen anderslautender Darstellungen - keine ‘gemeinsame Aufgabe’, sondern beschreibt lediglich einen wesentlichen Bestandteil des gemeinsamen kommunikativen Repertoires. Während sich also bestimmte Gruppen von ELF-Sprechern wie beispielweise internationale Projektteams gewinnbringend im Sinne der Praxisgemeinschaften (ELF-speaking communities of practice) konzeptualisieren lassen (Ehrenreich 2009b), müssen für weniger kohäsive, einmalige oder größere Konstellationen von ELF-Sprechern noch passende Alternativkonzepte gefunden werden. Ebenso wie bei der Beschreibung der Outer Circle Englishes ist auch bei der Beschreibung von Englisch als Lingua franca Raum für Variation. Eine der häufigsten Fehlinterpretationen der Ziele der ELF-Forschung ist die Auffassung, dieser gehe es um den Versuch, einen (präskriptiven) Mono- Standard zu identifizieren und kodifizieren, gepaart ist diese Sichtweise häufig mit dem Vorwurf, die Plurizentrizität der Sprache werde von ELF- Forschenden ignoriert. Interessanterweise wird dieser Einwand nicht selten von Outer Circle bzw. World Englishes-Experten vorgebracht (vgl. Y. Kachru & Smith 2008: 3f.) In der ELF-Forschung selbst wird die den Lingua Franca Englishes inhärente Variationsvielfalt, im formalen und im funktionalen Sinne, nicht in Frage gestellt. Entsprechende Aussagen werden begrifflich gefasst als Heterogenität und Diversität (heterogeneity and diversity, Canagarajah 2006), Flexibilität (flexibility, Dewey 2007b) oder in der Pluralform Englishes (Jenkins 2006; Cogo & Dewey 2006). Im Blick auf die didaktische Übersetzung dieser und weiterer Konzepte ist noch viel zu tun, da wie oben ausgeführt Philologen und ELT professionals dem skeptisch begegnen, was für ELF-Sprecher beispielsweise in der internationalen Wirtschaft das täglich Brot ist. Die gefühlte Diskrepanz zwischen den einzelnen Sprechergruppen, die am Anfang meines Forschungsprojekts stand und dieses ursprünglich motivierte, kann nach Abschluss der Datenerhebung und einem ersten Auswertungsdurchgang (s. Abschnitt 4) als ein wichtiges Ergebnis empirisch untermauert und damit bestätigt werden. 3. Forschungsdesign und -vorgehen Im Folgenden werden die Forschungsfragen meines Projektes kurz vorgestellt, anschließend folgen einige Ausführungen zum Feldzugang und zur Datenerhebung. Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 25 3.1 Forschungsfragen Zu Beginn des Beitrags war die Zielsetzung meiner Studie “Englisch in internationalen Unternehmen” schon kurz genannt worden. Die zentrale Forschungsfrage, die die Untersuchung zu beantworten sucht, lautet wie folgt (vgl. Ehrenreich 2005): 1. Welche Auswirkungen hat der Gebrauch des Englischen als Lingua franca in der internationalen Kommunikation in deutschen Unternehmen auf dessen Anwender und deren Selbstverständnis? Diese Frage zielt zum einen auf eine Phänomenologie und diskursanalytische Beschreibung internationaler ELF-Kommunikation in Unternehmen ab: In welchen Kommunikationssituationen kommt Englisch als Lingua franca zur Anwendung, welche Merkmale weisen diese Anwendungssituationen auf und nach welchen Prinzipien funktionieren sie? (Beteiligte an den communities of practice, Kriterien zur Sprachenwahl, Rollenzuweisungen, Machtverhältnisse; Vielfalt und Merkmale der Textsorten, Analyse authentischer Text- und Gesprächsdaten) Wie definieren ELF-Anwender “erfolgreiche ELF-Kommunikation”? Zum anderen ist das Ziel eine ‘dichte Beschreibung’ des Selbstverständnisses von ELF-Anwendern: Wer sind die ELF-Anwender und -Anwenderinnen auf der Führungsebene deutscher Unternehmen? Welche Ausbildungs-, Berufs- und Sprachlernbiographien haben sie, wodurch zeichnet sich ihre Einstellung zu Englisch bzw. zu Englisch als Lingua franca aus? Wie hoch ist der Frauenanteil in den ELF-communities of practice? Wie erleben einzelne Personen ELF-Kommunikation bzw. die Notwendigkeit der ELF-Kommunikation im beruflichen Alltag? Welche Erfahrungen machen sie dabei? Welche persönlichen, sprachlichen, kulturellen, unternehmensorganisatorischen und -politischen sowie karrieretechnischen Aspekte spielen in den subjektiven Bewertungen eine Rolle? Welche Ambivalenzen ergeben sich? Welche Strategien kommen zum Tragen? Ist aufgrund der Datenbasis eine Clusterbildung bzw. Profilerstellung von “beruflich erfolgreichen ELF-Anwendern” möglich? Welche Charakteristika weisen diese auf? Qualitativ-explorative Forschungsvorhaben bringen es mit sich, dass ursprünglich geplante Forschungsideen und -fragen adaptiert, modifiziert oder gar aufgegeben werden müssen. Modifikationen dieser Art waren auch bei meiner Untersuchung notwendig. So kann der ursprünglich vorgesehenen zweiten Forschungsfrage erst in der Folge der aktuellen Studie nachgegangen werden: 2. Wie lässt sich die Ausbildung eines metapragmatischen Bewusstseins bzw. die Entwicklung pragmatischer Kompetenz in der ELF-Kommunikation im Kontext eines Unternehmens der Privatwirtschaft methodisch im Längsschnitt erfassen? Susanne Ehrenreich 26 Eine ursprünglich geplante dritte, gender-kritische Frage war allein dadurch hinfällig geworden, dass in den beiden von mir untersuchten, technologieorientierten Unternehmen auf den obersten Managementebenen quasi keine Frauen vertreten sind: 3. Welche Einsichten ergeben sich aus einer gender-kritischen Perspektive auf die Bestandsaufnahme und Analyse der ELF-Kommunikation von Führungskräften in Unternehmen? Sind bzw. in welchen Positionen und Rollen sind Frauen vertreten? Auf welche Weise erfolgen männliche und weibliche Identitätskonstruktionen in beruflichen ELF-Kontexten? Lassen sich geschlechterspezifische gesprächsstilistische Unterschiede (genderlect) in der ELF-Kommunikation beobachten? Welche Faktoren sind hier am Werk? 3.2 Feldzugang Der Feldzugang zu einem Wirtschaftsunternehmen ist keine einfache Sache (vgl. Charles 2007; Yunick 2006). Nicht selten werden Untersuchungsvorhaben angesichts dieser Herausforderung modifiziert (Vollstedt 2002), häufig finden sich in Forschungsberichten Aussagen wie “I was lucky enough…” (Nickerson 2007 u.v.m.). In den meisten Fällen gelingt der Zugang über eine Schlüsselperson aus dem Verwandten- oder Bekanntenkreis (vgl. Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris 1997; McCarthy & Handford 2004; Koester 2006 u.a.). Dies war auch bei mir der Fall. Durch entsprechende Schlüsselpersonen bot sich mir die Möglichkeit, in zwei global agierenden Unternehmen mit Stammsitz in Deutschland Daten zu erheben. Das erste Unternehmen (hier: TechComp) ist ein Technologiekonzern mit einer Belegschaft von ca. 12.000 Mitarbeitern an insgesamt 60 Standorten in mehr als 25 Ländern auf allen Kontinenten. Das zweite Unternehmen ist ein führender Automobilkonzern mit weltweit über 350.000 Mitarbeitern. Das erste Unternehmen bildet den Schwerpunkt meiner Untersuchung, die Daten des zweiten Unternehmens werden in späteren Darstellungen vergleichend herangezogen. 3.3 Datenerhebungsinstrumente und Datenerhebung Als Datenerhebungsinstrumente wurden qualitative Interviews, Feldbeobachtungen inklusive des shadowing sowie Aufnahmen von Sprachdaten eingesetzt. Durch einen solchen mehrmethodischen Zugriff war die Möglichkeit gegeben, die Akteure (users of English) selbst zu Wort kommen zu lassen, sie in ihrer konkreten Kommunikationstätigkeit zu beobachten sowie authentische Business-Kommunikationssituationen aufzuzeichnen. Im Prozess der Datenerhebung in einem ‘studying up’-setting (Nader 1988) sind von der Linguistin vor allem Flexibilität und Anpassungsvermögen Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 27 gefordert. Einzelne Interviewtermine wurden bis zu fünf Mal verschoben. In der konkreten Interviewbzw. Beobachtungssituation war eine Balance zu schaffen zwischen der Betonung der eigenen Professionalität und einer möglichst unaufdringlichen Konzentration auf die Interviewpartner bzw. die Beobachtungssituation (vgl. dazu auch Welch et al. 2002). Folgende Datensätze liegen vor: - 28 qualitative Interviews mit Topmanagern (Vorstand, Geschäftsführung, oberste Führungsebenen) - Feldbeobachtungsnotizen für 6 Meetings (bis zu 10 Nationen aus 3 Kontinenten) - Notizen für 2 Tage Shadowing und 1 Geschäftsessen - Aufnahmen von 3 Telefonkonferenzen, 4 Telefonaten und 2 Besprechungen (bis zu 4 Nationen aus 3 Kontinenten), transkribiert nach VOICE Transcription Conventions 2.1. 4. Ausgewählte Zwischenergebnisse im Überblick Englisch ist ein wichtiges Thema im Unternehmen, das viele bewegt, das aber aus Zeitgründen wenig diskutiert wird (vgl. Kleinberger-Günther 2003: 91). Alle Beteiligten hatten schon bei der Terminvereinbarung und später in den Interviews viel dazu zu sagen. Die Rückmeldung lautete einhellig, man sei dankbar für die Gelegenheit gewesen, sich Zeit für dieses Thema zu nehmen und einmal strukturiert die eigenen Gedanken dazu zu formulieren. Der folgende Überblick gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Zunächst werden Beobachtungen zur Rolle und Funktion des Englischen als Lingua franca im Unternehmen TechComp dargestellt, im zweiten Teil werden einige der vorläufigen Ergebnisse dieser Studie in Bezug zur bisherigen ELF-Forschung gesetzt. 4.1 Englisch in internationalen Unternehmen - Beispiel TechComp Wer spricht mit wem welches Englisch? Die Situation bei TechComp ist durch eine hohe sprachliche Pluralität gekennzeichnet. Der Selbsteinschätzung der Befragten zufolge beträgt der Anteil der englischsprachigen Kommunikation, an der ausschließlich nichtmuttersprachliche Englischsprecher beteiligt sind, bis zu 70 Prozent. Dies bringt es mit sich, dass von allen Beteiligten - Führungskräften und Mitarbeitern - eine ausgesprochen hohe Kompetenz in World bzw. Lingua Franca Englishes gefordert wird. Diese Kompetenz bezieht sich nicht nur Susanne Ehrenreich 28 auf verschiedene geopolitische und funktionale Ausprägungen des Englischen (vg. Kachru 1982/ 92; McArthur 1998), sondern auch auf die individuell sehr unterschiedlichen Sprachniveaus der einzelnen Gesprächspartner. Als ein Beispiel sei eine Telefonkonferenz genannt, an der Teilnehmer aus China, Deutschland und USA beteiligt waren. Interessanterweise wird von vielen Interviewpartnern auf die Frage, welches Englisch ihnen am meisten Verständnisschwierigkeiten bereitet, indisches Englisch genannt. Am einfachsten zu verstehen sei, so die Meinung der deutschen Interviewpartner, das Englisch der deutschen Kollegen. Die Notwendigkeit zur Kommunikation auf Englisch besteht auf fast allen hierarchischen Ebenen des Unternehmens, wobei diese sprachlich-kommunikative Herausforderung sehr unterschiedlich gemeistert wird. Ohne allzu stark zu verallgemeinern, lässt sich als Tendenz feststellen, dass die Kommunikationsfähigkeit im Englischen im oberen Management weitgehend gut ausgebaut ist, schließlich sind die Vertreter der oberen Managementebenen auch in ihren jeweiligen Muttersprachen in der Regel hervorragende Kommunikatoren. Bei manchen Projektmitarbeitern allerdings sind die Sprach- und Kommunikationskompetenzen ausbaufähig. Im Zuge der Beobachtungen manifestierte sich diese Tendenz darin, dass international besetzte Besprechungen und Versammlungen des Managements nahezu durchgängig auf Englisch durchgeführt werden konnten, in manchen internationalen Projektbesprechungen hingegen, je nach Hierarchiestufe und Funktion der Teilnehmer, zum Teil häufig auf die Muttersprachen zurückgegriffen wurde. Dieser Rückgriff auf die Muttersprache kann jeweils unterschiedliche Gründe haben. Defizite in der Beherrschung der englischen Sprache sind ein Grund. In manchen Konstellationen kann es eine Frage der Motivation sein. So zum Beispiel in einer Runde, in der fünfzehn Deutsche (sieben Repräsentanten des Kunden, acht Repräsentanten der Firma TechComp), eine Chinesin (TechComp China) und zwei Amerikaner (Tech- Comp USA) zusammensaßen, die Chinesin und die Amerikaner aber lediglich als Zuhörer fungierten, da der Diskussionsgegenstand hauptsächlich zwischen den beiden deutschsprachigen Parteien auszuhandeln war. Auch Zeitdruck spielt eine Rolle. Für die meisten Beteiligten steht außer Frage, dass der Informationsaustausch in der eigenen Muttersprache einfach schneller vonstatten geht. Englisch ist als “tool” (so die Wortwahl vieler Interviewpartner) für die internationale Interaktion unabdingbar. Die “tool”-Metapher bedeutet jedoch keineswegs, dass die Verwendung des Englischen in einer reduziert instrumentalen Funktion erfolgt. Identifikatorische und soziale Aspekte spielen in ELF eine im sprachwissenschaftlichen Diskurs häufig unterschätzte Rolle. Manager wissen aus dem muttersprachlichen Kontext um den Einfluss und die Wirkungsmacht der sprachlich-diskursiven Konstruktion der eigenen Person, ihrer Funktion und des von ihnen zu verantwortenden Aufgaben- Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 29 bereichs. Es ist schließlich nicht egal, wie man sich und seinen Bereich im Unternehmen und beim Kunden - sprachlich-diskursiv - präsentiert. Auf internationalem Parkett hierbei auf ein zwar ausreichendes, aber dennoch begrenztes Repertoire zurückgreifen zu müssen, wird von einigen Befragten in bestimmten Konstellationen als einschränkend erlebt. Gleichzeitig gibt es Situationen, weniger konkurrenzorientiert und in eingespielten Teams, in denen solche Gesichtspunkte keine Rolle spielen, sondern einfach nur zügig, konzentriert und oft mit viel Humor an einer Aufgabenstellung - unter Verwendung von ELF - gearbeitet wird. Sprachmanagement und andere Sprachen Grundsätzlich herrscht in einem globalen Unternehmen wie TechComp ein pragmatischer Umgang mit Englisch vor (vgl. Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005), das Erfordernis bestimmt die Sprachwahl. In den Interviews wurde diesbezüglich wiederholt “der Eine im E-Mail-Verteiler” genannt, der eventuell kein Deutsch kann. Die ‘sprachliche Anstandsregel’ - bei Anwesenheit von Personen, die kein Deutsch sprechen, wird Englisch gesprochen - wird zumindest in der Theorie von allen hoch gehalten, in der Praxis jedoch, wie die Beobachtungen zeigen, nicht immer durchgängig umgesetzt. Ist in Situationen mündlicher Kommunikation (Besprechungen, Telefonkonferenzen, Pausen) klar erkennbar, dass alle Anwesenden (gut) Deutsch können, erfolgt die Kommunikation immer auf Deutsch. Hier unterscheidet sich Deutschland offenbar von anderen europäischen Ländern. Louhiala-Salminen (2002: 218, 234) beispielsweise beobachtete in Finnland englischsprachige Kommunikation auch ausschließlich unter Finnen. Auch wenn Englisch für die weltweite Geschäftstätigkeit unverzichtbar ist, so bleiben weitere Fremdsprachen weiterhin wichtig, so beispielsweise für die Kommunikation mit europäischen und asiatischen Kunden als Zeichen der kultursensiblen Aufmerksamkeit und selbstverständlich auch wegen des Wettbewerbsvorteils (vgl. Nickerson 2007: 353f. mit Bezug auf Vandermeeren 1999). Der multilinguale Arbeitskontext erfordert also, was weiter oben Sprachmanagement-Kompetenzen genannt wurde, d.h. nicht nur die Fähigkeit, flexibel von einer zur anderen Sprache zu wechseln, sondern auch ein Gespür dafür, wann welche Sprache angemessen ist. Bilingual, bisweilen auch multilingual ist auch der für Wirtschaftsfachsprachen typische company jargon, der sich bei TechComp typischerweise durch deutsch-englisches Code-switching und Code-mixing auszeichnet. Diese Sprachmischung wird in den Interviews häufig kritisch kommentiert, forschungsmethodologisch sind diese Kommentare jedoch primär als sozial erwünschte Reaktion auf die Linguistin einzustufen. In der Alltagspraxis erweist sich die Sprachmischung als höchst funktional und trägt in starkem Maß zu einer effizienten Kommunikation bei, insbesondere wenn es um Susanne Ehrenreich 30 unternehmensspezifische deutsche oder englische Fachbegriffe in englischbzw. deutschsprachigen Gesprächen und Besprechungen geht. Effizienz und De facto-Endonormativität Es ist eindeutig: Meist muss es schnell und unter Umständen gleichzeitig gehen, d.h. es bleibt allen Beteiligten wenig Zeit für die Sprachplanung. Dies betrifft die mündliche Kommunikation und E-Mails. Nur bei “wichtigen” schriftlichen Texten, dazu zählen offizielle E-Mails und Briefe, Verträge, Geschäftsberichte u.a. (vgl. Seidlhofer et al. 2006: 8: zu “‘prestigious’ writing”), gibt es Planungs- und Korrekturphasen. Die Rückmeldung im Alltagsgeschäft wird dabei mit Ausnahme von Verträgen in der Regel von (meist deutschen) Kollegen und Mitarbeitern eingeholt. Gängige Hilfsmittel wie Wörterbücher werden - auch hier spielt der Zeitfaktor eine entscheidende Rolle - wenig genutzt. Damit wird, was für mich als Linguistin zunächst schwer nachzuvollziehen war, sprachliche Korrektheit ein intersubjektives Konzept: ‘Was der Kollege, die Sekretärin für (sprach-)richtig hält’, ist der Maßstab. Als zentrales Kriterium für erfolgreiche und damit effiziente mündliche und schriftliche Kommunikation ergibt sich aus den Interviewaussagen vor allem die Verständlichkeit, die objektive Übereinstimmung mit der so genannten zielsprachigen Norm (amerikanischem oder britischem Englisch) spielt eine völlig nachgeordnete Rolle. Die Rolle der englischen Muttersprachler und der Zusammenhang zwischen Sprache und Kultur Muttersprachliche Mitarbeiter werden für die oben genannten “wichtigen” Texte von ihren Kollegen und Vorgesetzten gern als Ressource genutzt. Was ihre Einschätzung durch Nicht-Muttersprachler angeht, so sind diese sich weitgehend darin einig, dass englische Muttersprachler grundsätzlich im Vorteil sind. Ihnen ist die sprachlich souveräne Darstellung von Person und Inhalten - ein wichtiger Kompetenzausweis eines Managers - ohne zusätzliche (Fremd-)Sprachanstrengung möglich. Dies wird jedoch nicht ganz ohne Skepsis beobachtet. So mancher Nicht-Muttersprachler stellt sich die Frage, ob dieser sprachliche Vorteil in manchen Situationen möglicherweise dazu genutzt wird, fachliche Defizite zu überspielen. Eine mögliche Gegenstrategie besteht einem deutschen Interviewpartner zufolge darin, gegebenenfalls detaillierte technische Rückfragen zu stellen, um genau dies zu prüfen. Ob also das Verhältnis zwischen englischen Muttersprachlern und Nicht-Muttersprachlern als ein konkurrierendes oder kooperatives erlebt wird (vgl. Knapp 2002), hängt entscheidend von der jeweiligen Konstellation und Aufgabenstellung ab. Eine konkrete Rücksichtnahme auf Nicht-Mutter- Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 31 sprachler durch Anpassungen im Sprechtempo oder im Wortschatz auf Seiten englischer Muttersprachler konnte ich während meiner Beobachtungen nur selten feststellen. Soweit für mich nachvollziehbar, waren Akkommodationsstrategien dieser Art am ehesten bei Muttersprachlern mit Fremdsprachenkenntnissen zu beobachten. Auch hier gilt, dass für eine umfassende soziolinguistische Analyse dieser Art von Sprecherkonstellationen nicht nur rein sprachliche Erwägungen, sondern darüber hinaus alle für den jeweiligen Kontext maßgeblichen außersprachlichen, kontextuellen Faktoren mit einbezogen und entsprechend gewichtet werden müssen. Insgesamt und für diese Form der Sprachkontaktsituation wenig überraschend lässt sich eine Abkoppelung der englischen Sprache von der britischen und amerikanischen Soziopragmatik beobachten. Welche Relevanz sollten die entsprechenden Diskurskonventionen in einer deutsch-italienischen Interaktion auch haben? Die eigenkulturelle (z.B. deutsche) Identität wird auch in englischsprachigen Kommunikationssituationen weitgehend beibehalten (vgl. Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005). Dies äußert sich beispielsweise in der sozialen Deixis, insofern als je nach hierarchischer Zusammensetzung einer Gruppe gegebenenfalls auch in englischsprachigen Situationen die Anrede des eigenen Vorgesetzten mit Titel und Nachnamen unumgänglich ist, aber auch im Hinblick auf die kulturspezifischen Parameter der relativen Direktheit und Sachorientierung sprachlicher Äußerungen. Modifizierungen des eigenkulturell geprägten Gesprächsverhaltens finden aber durchaus statt. So zeigen die Interviewaussagen und meine Beobachtungen, dass einzelne Gruppenkonstellationen (vgl. das Konzept der communities of practice) ihre jeweils für sie als Gruppe angemessenen Diskursregeln gemeinsam aushandeln und diese sich mit der Zeit fest etablieren. Wünsche: Als wichtig erkannt und ausbaufähig Folgende Bereiche sollten in Sprachtrainings stärker berücksichtigt werden. Gewünscht wird mehr Training im Bereich des social talk, z.B. für Situationen wie Pausengespräche und Geschäftsessen. Dieser Art von Gesprächen (interactional communication) kommt laut den Interviewaussagen eine zentrale Funktion beim Aufbau des gegenseitigen Vertrauens in Geschäftsbeziehungen zu. Zum anderen wird eine Erweiterung der Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten für emotionale Abtönungen und Humor gewünscht, da insbesondere die wichtige Funktion des Humors in Besprechungen und Verhandlungen klar erkannt wird (vgl. Holmes 2007). Ebenso wichtig ist den Befragten die Fähigkeit, bestimmte Aussagen gezielt nuancieren zu können. Ein Strategientraining umfasst idealerweise auch Kommunikationsstrategien wie beispielsweise das Nachfragen, Paraphrasieren u.a. sowie Akkommodationsstrategien, d.h. eine Anpassung an sprachlich schwächere Gesprächspartner durch die Reduzierung des Sprechtempos und die Wahl Susanne Ehrenreich 32 entsprechenden Vokabulars. Dies wäre insbesondere eine Aufgabe für englische Muttersprachler. Trainiert werden sollten auch Strategien zur Einbindung stummer Besprechungsteilnehmer, die inhaltlich Wichtiges beizutragen haben, dies aufgrund ihrer realen oder gefühlten sprachlichen Defizite aber nicht tun. Die interkulturellen Gesprächskonstellationen machen außerdem kulturübergreifende gesichtswahrende Strategien zur zeitnahen und -sparenden Verständnisüberprüfung in englischsprachigen Kommunikationssituationen mit Sprechern unterschiedlicher Kompetenzniveaus erforderlich. Wenn beispielsweise auf eine Rückfrage in einer Besprechung, ob alles geklärt sei, genickt wird, später jedoch das zugesandte Material zeigt, dass im Blick auf konkrete Aufgabenstellungen erhebliche Informationslücken geblieben waren, bedeutet dies einen zusätzlichen Zeitaufwand, der reduziert werden könnte. Interkulturelle Interaktion auf Englisch zu bewältigen, stellt eine grundsätzliche Herausforderung dar. Dazu gilt es vor allem, eigenkulturelle Verhaltensweisen bewusst zu machen, sowie die Fähigkeit zu schulen, anderskulturelle Verhaltensweisen zu erkennen sowie kulturelle Diversität zu koordinieren. Weiterer Trainingsbedarf besteht beim monologischen Vortrag im Rahmen von Präsentationen auf Englisch. Befragt nach ihren konkreten Erfahrungen mit dem Englischtraining im Unternehmen zeigte sich eine relative Unzufriedenheit unter den Interviewpartnern. Offenbar müssen die Inhalte der Sprachtrainings sehr viel stärker auf die jeweiligen unternehmens-, und aufgabenspezifischen Erfordernisse abgestimmt werden. Die entscheidende Frage, die sich Führungskräfte stellen, lautet: Lohnt es sich, ein Zeitfenster für den Englischunterricht freizuhalten? Die Inhalte regulärer Lehrmaterialien sind für sie (und ihre Mitarbeiter) oft demotivierend, da diese sich nicht unmittelbar am nächsten Tag als arbeitserleichternd erweisen. Für Business-Englischtrainer bedeutet dies in der Konsequenz, dass eine spezifische Doppel-Qualifikation notwendig ist. Sie müssen etwas von der Sprache und der Sache, den unternehmensspezifischen Prozessen und der Technik, verstehen. Hier wird die allgemeine Problematik extern eingekaufter Trainings deutlich; Ähnliches gilt übrigens auch für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer. Unternehmen wiederum sollten erkennen, dass solcherart qualifizierte Trainer ihren Preis haben. Zudem sollten die (meist muttersprachlichen) Trainer die Situation ‘Englisch als Medium internationaler Kommunikation’ ernst nehmen. Für den Fokus des Unterrichts bedeutet dies, dass der Aufbau einer flexiblen Gesprächsfähigkeit wichtiger ist als das Einüben grammatikalischer Feinheiten, ebenso ist spezifisch britische oder amerikanische Idiomatik für Englisch als internationale Sprache nicht relevant. Höchst relevant ist hingegen das intensive Training des Hörverstehens unterschiedlicher regionaler Ausprägungen der World und Lingua Franca Englishes. Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 33 4.2 Erkenntnisse für die ELF-Forschung Die Sprecher In den Interviews wurden die Befragten aufgefordert, sich selbst den Kategorien Anwender/ Sprecher (user/ speaker) oder Lerner zuzuordnen. Die große Mehrheit definiert sich im Zuge dieser Selbstkategorisierung als user, einige betonten, dass sie sich zusätzlich aber auch als fortwährende Sprachenlerner sehen. Zudem unterstützen die Interview- und Beobachtungsdaten eindeutig die Konzeptualisierung dieser Sprecher als Mitglieder einzelner communities of practice. Die Beteiligten bilden Praxisgemeinschaften, die beispielsweise im Rahmen eines längerfristigen Projekts oder auch im Zuge der globalen firmeninternen Kommunikation zusammenwachsen und ein Englisch als Lingua franca-basiertes “shared repertoire” aufbauen (Wenger 1998; vgl. Poncini 2007; Seidlhofer 2007). Laut Interviewaussagen verringern sich mit zunehmender Gewöhnung aneinander die Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten in diesen internationalen Gruppen ganz erheblich. Normen, Sprachkontakt und Sprachwandel Gemessen an der englischsprachigen Kommunikation in einem stark international vernetzten Unternehmen wie TechComp ist die Ausrichtung auf den native speaker bzw. die Orientierung am britischen oder amerikanischen Englisch überholt und zielt an der globalen sprachlichen Realität vorbei. Die zielsprachige Norm ist, wie oben gezeigt, lediglich relevant bei wichtigen schriftlichen Dokumenten. Dort erhält die sprachliche Korrektheit einen symbolischen Wert (vgl. Seidlhofer et al. 2006: 8) und soll die Professionalität des Unternehmens nach außen unterstreichen. Abgesehen davon wird sprachliche Korrektheit zum intersubjektiven Konzept und ist damit de facto endonormativ ausgerichtet. Die von Sprachpuristen beklagte Korruption des Englischen (Görlach 2002) durch Nicht-Muttersprachler ist kein Thema, das international tätige Manager bewegt. Sie sind als ELF-Sprecher change agents, die kreativ und innovativ mit den ihnen verfügbaren sprachlichen Ressourcen umgehen. So kommt es zu kontaktlinguistisch motivierten unternehmensintern, teils auch branchenweit anerkannten Neuschöpfungen und Entlehnungen (in unterschiedliche Sprachrichtungen) sowie zu ad hoc gebildeten temporären Arbeitsbegriffen, auf die man sich einigt, wenn ein englischer Begriff in einer Besprechung oder Telefonkonferenz nicht verfügbar ist. Susanne Ehrenreich 34 Kommunikationsmedium, Textsorten und Mehrsprachigkeit Die Trennung von mündlichen und schriftlichen Textsorten ist bei einem Unternehmen wie TechComp weitgehend aufgehoben. Mails werden in der sprachwissenschaftlichen Forschung schon lange als Grenzfall eingestuft, auch das Format der Powerpoint-Präsentation lässt sich diesbezüglich nicht eindeutig klassifizieren. Häufig werden nicht nur beide Kommunikationsmedien, sondern auch mehrere Sprachen parallel genutzt. Nicht selten war zu beobachten, dass während eines (deutschen oder englischen) Telefonats oder in einer großen englischsprachigen Sitzung gleichzeitig (englische, deutsche oder anderssprachige) Mails und andere Dokumente gelesen oder auch verfasst wurden. Pragmatik Im Bereich der Pragmatik des Englischen als Lingua franca im Kontext eines internationalen Unternehmens müssen etliche der in der frühen ELF-Forschung angestellten Beobachtungen revidiert werden (vgl. Cogo & Dewey 2006). Missverständnisse sind nicht ausgesprochen selten (vgl. Meierkord 1996), sondern kommen durchaus vor. Ein Themenwechsel, wie er in informeller und konsensorientierter ELF-Kommunikation in solchen Situationen häufig beobachtet wird, ist in diesem Kontext jedoch keine Lösung. Auch ein Übergehen unklarer bzw. problematischer Äußerungen im Sinne des von Firth (1996) postulierten “let it pass”-Prinzips ist in lösungsorientierten Projektbesprechungen keine Option, da der jeweilige Tagesordnungspunkt geklärt werden muss. Dies impliziert aber nicht, dass gegenseitiges Verstehen in der ELF-Interaktion ein unerreichbarer Mythos bleibt (gg. House 1999). Vielmehr wird deutlich, dass in Untersuchungen zur ELF- Pragmatik kontextrelevante Informationen konzeptuell und methodisch unbedingt mit eingebunden werden müssen. Geht es in einer bestimmten Situation um das Globalverstehen oder um Detailinformation? Ist das, was ein Linguist als problematische Gesprächssequenz identifiziert, für die Beteiligten unter Umständen völlig unproblematisch und bedarf daher keiner weiteren expliziten Bearbeitung? In Ehrenreich (2009b) findet sich als Beispiel dafür ein Telefonat, in dem die beiden Gesprächspartner als Mitglieder ihrer community of practice trotz etlicher inhaltlicher Versprecher und ohne auf diese vermeintliche Kommunikationsstörung einzugehen, dennoch genau wissen, wovon sie sprechen und was jeweils gemeint ist. Dass Lingua franca-Interaktionen keine kulturneutralen Interaktionen (gg. House 1999), sondern erkennbar durch die jeweilige Herkunftskultur geprägt sind (vgl. Cogo & Dewey 2006; Pölzl & Seidlhofer 2006), ließ sich auch in TechComp beobachten. Viele der deutschen Beteiligten legen in der englischsprachigen Kommunikation ganz eindeutig ein deutsches Diskurs- Lingua Franca Englishes in internationalen Unternehmen 35 verhalten an den Tag. Einer der Befragten formulierte pointiert, dass er hier auch keinen grundsätzlichen Handlungsbedarf sehe, die Kunden kauften schließlich ganz bewusst das Gesamtpaket ‘deutsche Ingenieursleistung’ ein mit allem, was an Zuverlässigkeit, Pünktlichkeit etc. dazu gehört. Anstatt ELF-Sprechern pragmatische bzw. Diskurskompetenz nun einfach abzusprechen (vgl. “lack of pragmatic fluency”, House 1999: 85), gilt es zu erforschen, welches Diskursverhalten in welchen konkreten ELF-Situationen jeweils als kontextangemessen (appropriate) erachtet wird und wie sich dieses sprachlich-kommunikativ manifestiert (vgl. Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005). Wortschatz und Grammatik des Englischen als Lingua franca Die bislang vorliegenden Ergebnisse im Bereich der ELF-Lexikogrammatik werden von meiner Untersuchung weitgehend unterstützt. Grammatikalische Korrektheit, exonormativ und an der schriftsprachlichen Hochsprache ausgerichtet, spielt in der mündlichen und einem Großteil der schriftlichen englischsprachigen internationalen Wirtschaftskommunikation eine geringe Rolle (vgl. who/ which, Präpositionen u.a., vgl. Seidlhofer 2004). Es bestätigt sich, dass eine ausgeprägt idiomatische, d.h. gewählte und anspruchsvolle amerikanisch- oder britisch-englische Ausdrucksweise (unilateral idiomaticity) die gegenseitige Verständigung erschwert (vgl. Seidlhofer 2004). Mit dieser Begründung wurde von den Befragten häufig das britische Englisch als ein weiteres Beispiel für ein besonders schwer verständliches Englisch genannt. 4.3 Praxisbezogene Implikationen und eine offene Frage Gemessen an den sprachlich-kommunikativen Erfordernissen der internationalen Wirtschaft erscheint eine Diskussion über die Zielsetzung des schulischen Englischunterrichts mehr als überfällig. Jenseits der Alternative ‘Shakespeare-Abitur’ oder ‘interkulturelle Gesprächsfähigkeit’ geht es darum, die Englischlehrerbildung und damit mittelfristig den Englischunterricht durch einen zusätzlichen Fokus auf World Englishes bzw. Lingua Franca Englishes zu ergänzen. Insgesamt muss davon ausgegangen werden, dass für die Mehrzahl der schulischen und nachschulischen Lerner eine ausschließliche Ausrichtung des Englischunterrichts an der britischen und amerikanischen Sprache und Kultur nicht mehr zeitgemäß ist (vgl. Seidlhofer 2003, 2007). Auch wenn es für konkrete methodische Empfehlungen noch zu früh ist, konsensfähig könnten die zwei folgenden Forderungen sein: Schulung der Fähigkeit, sich unter Einsatz verschiedener sprachlicher Mittel und Strategien in der Kommunikation mit internationalen Gesprächspartnern ver- Susanne Ehrenreich 36 ständlich zu machen (vgl. Kohn 2007; Smith 1987; Seidlhofer in Schmundt 2008) und Training des Hörverstehens möglichst vieler der weltweit gesprochenen Englishes. Die erste Forderung ist eine umfassende und hat als Voraussetzung, dass Englischlehrkräfte im Zuge ihrer Ausbildung ein Bewusstsein für die Vielfalt und Komplexität englischsprachiger Lingua franca-Kommunikation entwickeln, die zweite kann unmittelbar umgesetzt werden. Abschließend soll mit Bezug auf meine dritte Forschungsfrage noch eine offene Frage formuliert werden, die für die gender-aufmerksame Studien- und Berufsberatung relevant ist: Weshalb finden sich in dem kommunikationsintensiven Bereich des international tätigen Managements in Industrie und Wirtschaft keine bzw. kaum Frauen? Es ist wünschenswert, dass junge Frauen, die ‘etwas mit Sprachen’ zu tun haben wollen, nicht nur den sprachbezogenen Dienstleistungsbereich vor Augen haben, sondern auch Berufe, in denen die inhaltsbezogene (z.B. technikbezogene) internationale Kommunikation einen Großteil des Arbeitsalltags ausmacht. 5. Ausblick Der Blick in die Wirtschaft lohnt sich für die englische Sprachwissenschaft und die ELF-Forschung. Insbesondere was Spracheinstellungen betrifft, konnten durch meine Studie bisherige Annahmen und erste Forschungsergebnisse überprüft und ergänzt werden. Was Jenkins (2007) bei ihrer Untersuchungsgruppe der Englischlehrkräfte vermutete, aber nicht bestätigt fand, konnte für die communities of practice der ELF-Sprecher in der Wirtschaft bestätigt werden. “Feeling good” in ELF (vgl. Jenkins 2007: 122) ist möglich und wurde von mir beobachtet - unter Managern in der internationalen Wirtschaft. Angewandte Linguistik und Englischdidaktik sind gefordert. 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AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen New ways of investigating morphological productivity 1 Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen The potential of a word-formation pattern to be exploited in the creation of new words is seen to be one of the defining characteristics of morphological productivity. However, most measures of morphological productivity as applied in recent studies deal with words attested in dictionaries and corpora and thus per definitionem with actual words. The present paper shows different approaches to the investigation of morphological productivity by presenting results from two recent studies on the productivity of English word-formation patterns in which the aspect of potentiality of word-formation was tested. These include a coinage test via an online survey and the exploitation of the World Wide Web to test the ratio of potential versus actual new creations. Although both studies presented therefore deal with expressive morphology and so-called creative coinages, which are frequently believed to be irrelevant for the investigation of morphological productivity, this contribution illustrates that such formations are decisive in gaining a deeper understanding of the multi-layered and complex phenomenon of morphological productivity. KEYWORDS: morphological productivity, word-formation, creativity, elicitation experiments, the Web as a corpus, verbal prefixation, noun-derivation 1. Introduction: on the notion of morphological productivity The question of productivity has always been considered a difficult one for modern linguistic theories in general, as, for example, pointed out by Aronoff (1980: 71), who claims it to have frequently been swept under some conve- Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 44 nient rug. Nevertheless, the question of productivity has become one of the central empirical problems for theories of word-formation, which has led Bauer to point out that “despite its importance, it is still poorly understood” (2003: 70). Therefore, it may not come as a surprise that literature on wordformation abounds with varied definitions of productivity. To our knowledge, the most exhaustive summary of possible definitions of productivity is provided by Rainer (1987: 188-190), taken up by Bauer (2001: 25). Most of these definitions take productivity as a quantitative notion in that they acknowledge the existence of a continuum, as for instance in Aronoff and Anshen’s (1998: 242-43) “the extent to which a particular affix is likely to be used in the production of new words in the language. On this view, productivity is a probabilistic continuum that predicts the use of potential words.” Thus, at the one end of this continuum, we find completely unproductive patterns, while on the other end, we find highly productive patterns with a number of cases ranging in-between (see also Kettemann 1988: 13). As a logical consequence, various ways of measuring the productivity of a particular pattern have also been proposed. However, most of these measures deal with words attested in dictionaries or corpora, i.e. they tell us, as Romaine (1983: 181) puts it, “which words are actual, but not which words are possible.” On the one hand, this means that measures of productivity depend to a large degree on the quality and size of the data base. On the other hand, this also means that these measures give no evidence of the potential of a word-formation pattern to be exploited in the creation of new words. This, however, is a serious flaw, as potentiality is one of the defining features of morphological productivity, as shown, for example, in the definition by Aronoff and Anshen (1998) above or in the following one by Plag (2006: 127): “The productivity of a word-formation process can be defined as its general potential to be used to create new words and as the degree to which this potential is exploited by the speakers.” In the present paper, we will try to remedy this by presenting results from two recent studies (Mühleisen 2006, Schröder 2008a) on the productivity of English word-formation patterns, in which the aspect of potentiality of wordformation was tested. These include a coinage test via an online survey and the exploitation of the World Wide Web to test the ratio of potential versus actual new creations. Before introducing these studies in more detail, we will first give a short overview on established and widely applied methods of measuring productivity. New way of investigating morphological productivity 45 2. Established methods of measuring productivity In the relevant literature, three principal ways of measuring productivity have been established. These measures are based on dictionary listings, on the analysis of corpora, or on psychological tests of native speakers’ intuition, i.e., elicitation tests (cf. Bolozky 1999; Plag 1999, on different types of productivity measurements, see Risto-Donevic 1999: 19-26). 2.1 Dictionary-based approaches Dictionaries can be used in a number of ways to identify the productivity of a morphological process. For example, dictionaries which record new words only, such as the Oxford Dictionary of New Words (Knowles and Elliott 1997), can be employed to investigate whether a word-formation rule is still active. One can also search the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for all very recent neologisms created on the basis of such a rule. In addition, one can compare the number of neologisms created using a particular word-formation rule during various periods of historical time and thus identify different degrees of productivity of the same rule over the course of time. However, one of the greatest flaws of dictionary-based investigations of productivity is that the quality of the results depends on the quality of the lexicographers’ work. In addition, dictionaries do not necessarily represent actual usage and may be influenced more by the linguistic norm rather than the linguistic system (cf. Bauer 2000: 838). As Booij puts it: “A dictionary is always lagging behind with respect to the use of productive morphological patterns because it only registers […] established words. Morphological productivity manifests itself most clearly in the appearance of complex words that never make it to the dictionary” (Booij 2005: 69). Most importantly, however, any dictionary can only list actual words. Dictionary-based approaches to productivity are therefore unable to include the aspect of potentiality to morphological productivity, which is considered central to the definition of productivity (see e.g. the definition by Plag 2006 given above). The same disadvantage also applies to the second type of data-base, viz. large computer corpora. 2.2 Corpus-based approaches The corpus-based approach has become increasingly popular for measuring morphological productivity. As Baayen and Lieber point out, the advantages of corpora over dictionary lists are threefold: firstly, corpora generally contain transparent words which are typically neglected in dictionaries; secondly, corpora contain only words actually used in naturally occurring speech whereas dictionaries may list words not attested in actual speech; thirdly, Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 46 corpora provide information on the frequency of words (Baayen and Lieber 1991: 803). There are a number of ways in which corpora can be used to measure productivity. The simplest method is to establish type or token frequencies: “the more words with some affix, the more productive the affix” (Baayen and Lieber 1991: 802). However, these types of rather unsophisticated measurement can, at best, only be used as a preliminary indicator of actual usage, because such a simple count may often be principally a reflection of past usage. Thus, a corpus, similarly to a dictionary, can only contain ‘existing words’ and will thus, theoretically, only yield results on the past productivity of word-formation patterns. However, a number of statistical methods developed by Baayen and his collaborators enable us to use corpora to compute “the probability of encountering a newly formed word of the relevant morphological category” (Plag 2000: 65; for further sources, see References). We need not discuss these statistical methods in detail, as they have been widely discussed and applied in e.g. Plag (1999), Scheible (2005) and Schröder (2007, 2008a). But it is worth mentioning that all of Baayen’s formulae have been subjected to severe criticism, especially by van Marle (e.g. van Marle 1992), although even he acknowledges that “[n]o one seriously involved in the study of morphological productivity can afford to leave Baayen’s work unread” (van Marle 1992: 152). 2.3 Elicitation tests Finally, elicitation tests can actually test the aspect of potentiality in wordformation and have therefore been described as a useful supplement to the other types of productivity measurement (e.g. Schröder 2008a: 41). There are two types of elicitation experiments: firstly, informants can be asked to judge the acceptability of existing or non-existing complex forms; or secondly, they can be induced to create words according to given word-formation rules. In the latter, the informants list all the words following a particular word-formation pattern they can think of. Acceptability experiments with novel or rare words, intended to reveal the potential of a given word-formation rule, have been conducted, for instance, by Aronoff (1980), Romaine (1983), Berman (1987), and Scheible (2005). To our knowledge, the only studies to include a coinage experiment (besides Schröder 2008a) are Anshen and Aronoff (1988) and Bolozky (1999). Given that elicitation tests are the only type of established productivity measurement which can actually test the aspect of potentiality in wordformation, it seems surprising that these tests are rarely carried out in studies on morphological productivity. In our discussion of new methods of investigating morphological productivity we will therefore pay special atten- New way of investigating morphological productivity 47 tion to this method by introducing Schröder (2008a), a study on the morphological productivity of verbal prefixation in English, in which new types of elicitation tests have been applied. 3. New methods of investigating morphological productivity 3.1 Schröder (2008a): On the productivity of verbal prefixation in English This study is part of a larger investigation on verbal prefixation in English. The verbs investigated are of the type upgrade (1920), overachieve (1953), underperform (1976) and download (1989), all of which are comparatively recent creations as the first citation dates in the OED show. Given that verbal prefixation is considered to be unproductive in Modern English, these verbs - most of which were created in the second half of the last century - may come as a surprise. According to Mair, these neologism seem to suggest “that this particular word-formation process might […] be making a comeback after centuries of decline” (Mair 2006: 63), and this is what the study investigates: Do creations such as these indicate an increase of productivity of a word-formation pattern which is considered to be old and unproductive? The study consists of altogether three different types of empirical investigation; the first two apply the established methods presented in section 2 above. However, since this paper is concerned with the more innovative and recent types of investigations of morphological productivity, only the third kind will be featured here (for a discussion of the other two types of investigation, see e.g. Schröder 2007, 2008a, 2008b). This third part of the study consists of elicitation tests, both acceptability tests and coinage tests. The design of these tests differs considerably from that of previous studies (e.g. Aronoff 1980, Aronoff and Schvanefeld 1978) in that it was conducted online and thus made accessible to a large number and a wide variety of native and non-native speakers of English. The acceptability tests in Schröder (2008a) still resemble those carried out in earlier studies (e.g. Anshen and Aronoff 1989, Aronoff and Schvanefeld 1978), while the coinage tests apply a new approach: in earlier, comparable experiments (e.g. Anshen and Aronoff 1988) informants had been asked to merely reproduce as many existing words as they could. In Schröder 2008a, however, the informants were asked to invent up to five new words with the prefixes overand underand to give a short explanation of their intended meanings (see reproduction of the relevant part of the questionnaire in the Appendix). 189 informants chose to participate in this experiment. Of these 189, 146 (77.3%) were native and 43 (22.7%) non-native speakers of English. On Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 48 average, the informants each proposed 3.81 words beginning with underand 3.57 words beginning with over-, and thus altogether, 727 possible words beginning with underand 673 overwere proposed during the experiment. Of these proposed words, verbs not occurring in the 2002 version of the OED on CD-ROM were regarded as ‘new’. In addition, all proposed words for which their creator did not provide a definition or which were not given in the form required (some informants proposed participles or nouns instead of infinitives) were eliminated from the final list, as were verbs which were coincidentally given several times with the same definitions by several informants. Still, altogether 425 new words with the prefix overand 502 with the prefix underwere created during the experiment, and we believe that this number suggests that these two prefixes can indeed be considered to be productive in Modern English. The results of this experiment also show that the two prefixes were freely combined both with Germanic (e.g. under-sit, over-spit) and Latinate/ Romance bases (e.g. under-acquire, over-criticize), with no clear preference for either. In addition, a variety of morphological rules seem to have been applied in the coining of neologisms with the two prefixes under consideration, as the following list shows: 1. Prefix + simple verb: e.g.: to under-sit (‘to sit under’); to over-spit (‘to spit on something’); to under-acquire (‘to fail to meet acceptable levels of acquisition’); to over-acquire (‘to acquire too much’); 2. Prefix + complex verb: e.g.: to under-acclimatize (‘to not adjust to the weather enough’); to over-brighten (‘to make too bright’); to under-outdo (‘to outperform others by a less-than-expected margin’), to over-download (‘to download (from the Internet) more than your limit’), under-appraise (‘to set the value of a property or item too low’); to over-disappear (‘to disappear without a trace’); to underempower (‘to give somebody inadequate authority’); 3. Prefix+ zero-derived verb: e.g.: to under-table (‘to be put under a table’); to over-fortnight (‘to spend 14 days in a specified place’); to under-brown (‘to fail to cook something long enough to achieve a desired degree of brownness’); to overfull (‘to put a lot of things in a small place’) 4. Other: e.g. to over-ambiguate (‘to turn a puzzle into a puzzlement’); to undermilkwood (‘digging up Dylan’); to under-ling (‘to treat someone as if they were inferior to you’), to under-cover (‘to work for the police in a secret way’) One might even argue that the verbs given as pattern 3 are actually examples of pattern 2, as to brown, to full and to green as zero-derived verbs can certainly be considered to be morphologically complex. Thus, from the analysis of the elicited neologisms one thing becomes clear: there are a number of verbs for which several patterns could be assumed or which defy any classification and hence have to be classified as ‘other’ in the list above. In addition, it is frequently impossible to decide for one of the available patterns with any certainty. New way of investigating morphological productivity 49 Finally, whether the informants actually employed any of the morphological rules listed above in the coining of the possible words remains subject of speculation. In fact, there are a number of possible words which have very clearly been created in analogy to existing verbs. Thus, to undereat (‘to diet’, ‘to not eat enough’) is very likely to be formed on the model of to overeat (‘to eat too much’) attested in the OED. That the formations are cases of analogy is sometimes made explicit by the informants themselves: for instance in the case of to under-exaggerate, which is defined as ‘opposite of to overexaggerate’ and to over-define, which is defined as ‘to define with more detail than necessary, antonym of underdefine,’ although the latter is not attested in the OED. Sometimes analogical coining is joined by conversion, as for example in to undercare (‘to care less than it should be’), perhaps built on the model of overcare, n. (‘undue or excessive care’), attested in the OED. The verb to overcare (‘to care too much’) is given by another informant. But analogical coinings are not always based on the semantic counterpart with the opposite prefix; they may also be formed according to the semantics of another, similar verb. Thus, to over-groom (‘to attend so assiduously to one’s personal grooming as to invite suspicion or comment’) may have been coined on the model of to overdress, to over-guest (‘to invite too many guests’) on that of to overbook, and to over-nod (‘to sleep too late, particularly of a morning’) and to over-slumber (‘to sleep too much in a slumbersome way’) on to oversleep. Again, informants sometimes explicitly stated that this strategy had been applied in forming the possible words, as, for example, in to over-respond, for which the informant gives as the intended meaning: ‘like to overreact.’ In the literature, the first type of analogical coining is usually referred to as “affix-substitution” (van Marle 1985: 256), the second type of this process could then be referred to as ‘base-substitution’. The neologisms discussed here illustrate that various morphological processes were applied in the coining of neologisms. This can be taken as an indication that speakers do not analyse these words into their morphemes or according to morphological rules, but rather on the basis of their form, i.e. the existence of one of the prefixes and the resulting word class. In addition, they show that analogical coining might be less marginal than assumed. This is why, as a result of the analysis of the elicitation test in Schröder (2008a), a morphological network approach is proposed to analyse the structure of morphologically complex words: Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 50 Figure 1: Illustration of two interlinked morphological networks (taken from Schröder 2008a: 232) The advantage of such an approach is that no one rule needs to be chosen over another as an explanation for a particular complex form. This resolves the problem that, as already mentioned, there are a number of verbs for which several patterns could be assumed. This elicitation test was designed to investigate the potentiality of wordformation patterns in an experimental fashion. But such a test can then also lead to a comparison between potential words and actual usage: approximately 75% of the creations of this experiment can also be shown to exist in the World Wide Web (August-October 2008) - a result which may be less surprising if we look at our second study (Mühleisen 2006) on innovative approaches to morphological productivity in more detail. 3.2 Mühleisen (2006): Of Lessees, Retirees and Beseechees Heterogeneity and polysemy in word-formation were also the starting point for this exploration of a particular morphological pattern in English (Mühleisen 2006) - the -ee suffix of the type interviewee - which has sometimes been described as “verb-derived passive human noun” (cf. Katamba 1994: 65). Except for the fact that -ee words are nouns, none of the other criteria are able to stand a test of closer scrutiny: -ee words are often noun-derived (e.g., biographee, aggressee), often not passive or patient (e.g., retiree, elopee), and sometimes not even human either (e.g., possessee - ‘technical New way of investigating morphological productivity 51 term in linguistics’ or milkee - ‘animal’). The heterogeneity of -ee words has led to a number of syntactic and semantic descriptions that have elaborated on the constraints of -ee word formations (Bauer 1983, Barker 1998, Baeskow 2002, Lieber 2004). In her investigation, Mühleisen (2006) includes a diachronic dimension and highlights how new formations can be based on a number of syntactic and semantic possibilities which have arisen in the 600 years of the development of -ee words through an interplay between analogical coining and rule-governed production. One part of the study is concerned with the question of whether or not this suffix is “semi-productive”, as it has sometimes been labelled in the literature (e.g., Portero Munoz 2003: 130). At the time of research in 2005, approximately 500 -ee words were attested in dictionaries and collections of chance finds by linguists - not all that many cases altogether considering the history of this suffix over six centuries. As a logical consequence, Mühleisen (2006) focuses on neologisms, i.e., -ee words that have actually been produced but have not been listed or attested before in any of the established sources. The approach for measuring the productivity of -ee words in Mühleisen (2006) is thus corpus-based rather than built on native speaker introspection as in Schröder (2008a). The serious disadvantages of using any of the established large corpora, especially for the investigation of recent and very recent words, have already been made clear in section 2.1. Mühleisen (2006) therefore resorts to the one large body of text collections which is unbeatable with regard to size, diversity of “Englishes,” varieties of users (i.e., here producers of text), text types and recentness: the World Wide Web, a corpus which has gained in importance in innovative linguistic research in the last few years (cf. Kilgarriff and Grefenstette 2003, Hundt et al. 2007). While there are also shortcomings in the uses of the Web for particular types of linguistic analyses, the advantages easily outweigh them. Next to choice of database, the selection of the search criteria is of primary importance in the search for neologisms. Because of the high frequency of occurrence of ‘double e’ that is not a suffix in English, a simple search in uncoded Web material for the actual suffix -ee would result in an unmanageable amount of rather chaotic data. The alternative option is the search for specific lexemes, their frequencies and their contexts of occurrence. For prospective neologisms, the problem is that the searchable items cannot be found in any dictionaries or word lists, which would obliterate the whole point of the endeavour. Therefore, a set of 1,000 potential search words - non-existent in common dictionaries or scholarly articles - was created as a test pool for -ee neologisms. Each one of these was then tested for its actual realization by speakers/ writers in any of the English language webpages. The criteria for the list of potential -ee words were Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 52 2 C stands for “corpus-item”, the number attached to it stands for the position (from 1-1,000) of the test word in alphabetical order. 1. No occurrence in any of the established sources, such as the OED, selected other dictionaries, or in scholarly texts on -ee words. 2. Recognizable derivation of either a contemporary English verb (the majority) or -er noun (less frequently). The choice of bases was, apart from the above criteria, alphabetically ordered random choices from the OED. Examples of test words starting with the letter b, for instance, can be seen below: Table 1: 25 out of 1,000 test words on potential versus actual formations with -ee on the World Wide Web C 2 54 badgee C 63 besmearee C 71 boastee C 55 baitee C 64 besmirchee C 72 bouncee C 56 bangee C 65 bewailee C 73 boxee C 57 barkee C 66 bewitchee C 74 bruisee C 58 batee C 67 blamee C 75 brushee C 59 beggee C 68 blessee C 76 burglaree C 60 bellowee C 69 blowee C 77 buskeree C 61 bereavee C 70 bluffee C 78 butcheree C 62 beseechee One might say that this procedure is, in some ways, close to the good old Aronovian idea (1976) of relating potential to actual words, a notion of productivity whose advantage lies in the fact that it takes into account the number of bases the affix can attach to. What is new here is that by mining the Web for meaningful realizations of potential words, we are able to capture many more recent neologisms across a wider range of text types than ever before. It is evident that results from such a procedure have to be refined following a rigid quality criteria checklist in order to exclude cases not falling into the intended category: a) Misspellings or typos were not counted. b) The -ee word had to be part of a coherent English-language text. c) Personal names (e.g. desiree), nicknames (robbee) or brand names were eliminated from the list. New way of investigating morphological productivity 53 d) Unambiguous diminutive meanings were not counted. e) The -ee lexemes had to be recognisable as nouns. f) The -ee word had to appear in a meaningful context. g) Word plays are often part of creative coinages. However, no word plays with a meaning completely detached from the base of the derivation were counted (e.g., Eye-rackee - ‘Iraqui’). h) Repetitions of a word in the same website were counted as only one occurrence. i) -ee words which appeared as part of a compound were counted as valid (e.g. party ruinee, blue rinsee, lap dancee) The result of this potential to actual words test was well beyond expectations: out of the 1,000 test words, 748 had been realized by speakers/ writers in a meaningful way, i.e. the number of known -ee words has suddenly jumped from about 500 words (before the study) to approximately 2½ times this size (after the study). This includes relatively frequent words like accusee, circumcisee, discriminatee, harassee, spankee or touchee (altogether 120 occurrences or 12.0 %, see Table 2 below), but it comprises also a high percentage of Hapax Legomena (21.4 %) and rare occurrences (26.7%, see Table 2 below): Table 2: Test word analysis according to frequency categories Category No. of Words Percentage Not found (= 0) 252 25.2 Hapax Legomena (= 1-2 occurrences) 214 21.4 Rare (= 3-20 occurrences) 267 26.7 Established (> 100 occurrences) 97 9.7 Frequent (< 100 occurrences) 120 12.0 Not quantifiable 50 5.0 Among the non-quantifiable category one can find such unlikely coinages as elevatee, faileee and grippee, which are given below in context. These examples should provide some evidence that, similar to the neologisms in Schröder’s study (2008a), the new formations here are not only based on morphological rules but rather that analogical coining, especially of the affixsubstitution type, seems to play a large role: Gripper/ grippee C 346: President Polk considered handshaking an art to be developed, both for his image and self-preservation. When a Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 54 man approached, he’d mentally assess his strength and quickly beat a strong man to the shake, ensuring that he was the gripper, not the grippee. President Hoover never did master the art of handshaking. Elevator/ elevatee C 238: With the Secret Floor Ballot, each employee in a large office building has a small remote control in his pocket, with which he can signal “3” without the elevator button lighting up. By the time the thing stops at the third floor, he is out the door before he can see the grimaces of the elevatee he left behind. Failee C 297: a) This will ensure the other trainees don’t get bored and the “failee” doesn’t get disheartened; you can return to this exercise later, […] b) “I think you can be the victim of someone else’s failure. So my parents are moderately middle-class people - my dad’s a lawyer - who haven’t quite had the life they expected. My Dad’s judgement led to him mistiming and misjudging a couple of crucial deals that would have meant he could retire at thirty. So I guess that makes my mother a failee: she’s living a certain degree of failure, as a result of the actions of someone else. It’s a good reason not to get married, too, methinks. The creation of grippee (C 346) seems to be triggered by the co-occurrence of the relational opposite gripper - a phenomenon which can be observed rather often if we look at the creation of a new -ee word in context. In fact, a collocation test in the study (Mühleisen 2006: 175-181) reveals that of all the 748 successful -ee lexemes, 552 items (73.8 %) occurred at least in one instance in “lexical solidarity” with an -er word, whereas 196 items (26.2 %) produced no such collocations. Analogical coining from an existing -er word even extends to instances where the -er word and -ee word have (usually deliberately) slightly incongruous meanings - as in the instrument versus person pairing of elevator - elevatee (C 238) above. But affix-substitution is not the only kind of analogical coining process that is visible here: similar to the ‘base-substitution’ observed in Schröder’s study above, in the first example of failee (C 297), it seems to be the semantics of another, similar noun - trainee - which is responsible for the creation process. It is one of the advantages of observing hapax legomena and rare examples of a new formation that one can get easy access to the context and possible influences of the creation. For the more frequent new -ee words in Mühleisen (2006), the picture is not quite as straightforward. It has been shown, however (see Mühleisen 2006: 181-186 for more detail) that the most frequent tokens are relatively rule-governed and comply with “prototypical” characteristics of -ee words, i.e. New way of investigating morphological productivity 55 1. verb-derived (i.e. verb exists), 2. with existing correlative -er noun, 3. in direct object relation to the verb, 4. sentient and probably human, 5. participant role 6. non-volitional and non-active part in the event 7. can be used in a legal as well as more general contexts This does not rule out analogical coining as part of the formation process of these frequent words. Neither does it mean that successful words have to comply with all criteria above to become established in usage. But it shows that there is a conglomerate of characteristics of -ee words which can be related to a successful contemporary formation (for historical characteristics of -ee words, cf. Mühleisen 2006: 78-112). We can therefore see that both frequent tokens and hapax legomena, can shed light on the types of processes - analogical coinage and rule-governed production - which are involved in establishing a new word. 4. Conclusion One might say that both of our new procedures of measuring productivity have produced what is often referred to as “creative coinages” - in the first procedure (Schröder 2008a) in an experimental and conscious way, in the second one (Mühleisen 2006) in “real life” but often in playful or humorous contexts. Indeed, many morphologists believe that words that draw attention to themselves are formed according to an unproductive pattern (e.g. Lieber 1992: 3), are marginal and “not necessarily to be taken seriously by a theory of word formation” (Lieber 1993: 3). However, we agree with Adrienne Lehrer that such an “attitude is unfortunate, because creative neologisms can tell us a great deal about important aspects of word-formation. Moreover, they are extremely productive! ” (Lehrer 1996: 64). Zwicky and Pullum (1987) find it necessary to differentiate between plain morphology, i.e. “the ordinary productive (and nonproductive) wordformation and word structure rules of a language” (Zwicky and Pullum 1987: 332) and expressive morphology, which is “associated with an expressive, playful, poetic, or simply ostentatious effect of some kind” (Zwicky and Pullum 1987: 335). And although they do not consider the latter to be a marginal phenomenon, they believe that “rules of expressive morphology are not subject to the same conditions as rules of plain morphology” (Zwicky and Pullum 1987: 338). The creations to under-milkwood and to under-fool about (see list above) are probably illustrative of this, especially as the former additionally does not Anne Schröder and Susanne Mühleisen 56 satisfy the criterion of transparency required of productively derived forms. They are probably the type of individual creativity “manifest in imaginative, ingenious neologisms” referred to by Bolozky (1999: 4), representing the part of an individual’s mental lexicon sometimes elicited in coinage tests. Zwicky and Pullum believe that there is not “simply a continuum from plain to expressive morphology” (1987: 338), but that the two should be viewed as two distinct phenomena. However, if we look at a detailed history of a word formation pattern - as for instance, suffixation with -ee - we can see that creative coinages were usually the trigger to initiate a new rule such as from noun-noun derivation to verb derivation in the 15 th and 16 th centuries, from indirect object formation (e.g. abandonee - ‘someone to whom something is abandoned’) to direct object formation (‘someone who has been abandoned’) (cf. Mühleisen 2006: 78-112). Bolozky (1999: 3) once pointed out that “precise measurement of word formation productivity […] would not seem to be a realistic goal”, and it is also not our goal to find the one conclusive formula for measuring productivity, but we hope with Bauer (2001: xiii) “that the work presented here will provide a stepping-stone in the development of a new deeper understanding”. We hope we have shown that there are more ways to include native speaker knowledge and production in investigating productivity than what we find in current literature, especially with regard to the feature of potentiality. 5. References: Anshen, Frank and Mark Aronoff (1988). “Producing Morphologically Complex Words.” Linguistics 26. 641-655. Anshen, Frank and Mark Aronoff (1989). “Morphological Productivity, Word Frequency and the Oxford English Dictionary.” In: Ralph Fasold and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.). Language Change and Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 197-202. Aronoff, Mark (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Aronoff, Mark (1980). “The Relevance of Productivity in a Synchronic Description of Word Formation.” In: Jacek Fisiak (ed.). Historical Morphology. The Hague: Mouton. 71-82. 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A Historical, Empirical and Sociolinguistic Analysis of a Word-formation and its Productivity in English. Habilitationsschrift, Universität Regensburg. Mühleisen, Susanne (2007). “Of Lessees, Retirees and Beseeches: a Corpus-based Analysis of the Productivity of a Heterogeneous Word-formation Pattern in English.” In: Sabine Volk-Birke and Julia Lippert (eds.). Anglistentag 2006 in Halle, Proceedings. Trier: WVT. 413-422. Plag, Ingo (1999). Morphological Productivity. Structural Constraints in English Derivation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Plag, Ingo (2000). “On the Mechanisms of Morphological Rivalry: A New Look at Competing Verb-Deriving Affixes in English.” In: Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts (eds.). Anglistentag 1999 Mainz. Proceedings. Trier: WVT. 63-76. Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: CUP. Plag, Ingo (2006). “Productivity.” In: Keith Brown (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 121-128. 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Anne Schröder Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Susanne Mühleisen Fachgruppe Anglistik Universität Bayreuth New way of investigating morphological productivity 59 Appendix Reproduction of the relevant section of the online questionnaire (from Schröder 2008a): AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart”: The ‘Post-War’ in Stevie Smith’s The Holiday Florian Niedlich This article investigates the concept of the ‘post-war’ in Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949). The novel depicts the years after the end of World War II as a dismal time of suspension, marked by paralysis, corruption and, above all, an acute uncertainty with regards to England’s role in world politics and to what exactly constitutes ‘Englishness’. The analysis will show that this uncertainty is symptomatic of a still more profound cultural uncertainty, thus locating the post-war within the larger framework of modernity. Moreover, it will be argued that the changed society of the post-war is experienced by the protagonist not as completely negative, but as having liberating aspects as well, which will lead to an investigation of the feminist dimension of the novel. The ensuing study of the unusual narrative of The Holiday, particularly of its blurred boundaries and fragmentation, will ascertain a correlation between form and content of the novel through three different interpretations of the eccentricity of the narrative: as a reflection of the chaos of the post-war, as a reaction to the complicity of language in the cruelties of the war and its constitutive role in the production of reality, and, lastly, as a challenge to the symbolic order and an undermining of the phallogocentric logic of the dominant, male discourse that comes close to an écriture féminine. 1. Introduction The end of the Second World War, the deadliest military conflict in human history, certainly marks a historical turning point with far-reaching and lasting consequences. In the aftermath of the war, the political landscape of the world changed fundamentally as nations were divided, created, occupied - their borders redrawn. International organizations were founded, wideranging decolonization came under way, and the United States of America and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s sole remaining superpowers, Florian Niedlich 62 1 All parenthetical references are to this edition. whose escalating rivalry and enmity towards each other were soon to lead to the conflictual bipolar division of the world known as the Cold War. At the same time, the war was, of course, also of psychological import. It was, above all, the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and its concentration camps, mass killings, and the genocide of the European Jews that had disastrous effects on the morale of the people and shattered their belief in many of the tenets and values of ‘enlightened’ occidental societies. In terms of literary history, the war and its aftermath may be said to have ushered in an increasing turning away from, or transformation of, (high) modernist forms of writing, which would find many different expressions and eventually bring about the literature and art commonly referred to as postmodernism. It is precisely against the backdrop of these significant political, psychological and literary developments that Stevie Smith’s novel The Holiday (1949) will be read. In doing so, this paper will investigate the book’s central concept of the ‘post-war’ and locate it within the larger framework of modernity. In a second step, the analysis will be extended to the formal level, through an examination of the novel’s unusual narrative, which seems hard to classify. It will be argued that its eccentricity is at the same time a fundamental reaction to the post-war, the expression of a growing skepticism towards, or concern with, language that somewhat anticipates the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities, as well as an example of what feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have called an écriture féminine. 2. ‘The Devil of a Middle Situation’ Stevie Smith’s novel The Holiday is set one or two years after the end of World War II, in a period that is repeatedly referred to in the text as the ‘postwar’. Celia Phoze, the narrator and protagonist of the book, states: “It cannot be said that it is war, it cannot be said that it is peace, it can be said that it is post-war; this will probably go on for ten years.” (Smith 1949/ 1999: 13) 1 Even though the war is evidently over and peace has been established, the majority of the population of England (and, of course, of other countries as well) is nevertheless still suffering from dire living conditions and bitter hardships and thus does not experience the peace as what it is actually meant to be, i.e. a time of harmony, tranquility and relief. In addition, “[d]ominating nations still strive to keep others in their subordinate places. America and Russia have replaced Britain’s power, but other than that, the world is still remarkably similar to the world at war.” (Severin 1997: 43) As Caz, Celia’s much loved cousin, puts it: “[T]here [is] a lot of the war left over “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 63 2 The portrayal of this paralysis links Stevie Smith to (other) modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, who wrote of a different paralysis more than 30 years before. from the fighting times” (8). In this context, it is telling that, with relative ease, Smith, in order to find a publisher for her book in the aftermath of the war, changed the setting from ‘war’ to ‘post-war’. It is this “being in the middle of things without the turning point yet come” (156), this “devil of a middle situation” (54), that is the main reason for the characters’ continual feelings of hopelessness and despair. “[W]hy do we cry so much? ” Caz asks - and the novel is very tearful indeed - and Celia responds: “It is the war, [...] and the war won, and the peace so far away.” (155) The post-war thus emerges as a kind of overwhelming vacuum - with reference to the title of the novel one might speak of a ‘holiday’ from history - a state of suspension and limbo, whose main characteristics are social paralysis, corruption, and a profound uncertainty permeating almost all areas of life. One of the things that Celia laments again and again throughout the novel is what she perceives as an absolute stagnation of Western societies, particularly England. She repeatedly condemns the futility of everyday life and work in a society that has no direction, expresses her longing for social reform and attacks people’s pettiness and general aversion to change: “[W]e seem to do nothing but a lot of things that are nothing. For we are not prepared to give up our way of life, for we have no bloody revolution since three hundred years, for we have this disgusting temporising mind, we will give up a little but not everything[.]” (53) Yet, Celia also recognizes the utter lack of any vision of a real alternative: “But where can one get this idea of a new world, and how can one believe it? ” (92) What is more, even people who, like Celia, wish for what her friend Tiny at one point calls “the clean sweep” (15) are nevertheless afraid of change and desirous of stability, too. This becomes clear when Celia, in the passage quoted above and in a fashion that is characteristic of the novel as a whole, immediately contradicts herself, after having called for a revolution, by switching to another position when she asks: “And why should we give it [i.e. “our Western way”] up, pray[? ]” (54). Here, as throughout the novel, Celia, who says of herself: “I tie up my own pride and advantage with England’s, I have no integrity, no honesty, no generous idea of a better way of life than that which gives cream to England.” (92), emerges as an allegorical embodiment of the English nation, paralyzed by “fear of action and so inaction” (142). This paralysis, which is further symbolized by Celia’s stagnant relationship with Caz, was, just like a general feeling of hopelessness and gloom, a central aspect of England’s post-war culture of austerity 2 . Another aspect of the post-war that Celia identifies as impeding change is what she regards as the corruption of English society: “How can we have a revolution and make a new world when we are so corrupt? ” (131) On the Florian Niedlich 64 3 It should be noted, however, that the novel almost never adopts a clear-cut position on the social and political issues it discusses. Instead, it just juxtaposes contradictory positions without ever offering any closure. The aspects listed here, though, seem to be criticized rather unequivocally by the implied author of the text. one hand, this corruption is linked to concrete matters such as a general lack of virtue and integrity of the people (“People govern, they are knaves, they are governed, they are simpletons.” [134]), the rise of a callous business ethic (cf. e.g. 58), capitalism, and consumerism (cf. e.g. 42, 144) 3 . On the other hand, Celia’s almost obsessive longing for innocence and the fact that this sense of corruption recurs throughout the entire narrative create the impression that it also transcends the immediate socio-political context and give it a quasi-mythic/ -religious dimension. “[T]he times are the times of a black split heart” (143), says Celia’s Uncle Heber after she has told him about her “wish[ing] for innocence more than anything, but [being] conscious only of corruption” (143), and it becomes clear that, in a way, this corruption is one that applies to humanity as a whole, that it is part of the modern condition of mankind, having lost its innocence in the unparalleled cruelties of World War II. However, the characteristic of the post-war with which the novel is most preoccupied is an uncertainty with regards to England’s changed role in world politics and to what exactly constitutes ‘Englishness’. The characters of the book argue about a wide variety of matters and problems related to these subjects such as the impending granting of independence to India, England’s relationship with America, the allies’ criticism of England’s colonial politics, the English law, and the English classes. There is no room here to discuss this in detail. What is striking about all these debates, though, is the fact that a conclusion is almost never reached. While Caz contends that “[the English] are right to quit India” (94), Celia sees English identity (as well as her own) closely bound up with India and its other colonies (cf. 100) and therefore states that “[i]t is not so simple as that [...]. The rest of the world is very unanimous to say the English should quit India [...]; but why, please? ” (125) Similarly, whereas Celia proclaims that “[t]he English law is above the world, [...] it is not to be bought, it is strong, flexible and impartial” (126), Caz counters this assertion by reminding her of the cruelty of laws like the “Emergency Whipping Act” (126) effective in India and of the corruption that is in actual fact part of the legal system (cf. 130). Only very rarely does the novel offer a closure to discussions like these. This lack of a coherent attitude of the implied author, along with other factors, has led some critics, such as Romana Huk, to the conclusion that what the novel shows is “the break-up of ‘Englishness’ itself” (2005: 196). While this assertion seems to be more accurate than that made by Kristin Bluemel, who declares that in her novels, Smith constructs “a new, nonrevolutionary, nonaristocratic, non- “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 65 imperial ideal of Englishness” (2004: 52) that she finds embodied in Celia’s beloved Lion Aunt (Bluemel 2004: 64), the truth possibly lies just in-between. The novel certainly illustrates how, with the decline of the British Empire, the loss of England’s superpower status, and its hurt pride due to its misery in spite of its victory, core elements of the received ideal of Englishness are being fundamentally called into question, so that the very concept is radically unsettled. Yet, the concept itself is never entirely ‘broken up’. Instead, it is upheld by the narrative itself, which is always negotiating its various elements, probing into different fields, searching for something to hold on to; by the implied author, who is anxious - like Celia, though not as frantic and chauvinistic - to preserve and save it. This process, however, is an unfinished one. It does not result in the creation of a whole new ideal as Bluemel claims. The uncertainty Celia and the other characters feel about England and Englishness is symptomatic of a still more profound cultural uncertainty. Celia states: “Everything in this world is in fits and splinters, like after an air raid when the glass is on the pavements; one picks one’s way and is happy in parts.” (143) What is brilliantly expressed in this passage is a feeling that is characteristic of modernity/ modernism: that of the loss of a sense of wholeness, meaning, order and certainty as the traditional bases of Western societies were increasingly being questioned by thinkers such as Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Frazer and - emphasized in the phrase just quoted - as people’s faith in them was shaken by the experience of the First and Second World War. Accordingly, reality was perceived as fragmented, relative, and exceedingly complex. As Celia puts it: “Always there are these under-tugs and cross currents, nothing is simple, nothing to be settled.” (130) She laments this loss of the old world several times, for instance when she says of modern love stories that, in contrast to those of the Victorian era such as Tennyson’s “Maud”, they “are never, oh, never right, but also are never wrong in the simple noble way of going wrong” (177), or when she maintains that modern life “does not give dignity in suffering” (181) anymore. In this context, Celia’s ubiquitous death wish - as well as her longing for madness (cf. 25) and her idealization of the war (cf. 183f.) - can be read as the result of an overwhelming desire to be free from this uncertainty and the concomitant responsibility of permanent sense-making. (Death, after all, is at least one certainty.) She herself realizes: “I am happy when I am unconscious.” (51) Celia’s enthusiasm about her holiday at her Uncle’s in Lincolnshire has to be understood in a similar way. It is a time that, she expects, will bring her “blessed calm” (56) and peace, i.e. a temporary relief from the chaos and confusion of life in the post-war. Just like the post-war, then, the holiday represents a state of suspension, albeit a positive one. However, it is also possible to read it as an extended death fantasy. Romana Huk rightly points out that “most of what ‘happens’ [...] in this latter Florian Niedlich 66 4 In a curious way, the novel’s last scene seems to play out in a calm and peaceful way the sermon about the death of the soul that Celia read out loud a little earlier (cf. 198f.). The scene and the sermon are linked through the motifs of repentance, the blanket and the “friendly hand to raise [one] up ‘with customary and domestic kindness’” (198f.) (later embodied by Caz), through the blessings and Celia’s final spoken word, Amen. half of the novel after the cast’s arrival on holiday [...] is dream-like” (2005: 201), and Celia herself once states that “it is like a dream” (149). It is during her holiday that Celia feels that “death is certainly very near” (161), that she tells Caz of her memory/ dream of falling into a stream and hitting her head on an underwater snag (cf. 163f.), and that she makes a suicide attempt (cf. 102f.). In a conversation with his cousin, Caz compares life to a railway station - “the train of birth brings us in, the train of death will carry us away” - and accuses Celia of being “romantic about death”, i.e. of imagining the train of death as “an excursion train” (155) and of hoping “that something may come up that is beautiful scenery and a country day” (163). Against this background, it is telling that Celia and Caz do actually take a train to leave for Lincolnshire and that a few days after their arrival, they are “off for an excursion to the sea”, where Celia admires the “magnificent scenery” (149, emphasis added). This association of the holiday with a state of near-death is further emphasized when Celia, giving a reason for signing a letter written to friends in London with ‘Sailor’, says: “Because I left them, [...] I sailed away. Oh, Death.” (150), and in the scene of Tiny’s departure from Lincolnshire towards the end of the novel, the symbolism of which clearly suggests a return to life from the realm of death (cf. 186ff.), and in which Tiny expresses his fears that Celia, for her part, might “not come back”, but instead “have a longer holiday” (187). In light of what has so far been said, the very end of the book may be understood as the climax and fulfillment of this death fantasy as a state of complete unconsciousness is finally reached 4 . In terms of a more literal reading, however, “the ending to the novel is obviously and deliberately ‘too tidy by far’” (Huk 2005: 208). It presents “a wished-for but [only] tenuous sleep that is far less genuinely peaceful than Beckettian” (Huk 2005: 211). Similarly, the holiday as a whole after all turns out not to be as tranquil and soothing as Celia hoped it would be, but instead shows the characters as still being restless, sad and despaired. There is, in the end, no escape from the desolate world of modernity. While Celia longs for such an escape and mourns for the old certainties, she also - and again, reminiscent of the contradictory modernist movement as a whole - actively participates in the breaking away from the established values, rules, conventions and traditions of Victorian society (cf. e.g. 142f.). Indeed, the decline of the old social order is experienced by her not solely as disorienting and frightening, but also as partly liberating. “[A]n answer suffocates” (145), she says; now that it is gone, new ways of looking at the world, new conceptions of social organization, etc. become possible. “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 67 5 Though arguably not an attribute of the implied author, this chauvinism is still problematic, since Celia is the character to voice most of the feminist arguments in the text. Particularly questions of femininity and the social conditions of women are repeatedly addressed by the novel. When Celia observes that “most women, especially in the lower and lower-middle classes, are conditioned early to having ‘father’ the centre of the home-life, with father’s chair, and father’s dinner, and father’s Times and father says” (28), the novel rather openly criticizes the oppressive nature of traditional, patriarchal family structures, and when she reports how a tombstone recording “the death of Thomin Krak, his business in life, his gifts to charities, his many dutiful sons and daughters” only “speaks last of all of Elizabeth his wife[,] [...] only to say: ‘And of his wife Elizabeth.’” (164), it is the social marginalization of women that comes under attack. The novel counters this marginalization by having a woman as its protagonist, a woman who even though she asserts that “it is not right or natural” (142) not to marry, i.e. though she has to a certain extent interiorized the gender role ascribed to her and the demands connected with it, refuses nevertheless to do so and thus also challenges this role. Another instance of this rejection of received gender roles can be found in Celia’s contempt for what she calls “the fashion girl” and her love for the un-girlish, tomboy-like “grubby girls, [...] with the hair in their eyes, and the pastel-coloured features screwed in absurd concentration” (123). One may trace other manifestations of this feminist impetus in Celia’s rejection of ‘pure’ reason and logic (“what can be observed and classified, free from the emotions, free from the past, [...] it is nonsense” [194]), things traditionally associated with masculinity, in favor of the (more feminine) emotions (cf. 66), and in what can be read as an ironical deconstruction of masculinity in the following passage: “There’s the masculine thing in that [i.e. the war], I said laughing, Es ist ausgeziechnet [sic]. Or whatever it is.” (184) Whereas, a little earlier, she seemed to be serious about fighting being something masculine, this idea is somewhat subverted here. Apart from the use of the derogatory word thing and the note of condescending indifference in “Or whatever it is”, it is above all Celia’s laughing that creates a sense of subversive irony and undermines the meaning of the words being spoken, just like the orthographic mistake in the German word ausgezeichnet breaks up its proper meaning. However, while the novel certainly has a decidedly feminist impulse, it can, on the whole, not be considered a straightforward feminist text. Womanhood is not the subject of the book, as Sanford Sternlicht contends (1990: 25), but just one of many, and several others, such as the loss of the Empire, are equally or more important. Moreover, there are again too many contradictions and inconsistencies to label the novel ‘feminist’. Particularly Celia’s chauvinism 5 and the novel’s praise of the lower middle class as the Florian Niedlich 68 6 For an account of the characteristics of intermodernist texts cf. Bluemel 2004: 5f. 7 Nünning’s discussion is of Smith’s first book, Novel on Yellow Paper. 8 Cf. the fact that Celia and Caz have been understood by several critics as two parts of the same person or consciousness. For such a reading cf. e.g. Plain 1996: 81. backbone and fiber of the nation (cf. 104ff.), together with its skepticism towards intellectuals (cf. 146f.), is strangely at odds with the book’s feminist ideas. 3. “This Horror of Words” From that of an Arnoldian Victorian to that of a proto-poststructuralist, Stevie Smith has received many, often contradictory labels. Indeed, her narratives, which appear simultaneously conventional and experimental and which bear the marks of realist as well as modernist and, at times, postmodernist modes of writing, do not properly fit into existing categories. This has led Kristin Bluemel to introduce the useful term ‘intermodernism’ to designate “a kind of writing [that, like Smith’s, is] grounded in the experiences of England’s working-class and ‘working middle-class’ cultures [and] that does not fit the familiar frameworks” (2004: 2). Bluemel asserts that “certain non-modernist texts of the 1930s and 1940s can be read to best advantage as cultural products of a single intermodernist impulse or movement rather than as products of distinct periods” (2004: 4) 6 . Another critic, Ansgar Nünning, has placed Smith among a group of writers he calls ‘eccentric monologists’, whose writings, according to him, form a neglected line of development of the English novel insofar as they are neither predominantly concerned with the creation of a plausible fictional world and the telling of a story nor with undermining the mimetic illusion but with the act of narration itself (cf. Nünning 2000). 7 In the following analysis, some of the elements that account for The Holiday’s being so hard to classify will be investigated. The most striking formal aspects of Smith’s ‘intermodernist’ novel are its blurring of boundaries and fragmentation. Both occur on several levels. The peculiar absence of quotation marks in the text continually blurs the boundaries between thought, speech and action as well as between the different characters, particularly Celia and Caz 8 . This difficulty to distinguish between the two is still increased by the fact that one of them repeatedly uses a word or phrase the other has thought, spoken or written a little earlier (cf. e.g. “survival lump” [125] and “lump of survival” [128] or “this evil feeling in this beautiful house” [195] and “a feeling of evil in this house” [198]). Furthermore, the boundary between dream and reality in the novel is hazy at times, too. This is especially the case in the holiday-section of the book, which has an overall dream-like atmosphere, and the surrealist passage in which Celia “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 69 relates an unlikely memory to Caz, who concludes that “[i]t was a dream”, to which Celia replies: “No, no.” (164) It may be added that the boundary lines between fiction and (extra-textual) reality, to a certain degree, are blurred as well, namely through Smith’s rather thinly disguised portrayals of her literary contemporaries George Orwell, Inez Holden and Mulk Raj Anand and of herself in her text (cf., e.g., Bluemel 2004: 9ff.). A last major instance of this technique of blurring boundaries can be found in Smith’s merging of prose and poetry. Not only does she incorporate a number of poems into the novel, but more importantly, she even turns the prose itself into poetry (see discussion below). The above-mentioned fragmentation is realized on more than one level as well. It is not only the traumatized and rootless characters that are fragmented, but also the consistency and coherence of their monologues and conversations and indeed the narrative as a whole are permanently disrupted by rather abrupt breaks and changes of subject, making the latter appear more like an amalgam of relatively separate fragments than as one homogeneous whole. As has already been pointed out, even the implied author of the text is drastically fragmented: Through its characters, the novel constantly contrasts irreconcilable attitudes to all kinds of subjects (frequently even in the same character) without ever providing any conclusion. Therefore, Celia’s remark that “[a]lways there are these under-tugs and cross currents, [that] nothing is simple, nothing to be settled” (130), which has been quoted earlier, may also be understood as a self-reflexive comment on this inconclusiveness of the novel. Read in this way, the quotation sheds light on the relation between form and content of the book. The blurred boundaries and the fragmentation in and of the text reflect the uncertainty, complexity and the sense of a loss of wholeness characteristic of the suspended state of the post-war. Similar to the characters, who feel lost and desperately try to ‘make sense’ of the changed world in which they are now living, the reader likewise feels lost, namely in a textual world that is equally confusing. In this context, Celia’s task at the Ministry appears like a metafictional comment on the reading process: decoding. However, the unconventional formal aspects of the narrative can still be interpreted along different lines. In one of her comments on writing, Celia states: One wishes [...] to be admirable, to write something that is truly noble, but the times are wrong, they are certainly wrong, at least in the West they are wrong. And there are too many words, there is too much about it and about, one has this horror of words - ‘I’ll be dumb’ - but no, one must not be dumb. Somebody should speak up. (53) What is this “horror of words”, this fear of, as she puts it somewhere else, “[her] word that could be a burden” (8)? As Romana Huk rightly points out, Florian Niedlich 70 9 Even though Huk explicitly mentions the linguistic turn, she nevertheless fails to recognize its wider implications beyond language’s being a ‘bearer of violent forces’ with regard to Smith’s novel. 10 “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” (Derrida 1967: 227) 11 Perhaps one could even go so far as to see in the novel’s concern about there being “too many words” and its relatively extensive use of marked and unmarked intertextual references an anticipation of certain postmodern theories dealing with the exhaustion of literary forms and possibilities as put forward by John Barth, Umberto Eco and others. It has to be said, however, that Smith’s work is, of course, still very far from the highly self-reflexive, metafictional, parodic writing that these authors have in mind. 12 In how far the adjective feminine works only metaphorically to designate a certain discourse and kind of writing subversive of the symbolic order and in how far it points to an actual link to femininity has been a subject of much controversy. “Smith’s characters seem to be plunged into what has been called ‘the linguistic turn’: that post-ideology-wars moment when fears of language itself as the coercive bearer of either violent forces or weakened consciousness in culture began to clearly emerge” (2005: 188) 9 . Similar to the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who famously declared that there should be no poetry after Auschwitz, Smith seems to have realized the complicity of language in cruelties like war and mass murder and to feel the need for a new kind of literary response. She refuses to resort to silence (“one must not be dumb”, “[s]omebody should speak up”), but also recognizes that a nonreflective use of language and traditional literary forms is no longer possible and puts the consequences drawn from this recognition into practice in her novel. From the awareness of this complicity of language it is but a small step to the constructivist view brought about by the linguistic turn in the more narrow sense of the term - i.e. the linguistic turn in the humanities - namely that language constitutes reality. Apart from a reading that construes Celia’s “horror of words” as the result of an insight into the corruption of language or of profound doubts about the possibility of linguistic/ literary representation of the modern world, it may also be taken to express such a consciousness of the crucial role of language in the production of reality. There are “too many words”; so many, that is to say, that no objective world, primary truth or essence is to be discovered ‘behind them’. As Jacques Derrida put it: “There is nothing outside of the text” 10 (Derrida 1976: 158). The signs are all there is. We do not have access to any reality outside signification. In this context, the blurring of the boundary lines between ‘reality’ and ‘text’, spoken words, thoughts and actions, etc. that has already been described might also be understood as a sign of this realization on the author’s side 11 . Finally, one can consider Smith’s unusual narrative an example of what feminist critics, particularly from France, have called an écriture féminine, i.e. a type of writing that is characteristically ‘feminine’ 12 . Completely different from ‘masculine’ language, such writing challenges the patriarchal system by “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 71 13 “Il faut que la femme s’écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l’écriture” (Cixous 1975: 39). 14 “[c]’est en écrivant, depuis et vers la femme, et en relevant le défi du discours gouverné par le phallus, que la femme affirmera la femme autrement qu’à la place à elle réservée dans et par le symbole c’est-à-dire le silence.” (Cixous 1975: 43) 15 For the following cf. Kristeva 1986a: 89-136. 16 “[…] une reprise du fonctionnement propre à la chora sémiotique dans le dispositif du langage […]” (Kristeva 1974: 48). 17 “C’est ainsi que nous pouvons penser d’ailleurs toutes les ‘déformations’ poétiques de la chaîne signifiante et de la structure de la signification: elles cèdent sous l’assaut des ‘restes des premières symbolisations’ (Lacan), c’est-à-dire des pulsions que la phase thétique n’a pas pu relever pour les enchaîner en signifiant/ signifié.” (Kristeva 1974: 47) subverting the symbolic order and dismantling the phallo(go)centrism embedded in language itself (e.g. in its hierarchical binary oppositions). As Hélène Cixous, one of the main proponents of this concept, puts it: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing” 13 (1981: 245); “[i]t is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other that that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence.” 14 (1981: 251) The work of Julia Kristeva has had great influence on this idea of écriture feminine, too 15 . Kristeva makes out two inseparable modalities of the signifying process, which is also the process of the formation of the subject: the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’. Whereas the former designates a manifestation of heterogeneous libidinal energies, connected with the pre-oedipal and pre-linguistic stage, in which the stable ‘thetic’ subject is not yet constituted, the latter denotes the fixation of meaning in/ through language, repression of drives and of the relation with the mother, and the emergence of the unitary social subject; it guarantees the normative, rational world of the symbolic order. It is the subversion of this order to which Cixous and Kristeva devote themselves. While for Cixous this is clearly a struggle of a marginalized femininity against patriarchy, the gendered dimension is only implied in Kristeva’s work. Kristeva argues that it is in the poetic language of literature - particularly in avant-garde writings that demonstrate a new self-reflexive practice she calls ‘text’ - that “a resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language” 16 (1986a: 103) takes place. All poetic ‘distortions’ of the signifying chain and the structure of signification may be considered in this light: they yield under the attack of the ‘residues of first symbolizations’ (Lacan), in other words, those drives that the thetic phase was not able to sublate by linking them into signifier and signified. 17 (Kristeva 1986a: 103) Florian Niedlich 72 18 Trans.: ‘[Cixous and Kristeva] advocate a writing that undermines and transforms the Symbolic Order - the ‘Law of the Father’ - by introducing into the text the repressed libidinality that underlies all structures of meaning. For both this becomes possible through a reactivation of the pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic phase that is also a retrieval of the connection with the mother.’ Of course, Cixous’s as well as Kristeva’s theories can be - and have been - criticized for a number of reasons, such as, for example, their partial adherence to the kind of binary thought they actually set out to subvert or for conceptions that, despite their declared efforts to avoid this, appear somewhat essentialist. Unfortunately, there is no space to elaborate on this here. 19 Even though she refers mainly to Novel on Yellow Paper, Civello was the first to draw attention to several of the aspects just mentioned. Lena Lindhoff sums up: [Cixous und Kristeva] plädieren für ein Schreiben, das die symbolische Ordnung - das ‘Gesetz des Vaters’ - unterläuft und transformiert, indem es die verdrängte Triebhaftigkeit in den Text einbringt, die allen Sinnstrukturen zugrunde liegt. Bei beiden wird dies möglich durch eine Aktualisierung der präödipalen, vorsprachlichen Phase, die auch ein Wiederfinden des Bezugs zur Mutter ist. (2003: 115f.) 18 To a certain degree, the narrative of The Holiday seems to be the kind of writing Cixous and Kristeva have in mind. While the semiotic can never manifest itself outside of the symbolic - which is why the semiotic that precedes symbolization is only a theoretical assumption - it nevertheless subverts the symbolic through its very articulation; so to speak ‘from inside’. It breaks up the fixed meanings and the logical and rational structure of language by pluralizing meaning and introducing rhythm, the irrational, illogical and heterogeneous into it. Even though Smith’s novel surely does not go so far as to allow an absolute free play of meaning and to “revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality” (Moi 2002: 106) as certain modernist and postmodernist works can be said to do, the semiotic disruption of the symbolic is nonetheless evident in her narrative technique. She creates a certain rhythm and musicality in her text through the frequent use of repetition, anaphora and epiphora, alliteration and other figures of speech and devices that make her prose very poetical; she disturbs syntax and ignores the rules of punctuation; she makes the transitions between passages abrupt and (seemingly) irrational, using “associational, rather than causal, logic” (Civello 1995: 114) 19 . It is this “heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language”, this “fluid motility of the semiotic” (Moi 2002: 161, 164) found in the text that links Smith’s novel with the excesses of signification of écriture féminine. In addition, Smith transgresses the boundary lines between genres - another departure from and attack on male writing - and, through the blurring of boundaries and fragmentation that have already been discussed, avoids closure and the adaptation of a fixed position, a strategy that has often been understood as a genuinely female one. Finally, Smith’s text is “The Times are the Times of a Black Split Heart” 73 20 … “invente la langue imprenable qui crève les cloisonnements, classes et rhétoriques, ordonnances et codes” … “submerge, transperce, franchisse le discours-à-réserve ultime” (Cixous 1975: 48). filled with numerous marked and even more unmarked intertextual references, which makes her text, in Kristeva’s terminology, very ‘dialogical’. This does not so much, as Romana Huk contends, evince her examination of her own imprisonment in the circulating discourses of her culture (cf. Huk 2005: 1-30 and 212f.), as create an intersection where texts meet and endlessly negotiate meaning (cf. Kristeva 1986b). Thus, The Holiday can be read as Smith’s attempt to “invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes” and to “submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse” 20 (Cixous 1981: 256). 4. Results Smith’s novel The Holiday introduces the concept of the post-war to characterize the years after the end of World War II in England. It has been shown that the novel depicts this period as a dismal time of suspension, marked by paralysis, corruption and, above all, uncertainty. It was primarily through an investigation of this uncertainty that the post-war could be placed within the more general context of modernity. With regards to the heroine’s holiday two different, though related, readings have been proposed: one that construes it as a longed for but ultimately futile escape from the confusion of the postwar and one that understands it as an extended death fantasy. Moreover, the analysis has shown that the changed society of the post-war is experienced by the protagonist not as completely negative, but as having liberating aspects as well. This has lead to an investigation of the feminist dimension of the novel, which has brought to light several manifestations of a decidedly feminist impetus, but in the course of which it has also become clear that the text nevertheless cannot be considered a forthright feminist one. In the ensuing study of the unusual narrative of The Holiday, several formal aspects, particularly the techniques of blurring boundaries and fragmentation, have come under scrutiny. A correlation between form and content of the novel has been ascertained through three different interpretations of the eccentricity of the narrative: as a reflection of the chaos of the post-war, as a reaction to the complicity of language in the cruelties of the war and its constitutive role in the production of reality, and, lastly, as a challenge to the symbolic order and an undermining of the phallogocentric logic of the dominant, male discourse that comes close to an écriture féminine. Florian Niedlich 74 Just like the post-war, then, Smith’s novel emerges as highly complex, multi-faceted and, to some extent, contradictory. References Bluemel, Kristin (2004). George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Civello, Catherine A. (1995). “Stevie Smith’s Écriture Féminine: Pre-Oedipal Desires and Wartime Realities”. Mosaic 28: 2. 109-122. Cixous, Hélène (1975). “Le rire de la méduse”. L’Arc 61. 39-54. - (1981). “The Laugh of the Medusa”. In: Elaine Marks / Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.). New French Feminisms: An Anthology. New York: Schocken. 245-264. Derrida, Jacques (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. - (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. Huk, Romana (2005). Stevie Smith: Between the Lines. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kristeva, Julia (1974). La révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIX e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. - (1986a). “Revolution in Poetic Language”. In: Toril Moi (ed.). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia UP. 89-136. - (1986b). “Word, Dialogue and Novel”. In: Toril Moi (ed.). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia UP. 34-61. Lindhoff, Lena (2003). Einführung in die feministische Literaturtheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler. Moi, Toril (2002). Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge. Nünning, Ansgar (2000). “‘Great Wits Jump’: Die literarische Inszenierung von Erzählillusion als vernachlässigte Entwicklungslinie des englischen Romans von Laurence Sterne bis Stevie Smith”. In: Bernhard Reitz / Eckart Voigts-Virchow (eds.). Lineages of the Novel: Essays in Honour of Raimund Borgmeier. Trier: WVT. 67-91. Plain, Gill (1996). Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Severin, Laura (1997). Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P. Smith, Stevie (1949/ 1999). The Holiday. London: Virago. Sternlicht, Sanford (1990). Stevie Smith. Boston: Twayne. Florian Niedlich Neuphilologisches Institut Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg 1 This status is confirmed by a number of writers in the essays collected in Griffiths (2006). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Victim (1961): Text and Context Alan Burton Victim (1961) was the first commercial film in Britain to deal openly with the need for legal reform concerning homosexuality and was in accord with the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee, which had examined homosexual offences and prostitution and reported in 1957. The film has attracted much criticism and debate, largely in terms of its liberal prescriptions and its ‘timid’ handling of a controversial theme. There has been no detailed attempt to consider this singular production in terms of the considerable pressures of its own time and appreciate the restrictions under which the filmmakers operated. The research draws on various documents relating to the Wolfenden Report, public opinion, censorship, and the production and reception of Victim, in the process constructing a more sympathetic and complex picture regarding the limits to the representation of homosexuality on British cinema screens in the early 1960s. The study concludes with an examination of some recent research into audience response to the film, which tends to confirm that Victim had a significant impact on gay men who struggled with their identity and subjectivity at a time when their sexuality was potentially illegal and could result in a long term of imprisonment with hard labour. If a man in a responsible position is convicted he will be utterly crushed. Whatever he does he cannot recover, even if the charge is (criminally speaking) of less gravity than dangerous driving. Killing a person on the road by driving while drunk costs you neither job nor friends. But loving a man of twenty-one or more can be a crime for which there is no forgiveness. (Quoted in Hauser 1962: 99) Victim is widely recognised as a landmark film in British cinema. 1 It was directed by Basil Dearden and produced by Michael Relph, an experienced Alan Burton 76 2 Overviews of the cinema of Dearden and Relph can be found in Burton, O’Sullivan and Wells (1997) and Burton and O’Sullivan (2009). 3 Commonly known as the Wolfenden Report after its chairman John Wolfenden. 4 The article was later anthologised in Dyer (1993/ 2002). 5 The article was later anthologised in Higson (1996). team of filmmakers well-known for their pioneering ‘social problem’ films in the post-war period. 2 The Blue Lamp (1950), I Believe in You (1952) and Violent Playground (1957) essayed the troubling figure of the juvenile delinquent; while Sapphire (1959), released in the wake of major disturbances in Nottingham and Notting Hill, London, dealt with racial tension and intolerance (Hill 1986: 67-95). Victim, given the social climate, was a daring treatment of the broadly perceived ‘social problem’ of homosexuality, brought into acute focus following the publication of the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in 1957. 3 Previously, homosexuality had been a taboo subject for British films, but since Wolfenden a few films had shown some courage and introduced the theme obliquely as in Serious Charge (1959), or displaced the incendiary material into the relative safety of historical distance and celebrity, as in Oscar Wilde (1959) and The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960). Victim was distinct in that it was a contemporary drama which made homosexuality the unambiguous focus of its narrative. Unsurprisingly, Victim has attracted critical attention and two articles are now appreciated as canonical writings on British cinema. Richard Dyer’s “Victim: hegemonic project” first appeared in Film Form 2 (1977), 4 and was characteristic of film studies as it developed in the seventies in its concern with the particular “organisation of codes and conventions which gives warrant for certain kinds of reading on the part of its audience”. That is, it sought to reveal how a film like Victim represented “a particular set of encodings which makes possible particular decodings”; for Dyer “the project of a film like Victim is to create a ‘unified’ or ‘organic’ artefact” (2002: 71). This general set of concerns regarding the “hegemonic project” of commercial narrative cinema - targeted here onto the specific text of Victim - rather elided the matter of the social and cultural significance of the film. In his theoretical concern with the possible variations in reading (decoding) the film, Dyer raised the issue of situating these potential readings historically, but concluded: “To know which of these various readings predominated in the years of the film’s release we would need to insert this analysis into the kind of social history of the period we do not yet have” (2002: 87). Writing several years later, Andy Medhurst addressed this omission in his “Victim: Text as Context”, published in Screen in 1984. 5 He consciously offered his article as a corrective to the “textual formalism” of the 1970s, arguing that “films need to be carefully located in the cultural and historical Victim (1961): Text and Context 77 6 The judgement is Medhurst’s (1996: 129). circumstances of their moment of production” (1996: 118). His (unsurprising) conclusion was that Victim reflected the recommendations of Wolfenden and its plea for liberal tolerance; for Medhurst, an uneasy position “advocating legal change without being seen to “approve of” homosexuality” (1996: 126). A major concern of his intervention, again in keeping with the temper of film studies at the time, was to read the film ‘against the grain’ and reveal its unintentional ‘comparative radicalism’ as a film advocating ‘coming out’. As he argued: “I want to indicate those moments in the text when the maintenance of its inscribed liberalism fails, and when what I see as the discourse of homosexual desire […] emerges” (1996: 127). The view that the social problem films of Dearden and Relph embodied the failure of liberalism to deal adequately with the social disruptions thrownup in the post-war settlement has widely dominated; the liberal totems of sympathy, compassion, tolerance and good-will being appreciated as insufficient to deal with the social realities of prejudice, inequality and discrimination. In his influential study of the British social problem film, John Hill suggests that the films “may well have obscured as much as they enlightened, and obstructed as much as they initiated the potential for social change and reconstruction” (1986: 3). The established critiques of Victim and the social problem film, emerging as they did from the agenda of gay radicalism and the post-Marxism of the New Left, are historically insensitive and suffer from a normative ‘reading backwards’ onto the texts, a retrospective imposition of values onto the films that had little or no relevance at the time of their release. It is not my intention to dismiss or invalidate the critical approaches offered by Medhurst and Hill, for they illuminate ‘possibilities’ in the meanings of the texts and helpfully comment on much larger trends in social and cultural history after the ‘fact’ of the films. What I will offer, instead, is a careful consideration of the ‘moment’ of Victim, an attempt to understand the film’s liberal humanism historically and not critically, and to accept the limits imposed by commercial film production and public opinion. The study will draw on a range of contemporary documentation, as well as recent criticism which tends to offer a more sympathetic view of the film. “Timid Wolfendenism” 6 Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business. To say this is not to condone or encourage private immorality. On the contrary, to emphasise the personal and private Alan Burton 78 7 For welcoming and supportive viewpoints see Hammelmann (1958). 8 Increased zeal by the police saw the annual number of prosecutions of male homosexual offences rise from 800 in 1945 to 2,500 in 1955 (McLaren 2002: 223). 9 Chis Waters evokes the “complex equation of moral decline, demographic anxiety and homosexual panic” to explain the social outcry (1999: 138). 10 For a detailed legal treatment of the law relating to homosexuality in Britain, and one informed by modern critical theory, see Moran (1996). For a historical and cultural overview of “queer sociability” in London up to Wolfenden, see Houlbrook (2005). 11 In this context, see the discussion of the landmark novel The Heart in Exile published in Britain in 1953 and its representation of the “homosexual underworld” (Houlbrook and Waters 2006). nature of moral or immoral conduct is to emphasise the personal and private responsibility of the individual for his own actions, and that is a responsibility which a mature agent can properly be expected to carry for himself without the threat of punishment from the law. (The Wolfenden Report on Homosexual Offences, 1957, para. 61) In August 1954, the British government established the Home Office Departmental Committee on Prostitution and Homosexuality. This reported in September 1957, generating “a major debate on male homosexuality in British society during the late 1950s and 1960s, the first time that this issue had ever been the subject of prolonged public discussion in British history” (Higgins 1996: 2). 7 The post-war period had been marked by some highprofile prosecutions of homosexuals and consequent sensationalist coverage in the popular press - “what might best be termed a tabloid discourse of homosexuality, a strategy dedicated to uncovering, naming and codifying homosexual lives for popular consumption” (Waters 1999: 139). 8 This led much intelligent opinion to support a dispassionate survey that could be of value in educating an ill-informed public and bring a measure of liberalisation to what some considered outdated laws. 9 The medieval severity of the legal code dealing with male homosexuality had been attenuated by the law of 1861, the last occasion for reform, wherein a capital sentence for sodomy was commuted to life imprisonment. The comparatively enlightened recommendation of the Wolfenden Report was to decriminalise homosexual activity between two consenting adults as long as it was conducted in private. 10 Much of the subsequent commentary on the Committee and its proposals has focused on its construction of the ‘good’ homosexual and its contrary identification and vilification of unacceptable homosexual behaviour. As Higgins notes: “The only praise given, and then often grudgingly, was to the celibate who sublimated his desires (preferably in work) and never owned up to what stirred his passions, what was usually called the ‘controlled homosexual’” (1996: 19). Various ‘representational strategies’ competed to provide the dominant portrait of the homosexual in the 1950s. 11 On one side, elements of the popular press, in their broader offensive against vice, competed with each Victim (1961): Text and Context 79 12 The three-part series “Evil Men” was carried by the Sunday Pictorial in May 1952. 13 McLaren has argued that the “top people’s” newspapers showed greater concern for the fact of blackmail, and how the present law disadvantaged the elite, targeting them as potential victims of blackmailers (2002: 228-29). 14 The comments appear on the jacket of the American edition (1953). 15 The trial also included a peer of the realm, the third Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, who had narrowly escaped conviction for an earlier charge some months previously. This time he was jailed for a year. other to expose the “Evil Men” and root out the “moral rot”; 12 while a counterveiling progressive discourse prescribed therapy rather than punishment, with expert knowledge directed towards the need for law reform. 13 The latter invoked the findings of the Kinsey Report on Male Sexuality (America, 1948) to demonstrate the widespread nature of male homosexuality and praised it as a model of statistical pertinence and sober discussion. In a similar vein, “frank and penetrating” appraisals aimed for a sympathetic understanding of the individual and the problem, as with Gordon Westwood’s Society and the Homosexual (1952); 14 while numerous contributions to learned journals generally aired the ‘problem’, often interjecting an enlightened opinion, as in the case of Dr Laidlaw, writing in Marriage and Family Living, who argued that “[t]he life of the homosexual is, at best, a hard and difficult one in our culture. It is our duty, as mature individuals, to bring to the homosexual sympathetic understanding and a helping hand, rather than social ostracism” (1952: 45). As a number of commentators have remarked, the publication by Peter Wildeblood of Against the Law (1955), recounting his sensational trial and conviction for indecency in the previous year, was a crucial intervention into the growing debate regarding legal change. 15 It has been described as “perhaps the first book ever published in Britain by a male homosexual who openly used his name, who offered a frank story of his life and who argued forcefully for rights for other men like himself” (Waters 1999: 150). In his account, Wildeblood, later a witness to the Wolfenden Committee, constructed the figure of the ‘respectable’ homosexual, hardly distinguishable from ‘normal’ men, one in sharp contrast to the “pathetically flamboyant pansy with flapping wrists”. “Most of us are not like that” he pleaded: “We do our best to look like everyone else, and we usually succeed” (quoted in Waters 1999: 145). Much of the evidence presented to the Wolfenden Committee pronounced the objectionable behaviour and appearance of effeminate men, who, in the popular imagination, were inclined to promiscuity; and in their refusal to pattern their relationships on the ‘heterosexual ideal’, offered “the greatest challenge to the social ideal of “normal” heterosexuality”. In contrast, there was an emergent view of the ‘good homosexual’, someone who was “allowed to find one partner from the same class and same age band as himself and settle down to a chaste life faithful to that one partner”: Alan Burton 80 16 Dr Eustace Chesser had published widely on sexual matters, including Live and Let Live. The Moral of the Wolfenden Report (1958), which carried a Foreword by John Wolfenden. See the review of the American edition, where support is readily given to the book’s plea for tolerance, but balks at its “questionable propositions”, the result of “desperate argumentation”, “perhaps understandable in the light of Britain’s savage persecution of the homosexual” (Galdston 1960). 17 Some commentators pointed to the forthcoming election as a reason for the Government’s caution. 18 It was over a year before the Report was debated in Parliament and the pressure group The Homosexual Law Reform Society was formed to lobby Parliament and influence public opinion. A revised legal code for prostitution was enacted in the Street Offences Act (1959) and an overview is provided in Hall Williams (1960); however, the more controversial matter of homosexuality had to wait until legal reform in 1967. How the British cinema dealt with the issue of female sexuality and the figure of the prostitute in the period is treated in Bell- Williams (2006). Sir Theobald Mathew, Director of Public Prosecutions, knew men like this and regarded them as offering no challenge to society as long as they lived discretely. According to Dr Eustace Chesser, ‘the normal homosexual - in other words, the homosexual who behaves with another homosexual in a normal manner, here you have a parallel with the heterosexual as well’. The bad homosexual, the pseudo-homosexual as he was sometimes called, challenged that ideal. That was his greatest crime. (Higgins 1996: 23) 16 The recommendations of the Wolfenden Report to remove from the statutes some elements of homosexual offences represented progressive thinking someway in advance of public opinion. This is apparent in the Government’s guarded response to the recommendations, and Sir John Wolfenden, for one, became impatient with its tawdriness, believing the inaction was due to a fear of the political consequences. 17 Other members of the Committee expressed disappointment at the lack of debate offered the findings in Parliament: Sir Hugh Linstead bemoaned the “conspiracy of silence” on the part of the Government, official Opposition and the general public; and Mr Victor Mischon expressed the “great pity that politics as such is allowed to bedevil the various issues that were brought out in the report. I had hoped that a brave and progressive legislature would have acted”. The Political Correspondent of The Times sagely concluded the account with the judgement that: There is a possibility that the Government will introduce legislation dealing with the laws relating to prostitution in the new session. Here they will take the Wolfenden recommendations as their guide. But legislation on homosexuality is not likely […] The Government’s view is that although the committee’s recommendations on homosexuality are logical enough, they are very much ahead of public opinion. (4 September 1958) 18 Victim (1961): Text and Context 81 19 The summary comment appeared in the Editorial to the issue (1958, 9: 1 (July), 3-6). 20 Jepson conducted an opinion poll among adult students in Yorkshire and cites a Gallup Poll from 1957. 21 A different legal code operated in Scotland, and the region was subsequently excluded from the liberal provisions of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act (Davidson and Davis 2004). Jeffrey Weeks’ conclusion that Wolfenden established a moral taxonomy for the next “permissive” stage of sexual law reform, while broadly pertinent, tends to mask the continued diversity of opinion and the undisputable fact that Wolfenden did not represent a “hegemonic” position regarding male homosexuality (1989: 244). For instance, the contributions to a special issue of the British Journal of Delinquency devoted to Wolfenden and the problem of homosexuality revealed the “mixture of approval and criticism” that met the Report; 19 and attempts at gauging public opinion on the recommendations tended to reveal the “acute division” of feeling in society (Jepson 1959: 249). 20 It is evident that the public debate surrounding the Wolfenden Report remained strongly influenced by the traditions of moral regulation and a commitment to conventional norms. After all, it would be a decade before liberalising legislation was enacted, and then it would not be universal for Great Britain. 21 It is also worth noting that Wolfenden did not reflect the most progressive thinking on male homosexuality and was openly criticised by some medical opinion. Psychotherapist Charles Berg pointed to the “endless incongruities” of the Report and found it “astonishing, in view of some of the material collected by the Wolfenden Committee, however superficial […] that the conclusions and recommendations should be so inadequate and in most cases so unsympathetic, or even savage” (1959: 20-21). Victim When Victim was released I was seventeen and at school in Farnham in Surrey. It was there that I went, rather bravely, to see it. My first impression was an overwhelming sense of identification with the gay characters. The diversity of types portrayed was very liberating for me. The second point was that the film was, in my view, very well done with some superb acting which gave it so much more reality. The sad ending was no surprise given the culture of the time. While it took me a number of years after that to sort myself out as a gay man I am certain that Victim had a very positive effect on me as a teenager. Incidentally I saw a re-run on television some two years ago and ended up crying for most of the last half hour! It is a wonderful reflection of life in 1961. (John Bennett, “The Victim Letters”, in Bourne 1996: 239) Alan Burton 82 22 The two Wilde films were released in May 1960 and that same month the Board received a draft screenplay for A Taste of Honey, which contained a sub-plot featuring a homosexual character, and the synopsis for Victim. Each of these films was eventually released with an adults only ‘X’ certificate (Aldgate 1995: 129). 23 In his study The Homosexual Society, Richard Hauser argues that interest in the problem of homosexuality had evaporated following the inconclusive debate around the Wolfenden Report, and it might be that one purpose of Victim was to bring the issue into the spotlight once again (1962: 17). Under pressure from recent Continental film releases and the general discussion following Wolfenden, the film press in 1958 had speculated that: The British Censor may shortly be asked to make an important decision - whether or not to approve the showing in Britain of films making honest drama of homosexuality, a subject which the British Board of Film Censors has always regarded as taboo […] Whether the recent publication of the Wolfenden Committee’s report will influence the British Board of Film Censors remains to be seen. (Duperley and Donaldson: 1958) There had been a partial relaxation of the stage-ban on homosexuality in the year of Wolfenden; however, John Trevelyan, the new liberal-minded Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), still maintained in 1959: “In our circles we can talk about homosexuality, but the general public is embarrassed by the subject, so until it becomes a subject that can be mentioned without offence it will be banned” (quoted in Aldgate 1995: 128). In the event, the Board had few problems with the “timid historical approaches” of the two Oscar Wilde films, but the proposed treatment of contemporary homosexuality in Victim created a much greater disturbance (Robertson 1989: 119). 22 As was customary with a controversial subject, producer Michael Relph approached Trevelyan about a possible film treating the blackmailing of homosexuals. He received acceptance in principle and in May 1960 forwarded a synopsis and requested comments before proceeding with the production. 23 Separately, John Robertson and Tony Aldgate have carefully gone over the correspondence between producer and Censor and provide a full picture of the interchanges leading to the production and release of Victim. In May 1960, Audrey Field, the reader of the synopsis, found it a “sympathetic, perceptive, moral and responsible discussion of a problem”; but warned: “it is very oppressive […] to be confronted with a world peopled with practically no one but ‘queers’ […] Great tact and discretion will be needed if this project is to come off, and the ‘queerness’ must not be laid on with a trowel” (quoted in Robertson 1989: 120). In a letter to Relph, Trevelyan requested care with the production: I do not say that the theme is impossible for an ‘X’ certificate film but I do think that great tact and discretion would be needed if the film is to be acceptable Victim (1961): Text and Context 83 24 The script was written by Green and her husband John McCormick. not only to us but also to the general public. As you know, public reaction on this subject tends to be strong. For the most part, intelligent people approach it with great sympathy and compassion, but to the great majority of cinemagoers homosexuality is outside their direct experience and is something which is shocking, distasteful and disgusting. This argues that public education is desirable and indeed it may be, but it also suggests that a film-maker should approach the subject with caution. (Quoted in Aldgate 1995: 134) At the end of June a completed script was sent to the BBFC and once again received the attention of Audrey Field. “We have never had such an explicit survey of this subject on the screen, or such a great number of different types of ‘Queer’ assembled in one film” she reported. Admitting: “I am rather nervous of this script”: “Relph and Dearden are not sensational film-makers, but a lot of the material here is in itself pretty sensational; and the public may be getting a bit tired of exaggerated plain speaking on this subject” (quoted in Robertson 1989: 121). In particular, the examiner was anxious about the portrayal of blackmailing and its related violence. John Trevelyan was moved to write a long letter to the scriptwriter Janet Green, 24 a document, according to Robertson, revealing of his “liberal approach” and the “manner in which he viewed the BBFC’s function within Britain’s traditional parliamentary democratic structure” (1989: 121). Trevelyan warned that the filmmaker “dealing with this subject is treading on dangerous ground and will have to proceed with caution” (quoted in Robertson 1989: 122). He then restated and expanded on the points raised by Audrey Field, requesting that a greater degree of normality be introduced into the drama, that the violence associated with blackmail be reduced and that all teenage characters be removed from the story. A detailed list of objections was itemized and included anti-homosexual dialogue, a homosexual’s account of his time in prison, a teenage club setting, and various scenes of violence and threat. A revised script, taking account of the objections raised, reached the BBFC in August 1960, and largely satisfied Trevelyan. However, he issued a final plea of caution to the producers: The only thing we are rather unhappy about now is that we get the impression that the balance between the contrasting attitudes to homosexuality does not represent that of present day public opinion and that it seems to us to come down rather heavily in favour of the homosexuals […] I think you should be careful also not to give ideas to potential blackmailers. (Quoted in Robertson 1989: 124) The completed film was presented to the BBFC in May 1961 and further negotiation was required between producers and Censor. Dearden and Relph put up a strong fight against proposed cuts and only consented to Alan Burton 84 25 Trevelyan pursued an identical policy of toning down sensationalism and promoting a responsible approach to homosexuality with Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961) (Aldgate 1995: 136-139). 26 This is the moment of “shattering intensity” for Medhurst when the unintentional radicalism of the text bursts through and is of particular import for a gay audience (1996: 131). 27 The character of Farr is of course a textbook representation of the ‘respectable homosexual’ valorised by Wildeblood and Wolfenden, and sardonically referred to by a later critic as “a gay hero with credentials enough to get into heaven, let alone society” (Russo 1987: 130). losing the statement “there’s a moment of choice for almost every adolescent boy”, which the Board thought “too sweeping and not a good idea to put into the minds of adolescents in the audience” (quoted in Robertson 1989: 125). Victim was finally awarded its expected ‘X’ certificate on 1 June 1961 and released for exhibition in September of that year. 25 Victim relates the tragic drama of a young man’s love - from afar - for an eminent barrister who is on the verge of being raised to Queen’s Counsel. Boy Barrett is being blackmailed and pays to keep his infatuation for Melville Farr from being made public. Stealing from the building firm where he works, Barrett is cornered by the police and takes his life in a police cell hoping to shield Farr, but leaves behind evidence that links him to the barrister. Farr had believed that the last desperate phone calls from Barrett had been for the purpose of blackmail and he had curtly dismissed him, and it is with great pain that he learns that Boy died to protect him. He vows to run the blackmailers down; regardless of the damage it would cause his career and reputation. With the help of Eddy, Boy’s friend, Farr moves among the circle of homosexuals centred on The Chequers public house, attentive for signs of anxiety that might lead him to the blackmailer. As he gets closer, he is surprised to learn that some of his acquaintances in business and the arts are paying to preserve their reputations and freedom, and Farr refuses to pay-off the blackmailers once and for all on their behalf. Meanwhile, the truth has begun to dawn on his wife, who demands an explanation and clarification of her husband’s relationship with Boy. In the film’s most famous and powerful scene, Farr, in an emotional outburst, admits that he stopped seeing Boy - he had been giving him regular lifts in his car - because he “wanted him”. 26 In collusion with the police, Farr sets a trap for the blackmailers, and the forces of the law move into an arrest when the culprits take what they think is a final pay-off. Afterwards, Farr is left to face the publicity and the inevitable damage to his prosperous career. He finds his wife waiting for him at their home, and they decide to face the onslaught together. 27 Unsurprisingly, censorship was a determining influence on the structure of the film. This of course was recognised by the filmmakers who expected to enter into negotiation with the BBFC; a factor specifically alluded to in an article Michael Relph contributed to the journal Films and Filming at the time of the film’s release. Here, unquestionably in light of his recent experiences Victim (1961): Text and Context 85 28 The Mark (1961) dealt with the sensitive subject of child molestation. with Victim, the producer examined the prospect of ‘freedom’ in the commercial cinema, claiming it as an ideal, adding: “Loose a term as it may be, freedom is something fiercely desired by every cinema enthusiast whether he be filmgoer or filmmaker” (1961: 24). Relph proceeded to outline the various “curbs on creative freedom” in the film industry, starting with the financiers whose tendency was to play safe and emulate past successes and could insist on a bankable star regardless of the performer’s suitability for the part. Then, in turn, the star “will want to pass judgement on the project from his own and not necessarily the author’s point of view” (1961: 24). A production will also depend on the goodwill of private, public and commercial bodies, local government and the police; for example, where location shooting is to take place: “Each, according to his indispensability to the producer”, reported Relph, “can dictate to him about the content of his film” (1961: 24). Next follows the confrontation with the Censor and its arbitration on what it deems to be in the ‘public interest’, a potentially lengthy process as we have seen with Victim. Finally, there is the matter of exhibition: If the distributor who financed the film does not happen also to own a circuit of cinemas, he must now sell it to a circuit-owning exhibitor. In Britain, this means to one of two men. Now, if both these men and the interests they represent doubt the film’s entertainment value or dislike its subject matter its almost total failure is assured. It may even (as in the case of The Mark) be denied a release at all. (1961: 24) 28 However, there was one final hurdle for the committed filmmaker. As Relph pointed out: If he has successfully pursued his artistic goal without compromise, he is likely to receive the praise of the cultured minority represented by the best critics, but if his film is not one that is also appreciated and understood by a mass audience, his picture will fail commercially; he will find it difficult to get a chance to make other films, and it may be that the commercial cinema is not his place. (1961: 24) In view of the considerable constraints outlined, Relph rhetorically asked the question: “What, however, of the producer with serious artistic intentions who believes in film as a medium and wants to use it in new and adventurous ways? To extend techniques and to say something positive about the world we live in” (1961: 24). An answer, allowing for the shift from convention to conviction in filmmaking, could be found in groups of producers using their collective muscle to handle their own distribution. Dearden and Relph had recently become involved in two such initiatives, Bryanston and Allied Alan Burton 86 29 Dearden and Relph produced The League of Gentlemen (1960), Man in the Moon (1960), Victim and Life for Ruth (1962) for AFM (films released through the Rank Organisation), and A Place to Go (1963) for Bryanston (film released through British Lion). 30 Relph paints an uncharacteristically favourable picture of Rank executive John Davis, a “staunch champion” of Violent Playground and Sapphire, but elsewhere an almost universally disliked figure who brought an accountant’s sensibility to the business of picturemaking. However, see the relatively sympathetic portrait of Davis in Macnab (1994: 218-219). 31 The scriptwriters could draw on substantial sociological and cultural evidence that came in the wake of Wolfenden, for example Westwood (1960). 32 The “end money” was the final 30% of the budget, the last to be repaid from the returns and therefore the most risky investment. Film Makers (AFM). As he reported, “Through these groups we are able to finance the first 70 per cent of our own films without the approval of our parent distributors who will have to sell the films for us” (1961: 24, 37). 29 Relph considered this a “great gesture of faith from the old-style distributor to the new-type producer” and the arrangement had gotten off to an excellent start with the resounding box-office successes of The League of Gentlemen (d. Dearden, 1960, AFM) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Reisz, 1960, Bryanston). Relph believed that the breakthrough for the producer-distributor arrangements stemmed from the success of his earlier social problem film Sapphire, which tempted the ultra-conservative Rank Organisation to support more challenging productions such as No Love for Johnnie (d. Thomas, 1961), Flame in the Streets (Baker, 1961) and eventually Victim. 30 The latter film, according to Relph, was “the most controversial subject ever backed by the Rank Organisation” (1961: 24). Relph then proceeded to outline the production of Victim, in view of the various potential constraints he had introduced. The scriptwriters had been commissioned to write the film “on a flagrantly controversial theme” 31 : The British Government had refused to implement the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendation to legalise homosexuality between consenting adults in private because of adverse public opinion. The film dares to advocate precisely this. It casts Britain’s (and the Rank Organisation’s) leading Romantic star, Dirk Bogarde, as a homosexual. Could a producer choose a more dangerous theme on which to set up a picture? To start with, Earl St. John, Davis’ enlightened Production Executive, helped us finance the script. Allied Film Makers, as it is able to do, granted us 70 per cent of the finance without consultation with the Rank Organisation. In view of the subject, however, we felt compelled to ask John Davis to read the script and it would have been possible for him in his capacity of Exhibitor to deny the film a showing. Not only did Davis endorse our distribution guarantee but he offered to put up the end money. 32 Victim (1961): Text and Context 87 33 The director Ralph Thomas, for example, was convinced the role would ruin Bogarde’s career, and the film critic Alexander Walker noted in his diary that the detractors were in “bad odour” with the actor (Coldstream 2005: 348). 34 At the time he was making the film, Bogarde told the press: “You can’t leave all the adult, intelligent films to the French, Italians and Swedes” (Daily Mail, 19 August 1961). 35 In a considerable irony, Syms was five months pregnant at the time. See her comments on the role in Bourne (1996: 159). Courage is in the air of the Cinema just now. Courage not only of producers, directors and stars like Dirk Bogarde, but of financiers like John Davis and of the public as well. Now is the time for every creative film-maker to throw his weight behind the commercial cinema and see if we can make the artists’ point of view prevail both with the public and the financiers. Their points of view are, after all, synonymous. (1961: 24) Michael Relph provided a revealing overview of the potentially tortuous path to production for a contentious film subject and a revelation of the challenge of bringing a progressive outlook to the British cinema screen. An examination of the production and reception of Victim also reveals much about the process of negotiation in commercial filmmaking, confirms the boldness and daring of Dearden, Relph and others in preparing this film, and the limits to what could be portrayed in a British film dealing with homosexuality in 1961. Actor Dirk Bogarde later recalled that accepting the part of Melville Farr “was the wisest decision I ever made in my cinematic life”; however, as is widely appreciated, it was a brave move for a film star with a strong female following. 33 As Bogarde added: “It is extraordinary, in this over-permissive age, to believe that this modest film could ever have been considered courageous, daring or dangerous to make. It was, in its time, all three” (1979: 241). 34 Casting was seemingly a problem. Bogarde reports that “very few of the actors approached to play in it accepted; most flatly refused, and every actress asked to play the wife turned it down without even reading the script, except for Sylvia Syms who accepted readily and with warm comprehension” (1979: 241). 35 Initially, the role of the crusading barrister was offered to Jack Hawkins, who had featured in Dearden and Relph’s The League of Gentlemen, but he was hesitant, and James Mason and Stewart Granger (who had just appeared for the team in The Silent Partner, 1961) were considered. Bogarde’s biographer, drawing on the papers of Janet Green, reports that Rank production executive Earl St. John suggested contract star Bogarde for the role (Coldstream 2005: 343-44). However, Relph consistently maintained that their first choice was always Bogarde, believing him “perfect for Victim”: It was very courageous of him to play the gay barrister. Until then his career had been built on being an attractive heterosexual matinee idol. From the start Alan Burton 88 36 Bogarde had a profitable working relationship with Dearden and Relph. His career had received an important boost with his appearance as the young delinquent in The Blue Lamp (1950), and he had featured with less success in their The Gentle Gunman (1952). He would finally work with the filmmakers on The Mind Benders (1962). In 1960, Dearden had bought Beel House from Bogarde as his home (The Times, 10 January 1966). 37 Bogarde’s biographer warns that his subject was, over the years, inconsistent in reporting his experience on the film (Coldstream 2005: 346-47). 38 Even at this late stage the central character is scripted as ‘Carr’ and Dearden has crossed these out and replaced with ‘Farr’. I would like to thank James Dearden for making available to me his father’s shooting script. he was very sympathetic to the subject, and helpful with the script. However, we expected Dirk to turn us down, so we had Michael Redgrave as our second choice because we knew about his homosexuality, and felt he would be sympathetic to the subject. (Quoted in Bourne 1996: 158-59) 36 Bogarde later claimed that exceptional precautions were taken with regard to filming: “The set was closed to all visitors, the Press firmly forbidden, and the whole project was treated, at the beginning, with all the false reverence, dignity and respect usually accorded to the Crucifixion or Queen Victoria” (1979: 241). 37 The director’s Final Shooting Script, dated 23 January 1961, contains numerous last-minute ‘pink’ replacement sheets, and further records many on-set adjustments to dramatic business and revisions to dialogue, part-indicating, perhaps, due care in the telling of the story. 38 Unsurprisingly, rumours of a British film daring to tackle the controversial theme of homosexuality reached the press, despite the desire for secrecy during the production that Bogarde alluded to. Leonard Mosley, writing for the Daily Express, confirmed the surprise in a report posted in the summer of 1961,where he declared he found it “hard to believe”: “Would Lord Rank really dare? ”; “Would a star of Dirk Bogarde’s calibre risk his reputation with his fans by playing such a role? ” (28 July). And the rumours led to wild speculation among some incredulous reporters, which the producers felt impelled to challenge. In one report it was claimed that: The Rank Organisation is to make a film about homosexuality starring Dirk Bogarde. But my information is that the subject will make its central character, a middle-aged barrister, only a potential homosexual. The reason: The studios are afraid that their top contract star for fifteen years would lose his female following if he played an honest queer. It concluded with the judgement that: If Victim at least points to the plight of millions who, because of Parliament’s refusal to amend the law, are open to blackmail because their promiscuity is homosexual rather than adulterous it may do some good. But if it implies, as is the case of some cheap literature, that homosexuals exist only among a low-life criminal group, then it will add little to public enlightenment. (Warren 1961: 31) Victim (1961): Text and Context 89 39 Simon Sparrow was the character Bogarde played in the popular series of Doctor comedies directed by Ralph Thomas and produced by Betty Box (1954-57). 40 Films and Filming claimed the “World’s largest sale amongst critical filmgoers” (May 1961: 3) and enjoyed a large gay readership for which it provided numerous “beefcake” photos of attractive male stars (Bourne 1996: 247). There is a contemporary discussion of blackmail and homosexuality in Westwood (1960: 147-49); while the situation of sexual blackmail was dealt with in novels such as Robin Maugham’s The Servant (1948) and Compton Mackenzie’s Thin Ice (1956), and in plays such as Terence Rattigan’s Table Number Seven (1954), Joe Orton’s Inadmissible Evidence (1964) and Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight (1966). Both producer and star responded to the “inaccuracy” of the report with letters to the journal, and the exchange revealed much about the expectations for a film production on the topic of homosexuality, as well as the filmmakers’ concern to establish their independence of operation and serious approach to the theme (Films and Filming, May 1961). Bogarde expressed his distress at reading: Such inaccurate reporting especially for once when one is trying to get out of the Simon Sparrow category (however excellent and delightful he was to play) and join forces with a team who are honestly trying to develop with a new and exciting trend in the Cinema today. 39 Both correspondents pointed out that Victim was being produced by Dearden and Relph for AFM, independently of the Rank Organisation, and that neither Rank nor Bogarde made any “alterations of substance” to the script. Relph confirmed that “The film puts forward the same point of view as the Wolfenden Committee, that the law should be changed”, and confronted a misimpression given in the report, stating: “Contrary to suggesting homosexuals ‘exist only among a low-life criminal group,’ the film shows that homosexuality may be found in otherwise completely responsible citizens in every strata of society”. The film was released to respectful reviews and some excellent notices, and Medhurst’s summary of the critical consensus “as regarding Victim as a well-intentioned piece of special-pleading, successful in making its social point, but in the process of doing so becoming schematised and propagandist and therefore aesthetically unsatisfactory”, underplays the respect many reviewers had for the daring of the producers and the pleasures of a good thriller (Medhurst 1996: 124). Films and Filming chose Victim as its “Film of the Month” for September 1961, promoting it under the tagline of “A plea for a minority …” and informing its readers: Under British law an unknown number of homosexuals live in fear of blackmail. Several years ago the Wolfenden Committee recommended a change in the law; but nothing has been done. Now producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden have made a film about the ‘crime’ of being different. 40 Alan Burton 90 41 Victor Perkins, in a notorious polemic against British cinema (and a specific critical demolition of Dearden) published in the year after Victim’s release, directed some of his venom at the social problem pictures wrapped-up as thrillers: “These pictures are particularly offensive in assuming that their holy platitudes are too loftily intellectual to be accepted by audiences unless the pill of wisdom is sweetened with spurious excitement. Thus in Sapphire and Victim, Basil Dearden and his scriptwriter Janet Green have produced thrillerproblem films which work neither as thrillers nor as examinations of a problem, and particularly not as films” (Perkins: 1972: 9, first pub. 1962). Michael Relph later defended the approach in the following terms: “We decided to contain them in a thriller structure, for which we were attacked quite a lot because it was felt we belittled the subjects we dealt with. But as far as reaching a wide audience was concerned, I think it was really necessary to use the thriller form. When you make a political film, you don’t want to preach to the converted. We were always trying to reach a wider public, which was a very ambitious thing to do at that time” (quoted in Bourne 1996: 158). Predictably, reviews centred on Bogarde’s performance and his bravery in taking on the role. For Ernest Betts it was “Bogarde at his best! ” (The People, 3 September 1961); while Leonard Mosley, writing in the Daily Express, felt it was a case of the star winning the “‘forbidden theme’ gamble”, and “the biggest slap in the eye Dirk Bogarde has dealt his more emotional female fans since the day he objected to a girl’s school next door to his house in Buckinghamshire” (30 August 1961). Thomas Wiseman acknowledged Victim as “A big risk for Bogarde - but he brings it off”; adding that “[i]n accepting this part, Mr Bogarde took a brave, calculated risk. What he may lose in terms of teenage adulation, he is sure to gain in adult respect for a performance that is intelligent and accomplished”. Wiseman also felt that “one must admire the sheer acrobatic skill displayed by the producer, Michael Relph, and the director, Basil Dearden, in walking the tightrope between holier-than-thou hypocrisy and dirtier-than-them offensiveness” (Daily Telegraph, 1 September 1961). Reviewers were divided over the choice of the scriptwriters and producers to present the theme in terms of genre cinema. 41 The veteran Dilys Powell argued, It is a thriller (and a good one) with characters which could not have been shown and on a subject which would have excited horror or ribaldry a few years ago. To treat the theme as a thriller may not be particularly bold, but to treat it at all was brave. (The Sunday Times, 3 September 1961) While, in contrast, Nina Hibbin, writing in the Daily Worker, felt that on the level of a mystery, Victim was “pretty run-of-the-mill stuff? ”. Recognising that any film “that takes a firm attitude on such a controversial issue could never have been made commercially without being pegged to a more conventionally sensational theme […] Blackmail, in this context”, she found the compromise “an uneasy one which puts the matter out of focus”. However, Victim offered a “sobering picture of the way homosexual inclinations make a Victim (1961): Text and Context 91 42 Much writing on the film has decried the cheapening of the serious theme of homosexuality through the recourse to a popular thriller plot involving blackmail. More recently, in fact, McLaren has revealed the crucial place of blackmail to eventual reform: “It was the importance of blackmail stories, as propounded in newspaper and court reports, in novels, plays, films, and academic treatises, that played a key role in the 1950s and 1960s in convincing both the English public and their politicians of the need for homosexual law reform” (2002: 238). permanent nightmare of private lives” (2 September 1961). 42 The reviewer in the Guardian praised Victim as a “good thriller” and, moreover, an “exceptionally good and rather brave sermon”: The sermon is about the plight of homosexuals in our society - that is, about a large minority of male human beings whom, in spite of the Wolfenden Report, the law continues to treat as criminals and who are, accordingly, particularly liable to blackmail. A humane police officer, in the course of the film, observes that our present laws about the punishment of homosexuality are “the blackmailer’s charter.” It is well said and the film proceeds very cogently to amplify and demonstrate the truth of the remark. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that in the present (alleged) state of public opinion on the subject, any feature film could have preached the salutary sermon more shrewdly and sensibly. (2 September 1961) Where there was disapproval of the film, it tended to be of the ‘failed to live up to the courage of its convictions’ type of criticism. For Derek Hill, It obviously took some kind of courage to approach such a theme, but the argument against a cruel and unnecessary persecution is hardly advanced by Janet Green and John McCormick’s script, which is more concerned with hoodwinking audiences about the identity of the principal blackmailer than with any serious inquiry into the issues it professes to consider. (Financial Times, 1 September 1961) William Whitebait, warming to the dynamic thriller opening in Victim, contentedly wrote “So far, so confident. The impetuous thriller lead-in has been given a new edge. The screw has been turned”. But anxiously acknowledged that: “Now the film must tackle the problem it has hinted at. How far can this be done? ” He was disappointed: Victim has a go; dabs in a cross-section of the homosexual’s world; states the case for toleration; pursues one drama of wreaked marriage and career; and for good measure winds up with a whodunit over the blackmailer’s identity […] Realism is whittled away. Inverts must be whitewashed, or else the prejudice of audiences might tell against them. All the villainy descends on the queer’s parasite the blackmailer, and to keep things lively the blackmailer’s are turned into grotesques […] Then the humanitarian case must be sustained, so the police develops a wise paternalism. And when it comes to marriage on the rocks, the best the script can do is to beat a hasty retreat into the terms of Galsworthian theatre. (New Statesman, 8 September 1961) Alan Burton 92 43 See also the similar treatment dished out in Films in Review (February 1962). The British Censor, writing in his memoirs, reported that in October 1961, following the encounter with Peter Baker noted that Victim was “a film which took courage to write, courage to act, courage to direct and produce and - in fairness to the often criticised Rank Organisation - courage to distribute to British cinemas”; but while finding it a “notable piece of propaganda” he thought it a “not very good film”: The arguments themselves are logical enough; but much as I sympathise with the producer’s intentions there are far too many occasions when the audience is expected to get the message. It is easy to understand the urge to hit hard, so that even the Primrose League lady in the back row of the stalls can be in no doubt about the opinions being expressed; but it takes more than clear exposition of an argument to persuade people to accept it. Propaganda drama needs more than logic on its side, it needs emotional involvement. And this is what Victim lacks. (Films and Filming, September 1961) The final summary comment should be left for Terence Kelley, writing in Sight and Sound, who asked, “Could Victim have been more frank than it is? ”, and soberly answered, “It is only fair to say that it could not (in the Britain of 1961)” (quoted in Walker 1986: 156-57). The American censors proved more unforgiving than their British counterparts. Victim was denied a Production Code Seal of Approval, which meant that its distribution was restricted squarely to the fringes of exhibition in art house cinemas and its commercial potential was clearly harmed. The film contravened the Code specifically in several dialogue uses of the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’. The trade paper Variety reported the advice of the distributor which suggested that “where local censorship bruises easily, exhibs should screen film before buying it” (20 December 1961). The intolerance that met the film in America was reflected in the review published in Time magazine. Headed “A Plea for Perversion? ”, the reviewer acknowledged a “neat plot”, “deft direction by Basil Dearden” and “the sort of grim good manners one expects of the British in these trying situations”. Expecting a carefully crafted attack on extortion, the reviewer was dismayed to encounter a “sensational exploitation of homosexuality […] and what’s more offensive, an implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice”: Everyone in the picture who disapproves of homosexuals proves to be an ass, a dolt or a sadist. Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself. “I can’t help the way I am.” says one of the sodomites in this movie. “Nature played me a dirty trick.” And the scriptwriters whose psychiatric information is clearly coeval with the statute they dispute, accept this sick-silly self-delusion as a medical fact. (23 February 1962) 43 Victim (1961): Text and Context 93 Victim, the Production Code was modified. The new provision read: “It is permissible under the Code […] to consider approving references in motion pictures to the subject of sex aberrations, provided any references are treated with care, discretion and restraint, and in all other respects conform to the Code. The ruling in no way opens up the Code to irresponsible or immoral or indecent themes or treatment” (Trevelyan 1973: 183). 44 This can only be assumed for the character of Sandy Youth, one of the blackmailers, who adorns his apartment with a print of Michelangelo’s David and affects a pronounced sense of style. This character conforms with a ‘type’ detailed in one contemporary study: “The semi-criminal situation of any active homosexual or bisexual with homosexual tendencies offers many opportunities for blackmail, since concern for the feelings of families, parents, etc. is a more potent factor than fear of prison. It is the ideal hunting ground for those who want to see their victim suffer and ‘pay up’” (Hauser 1962: 69). 45 In 1959, the psychologist Charles Berg argued, “were it possible for the punishers to mix freely in the lives of the alleged culprits, and really get to know them, their outlook, and even their way of life and delinquent behaviour, the compulsion to punish might increasingly give way to understanding and therapy, at least in a large number of cases” (Berg 1959: 31). Subsequent critical handling of Victim in the decade after its appearance and before the militant gay movement had established any real presence in British society, tended to show an awareness of the restrictions under which the film had surfaced and therefore make allowances for its handling of a contentious issue. For example, Raymond Durgnat, writing one year before legal reform, thought the script “something of a tour de force”, deploying “the detective story formula to lure us onto a Cook’s Tour of London’s homosexual milieu, types and problems”: The types, having problems, often become characters, and the film very efficiently counters most of the popular misconceptions about homosexuality. ‘Queers are only upper class’ - one is a builder’s labourer; ‘queers are effeminate’ - one is a muscle-man; 44 ‘you can tell queers at a glance’ - the queerest-looking queer is a normal ‘tec, posing; ‘queers are sapping the nation’s moral fibre’ - the ‘establishment’ queer in his Rolls-Royce really cares about the welfare of his employees; ‘a married man can’t be a queer’ - the hero (Dirk Bogarde) happily settled with his sweetly conventional wife (Sylvia Syms), is revealed as having, in his heart at least, an Achilles’ heel that they both, tragically, have to live with, and which he must, stoically, refuse to indulge, even if it means he’ll never know a truly passionate sexual joy. (1966: 32) Such a broad schematic presentation of gay presence across British society, a matter that concerned the censors lest it overburden the film at the cost of ‘normal’ society, could clearly perform an important educative role for audiences steeped in narrow and rigid stereotypes. 45 Durgnat praised the film’s “lack of sentimentality (queers are prominent among those who persecute queers)”, but felt that Dearden and Relph had “pulled their punches” in their treatment of the police and what were widely seen at the time as unacceptable policing methods in the use of agents provocateurs and a greater Alan Burton 94 46 Consider this evidence collected by Westwood: “Some people are so incensed by the idea of homosexuality that police methods that wouldn’t be tolerated for a moment in other crimes are allowed when they are after queers. A lawyer friend of mine laughed at the way the Wolfenden Committee had been misled about police methods. He said, “Good God, surely they don’t believe that! ” The worst thing is this threat of exposure or violence which the police use to persuade people to tell tales about others. I don’t think there’s much more than mild physical violence, but they’re not above threatening more if they think it will persuade a person to plead guilty” (1960: 138-39). In contrast to the impeccable moral crusading of Farr in Victim, Westwood found evidence that some legal professionals were far from scrupulous in their service to homosexuals facing charges (1960: 142). willingness to prosecute homosexuals rather than their blackmailers. 46 However, he was unrealistic, considering the ‘restraints’ on commercial film production outlined by Relph, in his belief that the filmmakers should have had the “moral courage to denounce police policies as intolerant and savage” (1966: 32). Roger Manvell, in his survey of British cinema since the war published in 1969, still found Victim a “remarkably sensitive film”, “explicit in its handling of the problem of the homosexual” and as was now widely acknowledged “its release marked once again a step forward in a progressive censorship policy” (Manvell 1969: 82). The belated legal reform regarding male homosexuality in 1967 was bound, eventually, to impact on the representation of homosexuality in the arts, as well as the retrospective view towards Victim, which had been overtaken by events and embodied the sensibilities of an earlier time. Late in 1967, one hopeful correspondent to Films and Filming felt that “Maybe at last homosexuality is going to be given genuine adult treatment in the cinema” and that producers will move beyond “the Victim era, in which the good guy had been a homo once, was sorry about it, and hoped he never would be again” (November 1967: 38). The hardening of the attitude towards Victim is evident in the writing of Alexander Walker. In his original review for the Evening Standard, he had praised the courage of Bogarde and “his brave, sensitive picture of an unhappy, terribly bewildered man”, something that will “win him and this film a far wider audience”. Walker believed that the script “tackles grippingly that parasite of perversion - the blackmailer”, and applauded Victim as a “good film. Good as a fast-paced thriller. Overwhelmingly good as an acting triumph for Bogarde” (31 August 1961). He was less fulsome a decade later when he came to write his history of British cinema in the 1960s. He now found Victim “prudent” but not “artistic”, and related a “more serious objection”, “that the barrister, played by Dirk Bogarde, although by inclination a deviant, is never allowed to get as far as the act. Thus the film sidesteps the less comfortable qualifications of its resolutely middle-class sympathies” (1986: 157, first pub. 1974). In 1976, when he was writing for a specifically gay readership and Victim had become distinctly unfashionable, Walker made a complete about turn: Victim (1961): Text and Context 95 47 Feinstein, while criticising Dearden’s direction and the ‘simplicity’ of the treatment, concedes that “its formal excess and thematic topicality provide a density and richness rare in the cinema” (1985: 654). Russo’s treatment of Victim in the 1980s was more generous, welcoming the portrayal of a gay hero who has to fight not only the entrenched prejudice of heterosexual society, but also the “paralyzing self-hatred” of the other homosexual characters in the film (1987: 131). 48 When Medhurst revisited Victim on the occasion of the anthologisation of his landmark article, he also was more generous towards the film, now considering it a film “which still has something meaningful to say […] about queer history, about Englishness and about homophobia” (1996: 131). 49 This oft-cited figure seems to have originated with Lord Jowett and delivered in his Maudsley Lecture to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association (Westwood 1960: 147). I never thought Victim stood up very well at the time, let alone now […] It presented homosexuals as very limp-wristed, arty-crafty people […] There was a sense of manipulation about it which showed in its desire to please everybody and offend no one. (Gay News, n. 101, 1976, quoted in Bourne 1996: 161) The critical tone regarding Victim was cemented, as we have seen, by the writings of Dyer and Medhurst in the late 1970s and 1980s, and this was reinforced by the unsympathetic treatment of the social problem film in general in the hands of John Hill. 47 In the middle-1990s, new writing on Dearden and Relph, and on gay figures and representations in British cinema, began to portray Victim and other social problem films in a more favourable light. In 1997, Raymond Durgnat, the first British critic to have given Dearden and Relph any developed attention, was invited to revisit the social problem films of the partnership, and elected to reappraise Sapphire and Victim. 48 In response to the established critiques of the filmmakers, Durgnat proposed to read the two films, not as deplorable failures to assert subsequent orthodoxies, but rather as an attempt to distinguish attitudes which subsequent orthodoxies may conflate or misread; to defend as reasonable (even if dubious) some conservative anxieties; and to appreciate Dearden and Relph’s balance between honest witness to the zeitgeist, and critical intervention against it. (1997: 63) Durgnat finds the films richer than his immediate predecessors, with the productions managing to “tightly integrate their principal social problem with rich sociological detail”; and with “‘liberal messages’” intimated “not by pious ideas (the racist is a villain, and so on), but through brief, idiomatic dialogue with deftly inserted data (for example, 90% of blackmail cases involved homosexuality)” (1997: 63). 49 In contrast with previously unsympathetic readings that had tended to find a simplistically uniform liberal sensibility to the films, Durgnat argues for a more complex organisation of the texts, where, through sophisticated narrational and structuring devices, “‘social community’” is “‘made strange’”, leading to a “‘loosening’” of audience Alan Burton 96 50 Something widely felt in gay society: “A depression, a Chief Constable who wants to be a hero, a sex-scandal of the more unsavoury sort - any of these things can start a manhunt again. No homosexual will feel safe until the law is changed” (quoted in Hauser 1962: 98). The sensitivity was tied into concerns over the McCarthyite witch hunts in the States and American concerns regarding the reliability of its British allies following the homosexual revelations of the spy Guy Burgess (McLaren 2002: 222). 51 Personal and moving accounts by gay men who saw Victim in 1961, and published in Bourne (1996: 238-54). 52 Bennett reports that Dearden and Relph had acquired the rights to Simon Raven’s Feathers of Death, “one of the best novels with a homosexual theme”, as a possible follow up to Victim. The film was never made. expectations; no unitary “‘ideology’”, “but a wide range of spectator attitudes” (1997: 64-65). His reading is historically sensitive to the highly-developed presence of “witch-hunt” motifs in the film. 50 Durgnat also singles out the unsettling “‘transverse’” detection within domestic intimacy, wherein Farr’s wife “prises the truth out of him” (1997: 64); for Durgnat, Laura’s “‘inquisition’ into her gay husband probes issues of sincerity, fidelity and communication as incisively as Ingmar Bergman’s marriage films” (1997: 66). In his study of gays and lesbians in British cinema, Stephen Bourne has also been positive about the impact and achievements of Victim, believing that “when Victim was released in this country in 1961 it had an enormous impact on the lives of gay men who, for the first time, saw credible representations of themselves and their situations in a commercial British film” (Bourne 1996: 155). He arrives at this viewpoint following the remarkable insights revealed by the “Victim letters”. 51 Dyer’s theoretical probing of Victim had only led him to wonder what audience responses to the film might have been; and Medhurst’s more contextually sensitive account is greatly expanded and enhanced by the revelations contained in the correspondence. In fact, a letter to Films and Filming just after the film’s release furnished a lone piece of viewer response. Dudley Bennett of Scotland, while appreciating “its unprecedented boldness”, found Victim “curiously flat and unconvincing” - possibly a case of a letdown after understandably high expectations. However, he acknowledged the difficulties facing the producers in bringing the subject to the screen and “that in making Victim they were perhaps mainly concerned in paving the way for better things. If this is so, Victim has achieved its purpose” (April 1962). 52 It is uniformly the view across the “Victim letters” that “The film had a huge effect, for the good, on the thinking of those who saw it” (St John Adlard, in Bourne 1996: 238). As one correspondent recalls, “A female colleague at work did remark (having seen Victim) that she thought ‘men like that’ shouldn’t be imprisoned” (Christopher Coates, in Bourne 1996: 241). Kenneth Keenan went to see the film unaware of its content, and simply because he “was in love with Dirk Bogarde! ”: Victim (1961): Text and Context 97 Homosexuals (known to me) found the film sympathetic, helpful and, above all, totally realistic. My view too! At the time of its release I was not able to discuss it in public at all. Only in private, in a friend’s house in Wigan. Six of us discussed it. We all lived near each other, but were entirely in the ‘closet’. (Quoted in Bourne 1996: 245) Bogarde was clearly an icon for the gay audience and “just so right as someone that a person could worship from afar, as Barrett was supposed to have done. The character finally came out and he was brave, dashing and very decorative. It was good to have a hero” (Tony Newton, in Bourne 1996: 248). For some young men, facing the cashier to buy a ticket for Victim was a significant act of identity politics, their “first ‘coming out’ statement” (P.M. Scott, in Bourne 1996: 351); and for one “callow twenty-two year old” at least, “it really was a watershed in my awareness of gay life” (George Toland, in Bourne 1996: 254). In many respects, Victim became an easy and obvious target for critics wishing to find scapegoats for the failure of British society and culture to deal adequately with the issue of male homosexuality. Such viewpoints fail to take into proper account the considerable restraints under which commercial film production operated and the tolerance of public opinion for behaviour which had for so long been considered unacceptable. The comparatively enlightened opinion of reviewers that met the film recognised the bravery of the filmmakers in tackling the controversial issue; and the testimony of gay men who sought out the film eager to encounter and experience even compromised representations of their kind, confirms the positive impact Victim had on contemporary audiences. As Michael Rutt informs us, Of all the films of the early 1960s which dealt with gay topics, perhaps Victim was the most heralded and awaited, with great expectations, by the gay community […] The impact of seeing the film in Leicester Square on its initial West End release was an experience which stays in the memory. He was convinced that Victim “did much to bring about the 1967 Act” and more tolerant attitudes to homosexuality (quoted in Bourne 1996: 250-51). Such a view was held in higher political circles. Lord Arran had introduced the legislation into Parliament that eventually was passed into the Sexual Offences Act 1967. He wrote to Dirk Bogarde in 1968 after he had seen Victim on TV and stressed that he wanted “to say how much I admire your courage in undertaking this difficult and potentially damaging part”. John Coldstream reports that the parliamentarian “said he understood that it was in large part responsible for a swing in popular opinion, as shown by the polls, from forty-eight per cent to sixty-three per cent in favour of reform”. Lord Arran concluded: “It is comforting to think that perhaps a million men are no longer living in fear” (2004: 360-61). In his biography, Bogarde also confirms the “countless letters of gratitude which flooded in” to him after his Alan Burton 98 53 On Jarman, see Lippard (1996) and Wymer (2005). performance in Victim (1979: 242). The evidence we have regarding the production and reception of Victim clearly established the restraints under which the producers toiled and the care with which they had to work; it also reveals that for some gay men the film was a significant, perhaps crucial, moment in their own self-realisation; while for many others it was possibly a watershed intervention in sexual politics, making smoother the path to legal reform. This is something for which the producers could be proud and of which critics of the film have made too little. Victim also had a considerable influence on the representation of homosexuality in cinema. In the view of Vito Russo, the film’s groundbreaking portrait of the pressures caused by hiding and the sense of despair of the homosexuals in the film removed it from the category of films that dealt only with “harmless amorphous sissies” and “made gays real” (1987: 132). This was significant progress and paved the way for further responses from filmmakers. In terms of British cinema, gay characters began to appear with more regularity, and homosexuality began to the represented with more sympathy and complexity in films such as The Leather Boys (1963), The Family Way (1966) and If… (1968). The period culminated in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), the first mainstream film to include an on-screen kiss between two males, and in which director John Schlesinger with “intelligence, sensitivity and honesty […] explores an emotional, bisexual triangle, involving three people in a painful search for love and happiness” (Bourne, 1996: 237). The film, still controversial, was, like Victim, a major turning point in the depiction of gays in the cinema. From this point onwards, the gay liberation movement would make itself increasingly felt in the cinema, and openly gay filmmakers like Derek Jarman would radically alter the framework of treating homosexuality in British film. 53 References Aldgate, A. (1995). Censorship and the Permissive Society. British Cinema & Theatre 1955-1965. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bell-Williams, M. (2006). “‘Shop-soiled’ Women: Female Sexuality and the Figure of the Prostitute in 1950s British Cinema”. Journal of British Cinema and Television 3: 2. 266-283. Berg, C. (1959). Fear, Punishment, Anxiety and the Wolfenden Report. London: Allen and Unwin. Bogarde, D. (1979). Snakes and Ladders. St. Albans: Triad/ Panther. Burton, A., T. O’Sullivan and P. Wells (eds.) (1997). Liberal Directions. Basil Dearden and Postwar British Film Culture. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Victim (1961): Text and Context 99 Burton, A and T. O’Sullivan (2009). The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Bourne, S. (1996). Brief Encounters. Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930-1971. London: Cassell. Coldstream, J. (2004). Dirk Bogarde. The Authorised Biography. London: Phoenix. Davidson, R and G. Davis (2004). “‘A Field for Private Members’: The Wolfenden Committee and Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1950-67”. Twentieth Century British History 15: 2. 174-201. Duperley, D. And G. Donaldson (1958). “Will Britain See These Films? ” Films and Filming (May). 31. Durgnat, R. (1966). “Dearden and Relph. Two on a Tandem”. Films and Filming (July). 26-33. Durgnat, R. (1997). “Two ‘social problem’ films: Sapphire and Victim”. In: Burton, O’Sullivan and Wells (eds.): 59-88. Dyer, R. (2002). The Matter of Images. Essays on Representation. 2 nd ed. London: Routledge. Feinstein, H. (1985). “Victim”. In: Magill, Frank N. (ed). Magill’s Cinema Annual 1985. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem: 649-654. Galdston, I. (1960). “Review of Live and Let Live”. American Journal of Psychiatry. 283-284. Griffiths, R. (2006). British Queer Cinema. London: Routledge. Hall Williams, J.E. (1960). “Sexual Offenses: The British Experience”. Law and Contemporary Problems 25. 334-360. Hammelmann, H.A. (1958). “Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution”. Modern Law Review 21: 1 (January). 68-73. Hauser, R. (1962). The Homosexual Society. London: Bodley Head. Higgins, P. (1996). Heterosexual Dictatorship. Male Homosexuality in Post-War Britain. London: Fourth Estate. Higson, A. (ed.) (1996). Dissolving Views. Key Writings on British Cinema. London: Cassell. Hill, J. (1986). Sex, Class and Realism. British Cinema 1956-1963. London: BFI Publishing. Houlbrook, M. (2005). Queer London. Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957. University of Chicago: Chicago. Houlbrook, M. and C. Waters (2006). “The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London”. History Workshop Journal 62. 142-165. Jepson, N.A. (1959). “Homosexuality, Capital Punishment and the Law. Two Questionnaires”. British Journal of Delinquency 9: 4 (April). 246-257. Laidlaw, R.W. (1952). “A Clinical Approach to Homosexuality.” Marriage and Family Living (February). 39-46. Lippard, C. (ed.) (1996). By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Macnab, G. (1994). J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge. Manvell, R. (1969). New Cinema in Britain. London: Studio Vista. McLaren, A. (2002). Sexual Blackmail. A Modern History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP. Medhurst, A. (1996). “Victim: Text as Context”. In: Higson (ed.). 117-132. Moran, L. (1996). The Homosexual(ity) of Law. London: Routledge. Alan Burton 100 Perkins, Victor (1972). “The British Cinema”. In: Ian Cameron (ed.). Movie. London: November Books. 7-11. Relph, M. (1961). “My Idea of Freedom”. Films and Filming (September). 24, 37. Robertson, J.C. (1989). The Hidden Cinema. British Film Censorship in Action, 1913-1975. London: Routledge. Russo, V. (1987). The Celluloid Closet. Homosexuality in the Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row. Trevelyan, J. (1973). What the censor saw. London: Michael Joseph. Walker, A. (1986). Hollywood, England. The British Film Industry in the Sixties. London: Harrap. Warren, P. (1961). “Rank’s ‘Victim’ May End Up a ‘Martyr’”. Films and Filming (April). 31. Waters, C. (1999). “Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual”. In: Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds.). Moments of Modernity. Reconstructing Britain 1945-1964. London: Rivers Oram Press. 135-151. Weeks, J. (1989). Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. London: Longman. Westwood, G. (1953). Society and the Homosexual. New York: E.P. Dutton. - (1960). A Minority. A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain. London: Longmans. Wildeblood, P. (1955). Against the Law. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Wymer, Roland (2005). Derek Jarman. Manchester: Manchester UP. Alan Burton University of Hull 1 Inaugural lecture held on June 18, 2009 at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. My thanks are due to Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart and Bernhard Kettemann for their support and encouragement; they are also due to the Bad Bederkesa group, especially to Roger Lüdeke for the ‘instigation’ and to Sabine Schülting for the ‘response’. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Performing Arts. ‘New Aestheticism’ and the Media 1 Andreas Mahler English Studies/ ’Anglistik’ today seems to have developed into some pool for an indiscriminate variety of questions about things ‘English’. Methodologically, however, these questions (or research objects) all seem to be invariably connected with some kind of textuality. ‘English’ texts may, on the one hand, be treated discursively as documents expressing some extratextual ‘social’ fact; some of them may, however, also be read non-discursively as monuments of some ‘artistic’ preoccupation. If the discursive project finds itself also pursued by historians, philosophers, theologians and the like, the counterdiscursive one might be in the responsibility of literary scholars and philologists - ‘Anglisten’ - only. Their object is the text as (inter)medial art. The question about art is not so much what art is but what it does. As a consequence, the recently observable ‘aesthetic turn’ may be interpreted as a newly instigated interest in exploring the intrinsic anthropological embeddedness of human experience in media of all kinds, which may in turn be described in terms of their (of necessity) latent performativity. 1. I want to begin with two texts. One is Edward Estlin Cummings’ ‘Grasshopper’ poem, the other one is the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl’s “oberflächenübersetzung”. The text of the Cummings poem reads like this: Andreas Mahler 102 2 For the sake of accessibility cf. also Allison et al. (ed.) (1983: 1044), where the poem is printed slightly differently. r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who a)s w(e loo)k upnowgath PPEGORHRASS eringint(oaThe): l eA ! p: S a (r rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs) to rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly ,grasshopper; (Cummings 1972: 396) 2 In comparison to this, the second part of Jandl’s “oberflächenübersetzung”, which I quote here, looks much simpler at first sight: mai hart lieb zapfen eibe hold er renn bohr in sees kai so was sieht wenn mai läuft begehen so es sieht nahe emma mähen so biet wenn ärschel grollt ohr leck mit ei! seht steil dies fader rosse mähen in teig kurt wisch mai desto bier baum deutsche deutsch bajonett schur alp eiertier (Jandl 1997: III. 51. 11-19) Both examples pose the question of ‘what this is about’. This seems to be one of the central questions asked when facing modern/ postmodern art, or perhaps even art in general. It addresses paintings, photographs, sculptures, ballets, performances, ‘events’, and, of course, texts. An audience traditionally wants to know what it is that they see - watch, hear, listen to, witness, read, consume; on the other hand, quite a lot of them seem to be losing interest as soon as they think that they have found out. Nevertheless, they keep coming back so that one may draw the conclusion that art seems to constitute some necessity in life even though it may be difficult to point out what exactly that necessity is. Scholars and scientists observe phenomena; they draw conclusions; they attempt to classify; they offer interpretations. Natural scientists, it has been Performing Arts 103 3 For a vigorous and well-informed defence of ‘nonsense’ see Lecercle (1994). 4 For a recent synopsis of the (pluralist) state of the art in English Studies in Germany and a surreptitious wish for the reconstruction of some “common ground” see the contributions to Nünning/ Schlaeger (eds.) (2007), esp. the introductory essay by the editors (7-22, the quote 18). 5 Evidence could be given for each of these instances. 6 For a similar observation cf. Culler (1997: 43): “Professors of French writing books about cigarettes or Americans’ obsession with fat; Shakespeareans analysing bisexuality; experts on realism working on serial killers. What is going on? ” said, observe things; social scientists observe people; the ‘Humanities’ may be said to observe human artefacts or ‘ideas’, trying to explain and attribute ‘meaning’. Facing the Cummings or the Jandl poem, one might be tempted to ask ‘what is this? ’ (But, of course, one may just as well come to the straightforward conclusion that this is rubbish, or to put it a little more politely - or aesthetically - ‘nonsense’). 3 In the case of asking, one of the next questions that arises is the one addressing the framework where one might expect a possible answer. This is the question of ‘discipline’. Whom would one, helplessly facing the Cummings or the Jandl text, turn to? Some would say that one might turn to some ‘expert’ professing literature: a writer, a critic, a ‘professor’ of literature or literary scholar, or, to be more precise, some specialist in English and/ or American and/ or German and/ or Austrian and/ or Comparative philology. Where would one find such a person? In the following remarks, I will first concentrate on the question of ‘discipline’; I will then go on to address the problem of motivation or interest before I discuss the ways and means of finding things out; I will conclude by coming back to the two poems, addressing the question of aesthetics as an old (and potentially new) field of research. 2. ‘Anglistik’, it has been said, may be a field of research without a paradigm (cf. Iser 1984). 4 If biologists study plants and animals, and sociologists people and societies, Anglisten seem to be studying a bit of everything. There are experts in plant names from the period of Old English up until today; there are specialists in the development of English society from the Restoration to the Victorian age; there are researchers dealing with the dash in eighteenth-century prose. 5 Anglisten seem to be working as sociologists, biologists, historians, musicologists, art historians, political scientists at the same time; they seem to be drawing on almost all fields of research, provided that their object is to some extent connected to the English-speaking world. 6 They observe ‘English’ things, ‘English’ people, and ‘English’ artefacts or ‘ideas’. Andreas Mahler 104 7 For the question of ‘discipline’ see the remarks in Culler (1997: 1ff.). This question seems all the more important since there can be no interdisciplinarity without disciplines, ‘genuine’ interdisciplinarity, as it seems to be propagated by some (especially by the advocators of a ‘pluralist’ approach in Cultural Studies), being a mere contradiction in terms; for the debate on interdisciplinarity see e.g. the contributions in Kocka (ed.) (1987). 8 For a recent survey of the state of the art in American Studies, with special reference to Austria, cf. Fellner (2008). 9 For the debate on ‘English’ in Britain see e.g. Eagleton (1983: 17ff.), as well as the contributions to Widdowson (ed.) (1982) and Bassnett (ed.) (1997). 10 Again, evidence could easily be supplied. On the other hand, however, there are also ‘proper’ historians who deal with English history, political scientists who are doing research into the idea of an English ‘constitution’, musicologists talking about Dowland, and art historians describing and explaining Turner. The question may be put like this: who is raiding into whose field? And what is more: is there such a field as ‘Anglistics’? This is the question of ‘discipline’; it is also the question of ‘interdisciplinarity’. 7 The answer to the question at present seems to be largely due to the denomination adopted. Talking about ‘Anglistics’ (or ‘Americanistics’) or about English (or American) Studies or about English philology or about Linguistics or Literary or Cultural or Media Studies in English seems to be making all the difference. 8 In addition to this, there seems to be a decisive disciplinary gap between the English-speaking (or ‘native’) countries and a foreign perspective. Doing ‘English’ in Great Britain or the United States seems to narrow down the scope of what is done within the field quite considerably, since there are other representatives of the Humanities such as historians or philosophers or social scientists doing their bit quite naturally with reference to their immediate (i.e. English-speaking) surroundings. 9 As a consequence, interdisciplinarity seems to be structured differently in a native context than in a non-native one. Germanisten in the German-speaking countries working on the construction of the railway line to Baghdad, on Flaubert’s novels or on the negotiation of power in early modern drama (with, faute de mieux, special reference to Shakespeare’s histories) 10 may still be looked at more askance than German representatives of English Studies writing about English food, the London Underground or the topography of the Lake District. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a wide-ranging interest. The only thing is who, in a highly differentiated scientific world, is the one to make statements about what. (This is the restrictive aspect of the term ‘discipline’.) At times, nowadays, one seems to gather the impression that anyone might make statements about anything, which, to some extent, seems to diminish the illusion of expertise rather than heighten it. But, indeed, who would make statements about the Cummings or the Jandl text? A possible suggestion Performing Arts 105 11 For the philological aspect of literary studies cf. Stierle (1996). 12 For an overview of the (to a great extent German) debate about ‘methods’ (‘Methodendebatte’) in literary studies see Winko (2000); for (largely dissatisfactory, old-style) presentations and discussions of different ‘methods’ (‘Methodenrevuen’) see e.g. Maren- Griesebach (1977) or the conspicuously polemical volume by Nemec/ Solms (ed.) (1979). 13 There is a plethora of terms designating methods in the Humanities, ranging from ‘theory’ over ‘methodology’, ‘method’, ‘approach’, ‘technique’, ‘procedure’, ‘tools’, ‘paradigm’, ‘strategy’ to ‘frame’, ‘focus’, and ‘lens’, etc. This is not the place for an attempt at differentiation, but one might begin by distinguishing between ‘theories’ as methods ‘from above’ (setting the frame in which one’s statements will be placed) and ‘procedures’ as methods ‘from below’ (providing the tools with which one’s statements may be reached). For methods from below see Griffin (ed.) (2005); for methods from above see e.g. Geier (1983); Nünning (ed.) (1995); Schneider (ed.) (2005). For a general defence of theory cf. Bode (1996).; for its interminability cf. Culler (1997: 15): “Theory is [...] a source of intimidation, 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? ’” 14 For an attempt to describe interpretation as a rule-governed behaviour see Titzmann (1977); for a British (and to some extent American) equivalent of aspiring to some ‘scientific’ standard, and clarity, in literary, and cultural studies, cf. Culler (1997) and the activities of the ‘New Accents’ group, notably Hawkes (1985: esp. 123ff.) and Belsey (1987). would be ‘word-lovers’, philologists. 11 They are the ones that might explain what people do with words in general, and what a certain writer did in writing a specific text in particular. This is what is neither done by historians nor by social scientists nor by geographers. It would be the unique terrain for people dealing with linguistic (or verbal, or rather semiotic) artefacts, placing them in contexts, and attributing to them functional ‘meaning’. This is where the adjective ‘English’ comes into play again: English studies could then, first of all, be about (English) ‘language’ in ‘texts’, and ‘texts’ in ‘contexts’ (with all three terms placed between inverted commas, since ‘language’ could also be taken to comprise non-verbal media just as ‘texts’ could also be photographs, films, choreographies etc., ‘context’ being a functional term anyway). 3. Wanting to know what language does in texts and what texts do in contexts, implies a certain ‘method’. 12 Methods in the Humanities seem to be different from what they are in the empirical sciences. 13 In physics, chemistry or medical research, it seems much easier to standardise a certain approach and set a group of scientists to the task of fruitfully going through the same procedure time and again than in the Humanities. This seems to be due to a lack of ‘hard facts’ (and a certain, to some extent subject-specific, innate boredom with standardisation). 14 As a consequence, instead of talking about a ‘methodological’ path through a ‘disciplinary’ field in the Humanities, I Andreas Mahler 106 15 For a concise analysis of the problematic and a practical differentiation in ‘questions’, ‘approaches’, ‘results’, and ‘problems’ cf. Weiß (1979: 59ff.). 16 For this attempt at systematisation cf. again Weiß (1979: 59ff.). would rather suggest to talk more modestly of ‘questions’ (‘what do I want to know? ’), ‘approaches’ (‘how do I find this out? ’), ‘results’ (‘what do I get? ’), and ‘problems’ (‘what do I not get? ’). 15 Adopting a simple model of communication, one could roughly crossclassify this (as has been done) with the basic instances of ‘author’, ‘work’, ‘reader’, and ‘universe’, placing the work in the centre and investigating the relations between work and author, work and reader, work and universe, and work and work (see Abrams 1971: 6ff.; the illustration p. 6). This would lead to various possibilities, depending upon whether the motivation of the research is historical, anthropological, political, systematical, aesthetic, autonomous, etc., i.e. depending largely on whether I want to make statements about causes in the past, relations in the present, or effects in the future. Focusing the relation between work and author might then answer questions such as ‘how can I explain the creation of a work of art? ’, either individually (biographically), sociologically, or epistemologically (within the framework of a ‘history of ideas’); concentrating on the relation between work and reader could help me address questions such as ‘how can I account for different readings of a work in different contexts? ’, either historically or culturally; exploring the relation between work and world would give me an idea of how a work of art addresses problems of a past or present or future society whereas going into the relation between work and work would tackle the question of how a work of art is made. 16 The questions to be asked might thus be questions about the work (as in textual criticism, New Criticism, Russian formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, etc.), or about the author (as in positivism, psychoanalysis, etc.), or about the world or context (as in the history of ideas, in historical criticism, mythological criticism, sociology of literature, Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, discourse theory, systems theory, Gender theory, postcolonialism, etc.), or about the reader (as in phenomenology, Performing Arts 107 17 For (theoretical as well as practical) overviews cf. Culler (1997: 123ff.), Selden/ Widdowson (1993) and Selden (1989). 18 For falsifiability as the ‘proof’, and justification, of all theory see, of course, the writings of Sir Karl Popper. 19 For this, see the concise remarks on (un)understandability in Stierle (1996: 1172); cf. in a similar vein the treatment of “deconstruction on the wild side” in Norris (1986: 92ff.). Reader-response criticism, reception theory, intertextuality, etc.), these mappings being, of course, neither exclusive nor exhaustive. 17 As a consequence, facing the Cummings or the Jandl text, my questions might be: ‘are these the correct texts? ’, ‘how do I account for the shape of the text? ’, ‘how does the text use language? ’ (work); ‘who wrote this? ’, ‘is this the expression of a sane mind, an ingenious, a sick one? ’ (author); ‘what does the text refer to? ’, ‘is it the expression of a historical constellation, a mythological one? ’, ‘can its shape be explained by reference to the sociopolitical context, as an expression of, say, class/ race/ gender differences? ’, ‘how does it relate to (historical, contemporary) discourses of power or subjectivity? ’ (universe); ‘what do readers do with this? ’, ‘what did they do with it? ’, ‘are there any pre-texts, post-texts to them in a line of intertextual dialogue? ’ (reader). 4. A scientific (or scholarly) mind knows no forbidden questions; in the scientific community, there are (or at least should be) no questions barred. But, of course, there may be silly questions, ‘good’ (promising) ones and ‘bad’ ones. Whatever I ask, there must always be some plausibility why it seems reasonable to ask precisely this, and whatever I do, there must always be some rational procedure which shows and explains how I have gone about to obtain my results. There seems to be some agreement that ‘scientific’ or ‘scholarly’ statements should at least fulfil three basic requirements: they ought to be intersubjective (i.e. communicable); they ought to be non selfcontradictory (i.e. straightforward in their argumentative structure); and they ought to be verifiable or falsifiable (i.e. reproduceable in following the same path) (cf. Titzmann 1977: 20ff.). 18 Making statements that elude understandability, that circumvent some inner logic, and eschew the demands of (whatever it is) ‘truth’, may sound ingenious - if not congenial - but seems of little epistemological use. Statments of this kind may serve a certain way of academic (or mostly pseudo-intellectual, or even pseudo-‘literary’) selffashioning rather than opening up the opportunity of rational discourse: of a critical, reciprocal dialogue about some chosen object of research. Despite their affected cleverness, such discourses look tritely - and, in the last analysis, one-sidedly - phatic. 19 Andreas Mahler 108 20 For a productive, and operational, wide notion of ‘textuality’ see Lotman (1990). 21 For the notion of poetics as the study of how something is made cf. Culler (1989). 22 For genericity in texts cf. the contributions to Genette/ Todorov (eds.) (1986) as well as Fowler (1987); for its ineluctability see the remarks in Stempel (1975). Treating things ‘English’ then implies, as does any other type of scientific (scholarly) interest, a controlled approach. The basis of the vast majority of questions asked in our ‘discipline’ seems to lie, first and foremost, in ‘texts’. Whether I want to know about Old English names for plants or about the Long Eighteenth-Century or about the history of the dash, I will always turn to ‘texts’ as my first source of investigation; so will I when inquiring into some photographs by Mapplethorpe, a Jarman movie, courtly dance rituals, ‘Canadian’ rodeos or British ‘punks’. There seems to be no ‘anglistic’ research without some material artefact. These artefacts can be said always to consist of some material base (without which they would be indiscernible), some (more or less conventionally codified) component attributing what is called ‘meaning’, and a (more or less flexible) ‘joker element’ called ‘use’; i.e. they can, in a first step, be analysed according to their syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic aspect. This is the field of semiotics (cf. Morris 1971: 417). Its principles seem to tally with the model of communication referred to above in the sense that the pragmatic aspect predominantly covers questions concerning ‘author’ and ‘reader’, the semantic one those concerning the ‘universe’, and the syntactic one mainly questions about the ‘work’ itself. Whatever I want to know, then, seems to be in some way connected with some aspect of ‘textuality’. 20 My research begins with making statements about ‘texts’, and what I offer as a first step is a structural analysis of the material artefact at hand. For this, I must be informed about its potentiality; I must be able to describe how it is ‘made’, and how it could have been ‘made’ differently, i.e. I must know something about its poetics. 21 This implies some language of description (cf. Fricke 2003). Whether I am confronted with a sonnet, or an Elizabethan jig, or a photograph by Cindy Sherman, or a painting by Constable, or Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, or English breakfast, or one of the good-bye tours of Phil Collins, I am always in need of some terminology with which to describe what I am observing. A controlled approach implies a controlled vocabulary. Analysing a sonnet, I must know about its generic rules and boundaries; analysing a movie, I must be aware of its use of images, sound, spoken language, of their interplay as well as of the conventions of the chosen genre; describing a ballet demands a possibility of notation fixing what is happening on stage before I go on to interpret what I think I see. 22 All these are acts of constructing a grid without which I would not be able to discriminate. Without attributing syntactic, or pragmatic, or semantic features in the first place, I would not know what to expect. ‘Textuality’ implies a ‘language’ in which this ‘textuality’ is expressed, Performing Arts 109 23 For the concept of ‘media awareness’ cf. Rajewsky (2002: 1ff.). 24 For this aspect see again Lotman (1990); cf. also the illuminating remarks on the dialectic between culture and imagination in Lobsien/ Lobsien (2003: 256ff.). The study of culture thus clearly supersedes what was once dismissingly called, by Ernst Robert Curtius, a mere fact-reproducing “Realiensalat” (for the quote cf. Lieber 2002: 842). 25 For this narrow definition of the term ‘discourse’ cf. Titzmann (1989: 51ff.). 26 For the distinction between ‘mimesis’ and ‘performance’ cf. Iser (1993: 250ff.). and it is only in developing such a ‘language’ that one becomes aware of the mediality of the whole enterprise. 23 5. Every culture seems to be based on some kind of textuality. Texts, as has been suggested, can be seen as ‘meaning-generating mechanisms’; their organisation forms, and perpetuates, what has been called the human ‘semiosphere’ (cf. Lotman 1990: 11ff. & 123ff.). The task of texts then is to provide (and to produce) cultures with ‘meaning’, which they process and reprocess incessantly so as to stabilise (and inadvertently shift) their ‘identities’. ‘Englishness’ or ‘Indianness’ are thus no stable features but functions of processes pervaded by material artefacts used as texts. As an ‘anglicist’ or representative of ‘English studies’, I may (and should) be interested in the way this ‘Englishness’ or ‘Indianness’ is textually constructed, describing thus the culture-constituting aspect of textuality. 24 This may be called the discursive quality of culture. If one accepts that the term ‘discourse’ refers to systems of (political, economic, religious, etc.) thought 25 , my interest in this case would lie in a mapping of all textuality onto some overall cultural ‘meaning’. My main focus would be the semantic aspect of a semiotics of culture; my readings would be largely ‘mimetic’, highlighting the representational character of all ‘texts’ under scrutiny; my interest would be to show the ideologies at work and to describe their textual negotiation. 26 Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. I can read The Taming of the Shrew as an early modern expression of patriarchal repression; I can see the courtly masque as a measure of disciplining a self-confident nobility into the framework of an absolutist court; I can interpret The English Patient (at least partially) as a reflection of a misled colonialist exploitation of the Gurkha and view the Rocky films as a snug glossing over of the US class problem. In all these readings, however, I would treat my texts as mere evidence for some extratextual problem: I would not so much want to make statements about the texts themselves than about something else for which the texts only serve as an illustration. This attitude has been called ‘expressive realism’ (cf. Belsey 1987: 7ff.). It sees texts as documents of some historical or social fact and treats them as if they opened up directly to some Andreas Mahler 110 27 For the distinction between ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ function cf. Luhmann (1974: 69); for a theoretisation of latency with regard to literature see Haverkamp (2002). 28 This opens up a ‘mimetic’ reading of the poem; cf., in contradistinction to that, the view that the grasshopper text “does not permit the establishment of any kind of illusion in the first place” in Wolf (1998: 286). 29 There is a slight change from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”; cf. Allison et al. (1983: 551): My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. problem of the world. As a matter of fact, it more sees through texts than seeing the texts themselves; what this approach is interested in is not so much the (structural) analysis of a text but its semantics - and its manifest social function. 27 As a consequence, looking at the Cummings or the Jandl poem, I might find out that the one ‘is about’ a grasshopper hopping (‘who, as we look up, now gathering into a/ the... leaps, arriving to rearrangingly become grasshopper’ 28 ) and interpret this, say, as an expression of the repressed desires of American minorities in the 1930s, and that the other one ‘is about’ a Wordsworth text (“my heart leaps up when i behold / a rainbow in the sky / so was it when my life began / so is it now i am a man / so be it when i shall grow old / or let me die! / the child is father of the man / and i could wish my days to be / bound each to each by natural piety / [william wordsworth]”) (Jandl 1997: III. 51. 1-10) 29 and see the German (or rather Austrian) replica as some reappropriating lyrical protest against Anglo-American Coca-colonization. 6. But this may not be the whole story. I can also enjoy The Taming of the Shrew as a source of (even doubly) gender-based laughter; I can admire the courtly masque as a multi-medial mise-en-scène of seemingly endless amazement; I can take pleasure in The English Patient as a postmodern(ist) novel displaying a complex self-conscious use of narrative technique and view the Rocky films as a celebration of unattainable (and, to some extent, admittedly pointless) brutal male force. This also applies to the Cummings and the Jandl texts. “Do not forget”, the older Wittgenstein cautiously warned (himself), “that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language game of giving information.” Performing Arts 111 30 For a (slightly misconstrued) polemic against the conception of art as mere communicative ‘information’ cf. Easthope (1983: 3ff.). 31 For the idea of the ‘thetic’ as opposed to the idea of the ‘aisthetic’ cf. Kristeva (1974: 78); for the notion of ‘counter-discursivity’ cf. Foucault (2002a: 48) as well as Warning (1999: 317ff.). 32 For the distinction between ‘monument’ and ‘document’ cf. the introductory chapter to Michel Foucault (2002b). 33 Cf. the laconic remark in Borges (1980: 133): “esta inminencia de una revelación, que no se produce, es, quizá, el hecho estético.” 34 This is what I have tried to develop in Mahler (2006); cf. also (again) Wolfgang Iser’s use of ‘performativity’ in Iser (1993: 250ff.). 35 For this concept see the contributions to Joughin/ Malpas (eds.) (2003), esp. the introduction (1-19); this ‘new’ aetheticism, however, it must be said, runs the risk of being just as ‘new’ as was the ‘New Historicism’ when it was introduced as a ‘method’ by Stephen Greenblatt on his move from the East to the West coast of the United States of America. - For a highly suggestive recent (Kantian) defence of the aesthetic as one of the decisive cognitive pillars of democratic culture, opening up a ‘free play of our cognitive capacities’ (‘das freie Spiel der Erkenntnisvermögen’), see the profound remarks in Peper (2002: esp. 32ff.); characteristically, Peper, too, (inductively) begins to develop his theoretical thoughts on the basis of a Jandl poem (“fortschreitende räude”, 2f.). (Wittgenstein 1967: 28e) Against this background, one might venture to say that the Cummings poem is not really ‘about’ a grasshopper, nor is the Jandl text conclusively ‘about’ a Wordsworthian pre-text. Neither of the two texts seems to constitute a mere mimetic riddle which is ‘solved’ as soon as one has found out what it refers to. The grasshopper poem seems to be just as little about a grasshopper as Dürer’s painting of the “Hare” is about a hare or Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” are about sunflowers. The picture gallery (just as is the poem) is not the place I turn to if I wish to be better informed. 30 If it were, I would simply take up the information and turn to the next picture to see what I can learn there. But this is not what I do. Rather, instead of merely taking up what I see, I begin to focus on how (and why) I see what I see; instead of concentrating on the discursive or ‘thetic’ aspect of the material artefact, I begin to concentrate on its ‘counter-discursive’ or ‘aisthetic’ aspect. 31 In other words, I change the game. I no longer see the material artefact as a document of some social (political, psychological, ideological, etc.) issue; rather, I begin to see it as a ‘monument’ 32 of some (possibly) cognitive issue that to some extent eludes my capacities. It is in this sense that the aesthetic has tentatively been described as the ‘imminence of a revelation that does not come’. 33 As a consequence, what I experience in reading the Cummings or the Jandl text may not be so much what they mimetically refer to - the ‘idea’ behind the text - but what they actually ‘do’. This may be called the ‘performative’, or the ‘pragmasemiotic’, aspect of art. 34 It may also be called ‘new aestheticism’. 35 It draws attention to what (in art) is actually done with semiotic artefacts, focusing not so much on the manifest function of the media concerned, which - quite legitimately, and usefully - reduces Andreas Mahler 112 36 This is again the notion of latency (see above note 27). 37 For the notion of ‘eccentricity’ as the basic human condition cf. Plessner (1981: 360ff.). 38 For the notions of ‘verso’ and ‘recto’ cf. Saussure (1985: 155ff., esp. 157; for the illustration see 99), for the English version cf. Saussure (1959: 111ff., esp. 113), where they are rendered as ‘front’ and ‘back’: “Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back” (for the illustration cf. 66f.); see also Mahler (2006: 229ff.). 39 This is what Eva Müller-Zettelmann does in her reading of the Jandl text as a self-denying (implicitly metalyrical) parody of the religious subtext in the Wordsworth poem (cf. Müller- Zettelmann 2000: 250ff.). mediality into the mere status of ‘serving’ as a means of (transparently) transporting semantic information, but on their latent function, the one that has to remain hidden to us so as to guarantee for us that it is working. 36 This would be the idea of the ‘revelation that does not come’: in seeing the arts ‘perform’, we get a glimpse of the fact that our cognitive capacities are of necessity bound up within some kind of mediality, which we immediately have to deny to ourselves so as not to lose the illusion of having direct access to the ‘world’ (cf. Mahler 2004 and 2009a). What we experience is our own ‘eccentricity’ 37 , the mechanism of what has been called our ‘cognitive matrix’ (Mahler 2004). In playing the game of Cummings’ grasshopper ‘aesthetically’, I do not only convert syntactic material - what has been called the language’s verso (the text of the poem) - into semantic gratifications - its recto (a grasshopper hopping) - but I also re-convert the idea of hopping (the recto) into the syntactic display of the ‘letters on the page’ (the verso), creating a to-and-fro movement which leads me time and again across the medial gap between the two inverted levels characteristic of any kind of ‘language’. 38 Likewise, in experiencing the Jandl text - which, as the “oberflächenübersetzung” that it is, seems to be some kind of (English/ German) versoverso-transposition itself - I can engage in a recto-verso game, enjoying the syntactic gratification of a new material artefact 39 , as well as in a verso-recto game, drawing (imaginative) pleasure from the new semantic effects achieved by the German/ Austrian version, which offers me, among other things, the (isotopic) idea of a rather Germanic experience of a forest (“zapfen”; “eibe hold”; “baum deutsche deutsch”) or of some hidden pleasures or obscenities (“ohr leck mit ei”; “wenn ärschel grollt”) or of an exotic Performing Arts 113 40 This is precisely what happens in so-called ‘mondegreens’; where mishearings are used as alternative (transposed) signifiers (verso) opening up new and unexpected readings (recto) (cf. Keiper 2008). 41 For the notion of a ‘radical imaginary’ as opposed to a ‘social imaginary’ cf. Castoriadis (1987). 42 For the fictive as an agency of ‘realising’ the imaginary by means of re-using elements of the real cf. Iser (1993: esp. ch. 1). 43 This refers to the basic tenet of the New Critics (cf. Belsey 1987: 15ff.). 44 This additionally activates the punctuation in that the single bracket plus colon in line 5 can be seen as a zero form of the animal leaping, just as the comma and the semicolon embracing the grasshopper in the last line may be interpreted as some provisional halt. animal world within this forest (“rosse mähen”; “schur”; “eiertier”). 40 What I begin to become aware of, then, is the incessant process of semiosis (cf. Lotman 1990): our (human) capacity to turn a ‘radical imaginary’ 41 into arbitrary shapes of (fictive) ‘meaning’ and to dissolve them immediately back again into mere materiality; and in pursuing this, I begin to (anthropologically) discover, and explore, my media-based condition as a meaning-generating animal. 42 This, I believe, is what is not done with ‘language’, ‘texts’, and ‘contexts’ by historians, biologists, sociologists, theologians and the like; it is only done by us. And we should do it. 7. But, again, this is not yet the whole story. Looking at the Cummings text, I cannot only ‘read about’ a grasshopper hopping, I can also ‘see’ one actually hop. What I discern is not only a scriptural representation of the movement of the animal but also a visual presentation of it. In other words, I get the ‘message’ (whatever it is) through two media at the same time. I do not only read the ‘words on the page’ 43 , but I can also look at something material hop, ‘gathering’ from a right-justified and hyphenated “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” in the title into an upper case “ PPEGORHRASS ” in line 4, invisibly (“aThe): ”) ‘leaping’ through lines 5 to 10, before it lands as a rather confused and disorderly “gRrEaPsPhOs” in line 11, only to ‘rearrange’ itself into the wonted, and left-justified, “grasshopper” in the last line (14). 44 Eva Hesse, the congenial and imaginative German translator of this poem, has clearly recognised this, visualising the leap from “ R - Ü - P - F - E - S - A - G - H - R ” to “ PFEGÜRHRAS ” to a barely distinguishable “T: er” to “gRraPfeHüs” to an ordinary lower case “grashüpfer” in the end, as can be seen in her German version of the poem: Andreas Mahler 114 45 Again, the layout differs slightly from the original. 46 For this definition of intermediality cf. Wolf (2001) as well as Rajewsky (2002: 12ff.); cf. also Hansen-Löve (1983) and the programmatic essay (inaugural lecture) by Werner Wolf (1996). 47 Cummings himself uses the term ‘Poempictures’. R - Ü - P - F - E - S - A - G - H - R der wi)e wi(r hinseh)n sichjetztauf PFEGÜRHRAS bäumt zum T: er hU ! pf: T und (s eTzT .gRraPfeHüs) auf sich wie (an) der (ord) zum (nend) ,grashüpfer; (Hesse/ Ickstadt (eds.). 2000: 282) 45 Both the English and the German ‘Grasshoppers’ thus operate two versos - one based on digitalised writing, the other one based on analogical visualisation. This is a true case of what has been called ‘intermediality’, involving, as has been said, two conventionally distinct media - words and images or, rather in this case, words as words and words as images - in one and the same process of expression or communication. 46 Cummings’ ‘Grasshopper’ is a poem, and a picture, at the same time 47 ; it is (doubly) a ‘visual poem’ in that it simultaneously uses letters, on the one hand, as an arbitrary sign system ‘speaking about’ its object and, on the other, as an analogical means of directly ‘depicting’ its object. This opens up the possibility to play the verso-recto-/ recto-verso-game on two levels at the same time. ‘Reading’ the poem verbally and pictorially thus makes me hop about myself between the two versos and their corresponding rectos (which might probably even be only one). Performing Arts 115 48 For the cognitive aspect of Cummings’ poems see the chapter “Inferences from a Cummings Poem” in Jakobson/ Waugh (1979: 222-230); cf. my introduction and commentary to the German version in Jakobson (2007: II. 717-731). For (medial) interminability cf. also Mahler (2009b). 49 The formulation refers back to, of course, Stephen Greenblatt’s well-known dictum ‘There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us.’ 50 If the tilting of the ‘Grasshopper’ poem can be called centripetal in the sense that it tends to give us different mimetic shades of one and the same representation (the grasshopper), the tilting of Jandl’s “oberflächenübersetzung” looks rather centrifugal in that it performatively opens up new presentations offering the activation of new material (such as German signifiers and musical sounds). My verbally achieved syntactic gratification equals my pictorially achieved semantic gratification and vice versa. Consequently, I begin to lose myself in an interminable game, which, inadvertently and pleasurably, makes me acknowledge, and enjoy, my media-based condition as a meaning-making animal. 48 In the eternal criss-crossing between the verbal and the pictorial, there is forever meaning, no end of making meaning, only without any definitive (i.e. ‘meaningful’) result. 49 8. The same can be said to apply to the Jandl text, especially to its 1984 recording made, and performed, by the poet himself (Jandl 1984). The performance of the poem is divided into four parts. The first part gives us a straightforward classical recitation of Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” spoken by a woman’s voice (Lauren Newton) in what I would classify as an upper class American east coast accent and accompanied by an old-fashioned, organ-like synthesizer (00: 00-00: 27); this is followed by a male voice (Ernst Jandl himself) articulating the German/ Austrian part of the “oberflächenübersetzung” in a sharp declamatory tone, with the instrumental accompaniment changing from festive organ to a rather improvisatory jazzlike flute (00: 28-01: 03); the third part is then an overlay of the two verbal versions without any instrumental accompaniment at all (01: 04-01: 34); and the fourth part, which is by far the longest, ends in letting organ and flute peter out in an increasingly disharmonious coda (01: 35-02: 44). What we thus get is, as it were, an acoustic version of the ‘Grasshopper’. Where the Cummings poem uses visual material both verbally and nonverbally, the Jandl performance gives us both verbal and non-verbal sounds (with the non-verbal sounds finding themselves in addition characteristically produced by two different wind instruments). As a consequence, it can be seen as an intermedial dialogue between spoken language on the one hand and music on the other, again operating on two versos competing for (potentially) one recto at the same time. 50 Where the verbal material of the two Andreas Mahler 116 languages opens up the possibility to articulate two (and more) entirely different things on the basis of (apparently) one and the same phonic substance, the musical sounds can either be interpreted as (semantically) confirming (and/ or denying) the solemnity of “My Heart Leaps Up” as a hymn appropriately backed up by an organ and the disrespectfulness of the “oberflächenübersetzung” adequately mirrored in the sounds of a free jazzlike flute, accentuating the ‘classical’ character of the one as well as the ‘modernity’ of the other - or they can be seen (or rather heard) as (altermedially) performing what the texts are doing, which seems to be particularly prominent in the noises made by organ and flute in the coda, which increasingly threaten to sound very much like what happens - I beg your pardon - “wenn ärschel grollt”. 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Warning, Rainer (1999). “Poetische Konterdiskursivität. Zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Umgang mit Foucault”. Die Phantasie der Realisten. Munich: W. Fink. 313-345. Weiß, Wolfgang (1979). Das Studium der englischen Literatur. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer. Widdowson, Peter (ed.) (1982). Re-Reading English. London: Methuen. Winko, Simone (2000). “Methode”. In: Harald Fricke et al. (eds.). Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. 3 rd ed. 3 vols. II. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 581-585. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1967). Zettel. Eds. G.E.M. Anscombe / G.H. von Wright. Berkeley / Los Angeles: U of California P. Wolf, Werner (1996). “Intermedialität als neues Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft? Plädoyer für eine literaturzentrierte Erforschung von Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Wortkunst und anderen Medien am Beispiel von Virginia Woolfs ‘The String Quartet’”. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 21. 86-116. Wolf, Werner (1998). “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry? ”. Poetica 30. 251-289. Wolf, Werner (2001). “Intermedialität”. In: Ansgar Nünning (ed.). Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ansätze - Personen - Grundbegriffe [1998]. 2 nd ed. Stuttgart & Weimar: Metzler. 284-285. Andreas Mahler Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Seite 120 vakat 1 An Historical Study of English (1996), Essentials of Early English ( 2 2005 [1999]), An Introduction to Middle English (co-authored with Simon Horobin, 2002); “From Middle to Early Modern English” (2006). 2 This review will use page numbers for references, since using the book’s system would unnecessarily complicate the checking of quotes: Except for the preface, every single paragraph in the book, and be it only 3 lines, is numbered, but the numbering starts anew in each subchapter. Thus, the first paragraph of Ch. 1, subch. 1, has the number 1.0., but so does the first paragraph of Ch. 2, subch. 1, and so on, so that e.g. a paragraph numbered 4.3 can be found on pages 14, 40, 63, 99, 114, 139. However, the page headers do not identify the chapters and subchapters, which makes looking up Smith’s many cross references extremely difficult. 3 This point has also been raised by Hansen (2001: 112-113) in a review of Smith 1999: “Die referierten Fakten werden zu wenig zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt”. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 35 (2010) Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen Jeremy J. Smith, Sound Change and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Corinna Weiss Over the last decade, Jeremy J. Smith has published a number of introductory texts 1 for students of English historical linguistics. His new book also targets “advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students” (xi) as the primary readership, and for their benefit Smith intends to “keep the use of technical terms to a minimum, [...] describe what some may consider rather basic knowledge about the history of English sounds [and] re-examine basic notions from first principles” (xi). Yet he modestly hopes that “teachers may also find something of value [...], if only to dispute”(xi). This mixed audience may be responsible for the division of the book into two parts: The first (1-91 2 ) establishes the theoretical framework on an introductory level, the second (93-160) presents three specialist studies of key sound changes at turning points in English language history: Old English Breaking, quantitative changes in the transition from Old to Middle English, and the Great Vowel Shifts [sic]. However, the two parts do not always correspond well: some introductory descriptions are insufficient for the understanding of the more technical chapters, while some of the provided theoretical framework is not at all employed in Smith’s argumentation 3 . Rezensionen 122 4 Cf. a similar criticism in Skaffari (2001: 413) on Smith 1999: “However, teachers may be looking for more extensive accounts of the language-external cultural background”. Smith focuses on the ‘Why? ’ rather than the ‘What? ’ or ‘When? ’ questions, and attempts “an articulation between current trends in sociohistorical linguistics and wider debates in historiography” (1) in examining the complex matter of “the articulation between variation and change” (3). He argues that modern historiography, “stimulated by postmodernism to rethink its theoretical underpinnings” (5), is of “some relevance for historians who work with language” (6). However, the book does not quite fulfil the reader’s expectations in this respect: modern historiography plays a rather subordinate role in both the text and the References 4 . On the other hand, Smith, in what he disparagingly calls “parasitism on other disciplines” (5), uses examples from philosophy, evolutionary biology, meteorology, or physics to discuss questions of contingency. As Valtonen (1999: 115), in her review of Smith 1996, has pointed out, this is not entirely unproblematic either, since there is “a consistent difficulty for the writers or readers of interdisciplinary publications to be specialists in more than one discipline”. Thus, while Smith quotes Keller 1994 for the “‘hidden hand’ or ‘blind watchmaker’ effect (Keller 1994)”, Keller’s subtitle suggests “invisible hand”, and the The Blind Watchmaker is Dawkins’ (1986). Ch.1, “On Explaining Sound Change” (1-28), outlines the general theoretical framework. Subch. 1 familiarizes readers with Smith’s main aims, and subch. 9 more or less repeats the list of Contents in outlining the structure of the book. Subchs. 2-7 establish the first principles of sound change, speaker innovation, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, actuation, hyperand hypo-adaptation, contact, and systemic regulation. Ch. 2, “On Evidence” (29-50), discusses witnesses, writing systems, verse practices, contemporary comments, and reconstruction. Here, Smith distinguishes between protoand pre-languages: the term protosignifies a nodal point on a tree model, while prerefers to the period of divergence. For him, “Pre-Old English”, therefore, is taken “to refer to the period between the node ‘Anglo-Frisian’ and the node ‘Old English’” (49). Though aware that this distinction “may seem to be rather technical and (to some) unnecessary”, he considers it “important [since] we need a way of referring to the process of divergence” (50). However, the nodes Anglo-Frisian and Old English do not appear in his family tree (89), and Ch. 4 employs ‘Pre-English’ rather than ‘Pre-Old English’ for “the period of divergence which resulted in what may reasonably be considered a discrete language” (88-89). Also, the family tree has the nodes “Proto-North West Germanic” and “Proto-West Germanic”, but Smith variously uses “Proto-Germanic”, along with “pre-Germanic”, “(Proto-) Ingvaeonic” (despite his observation “that there is considerable controversy about what is meant by Ingvaeonic” (91)), “the Germanic period”, “West Germanic”, and additionally “Anglo- Saxon”, “pre-West Saxon”, “pre-historic Old English”, “Early Old English”, “Proto-Old English”, “Norse” and “Scandinavian” in rather less strictly defined ways. Thus, Valtonen’s (1999: 114) criticism of Smith (1996), i.e. the “inaccuracy or unnecessary overlap in the use of terminology for the languages and peoples”, equally applies to this book. Ch. 3 describes phonological approaches and processes (51-87), but it appears that Smith attempts a little too much considering the overall length of the book’s main Rezensionen 123 body (160 pages). He admits that the “constraints of space” make his outlines of e.g. Taxonomic, Generative, and Natural and Evolutionary Phonology (63-73) “very crude and un-nuanced [sic]”. One wonders why he nevertheless feels obliged to include the latter two, since ultimately, “the approach of the book is eclectic” and the terminology that “of taxonomic phonology, which has advantages of simplicity and being widely understood” (74). Ch. 3 concludes with an explanation of Grimm’s Law as a phenomenon induced by contact between Germanic and Raetic, which Smith himself admits to be “extremely tentative given the limitations of the evidence” (87). This extended example is mainly based on Esau 1973, and supplemented by passages from Smith 1996, Smith 2004a and 2004b. However, Esau’s interpretation of perceptive and productive problems crucially hinges on a special feature ‘murmur’, which Smith’s conventional account of Grimm’s Law (53) does not mention at all. What is worse, some extremely misleading errors make it well-nigh impossible to understand the argumentation without going back to Esau’s original. Smith, e.g., states that “both series [of obstruents] were voiceless [my emphasis]. A secondary distinction seems to have been aspiration […]. However, aspiration was not, in Raetic, of crucial importance; voice [my emphasis], being more salient acoustically, was the primary distinctive feature” (83). This contradiction topples the whole argument. What Esau (1973: 467-468) really says is that the “P T X were phonologically voiceless fricatives [and] p t k voiceless stops” and that, therefore, the “Raetic series used the feature continuance [my emphasis] as main contrast”. Smith’s corroborative evidence from Present-Day English, i.e. “that many foreign speakers of English, notably Germans, have a habit of using a bilabial fricative [ß] in place of English [f]”(80) is hardly convincing in the light of Gimson (2001: 183): “particularly Germans […] use bilabial friction / ß/ instead of the labiodental sound”, since the respective labiodental in Gimson is / v/ and not / f/ . The examples frater - brother and kannabis - hemp are not particularly well chosen either, because they contain two instances of Grimm’s Law each, but the sounds under discussion are neither consistently the initial ones nor indicated by special fonts. Also, that / f/ in Latin frater is the reflex of IE. / bh/ , the input of Grimm’s Law, would be helpful for students to know. Some of them may also wonder why Smith calls [ß] an “affricated realization of / b/ ” (80), if his own definition of affricates on the same page is to hold: “If the release of a plosive closure is not made rapidly, a fricative sound, articulated in the same area of articulation as the plosive, will be heard; plosives made with this slow, fricative release are said to be affricated”. It might have helped to add Gimson’s (2001: 147) observation “that in rapid, familiar, speech, where easy intelligibility rather than articulatory precision is the aim, the closure of plosives is often so weak that the corresponding fricative sound, without a preceding stop [my emphasis], is produced”. Ch. 4.1 (88-91) discusses the relationship of English to the Germanic languages without providing any maps. British students will perhaps know where “Jade Bay” is, or “old Germania”, when to date the “eve of the Adventus Saxonum”, or that the “North sea littoral” is the coastal area, but I doubt that these designations will enhance the understanding of foreign students. Quite generally, extending (non-native) students’ vocabularies is a laudable objective, but will they really need such quaintly stylish words as congener, congeries, conspectus, or fissiparous, which do not even occur in the British National Corpus on any scale to speak of (BNC 1, 4, 9, 9 occur- Rezensionen 124 5 On pages 5, 22, 25, 48, 61, 62, 64, 69 (2 times), 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 116, 118, 129, 130. The likely reason for its disappearance is that Smith 2004 does not employ the phrase. 6 On pages 1, 3 (2 times), 9, 14, 48, 61, 73, 84; in a context where “articulation” is simultaneously used to mean ‘production of sounds’ this is particularly misleading, e.g. “Bringing phonetics and phonology into articulation” (61). rences respectively). On the other hand, a little more variation of certain pet expressions would be welcome: underpin, in various word forms, is used 19 times between pp. 1-130, but disappears from the book thereafter 5 , articulate with/ articulation between, meaning ‘form a joint’, occurs 9 times 6 . Appendix 1, “The Principal Sound Changes from Proto-Germanic to Early Modern English” (161-173), relying on Hamer (1967), is a rather “old-school” list of sound changes and “for the sake of completeness” (161) it lists many changes which are not discussed in the body of the book at all. The “Suggestions for further reading” (177) are brief and mostly oriented towards beginners. The second half of the book with its more technical Chs. 4-7 (92-160) and Appendix 2, “Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening of i, u: Etymological Notes” (p.174-176), aims at “the more advanced scholars” (xi). Subjecting vowel changes to closer scrutiny, Smith argues along the lines of both language contact and systemic pressure. Ch. 4 first deals with the dating and dialect geography of Old English Breaking. On the assumption that it really did produce diphthongs, Smith discusses likely triggering factors, such as North Germanic influences on Anglian and, in turn, of a transfer to West Saxon of specifics thus acquired, e.g. the velar qualities of / l/ and / r/ . Ch. 5 deals with quantitative changes: drawing on some more recent literature, and trying to bring prosodic and phonetic explanations into accord, Smith describes Homorganic Lengthening [HOL], Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening [MEOSL] and “shortening before multiple and long consonants, and shortening before [sic! recte in] trisyllabic words” (121). For HOL, Smith first postulates a West Saxon process of “final-consonant devoicing in stressed vowels [sic! recte syllables]” (120), in words like cild or lomb/ lomp. This tendency of “the continental West Germanic languages”, though rarely reflected in the spelling, is absent from North Germanic. Anglian, as “the most North-Germanic-like of the Old English varieties” (120), therefore has voiced sounds, which later encroach upon West Saxon. The outcome would be a conditioned lengthening of the vowels, since “liquids and nasals are the most ‘vowelly’ [sic] of the consonants [...] liable to assimilation [my emphasis] with the preceding long vowel” (120). This may surprise students who remember Smith’s claim that / l, r, m, n/ are “the most ‘vowel-like’ of English consonants, and liable to dissimilation [my emphasis] to a preceding vowel” (112). The shortenings and MEOSL are linked to complex prosodic processes relating to the reduction of unstressed syllables. It is hardly surprising that this obscuration and loss is viewed as “the result of interaction between Norse and Anglian” and the “break-up of tightly knit communities which seems to have accompanied the spread of ‘Norsified’ culture”(123). Ch. 6 investigates the origins of what Smith calls the Great Vowel Shifts, since he identifies two processes quite distinct from each other: a ‘full’ Southern and a Northern Shift, which vary “diatopically, and quite possibly diachronically, in terms of […] Rezensionen 125 overall shape and even actuation” (126). Apart from systemic factors, the Southern Shift originates from linguistic contacts between the different layers of society in late medieval London with its emerging new standard. System I, the prestigious London variety, influences System II, the slightly different, less prestigious variety of the weakly tied and socially aspirant newcomers to London (‘Mopsae’). Then, in turn, their variety, with certain hyper-adaptations, becomes dominant for a time, only to be replaced by System III, the speech of easterners from East Anglia, again not without some hyper-adaptations. The description of the Northern Shift closely follows Aitken’s seminal survey of the vowels of the Older Scots period, with whose numbering of vowels specialists may be familiar, though students may find it less helpful. The argumentation is complex, primarily involving system internal pressures in threeand four-height vowel systems. A possible sociolinguistic aspect comes in more as an aside: in one brief paragraph, Smith draws a parallel to the London situation, since the Northern shift corresponds in date to the emergence of a quasi-standard language in Scotland. However, this “process of gradual elaboration” (152) might have warranted a more in-depth treatment and, as Skaffari (2001: 413) remarks on Smith (1999), “teachers may be looking for more extensive accounts of the language-external cultural background”, especially when promised new methods of modern historiography. Ch. 7 sums up the discussions and draws some general conclusions: as in history, explanations of language change are rarely, if ever, monocausal, rather they need multiple triggering. Breaking results from intraand extra-linguistic features, the quantitative changes from prosodic and phonetic features and contact between English and Norse, both Shifts from phonological input and social interaction. The “References”, “Suggestions for further Reading”, and an “Index” complete the volume. While reading this review, some more advanced readers may have experienced some kind of déjà vu: though Smith admits that his “discussions draw in part on material published [by him] elsewhere”, he claims that “in each case the development has been completely reassessed”, with “either a new or a much revised approach” (x). This did not exactly prepare the reviewer for the fact that large parts of the book are very close to verbatim reprints of older material. Thus, extended passages in the first part come from Smith 1996, 2002, 2004a and 2004b, and Horobin and Smith 2002. Chs. 4.2-4.7 are (near) verbatim reprints of Smith 2002 and Ch. 6 amounts to little more than a cut and paste from Smith 1993 (incidentally not in the References), 1996, and 2004a and 2004b, with only minor re-orderings, such as the shifting of footnotes into the text or vice versa, and very slightly altered vocabulary/ terminology: to give a few examples, Smith replaces “Germanic Heimat” by “Germanic homeland” (99), “the evolution of the classic Old English sound changes” by “the origin of the prehistoric Old English sound changes” (105), “minor” by “very small”, “actuation” by “triggering”, “interacted” by “have interacted” (p 153), “Indeed” by “Moreover” (139), “archaic” by “old-fashioned” (136), “local area” by “area”, “hypercorrect” by “hyperadapt”, “prone” by “liable” (135), “reactive hypercorrection” by “hyperadaptation” (133). Though self copy may not be unusual in the scientific community, reusing texts on such a large scale without clearly marking them as verbatim quotes does not set the best example for students. Rezensionen 126 7 Cf. previous reviews of Smith 1999: “more advanced readers may find the repetitions and heavy cross-referencing […] tedious” (Skaffari 2001: 412); and of Smith 1996, “a little too much repetition of the theoretical principles” (Valtonen 1999: 11). 8 “A sound change has taken place when a variant form, mechanically produced, is imitated by a second person and that process of imitation causes the system of the imitating individual to change”. Also, students are generally taught to provide an up-to-date and complete bibliography. However, the References do not live up to this standard: The Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology are missing, as are some of Smith’s own publications from which he takes over material (Smith 1993 and Smith 2004a). Smith 1995 is wrongly dated, since volume 95, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, appeared in 1994. Incidentally, the error already occurs in Smith 1996: 214. Jones 1912 correctly is 1911. And while occasionally it may be helpful to include the original publication date, more recent editions or reprints should not be omitted: thus, the first edition is Baugh 1935, while Baugh and Cable 1993 (4 th ed.) has seen a 5th edition in 2004; Gimson’s Pronunciation of English first appeared 1962, but Gimson 1989 [4 th ed. by Ramsaran] should be replaced by Gimson 2001 [6 th ed. by Cruttenden]. Suband series-titles/ volumes should be supplied in e.g. Jones 1911, Esau 1973, Keller 1994, or Dossena and Lass 2004. In addition to Labov 1972, one might want to find Labov 1994 and 2001. Quite generally, one would wish for the inclusion of more recent publications. To call Hamer 1967 [a booklet for beginners of 35[! ] pages, which in Austria exists in only two copies and is, moreover, out of print] a “standard grammar” (xv) and adopt its “handy scheme” (161) of lettering sound changes A, B, C, etc. in Appendix 1, is downright unacceptable. The amount of repetitiveness in such a short book, even in the light of didactic considerations, is irksome 7 : to give just one example, Smith’s three-line definition of sound change 8 (13) is fully repeated eight times in the book on pp. 27, 56, 70, 73, 94, 109f., 116, 126; its non-appearance after p. 126 has most likely the same reason as that for underpin (see fn. 5). Incidentally, the somewhat mechanical Index coyly has “sound change: 13 (defined) and passim” only. And while it lists Alpine passes, Austria, giraffes, Holocaust denial, human (male) nipples, meteorology, the Industrial and Russian Revolutions, Stilicho, Dick Whittington, etc. etc., (Proto-, pre-, North-, West-) Germanic, along with other preand protocombinations, are not listed. The page numbers under “German” variously refer to Old High, Middle High, Middle Low, and Present-Day German. Advanced readers may also want to know where Smith refers to secondary literature and therefore they may miss the names of these authors in the Index. The inclusion of a (comparative) list of phonetic symbols (as in Smith 1999: 25) might have helped foreign students with Smith’s transcriptions, which vacillate between Received Pronunciation/ Southern Standard British English, Present-Day Scots and Scottish Standard English. Finally, more careful editing might have eliminated misleading errors as well as problems with fonts (sometimes the readers are left with Unicode numbers) and simple misprints, such as e.g. “Raetic seems to have had two series of obstruents: / p, t, k/ and / f, T, k/ [recte / f, T, X/ ]” (82 and again 83), or “Gh in cough tussio, laugh tussio” [recte laugh rideo] (42). Also, why “the gloss sus indicates that sow here is not Present-Day English sow but rarer word sough” (44) is not clear, since sus means Rezensionen 127 ‘sow [animal]’ in Latin, and the gloss is there to distinguish it from “sow (both when it signifies seminare and encire)” (Jones 1991: 177). Despite the criticism, Smith’s text is generally easily readable and his anecdotal examples and comparisons from sciences outside the more narrow linguistic areas enliven the theoretical material; thus, embryos, patterned hexagons in a honeycomb, the long neck of the giraffe and the male human nipple, the kinetic energies of Porsches and lawnmowers, etc. are certain to get the attention of students. If students of historical linguistics are not deterred by the price (~ 63 ), they will benefit from the book, especially under the guidance of experienced tutors, since they will get insights into the workings of sound change and the kind of argumentation that, if only in a less narrow sense of the word, comes close to its explanation. References British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition) (2007). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http: / / www.natcorp. ox.ac.uk, 14.8.2009. Baugh, Albert C. (1935). A History of the English Language. New York: Appleton-Century. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable ( 3 1978, 5 2004). A History of the English Language. London: Routledge. Dawkins, Richard (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman. Esau, Helmut (1973). “The Germanic consonant shift. Substratum as an explanation for the first sound shift”. Orbis 22. 454-473. Gimson, A.C. (2001 [1962]). Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 6 th ed., rev. by Alan Cruttenden. London: Arnold. Hamer, Richard F.S. (1967). Old English Sound Changes for Beginners. Oxford: Blackwell. Hansen, Klaus (2001). “Review of Jeremy J. Smith (1999). Essentials of Early English. London, New York: Routledge”. Anglia 119. 111-113. Horobin, Simon and Jeremy J. Smith (2002). An Introduction to Middle English. (Edinburgh textbooks on the English language). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Jones, Charles (ed.) (1991). A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, by Sylvester Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Jones, John D. (ed.) (1911). Coopers Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1685). (Neudrucke frühneuenglischer Grammatiken, Bd.5). Halle a.S.: Niemeyer. Keller, Rudi (1994). On Language Change: the Invisible Hand in Language. London: Routledge [transl. of Keller, Rudi ( 3 2003 [1990]). Sprachwandel: von der unsichtbaren Hand in der Sprache. Tübingen: Francke]. Labov, William (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. (Language in society, 20). Oxford: Blackwell. Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. (Language in society, 29). Oxford: Blackwell. Onions, C.T. (ed.) (1966 [repr. 1996]). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon. Simpson, John (ed.) (2009). Oxford English Dictionary. Second Edition on CD-Rom, Version 4.0., or Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online, http: / / dictionary.oed.com. Skaffari, Janne (2001). “Review of Jeremy J. Smith (1999). Essentials of Early English. London & New York: Routledge”. Language 77: 2. 412-413. Rezensionen 128 Smith, Jeremy J. (1993). “Dialectal variation in Middle English and the actuation of the Great Vowel Shift”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 94. 259-277. Smith, Jeremy J. (1994). “The Great Vowel Shift in the North of England, and some forms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 95. 433-437. Smith, Jeremy J. (1996). An Historical Study of English. Function, Form and Change. London & New York: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. ( 2 2005 [1999]). Essentials of Early English: An Introduction to Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. London: Routledge. Smith, Jeremy J. (2002). “The Origins of Old English Breaking”. In: Iyeiri, Yoko and Margaret Connolly (eds.). And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche. Essays on Medieval English presented to Professor Matsuji Tajima on his sixtieth Birthday. Tokyo: Kaibunsha. 39-50. Smith, Jeremy J. (2004a). “Classifying the vowels of Middle English”. In: Kay, Christian J. and Jeremy J. Smith (eds.). Categorization in the History of English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 221-236. Smith, Jeremy J. (2004b). “Phonological space and the actuation of the Great Vowel Shift in Scotland and Northern England”. In: Dossena, Maria and Roger Lass (eds.). Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. (Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication, vol. 16). Bern et al.: Peter Lang. 309-328. Jeremy J. Smith (2006). “From Middle to Early Modern English”. In: Mugglestone, Linda (ed.). The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford UP. 120-146. Valtonen, Irmeli (1999). “Review of Jeremy Smith (1996). An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100. 111-115. Corinna Weiss Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Wien Rezensionen 129 André Hahn, Family, Frontier and American Dreams. Darstellung und Kritik nationaler Mythen im amerikanischen Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Beiträge zur Anglistik, Band 14). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2008. Page Laws National myths are like Gordian knots, storylines curling around some truth just out of sight beneath the next tangle. The problem is that, on being probed, myths start to squirm and even strike back at the earnest hand of the researcher. The truth is that myths often conceal nothing: they are themselves both the lie and the truth, the positive and the negative. You can deconstruct but not destroy them. Myths - compounded as they are of language - share its Protean qualities. Andre Hahn’s earnestly probing study of American myths as embodied in 20 th century drama is admirable in its thoroughness and for deft insights on individual plays. But it also seems misguided in its basic thesis idea: that six American playwrights set out to “destroy” certain American myths because these myths were/ are “falsch, dekadent oder verkommen” (1). The choice of the word “destroys” unnecessarily skews Hahn’s readings from the start, forcing him to ignore or soft-pedal some very valid (but inconvenient) truths his own readings reveal. Even a verb such as “challenge” might have better served for Hahn’s thesis and allowed him more nuanced, less ham-handed observations. Hahn works hard and responsibly to define the concept of “myth,” citing the seminal works of Roland Barthes and Eugen Böhler. He seems at first open to a broad, practical working definition of myth as a shared set of common cultural beliefs, giving a people its sense of common identity (2-3). But he immediately returns to his reductionist bent, couching each target playwright’s intent in negative terms. Edward Albee, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? destroys the “myth of the happy family”; Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch destroys the myth of the “morally intact small town”; Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman disillusions us concerning “the American Dream”. Arthur Kopits’ Indians destroys the myth of the Frontier while debunking the “Lebenslüge” of the great American icon Buffalo Bill. David Rabe’s trilogy The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and Sticks and Bones destroys the myth of the heroic American soldier, revealing soldiers as, instead, cauldrons of “aggression, self-loathing and paranoia.” Finally Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play “ironizes our hero-worship of Founding Fathers by ironizing Lincoln” (3). In actuality Americans generally save the term “Founding Fathers” (or its intentional corruption “Foundling Fathers”) for colonial forebears who guided the country ‘four score and seven’ years before Lincoln’s tenure. That is not a serious error on Hahn’s part, however, and he compensates for it with his wide-ranging knowledge of American drama by the Big Three (Miller, Tennessee Williams and Albee) plus some lesser lights. Unfortunately Hahn sometimes displays his impressive range of reading at inopportune moments, going off on tangents with surprising predictability (at least once per chapter in about the same spot). More puzzling than these tangents are some odd choices of examples drawn from inappropriate contexts. For example, in a study of specifically American literature, Rezensionen 130 Hahn chooses an example from British military history to illustrate how wrong national myths can be. The RAF (Royal Air Force) is celebrated for its bravery because it is widely held to have been outmanned and outgunned by the German attackers of Britain in WW II. Hahn insists that, on the contrary, the RAF was really stronger than their heroic underdog ‘myth’ would have us believe (8). But what an odd time and place to discuss European military history, especially to the detriment of the British and the indirect vindication of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Elsewhere Hahn oddly pontificates against Americans’ “Drogensucht,” using for his evidence the alcoholism of Albee’s George and Martha, and of Tennessee Williams’ Brick (in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), plus Mary Tyrone’s drug addiction in O’Neil’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (73). While it’s true that these fictitious characters all have addictions, it hardly seems wise to impugn Americans for the habits of stage creations. Hahn is likewise on dangerous terrain when he suggests an analogy between the American cavalry men who slaughtered Indians and the SS officers who killed “Jews and Communists” in concentration camps (181). Yes, some analogy does exist, but it seems an odd and inappropriate point to make in this essay. Hahn inadvertently implies the SS officers are somehow less guilty because they had deranged American predecessors. Every critic mounts his or her hobbyhorses from time to time, and Hahn is certainly due some limited time in the saddle. His readings of his chosen plays are, all in all, detailed, thorough, and often insightful. At his best, he bucks the negativity his thesis demands, noticing that in Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a play supposedly devoted to “destroying” the myth of the American Dream, Charley and Bernard (Willie’s neighbours) are loyal, honest and successful examples of the Dream gone right. Positive counter currents exist in all these negative plays: e.g. evidence of actual love between George and Martha, evidence that Lincoln might have actually done his country some good. That’s the power of myth that won’t come unravelled - and it’s certainly critic-proof. Page Laws Department of English and Foreign Language Norfolk State University Rezensionen 131 1 See also Chatman (1990: 115), Bal (1997: 5), and Prince (2008: 19). 2 For instance, at one point, Abbott compares the degree of narrativity in the following two sentence combinations: (1) “She ate lunch. Then she drove the car to work”; (2) “Brooding, she ate lunch. Then she drove the car to work.” Given Abbott’s definition of narrative in terms of action, I was surprised to read that “the addition of that one simple word, ‘brooding,’ H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 (2 nd edition). Jan Alber H. Porter Abbott’s Introduction to Narrative is a great introduction for underand postgraduate students because it demands no previous knowledge of narrative (or narrative theory) on the part of the reader. At the same time, it is an excellent and comprehensive reference work for specialists in the field. The book is coherent and consistent; it is knit together like a tight web: Abbott frequently returns to terms and concepts that he introduced earlier on, which enables his readers to deepen their understanding. His style is accessible, clear, direct and to the point. I also like the fact that Abbott discusses a wide variety of different narrative genres. He analyses novels, short stories, plays, films, television series, narrative poetry, hypertext narratives, comic strips, paintings, role-playing games, and numerous non-fictional narratives (such as autobiographies, newspaper articles, and stories in the legal arena). Abbott’s Introduction also gets the balance right between prototypical and more marginal narratives, ‘high’ and popular culture, as well as contemporary and historical material. The book is structured in a very effective way: Abbott has added marked boxes to the running text which contain additional information, questions, or discussions. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is followed by a list of secondary resources and additional primary texts. The book ends with a useful glossary and topical index. Despite this overall good impression, I had a few terminological and conceptual problems to which I will refer in the following summary. Abbott begins his Introduction with a very convincing discussion of the presence of narrative in almost all human discourse. He argues that “narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understandings of time” (3). Abbott then goes on to discuss a number of paintings that depict single events, and he shows that even these static moments imply succession: we always grasp the depicted events in the context of a story in progress. For Abbott, “our narrative perception stands ready to be activated in order to give us a frame or context for even the most static and uneventful scenes” (10). In contrast to other narrative theorists who argue that narratives require a narrator (cf., e.g., Stanzel 1984: 65, Genette 1988: 16-17, and Phelan 2005: 18), Abbott defines the term ‘narrative’ in terms of action over time, or, as he puts it, “the representation of an event or a series of events” (13) 1 . I feel that Abbott might have devoted more time to the discussion of alternative definitions and their consequences. I am particularly thinking of Herman’s focus on the role of emotional responses to experience in narrative (2002) or Fludernik’s definition of narrative in terms of experientiality, i.e. “the quasi-mimetic evocation of ‘real-life experience’” (1996: 12) 2 . Furthermore, like most narrative theorists, Abbott discriminates between Rezensionen 132 does much to augment narrativity” (25). If one follows Abbott’s definition, a higher degree of narrativity should involve more action or eventfulness (rather than an increase in emotional “depth” [25] or, as he argues later on, the existence of “a narrator” [30] - these two features are optional for him). Nevertheless, I agree with Abbott’s argument that (2) involves more narrativity than (1) because (2) correlates with a higher degree of experientiality, or, to put this slightly differently, because (2) offers more in terms of emotional insight. 3 Abbott has a complex view on the relationship between story and discourse. He argues that “it may look like there is a story out there that pre-exists the narrative discourse and therefore is ‘mediated’ by it.” However, “without first creating the narrative discourse,” authors “would never know the story.” Hence, for him, “story appears both to precede and to come after narrative discourse” (20). the “story” and the “narrative discourse”: the former refers to “an event or sequence of events (the action),” while the latter denotes “those events as represented” (19). 3 I disagree with Abbott’s argument that “all stories, like all action, go in one direction only - forward in time” (17). As Richardson (2002: 48-52) has shown, unnatural narratives frequently confront us with stories (and intradiegetic temporalities) that are circular, contradictory, antinomic (retrogressive), differential, conflated, or dual. I think it would be better to say that in most narratives, the story moves forward in time, while there are also exceptions to this rule. In the third chapter, Abbott addresses the question of where narratives end and the real world begins. While paratexts (such as book jackets, prefaces, chapter headings, program notes, and so forth) have to be placed on the threshold of narrative, postmodernist experimental fiction plays around with the outer limits of narrative. Abbott argues that up to a certain point, confusion and narrative coherence can coexist. But the question is of course, “what is the tipping point? How much frustration is too much? And what do we call this kind of writing when it is no longer called narrative” (32). Abbott leaves these questions open. My own solution to this problem would be to argue that as long as experimental texts show basic narrative features and say something about us and the world we live in, they still qualify as narratives. In Chapter 4, Abbott argues that narratives influence our thoughts and feelings in particular ways. He refers to this impact in terms of “the rhetoric of narrative” and defines it as “its power” (40). Abbott then devotes some time to a discussion of masterplots (46-52), i.e., recurring stories that are bound up with types or stereotypes (such as the Cinderella story, the Oedipus myth, or David’s fight against Goliath). According to Abbott, “much of the power of these particular masterplots [...] is their moral force. They create an image of the world in which good and evil are clearly identifiable, and in which blame can fall squarely on one party or another” (48). Moreover, Abbott argues that narratives frequently involve a conflict in which power is at stake. The ancient Greek word for conflict is agon, and the terms “protagonist” (hero) and “antagonist” (the hero’s chief opponent) are derived from it (55). For Abbott, the term “closure” refers to the resolution of a story’s central conflict (e.g., death in the case of tragedy, and marriage in the case of comedy) but also to a broad range of expectations and uncertainties: “all successful narratives [...] are chains of suspense and surprise that keep us in a fluctuating state of impatience, wonderment, and partial gratification” (57). Abbott highlights the fact that we all look for closure in narratives but we do not want closure too quickly. Rezensionen 133 In Chapter 6, Abbott discriminates between homoand heterodiegetic (firstand third-person) narrators in the sense of Genette (1980: 189-94; 1988: 21), and points out that the former exist within the projected storyworld, whereas the latter exist in a different fictional realm (75). It struck me that Abbott seems to use the terms “heterodiegetic” and “extradiegetic” interchangeably. More specifically, Abbott says that the terms “heterodiegetic” and “extradiegetic” both refer “to narration that comes from outside the storyworld” (75). At a different point, Abbott argues that the narration in Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe/ In the Labyrinth (1959) “appears to be largely extradiegetic, the narrator rendering the story in the third person” (169). However, Genette uses the term “extradiegetic” to refer to the level of a narrator who produces a narrative which constitutes an intradiegetic level, in which a character can appear, who may then become the intradiegetic narrator of a metadiegetic (or hypodiegetic [Bal 1981: 43]) narrative (Genette 1980: 228f.; 1988: 85). It is worth noting (and Abbott does not mention this) that homodiegetic narrators (such as ‘Chaucer’, the first-person narrator of the Canterbury Tales) can be extradiegetic as well. In the case of the Canterbury Tales, ‘Chaucer’ produces the frame narrative about the pilgrims riding towards Canterbury: hence, he is extradiegetic with reference to the framed stories. And at the intradiegetic level, several characters (such as the Wife of Bath) become intradiegetic narrators who then tell hypodiegetic narratives (such as “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”). Moreover, I do not quite understand why Abbott does not mention the different types of focalization as they were developed by Genette (1980: 189-94) and others. I can see that one may disagree with the concept of zero focalization, but I think it would have been useful for students to introduce the terms “internal” and “external focalization” (because they are frequently used by narrative theorists). Abbott’s description of a scene from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) may be terminologically confusing: he argues that “Flaubert’s narrator maintains a strict, external third-person narrative voice but lets us look through the eyes of someone else” (73). I think that the scene can be more clearly described as a form of heterodiegetic narration with internal focalization. Like Booth and others, Abbott relies on the presence of an implied (or “inferred”) author as that sensibility which accounts for the narrative “in the sense that the implied authorial views that we find emerging in the narrative are consistent with all the elements of the narrative discourse that we are aware of” (84). Abbott posits an intentional reading (102-103) (that tries to approximate the mind of the implied author) and avoids the neglecting of material in the text (which he calls “underreading”) as well as the importing of material that is not in the text (“overreading”) (86-90). In Chapter 8, Abbott offers two alternative types of reading, namely “symptomatic readings,” i.e., suspicious interpretations (such as deconstructive ones) “the implied author would not agree with” (104), and “adaptive readings,” which look at the use and altering of pre-existing stories (106-108). Abbott sees the process of adaptation as a form of “creative destruction” and points out that “faithfulness to the original” is not the only goal of adaptations: “an adaptation can be less or more profound, less or more sentimental, less or more fun, and so on” (113). He then discusses some of the differences between prose texts on the one hand and plays and films on the other. First, much of the flexible indeterminacy of prose texts is foreclosed on the stage and on the screen (118). Second, it is harder to represent character interiority in plays and films. Third, plays and films are Rezensionen 134 slightly weaker on figurative language. Abbott also says a few words on constraints of the market: he points out that “if the market exerts a powerful force that tends to soften the edges of produceable plays, it is not the only force operating in the circulation of narrative. Producers, especially in small, marginal theaters, regularly take risks with radically new material” (126). In Chapter 10, Abbott addresses the interrelation between self and narrative. He rejects essentialist notions of the self and argues that “it is only through narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that operate through time” (130). Following E.M. Forster, he discriminates between flat and round characters. The former have no hidden complexity (such as stock characters), while the latter are multi-dimensional and have varying degrees of depth (133-134). Abbott also highlights that it is difficult, if not impossible, to characterize actual human beings without the use of types (such as the hypocrite, the flirt, the evil child, the wimp, the nerd, or the vixen) that circulate in narratives (136-37). The two following chapters are new and were added to the second edition of Abbott’s Introduction. In Chapter 11, Abbott addresses potential differences between fictional and non-fictional narratives. He argues that there are three basic kinds of representation: “factual, false, and fictional” (157). While non-fictional accounts can be tested and falsified, fiction is not falsifiable because it is neither true nor false. Abbott also investigates the gray area between the two poles of fiction and nonfiction: he points out that narratives can be fictional but still historically correct (150-152), and he argues that there may be truth to fiction, namely “the truth of meaning rather than fact” (153). In Chapter 12, Abbott presents us with a discussion of narrative worlds. He points out that narratives do not only represent events in time but also in space. All narratives contain at least two worlds, namely (1) “the storyworld in which the characters reside and the events take place”, and (2) “the world in which the narration takes place” (169). Abbott even adds a third world to this taxonomy, namely (3) “the world of production that contains both the storyworld and the world of narration” (170). In this chapter, Abbott also discusses forking-path narratives in which competing worlds encroach on each other, especially in fantasy, science fiction, and postmodernism (167-169). Abbott moreover analyses legal narratives taken from the historic Lizzie Borden case. He argues that “a trial can be described as a huge, unpolished narrative compendium featuring the contest of two sets of authors, each trying to make their central narrative of events prevail by spinning narrative segments for their rhetorical impact” (179). Abbott then illustrates that narrative ‘battles’ in trials, political races, or intellectual controversies are always embedded into cultural masterplots that play a crucial role with regard to the finding of the most plausible story version. While Chapter 13 focuses on the contest between narratives, the final chapter (Chapter 14) returns to conflicts within narratives. Abbott here accentuates the crucial role of what he calls “passionate thinking”: “insofar as we share in our own lives the larger conflicts of which [...] narrative conflicts are particular examples, we are moved by the narrative, drawn into it, and become alert to how these conflicts play out” (198-99). Abbott also shows that the readings of the Oedipus myth by Aristotle, Freud, Propp, and Lévi-Strauss all have the same underlying orientation, namely “an attention to conflict of some kind and how it plays out” (199). Finally, Abbott points out Rezensionen 135 that at the end, narratives may resolve the central conflict (and provide closure) or leave the conflict open (and refuse closure). With regard to his own text, Abbott opts in favour of the latter. I will not spoil readers the pleasure of discovering this ending for themselves - suffice it to say that it is done brilliantly. References Bal, Mieke (1981). “Notes on Narrative Embedding”. Poetics Today 2: 2. 41-59. - (1985/ 1997). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2 nd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London & New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard (1972/ 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Transl. Jane E. Lewin Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. - (1983/ 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Transl. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Herman, David (2002). Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Phelan, James (2005). Living To Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Prince, Gerald (2008). “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability”. In: John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 19-27. Richardson, Brian (2002). “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”. In: Brian Richardson (ed.). Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames. Columbus: Ohio State UP. 47-63. Stanzel, Franz Karl (1979/ 1984). A Theory of Narrative. Transl. Charlotte Goedsche, with a Preface by Paul Hernadi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Jan Alber Englische Literaturwissenschaft Universität Freiburg Rezensionen 136 Richard Alexander, Framing Discourse on the Environment. A Critical Discourse Approach. New York & London: Routledge, 2009. Alwin Fill “As linguists and language scholars, many of us hold that language plays a major role in predisposing speakers to perceive or to construct the world in a specific fashion.” (3) Richard Alexander’s book is based on the assumption that discourse is not just ‘talk’, but that there is a close link between discourse and what a society holds to be true and important. Discourse thus shapes our ideas and attitudes towards current problems and consequently has a great influence on our actions. It is, however, possible to make people aware of the pursuit of power being exercised through discourse - an awareness-raising task Alexander sets himself in writing the chapters of this book. Framing Discourse on the Environment is grounded in the theory of a dialectical relationship between language, ecology and society, but the main focus of the book is on the analysis of texts. From a methodological point-of-view, the book successfully combines quantitative with qualitative research by linking the questions asked by Critical Discourse Analysis with the statistical method of corpus linguistics. Among the linguistic parameters used for the texts are key-words and purr-words, personal pronouns, nominalizations, metaphors, euphemisms, word-frequencies and collocations. The corpus analysis makes many concordance tables necessary; these however are easy to read since important elements are highlighted and all results are discussed in the subsequent text. Alexander’s book is rich in examples of discourse in which human attitudes towards the ‘environment’ are framed. The texts investigated come from various genres and deal with a variety of topics. They range from an issue of The Economist and a speech by BP CEO John Browne to the mission statements of The Body Shop and the self-representations of large oil and energy companies (e.g. on the internet) as well as of agricultural companies producing genetically altered seed. In the central part of the book (chapters 6 and 7), we find the BBC Reith lectures of the millennium year 2000, which are scrutinized using quantitative and qualitative methods. Chapter 6, called “Wording the World”, explains why these particular radio lectures were chosen and what statistical methods were used. The choice of the lectures as texts to be investigated can be called a happy one, in particular because of the extreme diversity of the speakers. These were a British Tory politician, an American conservation biologist, BP CEO John Browne, Gro Harlem Brundtland (former PM of Norway, known for her commitment to ‘Sustainable Development’), Vandana Shiva (an Indian biodiversity activist) and the Prince of Wales, whose commitment to environmental issues is well known. Alexander’s method makes a comparison between the speeches on the lexical (including the collocational) level possible. For instance, all speakers used the items globalization, sustainable development and world, though with differing frequencies and different collocations. Thus, Shiva uses world most frequently with a strong focus (from the collocations) on feeding the world (94). Browne uses sustainable development three times together with business and obviously sees this development as Rezensionen 137 coupled with profit and economic success: “Sustainable development requires successful companies.” (101) In chapter 9 (“Engineering Agriculture”), Alexander focuses on a central issue of eco-criticism, viz. industrial forms of ‘seed production’, in particular those which involve ‘genetic technologies’. On investigating publicity material of crops and seed sellers (e.g. the Monsanto website), Alexander sees ‘linguistic engineering’ at work, particularly where genetic engineering is made out to be beneficial - even indispensable - for small farmers. This linguistic engineering begins with the collocations used with genetic - among others the following: modification, improvement, enhancement, performance, attributes of plants (155-157). It continues with the frequent use of benefit/ beneficial (e.g. to smallholder farmers) on the Monsanto website (141), and ends by employing such words as stewardship, pledge and commitment for activities which in reality are connected with profit. Alexander shows how the discourse on the issues of genetics is framed so as to make genetic technologies out to be essential in the struggle to “aid poor countries to feed their own populations” (159) - a frame which is contrary to the facts. Chapter 11, on obfuscation and disinformation, deals with the “militarization of rhetoric”, particularly with linguistic strategies which obfuscate what really happens in a war. There is a gap between words and deeds: “If our troops are faced by lifethreatening behaviour in any form they will respond in a robust and decisive fashion,” was broadcast on the BBC during the Blair government. Translated into ordinary English, which is closer to reality, this would be “They will kill anyone who they consider to be acting aggressively” (197, following Paul Chilton). The code names of U.S. military operations, with their harmless cowboy or sports allusions, tell a similar story, e.g. Operation Ranch Hand, Operation Arc Light, Operation Freedom Train, Operation Tailwind, etc. (203f.; see the tables of adjectives (204), and of nouns (205), in these names). With all the obfuscating and euphemizing which occurs, it is no wonder people know so little about the reality of the political world, in spite of being surrounded by so much ‘information’ - a situation called by Alexander (following Chomsky) ‘Orwell’s problem’. In an excursus on theory (175-180), Alexander voices a critique of linguistics, which up until now has chiefly concerned itself with abstract models of language, with Universal Grammar and with investigating linguistic structures and correctness of language use. In this excursus, we also find an interesting comparison between Chomsky and Halliday, supported by extracts from their writings on topics such as classism and racism (178-180). While the two famous linguists agree on the role of these ideologies in capitalist society, Chomsky, in sharp contrast to Halliday, does not see them as problems with which linguists should concern themselves. In one passage, Alexander himself warns of overestimating the power of language and the manipulatory force of euphemisms: “The examination of military euphemisms and the ‘militarization’ of language should not be used to suggest that language is somehow primary or ‘significant’.” (197) When people are confronted with soldiers directing bombs at them, language becomes insubstantial. Alexander’s book is a profound study of the linguistic framing of reality, a study immensely rich in examples and corpus-based data. In its political and ideological chapters, the book goes far beyond its title, which only promises an analysis of discourse on the environment. The book is empirically oriented, but the discussion of Rezensionen 138 the role of linguistics in making the public aware of the importance of language is also of theoretical interest. Perhaps one could object that some of the texts in Alexander’s corpus cannot really be called ‘recent’ (e.g. the Body-shop mission statement of 1994 and the Browne speech of 1997). Another point of possible criticism is that the comparison of the six Reith lectures from the year 2000, though interesting as a piece of applied corpus analysis, does not yield convincing results concerning the different ways the six authors deal with environmental problems. Framing Discourse on the Environment is not a simple presentation of euphemisms and other linguistic strategies: it is a disquieting report of the things people in power do with language. It rings an alarm bell which should raise the readers’ awareness of how Discourse frames, construes, even distorts reality. For anyone interested in language, ecology and politics, the book is an eye-opener and should be compulsory reading. Alwin Fill English Department University of Graz