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Gudrun Tockner The Risk of the Nanny State. Lifestyle Advice in Public Health Campaigns........................................... 3 Martina Elicker Representations and Distortions: American Law in US TV Series, 1960-2010 ............................................................................................. 17 Marjeta Vrbinc / Alenka Vrbinc Subject-field Labelling in Monolingual Learner's Dictionaries: The Gap between the Current State and Dictionary User's Expectations 33 Allan James English(es) in post-devolution Wales: The sociolinguistic reconstruction of late modern Valleys Voice .......... 47 Ludwig Deringer The 125 th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America, 2009: A Focus on the Poetry Sessions ................................ 65 Derek Maus Andrew S. Gross and Susanne Rohr. Comedy - Avant-Garde - Scandal: Remembering the Holocaust after the End of History ................................. 71 Hugo Keiper Frank Erik Pointner. Millers' Tales. The Construction of a Professional Identity in Early Modern Texts ............................................................... 75 Renate Brosch Philipp Horst, Language/ Art - Artistic Representation between Poetry, Concept and the Visual ................................................... 82 Martina Häcker Ingrid Tiecken-Boon van Ostade, An Introduction to Late English ........... 85 Sascha Pöhlmann Christian Quendler, Interfaces of Fiction: Initial Framings in the American Novel from 1790 to 1900 .............................................. 88 Daniela Wawra Alwin Frank Fill, Language Impact. Evolution - System - Discourse.......... 92 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 35, 2010 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 von der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung und der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität 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. © 2011 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5, 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 ! " # ! $ %&' ( )* + , & The UK’s Faculty of Public Health defines public health as “[t]he science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through organised efforts of society.” (“What is public health? ”). Does this mean that in order to prevent disease and prolong life, society (and, in particular, the state) has a duty to restrict personal choices when it comes to potentially ‘risky’ or ‘unhealthy’ lifestyles? Or does this impair civil liberty and the freedom of the individual to choose for himor herself? Nowadays, government guidelines and recommendations are omnipresent: everyday consumer goods carry labels warning of potential risks and estimating their general suitability for a ‘healthy lifestyle’, and advertisements on television and radio promote ‘healthy choices’ from quitting cigarettes to drinking responsibly to losing extra pounds. Many of these endeavours might be sensible from a medical point of view. However, in the public’s point of view, there is a thin line between being helped and being told what to do. It was Margaret Thatcher who first coined the term Nanny State in 1979 (Cottam 2005: 1593), and it has since been invoked with suspicion whenever government policies seemed to be too intrusive on people’s private lives, dictating what they ought to eat and drink and how they ought to behave. Calman (2009: e9) concludes his summary of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ examination of ethical issues in public health with the statement that “the state has a duty to look after the health of everyone, and sometimes that means guiding or restricting people’s choice.” Restriction, and even guidance, of choice is an issue in the public’s perception of these legislations and cam- $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # paigns, especially if, as Cottam (2005: 1593) points out, the targets are lifestyle choices. At the same time, the discourse about preventive health and risk has changed in a wider context. Health has become conceptualised not so much as the absence of illness, but through its relation to the risk of potential ill-health. As Skolbekken (2008: 18) puts it, “nobody is perfectly healthy through [surveillance medicine’s] gaze. We are all potentially sick or at risk of developing a disease and eventually dying.” Lifestyle choices are a dominant feature of this discourse. As Petersen and Wilkinson (2008: 7) argue, “[m]any practices and interactions that were once seen as bringing pleasure have become the source of worry”, not just for governments, but for the population at large. A greater emphasis on preventive medicine and potential risks has led to a reappraisal of the (potential) patient’s role: Ogden (1995) outlines the progression from a passive through an interactive to an intra-active identity in psychological theory - once people are conceptualised as being ‘in control’ of their own health, “[t]he risk to health comes from the individual’s presence or absence of self control” (413). The patient, therefore, is no longer simply expected to passively undergo treatment, but to actively ‘work’ towards health. On a larger scale, everyone is expected to take active measures to assure that his/ her health is as good as it possibly can be. Of course, in the context of the increasing preoccupation with risk, this also means avoiding even potentially ‘unhealthy’ factors. This ideological interconnectedness of the concept of health with risk (and its avoidance), in combination with an increasing expectation of active risk management leads Petersen and Wilkinson (2008: 6) to state that “the self-management of risk has become an imperative of citizenship.” The argument is already framed in political terms. However, the authority of the state is especially precarious in matters of personal lifestyle choice, and authoritarian rules and regulations on the matter are connected with the negatively connotated ‘Nanny State’. The question of how public health campaigns try to avoid this stigma in texts focusing on the concept of risk prevention therefore promises to be interesting. , . / +! This paper aims at analysing a number of texts taken from the websites of governmental public health organisations from the UK and the Republic of Ireland (NHS England, NHS Wales, NHS Scotland, Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland and the Irish Health Service Executive). All of these texts offer advice and guidelines to users, and all of them focus on three main lifestyle choices: food, alcohol and smoking. Usually, physical exercise and sexual and/ or mental health are the other main topics in the & ! ' ( lifestyle section of these websites. However, in order to keep the corpus relatively homogenous, only the three sections that are to do with the consumption of goods have been taken into account. The corpora were manually tagged to exclude repeated text from links (such as back to top or for more information see...) from the analysis. The following table shows the numbers of types and tokens in the three sub-corpora. Corpus Types Tokens Alcohol 3,559 31,909 Food 3,809 48,686 Smoking 3,030 31,226 Total 6,834 111,821 % ) ! *% '+ % + , The standardised type/ token ratio for the entire corpus is 38.4, far below the standardised TTR of the British National Corpus at 43.5. This indicates a level of sophistication that is below that of the average (mostly written) British English text, and indeed the texts collected tend to favour a more colloquial language and simpler structure than texts on the same subject geared towards a medical audience. Both Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Analysis are employed in order to investigate how the role of the advisee is constructed, and whether this reaffirms the theory of risk and personal responsibility outlined above. Corpus linguistics, rather than being a field of linguistics per se, can rather be termed a methodology. As McEnery and Wilson (2004: 2) point out, “[a] corpus-based approach can be taken to many aspects of linguistic enquiry.” The aim of corpus linguistics is the description of natural language by means of the computerised analysis of so-called corpora. A corpus, according to Teubert and ermáková (2007: 41), is made up of “a (suitable) sample of the discourse” that is to be investigated, since the entire discourse of a speech community would of course be too large to process. Naturally, since most corpora are finite, there is a certain amount of controversy about what constitutes a representative corpus (cf. McEnery and Wilson 2004: 29-31). The software used to analyse the compiled corpora for this paper was Mike Scott’s Wordsmith 5.0. Critical Discourse Analysis, according to Mesthrie et al. (2001: 320), acknowledges the interrelation of ideology, power and language, and attempts to analyse texts accordingly. Its main proponent is Norman Fairclough. In Language and Power, Fairclough (1989: 1-2) draws attention to the way language perpetuates social power inequalities through linguistic conventions of which language users are usually not consciously aware. Fairclough uses the concept of discourse, which he defines as “language as social practice determined by social structures” (1989: 17). He establishes a three layered model of discourse, with the ‘text’ at its centre, surrounded by ‘discursive practice’, which is in turn embedded in ‘social practice’ (Fairclough 1989: 25). Discourse analysis is ‘critical’ because it is supposed to “show up connections which may be hidden from people - such as the connections between language, power and ideology” (Fairclough 1989: 5). Due to the nature of the texts and the public perception of unwelcome interference with personal choice on the one hand, and a healthy lifestyle as one minimising as many risks as possible on the other, certain features are expected to occur: in particular, due to general suspicion concerning the ‘Nanny State’, they are presumably not overtly prescriptive (you must), instead appealing to common sense notions of health and wellbeing. Furthermore, direct references to institutions are expected to be nonovert, as this would reinforce their textual power rather than the reader’s. From a simple reading of the texts used in the corpus, the impression is that, while the word we occurs relatively frequently, it is usually used as a generic expression of common sense (we all) rather than referring to the institution giving advice. Preliminary analysis has identified the most salient semantic fields among the two hundred most frequent words in the corpus. It is to be expected that in a corpus that is primarily preoccupied with lifestyle choices connected to nutrition, smoking and drinking words like food, smoking and drinking appear very frequently. Likewise, texts representing public health organisations and focusing on preventive health can be expected to talk at length about health or risks. However, there were several semantic categories that were surprising, and telling in how they were used in the discourse. These were chosen for further analysis. The following table illustrates the semantic categories devised for the first two hundred words of the corpus, with the token numbers in brackets. Of these, ‘Choice’, ‘Trying’, ‘Reducing, Quitting, Increasing’ and ‘Help and Support’ were analysed in greater detail. Semantic categories Action make (309), use (191), find (146), add (86), found (70), makes (70), using (70), Alcohol and Cigarettes alcohol (653), smoking (642), drink (482), drinking (479), smoke (257), drinks (176), nicotine (137), cigarettes (97), cigarette (90), drunk (72) The Body body (223), blood (138), heart (138), liver (100), skin (59), physical (54) Choice choose (111), choice (53) Evaluation good (239), likely (131), just (140), important (117), better (107), different (97), well (96), instead (92), small (86), best (81), young (69), same (67), sure (65), & ! ' ( especially (63), right (59), easy (58), heavy (58), usually (56), available (55), long (55), fresh (54), added (52), balanced (52) Health, Ill-health and Risk health (268), healthy (250), risk (230), disease (123), cause (115), problems (112), symptoms (95), cancer (92), effects (91), energy (89), pregnant (88), life (86), pregnancy (83), healthier (67), problem (67), damage (65) Food fat (437), eat (330), food (330), foods (300), salt (275), weight (273), fruit (242), fish (233), eating (198), meat (157), diet (153), milk (145), calories (127), sugar (116), water (109), breakfast (107), vegetables (105), saturated (103), bread (101), vitamins (90), eggs (83), rice (82), beans (75), juice (75), vitamin (73), cheese (70), starchy (69), meal (67), oily (67), cooking (63), meals (62), shellfish (62), cooked (61), sugars (61), pasta (59), veg (59), nutrients (57), potatoes (56) Help and Support help (347), support (143), advice (113), tips (78), helps (53) Measurements high (239), units (199), amount (142), low (105), per (91), levels (90), lower (80), lots (68), regularly (65), portion (64), portions (62), half (61), plenty (61), 100g (59) Perceptions and Emotions need (252), feel (167), think (151), want (144), know (143), like (132), remember (118), see (112), look (93), withdrawal (74) People people (351), children (168), women (149), baby (138), smokers (97), men (91), child (88), GP (81), family (64), friends (54), babies (53) Reducing, Quitting, Increasing stop (210), quit (166), keep (127), don’t (124), avoid (109), start (102), reduce (96), quitting (83), lose (70), stopping (67), increase (61) Time day (277), time (190), week (103), years (84), times (64), year (64), days (58) Trying try (257), trying (63) Movement and Transfer give (219), go (168), take (120), giving (88), going (64), put (63) % ) ( * # , $ ! , ( The official website of the NHS England is not simply called “NHS England.” Instead, its header reads “NHS choices. Your health, your choices.” The concept of being able to choose for oneself is important throughout the texts. The verb form choose itself occurs 111 times in the corpus, the corresponding noun choice/ s 77 times, and option/ s 47 times. These occur significantly more often in the food corpus, where the choice is mostly between regular and ‘healthier’ options, as in Try to choose wholegrain varieties whenever you can. In the alcohol corpus, the verb usually occurs in the phrase choose to drink, while the noun only occurs three times: Concordance sample of choice* ot drink is a much healthier choice . The NHS recommends that: * Men keep count and make informed choices when you're drinking. Bottle (330ml) more than you that's their choice * Don't mix alcohol with drugs of an The first of these repeats the pattern from the food corpus, where there is a healthy and therefore, by implication, an unhealthy choice that has to be made, while the other two stress the importance of personal choice. The latter reappears in the smoking corpus, where the personal choice to smoke or to quit smoking is the most important aspect. Concordance sample of choose* / choice* rch shows that no matter when you choose to give up, be it 18 or 80 years of t them regardless of whether they choose to continue smoking or not. Assure earn: * Remind yourself that your choice to smoke or not to smoke is still the The frequent use of the word choose, often occurring in speech acts such as advice or suggestions, usually represented by imperatives, and very often with direct reference to the reader (you/ your) in close proximity, stresses the concept of personal action. It is the reader who must ultimately choose what to do about his/ her situation, and whether to act according to the advice given on the homepages or not. Of course, the semantic implication of choose and choice also touches on the issue of personal freedom, the value that is seen under threat by the ‘Nanny State’ outlined in the Introduction. When advice is presented as a choice, it ceases to sound restrictive; after all, a choice implies always at least two possible ways of action (even though it might be objected that there is a contradiction between using a directive speech act in connection with choice). Presenting a healthy lifestyle as an individual choice avoids an authoritarian “thou shalt not” attitude, which people might be wary of. However, what constitutes a healthy lifestyle is still defined by the institutions giving advice, and whether the choice is actually a sheer matter of free will is debatable. In one of the videos on the NHS website, a young woman talks about weight loss in terms of choice, but the example she gives is interesting: It’s [i.e. losing weight is] so much of a lifestyle choice now. You know, do I wanna be really unhappy, or do I wanna be en- & ! ' ( joying life? (“Weight loss tips” [online]). The commonsensical assumption revealed by this statement is significant: real enjoyment comes from being slim and active and leading what the NHS promotes as a healthy life, while any deviance will result in unhappiness. Emotive language like this does raise the question whether people who do not conform to this lifestyle actually feel unhappy, and if so, whether this is because public discourse constructs them as unhappy. If one is told that refusing to choose the ‘right thing’ will make one miserable, does this still count as a free choice? , ! + Another semantic field that occurs with striking regularity is that connected to ‘trying’ things. Interestingly, this semantic field reappears throughout all three sub-corpora with roughly equal frequency. The word try appears 257 times in the corpus, and trying appears 63 times, while the past tense is significantly less present: tried only appears 16 times, so the focus is obviously on the ongoing process, rather than the results of it. Its synonym attempt and its grammatical forms, however, only appear fifteen times, of which four refer to attempted suicide, and only eleven are used in phrases like Concordance sample of attempt* most smokers several attempts to quit completely. The good n elp you in your quit attempt if you’re prepared for the chal prepare you for this attempt and help you avoid temptation. metimes stem from an attempt to cope with an underlying prob The use of try rather than the slightly more formal attempt ties in with the less sophisticated nature of the source texts, which is already detectable in the standardised type-token ration. It is, however, also noticeable in terms of its grammatical usage: in the relatively informal ‘language of advice’ the texts in the corpus are employing, it sounds far more natural to use the word try as an imperative than the word attempt. The word try is particularly interesting in this context: it is only used as a verb, and apart from the phrases you could try and you should try and the infinitive use of to try, it is always used as an imperative. This gives a total of 213 instances of an imperative need to try something. The five clusters that appear most frequently are (in order of their frequency) try to eat, you could try, try not to, try to choose and try to avoid. Of these, you could try seems to be a suggestion, while the other forms seem to realize a more straightforwardly directive speech act. Fairclough (1989: 55) draws attention to the hidden power in directives and hints, a strategy that is sometimes more effective because it draws less attention to the power imbalance that is expressed. You could try (and also the related phrase you should try, see above) quite obviously falls within this category. However, I would argue that even when it is used in an overt imperative structure, such as try to choose the verb try retains enough semantic ambiguity to avoid sounding coercive. In a construction like try to choose wholegrain varieties, try to choose the healthier options or try to choose options that are low in fat, one can even find three words that soften the imperative meaning in a single phrase: try, choose, and options/ varieties. All of these leave room for the ‘free will’ of the advisee: choosing between different options or varieties has already been discussed above. Telling readers to try to eat certain types of food does not sound nearly as authoritative as simply telling them to eat certain types of food. Focusing on trying rather than achieving includes the possibility of failure, thereby making it less threatening - one could even argue that this gives the reader an easy way out if their attempt is not successful, while at the same time urging them to act. It also casts the institutions in the role of advice providers rather than commanders - there is a certain implication of understanding in this insistence on trying. This observation ties in with the general avoidance of ‘restrictive’ directives in the corpus: the phrase you should appears 57 times in the corpus, whereas the much more rigid you must only occurs three times, and at one of these occurrences, is used in an subordinate clause, thus not contributing to a directive illocution (reduce the risk of destructive ‘all or nothing’ thinking that says you must either stick to an extremely rigid diet or no diet at all). Moreover, the empowering phrase you can occurs a staggering 304 times, making it clear that the focus of the texts is on an enabling rather than a prescriptive discourse. Again, this underscores the active role of the advisee, and the concept of free will and the freedom to choose attached to it. , , & + 0& + A peculiar aspect that became obvious during the preliminary analysis is the use of verbs connected, in a wider sense, to increase and decrease. In this respect, there are clear connections of certain verbs with certain subcorpora. While the food corpus, as mentioned above, is preoccupied with choosing a different (by implication a healthier) option, and therefore with a change in diet, the smoking and alcohol corpora seem to reflect the acceptability of the habit. While the consumption of alcohol seems to be acceptable within limits, smoking is seen as a habit that should be abandoned altogether. The word stop, occurring 210 times in the corpus, is predominantly found in the texts that advise against smoking. Stop smoking is by far the most frequent phrase in this context, occurring 72 times, and thereby far & ! ' ( more often than stop drinking, which only occurs 8 times, with one of the occurrences being an advice to never stop drinking suddenly. Noticeably, in the food and alcohol corpus, the word tends not to be used in connection with an action on the part of the readers; they are not advised to stop doing something, but rather informed about possible outcomes, as in the following examples: Concordance sample of stop* alcohol quota out for longer. It'll stop you getting dehydrated too and les e body, causing changes in some and stopping others from working properly. t eat properly and too much alcohol stops the body absorbing the nutrients ohol disturbs our brain rhythms and stops us getting enough of the deep sle ing sex. And of course, it can also stop guys from getting and keeping an e minutes to help you lose weight and stop weight going back on n ater, or other fluids, every day to stop us getting dehydrated. When the we re helps to keep bowels healthy and stop constipation. And this means we ar With the word quit, which is more closely linked idiomatically to the phrase to quit smoking, this is even more noticeable. 261 occurrences, all but one in the smoking corpus, and without exception linked to the concept of quitting tobacco, drive home the importance attached to giving up cigarettes for good. Smoking seems to be the only topic considered in this paper where a governmental insistence to cease and desist is considered acceptable, and even an imperative like Quit smoking for the benefit of you and your family does not appear to be too harsh. When the concept of reducing the intake of certain substances or ‘cutting down’ on them is considered, the relation between the alcohol and the smoking corpus is reversed. While the reader is advised not to drastically stop a problematic alcohol intake, but rather cut down on it, cutting down on cigarettes is discouraged in favour of giving them up completely. The phrase appears in the smoking corpus in sentences like Can’t I just cut down rather than give up [smoking]? (a question which is answered in the negative), or the warning that when you cut down you tend to take more and deeper puffs on each cigarette. In the alcohol corpus, however, where the phrase appears most commonly, cutting down is encouraged. Generally, there is a certain preoccupation with amounts and measurements in the alcohol corpus, while the smoking corpus focuses on indicators of time (days, months, years). The texts in the smoking corpus go to great lengths to describe the physical effects of quitting cigarettes after a certain amount of time. There is no recommended cigarette intake over the course of a week, while most of the words connected to time in the alcohol corpus refer to the recommended limits of one’s daily or weekly alcohol intake. A word closely connected to the concept of re- stricting one’s alcohol intake to what is perceived as a reasonable level is the frequently occurring unit. This measurement occurs 236 times in the corpus, all but five times in the alcohol sub-corpus, and every single time it refers to a so-called standard unit of alcohol, defined as 8g of pure alcohol, which is used to measure the alcohol intake for men and women that is still deemed medically safe (cf. Jackson and Beaglehole 1995: 716). The focus of the text here is first to define a unit in generally understandable terms, and then give clear guiding lines as to how many units are still deemed within a ‘healthy’ range, e.g. Concordance sample of unit* -strength bitter contains just over two units , while a glass of wine can contai alf units. A double can be nearly three units . You can't count one drink as one y should not drink more than one to two units of alcohol once or twice a week an It seems that, unlike smoking, which is explicitly condemned, alcohol is still so widely accepted socially that the language used in connection with it refrains from any outright ban and rather tends towards reducing its use as part of the desired ‘healthy lifestyle’. ,1 * "&** Despite its overall focus on empowerment and the agency of the reader, the concept of help is omnipresent in the corpus. The word help ranks seventh in a list of content words of the entire corpus, before words like food, health or risk, and even higher if grammatical variants such as helps and helping are included. All in all, there are 416 occurrences of the word help/ s, 143 occurrences of support, but only eighteen instance where the word aid(s) is used. Interestingly, the more sophisticated aid is only used in the smoking corpus, to refer to cessation aids, i.e. chemical nicotine substitutes. The frequent offers of support seem, at first glance, to cast the advisee in a more passive role than originally expected. The implication seems to be that they are struggling with some kind of deficiency that requires help, whether it be the ‘wrong’ diet, an addiction to nicotine, or the overconsumption of alcohol. At the same time, the omnipresence of offers to help reinforces the ‘benevolent’ nature of the discourse: rather than presenting people with a set of behavioural rules in order to make them change their lifestyles, they are repeatedly told that doing certain things will help them. Interestingly, it is hardly ever people who are the source of help. A personal helper is only mentioned in twenty-four instances, and most of the times, it is people from the personal environment of the advisees who act in this role - friends, family, the family doctor, or even they themselves, but not the institution giving the advice in the first place. The only institutional entities to appear in this context are local voluntary services, & ! ' ( smoking cessation advisors, and regular support groups all mentioned once. Ten times, the corpus advises to seek help from your GP or your doctor, four times it is friends and family that are identified as helpers, twice the phrase help yourself appears, and in the remaining five instances, it is the reader him/ herself who can help other people of their acquaintance (to give up smoking in all instances). Once again, this avoids giving obvious discursive power to political institutions like the NHS. Help, when it comes from a human source, is limited to the personal environment, or at the most to local and non-governmental organisations that are not tinged with the suggestion of influence from the state. The vast majority of help, however, is not portrayed as stemming from human beings at all - it is abstract concepts, ways of behaviour, advice and information, or drug treatments that promise to help the reader. This is a prominent feature of all three sub-corpora, exemplified by phrases like the following ones: Concordance sample of help* And eating breakfast could actually help you control your weight. There i the oil as you can and it will also help to put the egg on some kitchen pape take your mind off your drinks and help you to slow down. Step 7 Have alc ating before you start drinking can help limit how quickly alcohol gets into otine replacement therapy (NRT) can help people break this physically addict juice There are treatments that can help reduce the intensity of these cravi g smoking. When you give up, it can help to know that the first few days are utting down on tea and coffee could help to improve iron levels in the body. This way of insisting on the helpful quality of behaviours that are to be encouraged not only avoids giving more direct commands that might sound too authoritarian. It also implies that the outcome that one is helped to achieve is ultimately desirable. If eating breakfast is advertised as help[ing] you control your weight, controlling one’s weight according to the standards outlined throughout the rest of the text is presented as a positive and favourable outcome, without having to resort to more restrictive rhetoric. 1, ( & Throughout the corpus, advisees are constructed as active participants rather than passive recipients of advice, and the concept of free will is strongly emphasised in connection with their actions. The texts steer clear of phrases and words that might sound too restrictive and thereby cast the institution giving advice as dictatorial or reinforce the stereotype of a state that aims at controlling its citizens. This is accomplished by a strong focus on choices, implicitly condoning a pluralist attitude that allows for alternatives, and a preference for imperatives that sound less threatening, e.g. try doing instead of do. The concept of help, which is omnipresent in the text, is mainly linked to the private sphere if the helpers are human, but far more often used to refer to modes of behaviour or treatments. The governments or the public health institutions from whom the advice stems, however, hardly ever appear as helpers, arguably to avoid drawing attention to them as more powerful than the reader. The discourse also seems to echo cultural norms, such as the avoidance of a complete condemnation of so powerful a cultural signifier as alcohol. Yet despite the empowerment of the advisee and the strong focus on free will and choice, commonsensical notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decisions are reinforced throughout the corpus, making the notion of an actual ‘free choice’ questionable. All of this evidence points to the conclusion that the ‘Nanny State’ discourse has indeed caused a shift towards ‘soft’ advice, with a focus on personal freedom and the freedom to choose, resulting in the avoidance of authoritarian commands. ' + * ! Calman, Kenneth (2009) “Beyond the ‘nanny state’: Stewardship and public health.” Public Health 123: e6-e10 (sic). Cottam, Rachel (2005). “Is public health coercive health? .” The Lancet. 366.9497: 1592-1594 Fairclough, Norman (1989/ 1996). Language and Power. London: Longman Jackson, Rodney & Robert Beaglehole (1995). “Alcohol consumption guidelines: Relative safety vs. absolute risks and benefits.” The Lancet. 346.8977: 716. McEnery, Tony & Andrew Wilson (2001). Corpus Linguistics. 2 nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Mesthrie, Rajend, Joan Swann, Andrea Deumert & William L. Leap (2001). Introducing Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ogden, Jane (1995). “Psychosocial theory and the creation of the risky self.” Social Science & Medicine. 40: 3. 409-415. Petersen, Alan & Iain Wilkinson (2008). “Health, risk and vulnerability: an introduction.” In: Alan Petersen & Iain Wilkinson (eds.). Health, Risk and Vulnerability. London: Routledge. 1-15. Scott, Mike (1996). WordSmith Tools 5.0. Oxford: OUP. Skolbekken, John-Arne (2008). “Unlimited medicalization? Risk and the pathologization of normality.” In: Alan Petersen & Iain Wilkinson (eds.). Health, Risk and Vulnerability. London: Routledge. 16-29. Teubert, Wolfgang and Anna ermáková (2007). Corpus Linguistics. A Short Introduction. London: Continuum. “Weight loss tips” NHS choices. http: / / www.nhs.uk/ video/ pages/ medialibrary.aspx? Id ={B56BA25D-B993-4206-8A824F18F30F313F}&Uri=video/ 2007/ sept/ Pages/ Weightloss.aspx. (November 2009) “What is public health? ” (n.d.) The Faculty of Public Health. www.fphm.org.uk/ about_faculty/ what_public_health/ default.asp. (November 2009) & ! ' ( " & Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland. http: / / www.healthandcareni.co.uk/ (November 2009). HSE.ie. Health Service Executive Website. http: / / www.hse.ie/ eng. (November 2009). NHS Choices. Your Health, Your Choices. http: / / www.nhs.co.uk (November 2009). NHS Scotland. Scotland’s Health on the Web. http: / / www.show.scot.nhs.uk (November 2009). NHS Wales. Health of Wales Information Service. http: / / www.wales.nhs.uk (November 2009). $ - # . / Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Deborah L. Madsen / Mario Klarer (eds.) The Visual Culture of Modernism Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 26 2011, 265 S. €[D] 49,00/ SFr 65,50 ISBN 978-3-8233-6673-7 The Visual Culture of Modernism offers a wide-ranging exploration of intertextual relations that bring together artists, artistic forms and artistic periods in response to the question: what is the relevance of early twentiethcentury American Modernism to our present historical moment? Scholars from Europe and America develop responses to this question based on the philosophical heritage of modernity and in the context of the range of Modernist cultural praxis. The essays collected here explore links between literary and cultural Modernism, the relationship between the concepts of modernity and Modernism, and the legacy of Modernism in the late twentieth century and the contemporary period. Cinema, cinematic paratexts, television, the visual arts of painting and photography, poetry, fiction, and drama are among the artistic forms discussed in terms of issues ranging from cinematic and stage reinterpretations of Modernist literary texts to the genre of televisual melodrama and the trope of racial passing. The essays argue that visuality remains an urgent concern, from the Modernist period to our present age of media revolution. 093911 Auslieferung Oktober 2011.indd 18 24.10.11 13: 59 * . $) # 2 3" 4 " 5 6 7 0 1 This paper aims to illustrate how American television series reflect tendencies and realities of the American legal system and legal policies. The depiction of the law and the legal professions on TV is closely related to historical developments in American society and its law. Four major periods can be distinguished, which will be discussed by means of popular television series representative of these eras. As will be exemplified, some of the TV shows mirror the American legal system, lawyers, judges, and police officers quite accurately and realistically, while others overtly or covertly distort legal realities. Either way, these series reflect and at the same time help reinforce public perception of what constitutes American law and justice. In contrast to the 1960s through 1980s, TV shows have become more true to the realities of the law and American policies in recent years, which is also evident in their account of rather complex legal concepts and the use of law-specific terminology. , & It is nowadays commonly acknowledged that law-related TV series mirror tendencies in society in general, and the legal system in particular, and at the same time help shape the audience’s perceptions of legal issues and professions. Asimov and Mader (2004/ 2007: 7) note that “most people learn most of what they think they know about law and lawyers from consuming popular legal culture”, which portrays ‘law in action’ rather than ‘law in the books’, i.e. law from the perspective of how it is actually practiced by judges, attorneys, police, legislators, etc., as opposed to what the law books say they are supposed to do. Nowadays, media representations of lawyers and the law sometimes provide the sole basis on which people evaluate the work of the law, which has led to enormous distortions in the perceptions of the reality of the practice of law. $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # 0 1 This paper aims to outline four major periods in the portrayal of legal realities as promoted in popular US TV series and their perception by the public over the past five decades. The focus will be on a brief discussion of the main characters (e.g. prosecutors 1 , defense attorneys, and police officers) in Perry Mason, Hill Street Blues, Matlock, Law and Order (L&O), The Practice, and Boston Legal (BL), in order to illustrate the shift of attention from popular defense attorneys defending the innocent (e.g. Perry Mason and Matlock) to law enforcement officers and prosecutors, and finally back to defenders, but now - more realistically - representing both guilty and innocent clients. The four periods analyzed will be embedded in a discussion of the historical development of US law and legal policies, with particular regard to the public’s views on what constitutes American law. , 8 29 3" # 2 4 Period One is dominated by the great number of TV series featuring defense attorneys at the service of the poor, deprived, and innocent (e.g. Perry Mason [1957-1974] and The Defenders [1961-1965]). These shows depicting socially conscious defense lawyers, popular throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, were subsequently replaced by popular cop series, such as Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) and NYPD Blue (1993-2005), in which defense lawyers were no more than secondary characters and “law enforcers representing the power of the state to track down criminals became the major defenders of justice” (Rapping 2003: 21). I refer to this development as Period Two, which went hand in hand with society’s movement toward conservatism and the viewers’ increasing satisfaction at seeing wrongdoers caught and punished. There are only very few exceptions to the cop format through the late 1980s and early 1990s, one being LA Law (1986-1994), which featured no cops but a law firm; however, unlike the more recent TV shows, such as Boston Legal, it depicted upscale corporate lawyers devoting most of their billing hours to defending wealthy Beverly Hills clients. Matlock (1986-1995), on the other hand, was the only really popular television series at that time which focused on a clever defense attorney in the mold of Perry Mason, rather representative of the period before the first turn. Period Three, effectuated by American television in the 1990s, is triggered by complex socio-political factors precipitated by the Supreme Court’s 1981 landmark decision to allow cameras in the courtroom. This decision has to be considered within its socio-political framework: after the liberal 1960s and 1970s, in which the central concern of law en- 1 Prosecutors are frequently referred to as D.A.s (i.e. district attorneys) in American Law, as most of the US prosecutors actually work in state and federal district courts. & + 2 forcement was the protection of the rights of the defendant, who was seen as a victim rather than an aggressor, the US Supreme Court had finally given in to the call for a more stringent, conservative stance toward criminal punishment. The Supreme Court decision was an attempt to display to the justice-weary public, who felt that many accused actually got off lightly due to what seemed to them a faulty legal system with too many loopholes, that alleged criminals did end up being punished and that justice was indeed done. All of this paved the way for Court TV, a TV channel devoted exclusively to legal issues including live broadcasts from the courts, which was established in 1991. This obvious shift in TV programming, and particularly in television’s approach to criminal justice issues, marks the second shift. Court TV, in turn, helped trigger the surge of more than 30 new law series on American television in the last decade of the 20 th century alone (e.g. Law & Order). Thus, popular cultural forms, such as television and film, began to recognize “popular concerns about increasing crime or the threat of crime, and social order, while emphasizing the need for law and order to be re-established in society” (Strinati 1995/ 1997: 168) and started to appropriate legal contexts and concepts to their respective formats. 2 These new law series clearly reflected and further enhanced the public’s growing interest in criminal trials, which was fueled even more by realworld ‘rich and famous’ cases, e.g. The Menendez Brothers and the O.J. Simpson trials in the 1990s, which projected and ironically reinforced the false impression that the US criminal justice system was ‘soft on crime’, an image the US Supreme Court had actually intended to counteract by allowing cameras in the courtroom (Rapping 2003: 106-128). Defense lawyers - apparently sleazy and greedy - became the center of attention and public outrage, as TV viewers watched obviously guilty defendants get away with the crimes they had committed, mainly due to the fact that they were rich and able to afford ‘the best possible defense’. Another societal shift that has had a major impact on the representation of legal issues on TV is a change in what is seen as the province of the law. Since the 1990s, “the courtroom [has] increasingly [been] replacing other, more traditionally political arenas as the major sphere within which vexed social and political issues of all kinds were being debated and ruled upon, both institutionally and publicly” (Rapping 2003: 10). Simultaneously, the criminal justice system has moved toward a “broadening of what is considered ‘criminal behavior’” (Rapping 2003: 15), nowadays including issues traditionally perceived as family or social issues handled through extralegal agencies. Rapping (2003: 15) refers to this phenomenon as “the criminalization of American life”, while Villez (2010: 12) calls it “the massive judicialization of American society”. 2 For a thorough discussion of courtroom dramas in movies see Bergman and Asimov (2006). 0 1 TV series such as Law & Order (1990-2010), The Practice (1997-2004), and its spin-off Boston Legal (2004-2008) have also exploited this notion, promoting the idea that basically any and all social issues and problems can be handled within the narrow terrain of the law; hence the depiction of sometimes ridiculous cases, often combining civil lawsuits with potentially criminal or at least negligent behavior of the defendants, with a large amount of compensatory and punitive damages at stake. This naturally leads to a shift of attention to the victim. In fact, the practice of law itself has become more and more victim-centered, rather than defendant-centered in the US. Thus, the prime questions are no longer the motive triggering the criminal act and the alleged offender’s mindset but the “guilty act” (Rapping 2003: 34) itself and its consequential, mostly harsh punishment. The criminal is now depicted as a “dangerous outsider” (Rapping 2003: 35), who through his/ her acts of violence threatens the community’s stability. Hence, the legal and public interest is shifted from the ‘why’ of the crime, foregrounded in the 1960s and 1970s, to the criminal deed’s moral nature and consequences, thus emphasizing the victim’s position. In TV series such as L&O and its spinoff L&O: Special Victims Unit, the opposition of law versus crime is underscored, whereby the audience is aligned with the law and the protagonists, and crime and criminals are negatively presented, as ‘different’, as ‘the other’ (Bignell 1997: 126). This dichotomy reflects the public’s fear of crime and their vengeance-like desire to have wrongdoers punished, and at the same time plays into this fear by reinforcing the notion that crime is indeed an omnipresent factor in today’s society. These television shows’ “mythic narrative structure has ideological significance, since it naturalizes ‘us’ and presents ‘the other’ as the source of disruption and disorder” (Bignell 1997: 127). This turn is clearly mirrored in defense lawyerand courtroom-based series such as The Practice as well, in which the drama often revolves around the conflict between the defense attorneys’ own moral values and their plight of having to defend mostly guilty clients ‘in the name of the law’. As opposed to Perry Mason (1957-1966) and its ‘clone’, Matlock, for example, who tended to defend only the innocent and thus were conceived as ‘good lawyers’, these more recent shows of the 1990s and early 2000s depict the unease and guilt of the defenders in view of the acquittal of many of their obviously guilty clients, their disgust and selfcontempt at winning such cases. This tendency is clearly counteracted in Boston Legal (BL), which is representative of Period Four, where the fundamental democratic ideas of ‘the presumption of innocence until proven guilty’ and the concept of providing ‘the best possible defense’ for the client are in the foreground again; thus winning cases is considered desirable and ultimately noble by the defense lawyers. In that, BL also works against the common misconception of the leniency of the legal system toward alleged criminals, and & + 2 through its more liberal stance shifts the focus from the victim’s perspective back to the defendant’s, emphasizing the raising of ‘a reasonable doubt’ as a main concept of a successful defense. Legal notions, such as actus reus, mens rea 3 and the prosecution having ‘the burden of proof’ in criminal cases, are drawn upon repeatedly by the BL lawyers in their quest for creating ‘reasonable doubt’. , ( % 9 % ! / 5 " & 5 / 5 # 2 8 #: 8 5 % 5 # + # As will be seen in the following discussion, the four periods outlined above cannot always be clearly separated; on the contrary, the developments are interrelated and consequently also overlap in some of the underlying concepts of the TV series of the 1980s and 1990s in particular. This can be seen most obviously in the case of L&O, in which the format of traditional cop series (in the mold of Hill Street Blues) is combined with courtroom drama, thus bridging the first, second and third periods. On the other hand, Matlock, although created and popular in the late 1980s and 1990s, clearly operates within the ‘defense attorney solving the case’ tradition of Perry Mason of the 1960s and 70s, and hence harks back to the first period. Both television series illustrate the wide range of approaches toward the American legal system of the late 20 th century, which in turn mirrors the diverse socio-political movements brought about by the 1981 landmark decision of the US Supreme Court. The Practice, by contrast, is more explicitly linked to the third period, with its rather victim-centered stance, while BL is quite a prototypical representative of Period Four. With its rather overt political stance, underscored by a sharp sense of irony and sarcasm, BL is certainly the most multi-faceted and multi-layered of the TV shows discussed here and will therefore receive a more thorough analysis. The legal drama most directly associated with the first period is definitely Perry Mason, featuring a fictional Los Angeles defense attorney of the same name (starring Raymond Burr), who originally appeared in detective novels by Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason TV series website). Each episode follows the same format: in the first half of the show, the prospective murder victim is depicted as deserving homicide, often with Mason’s client threatening to kill the victim; the body is retrieved (frequently by Mason himself, or his private investigator, Paul Drake), with numerous clues incriminating the client; the second half of the episode is then devoted to Mason defending his client in court, thereby establishing the guilt of another character present in the courtroom. Hence, as will be 3 A crime must contain two elements: the actus reus ‘guilty act’, and the mens rea ‘guilty mind’ (see Automatism website). 0 1 demonstrated in more detail in the discussion of Matlock, the entire investigation and defense rest on Mason, with the defender functioning more as a detective than a lawyer, as he has to discover evidence of who really committed the crime, thereby freeing his invariably innocent client. In fact, Mason only loses three cases of almost 300 to the prosecutor 4 , slick and sleazy district attorney Hamilton Burger, played by William Talman. Although this depiction of an American defense attorney is highly unrealistic, Perry Mason nevertheless “was the first role model for the defense attorney hero on TV” (Rapping 2003: 22). As pointed out before, the second period is characterized by a shift of focus from successful defenders to police officers and their daily hassles and routines. The US serial police drama Hill Street Blues perfectly represents and illustrates this change in television programming in the 1980s, which coincides with American society’s move towards a more conservative attitude when dealing with criminal actions and assumed offenders. Hill Street Blues chronicles the lives of the staff of a single police precinct in an unnamed American metropolis, combining urban characteristics of both Chicago and New York City, although filmed in Los Angeles. The main focus of the series is on the tough, bitter inner city life realities and on the way in which the police tackles societal problems, including gang culture and brutal drug-related crimes. Rapping (2003: 2) refers to police dramas such as Hill Street Blues as “’Cops with a Heart’ series”: it is no longer lawyers but “the police officers whose hearts [bleed] for the underprivileged; who [anguish] about sexism, racism, and poverty; and who - and this [is] really innovative - [have] complex personal lives […]” (Rapping 2003: 3). Each Hill Street Blues episode features a number of intertwined storylines, based in the main characters’ personal and professional lives. Some of these stories are resolved within the episode, others develop in several episodes throughout a season. Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), his Lieutenant Ray Calletano (René Enríquez), and his three Sergeants come from all walks of life and different ethnic and racial backgrounds ranging from African-Americans to Hispanics, which in the 1980s was a groundbreaking feature of American television and paved the way for TV series such as Criminal Intent in the 1990s, in which it became commonplace to feature police crews of diverse ethnic and racial make-up. Hill Street Blues includes several inter-racial and interethnic cop partnerships and examines controversial issues, e.g. police corruption, racism, and alcoholism. In their daily quest to track down the wrongdoers, the officers are continually torn between doing ‘what is right’ and ‘what works’ in a given situation, which to some extent mirrors 4 Perry Mason’s losses are: “The Case of the Witless Witness”, “The Case of the Deadly Verdict”, and “The Case of the Terrified Typist” (Perry Mason website), of which one is actually reversed on appeal - a track record any real-life lawyer will envy. & + 2 real-life police work. What is ignored almost entirely in Hill Street Blues is the defense dimension, which is at the center of the previously discussed Perry Mason. Although one public defender, Joyce Davenport (incidentally Furillo’s girlfriend, played by Veronica Hamel) is given occasional guest appearances, the character never develops beyond its minor scope in the series, being limited to the domestic sphere of Furillo’s home, predominantly the bedroom. Thus, the TV series’ almost complete exclusion of defense attorneys foreshadows more recent shows such as CSI and its spin-offs CSI: Miami and CSI: New York, in which police investigation, albeit employing more sophisticated technical methods, and the apprehension of the offender are highlighted. By contrast, Matlock features a feisty defense attorney, Ben Matlock, played by Andy Griffith, who in Perry Mason-style gets an acquittal in a jury trial for almost every one of his clients. He has his law practice in Atlanta, Georgia, and is assisted by various private investigators and at times by junior partners in his practice. Matlock is known for his finicky fashion sense 5 as well as for his visiting crime scenes himself, trying to discover clues otherwise overlooked and to come up with viable alternative theories of the crime in question, usually murder. Hence, the focus of the series is not on police investigation techniques but on the defense attorney’s sense of the crime and his strategies in proving the innocence of his clients and at the same time exposing the actual offenders. The real US justice system is thus distorted: whereas in reality the burden of proof lies with the prosecution, it seems in Matlock that justice can only be done by the defender carrying out his own investigations and in this way doubting, if not ridiculing, the police’s and prosecution’s efforts to bring justice to the cases at hand. Hence, defense attorney Ben Matlock becomes what Bignell (1997: 126) refers to as “the mythic representation of justice.” Unrealistically, Matlock also exclusively defends the innocent, which casts additional doubt on the work done by police and district attorneys alike, who have arrested these innocent people in the first place. Like Perry Mason, Matlock makes no attempt to describe what real lawyers actually do and how the criminal justice system actually functions (see also Asimov and Mader 2004/ 2007: 100-101). Yet, this Perry Mason-like format of the series, with Matlock identifying the offenders and then confronting them in a dramatic, ‘show-down’ courtroom scene near the end of each episode 6 remains the only television legal drama throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Period Three, which emphasizes the defense attorney as hero rather than police officers, 5 Matlock always appears in court wearing a trademark light gray suit. 6 Villez (2010: 13) points out that this simple structure and its repletion in every single episode, as introduced in Perry Mason and continued in Matlock, allowed the audience to (re-)discover certain aspects of the legal system each week and to build up criteria and knowledge about the law, which then served as the basis for more complex legal dramas on TV. 0 1 and thus thwarts the contemporary zeitgeist in TV programming. Obviously, the image of the “efficient, brilliant and friendly lawyer” (Villez 2010: 18) is very reassuring for TV viewers. At the same time, it highlights the importance of effective and thorough legal representation in court as a fundamental civil right in the US legal system, valuing the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ notion. What the show fails to accomplish, though, is a more realistic portrait of the work of a defender, which is not to track down criminals via the effective and successful defense of an innocent client but the defense per se. Thus, the series stops at a premature point of legal routine: it always identifies the actual killer but falls short of giving insight into the defense of this particular alleged criminal. There is no conviction in the end, which again echoes the more liberal tradition of the 1950s through 1970s, with its noble defenders representing only the innocent - a tradition that had definitely come to an end by the mid-1990s (see the discussion of The Practice and BL below). L&O, the longest running crime drama on American primetime television, operates within a different, potentially more realistic format: half of its one-hour time slot is devoted to police investigation and the arrest of suspects, and the rest to their criminal prosecution, with episodes often being based on actual cases (Villez 2010: 24). Hence, New York City police officers and their psychological and forensic methods to ferret out the offenders on the one hand and prosecutors and their techniques to decide upon and negotiate a proper punishment on the other hand are given equal attention and emphasis in the series. This shift of focus from defense lawyer to police and prosecution is what I have previously referred to as the first turn, which coincides with and partakes in the American public’s increasing enthrallment with criminal cases, additionally fueled by the establishment of Court TV in 1991. In the wake of high-profile cases such as the O.J. Simpson trial, Americans came to see defense attorneys as highpowered, greedy, manipulative, unfazed by whether justice is actually done as long as they win their cases and earn much money. 7 Hence, it appears almost logical that the public’s interest in and preoccupation with criminal law is diverted from the formerly ‘noble’ defense attorney to strict law enforcement agencies such as staunch police officers and unwavering D.A.s who seem to be the sole safeguards of justice in the late 20 th century US. What is interesting to note about L&O, though, is that due to its long run of twenty years, the series itself has undergone not only numerous cast changes but also shifts in position: while in the earlier years liberal concerns were given more serious attention, more recent episodes have reflected the more punitive New York criminal justice system, which “has 7 This is in stark contrast to the depiction of defenders as noble in Perry Mason, for example, in which the prosecutor is portrayed as sleazy - as the ‘enemy’ in the eyes of the television viewers, who were obviously encouraged to identify with Mason and his clever defense antics. & + 2 restored the death penalty and instituted other changes that make criminal prosecution easier and criminal defense more difficult” (Rapping 2003: 28). Thus, episodes of the last few seasons are more concerned with the ‘toughon-crime’ stance and the pure pursuit of conviction at all costs, as opposed to earlier segments, in which main characters such as chief assistant district attorney Ben Stone (played by Michael Moriarty) lacked this angry, often vengeful determination to convict. The more recent D.A., Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), by contrast, is portrayed as the powerful representative of established institutional power, i.e. the American justice system, who is becoming increasingly impatient with defenses based on what he calls “psychobabble” and “sob stories about sad childhoods” (Rapping 2003: 31); similarly, his chief police detective, Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), an older, formerly alcoholic, much divorced man whose personal flaws “have left him cynical and hard boiled to a fault” (Rapping 2003: 29) and his partners have gotten less philosophical and more aggressive and violence-prone themselves. 8 As opposed to other successful law series and films (in the mold of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe), L&O focuses on protagonists who are not independent private investigators but representatives of the state itself, who are not above bending the rules a bit in the name of everillusive justice. The main characters as well as the law and legal institutions themselves are depicted as flawed, and in that they are obviously meant to reflect the urban landscape of loneliness, economic and gender inequality, incipient violence, and breakdown of traditional values on a larger scale. All of this makes up the overtly conservative slant of the series: the heroes are part of the establishment, exercising power, growing restless and impatient in view of criminal action, avenging and punishing crimes, much more concerned with judging and preserving the law than with treating and rehabilitating. Thus, the stance conveyed by L&O undoubtedly mirrors the right-wing drift in the USA after Reagan’s election in 1980, which lasted until Obama’s election in 2008. During these decades, maintaining ‘law and order’ (hence the title of the series) in big cities was given priority, with the law being used “as a shield to protect people” (Villez 2010: 27), while previous priorities, such as affirmative action and community service, were being put into question (Villez 2010: 12). Consequently, L&O reinforces the US legal system’s preoccupation with the victimized individual rather than with the best possible defense for the presumed criminal. Although in a different vein, The Practice continues the underlying conservative tendencies mirrored and promoted in L&O. It seems like a direct descendant of LA Law, 9 the first US TV series to aim at dramatizing 8 For a more detailed analysis of individual characters see Rapping (2003: 27-34). 9 LA Law realistically showed, e.g., that lawyers in the US spend relatively little time in court and a great deal of their time in their offices; it also made clear that many legal matters actually do not involve litigation, but rather plea bargaining and other forms of settling the case. 0 1 law practice as it really exists. In the same mold, The Practice centers on the partners and associates at a small Boston law firm. Like LA Law, The Practice’s plots typically feature the firm’s involvement in various criminal and civil cases, often mirroring current events. Yet, unlike the former, the latter revolves around the constant conflict the main characters experience between legal ethics and personal ethics: more often than not, law and justice do not coincide, the obviously guilty are frequently acquitted and the innocent are convicted. The inner turmoil and selfloathing of the associates in the law firm are highlighted, emphasizing the notion that the US justice system is faulty and fails to do justice, which is also illustrated by the image of the police being repeatedly questioned in subplots throughout the eight seasons of The Practice. The plot of each segment is developed around Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott), senior partner at a Boston law firm, and his associates and junior partners, among them Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams), Jimmy Berluti (Michael Badalucco), and Eugene Young (Steve Harris), who come from all walks of life 10 and accordingly look at the practice of law from different angles. Yet, they all share feelings of contempt and disdain at what they consider an inadequate and lopsided legal system in which their noble ideas of defending the innocent are turned upside down by the reality of winning cases for guilty clients: Donnell originally opens his firm with idealistic dreams of protecting the innocent, but he quickly learns that guilty drug dealers and the like tend to be the ones who provide the business with regular income. They all also share a friendship with hard-line assistant district attorney Helen Gamble (Lara Flynn Boyle), who often prosecutes cases in which the law firm is involved. This constellation seems highly unrealistic, as the great majority of defense attorneys in reality tends to hang out with their own, as do prosecutors (Rapping 2003: 39). The fact that The Practice, in contrast to traditional cop shows and the purely crimeand prosecution-based L&O, also includes personal episodes of the individual protagonists lends a more human touch to the series, which in turn echoes the agonies the characters experience and suffer in their legal duties. Although The Practice rather accurately delineates legal realities as experienced by partners and associates of a law firm (and to a lesser extent those of the prosecution), it fails to move beyond the pessimistic perception of law and justice as propagated by L&O. Of course, The Practice looks at the legal system from a different perspective, namely that of the defense rather than police and prosecution, and it describes both criminal and civil cases and the various defense strategies the attorneys employ for 10 Berluti, e.g., is an Italo-American from a working-class background; Dole went to Harvard Law School and in the series gets married to Donnell; Young is an African- American, formerly a private investigator, whose brother died in prison after a coerced confession led to his conviction for a crime he did not commit. & + 2 both fields of law. 11 But unlike Perry Mason and Matlock, for example, The Practice gives a rather bleak vision of the profession: the job of a defender is no longer considered glorious, highly reputed, and noble but rather a constant struggle with cases in which real issues of morality and justice are at stake. Contradictory views on what justice actually is are presented and verbalized throughout the series, with questions revolving around whether it is justifiable and justified to represent a client one knows to be guilty or negligent, just because they have a constitutional right to be represented in court and defended. In criminal law, this stance casts doubt on two fundamental ingredients of US democracy, namely the presumption of innocence until proven guilty 12 and the right to counsel, the latter firmly embedded in the US Constitution. 13 As Rapping (2003: 37) aptly puts it, “if the series were truly advancing the view […] that every defendant, no matter how odious or guilty, deserves the very best defense possible so that our democratic system can function properly, they [i.e. the defense attorneys in the series] would not experience moral anguish and disgust when they win their cases.” It is interesting to note that the thus far final shift to Period Four, as illustrated by my discussion of BL, is actually effectuated by David E. Kelley, one of the most renowned producers of legal TV series in the USA. Himself a former criminal defense lawyer in Boston, he went on to create popular and critically acclaimed television series such as the aforementioned LA Law and The Practice, as well as Ally McBeal, Picket Fences, and BL (Bergman and Asimov 2006: 106; TVCrit1: Boston Legal website). In BL, Kelley - more than ever before - points out shortcomings of the American legal system within the context of contemporary political and social events and ideologies. Consequently, the content of BL is obviously more than an entertaining and critical glimpse of the system of law; “it is a medium from which Kelley uses character driven rhetoric to provide contextual provocation in the hopes of creating insightful thought” (TVCrit1: Boston Legal website). On the one hand, BL depicts defense attorneys who display all the stereotypical features associated with lawyers, which Rapping (2003: 2) characterizes as making “bundles of money being sleazy, corrupt, and soulless.” The two main characters in BL, Denny Crane (William Shatner) and Alan Shore (James Spader) incorporate all of those characteristics. Crane is an old, rich, narcissistic, self-indulgent, eccentric, corrupt, womanizing senior partner in the Boston law firm Crane, Poole & Schmidt, who is in love with the sound of his name; at 75, he 11 The main emphasis, however, remains on criminal law; unlike L&O and the like, the position of the prosecution, although part of each episode’s plot, is not of primary interest. 12 This is a legal right of the accused in a criminal trial, recognized by many nations including the US (see Presumption of Innocence website). 13 See Sixth Amendment (US Constitution website). 0 1 is well past his prime, suffering from dementia (which he himself refers to as ‘mad cow’), yet lives off of his glorious, long-gone reputation. He is a fierce, gun-loving Republican who will shoot people who interfere with his life one way or another without hesitation, which has gotten him into trouble with the law several times. Shore is portrayed as a slick, determined attorney, equally infatuated with women. He crosses the line frequently, bending the law his way, keen on winning every single case. Unlike most real-life lawyers, Shore is an expert in almost every field of law, taking on criminal and civil cases alike and winning most of them. He is a liberal Democrat who despite his usually unscrupulous conduct also displays some moral values and will take on some cases pro bono. Both attorneys have connections, which they are always willing to exploit to their own advantage. Yet, on the other hand, both display a great deal of humanity and loyalty at times, toward each other as friends as well as toward their clients. They also show much self-deprecating irony, which, despite their sometimes slick and inconsiderate manners, makes them likable, endearing, and entertaining as characters. Much of the sarcasm and cynicism results from the plot itself and the defenders’ personalities and looks. In one episode, e.g., it is not beyond the two to dress up as pink flamingos for a charity event, ridiculing themselves; in another instance, Denny Crane will desperately try to squeeze himself into a much too tight wetsuit for a fishing trip, displaying his ample bulge. However, the most comical and pointed examples of irony are verbal and usually openly allude to either legal flaws in the system, the current political situation, or the relationship to a former lover. In “The Black Widow” (Season 2, Episode 1), e.g., Denny Crane enters the conference room, red-faced, obviously aroused by the sight of a beautiful client, Kelly Nolan (Heather Locklear), accused of murdering her late husband. She turns to her defense attorney, Alan Shore, “Who is this man? And why is his face about to explode? ”, which prompts Shore to introduce the two thus, “Kelly Nolan, this is Denny Crane. Success has caused his head to swell.” In “Kill Baby Kill” (Season 5, Episode 9), Shore is somewhat uncharmingly complimented for his rather fit appearance by a former classmate, Martha: “You know, I always figured you to age fat and bald”, at which Shore retorts, “Well, I was lucky enough to stave off the evil that so ages men - marriage.” Later in the episode, Crane discusses Republican politics with his codefender Carl Sack in a Virginia bar: “You heard it all at the Republican Convention, ‘Kill, baby, kill’”, to which Sack replies, “I thought Republicans were pro-life”, which Crane refutes by a tongue-in-cheek explanation, “That’s for babies. Criminals, we kill.” In the final scene of the episode, Shore and Shirley Schmidt, another senior partner in the law firm, subsume the most recent presidential elections of 2008, which the former concludes thus: “I already miss Sarah Palin though. & + 2 She was fun while she lasted. I hope they let her keep the wardrobe”, commenting on Palin’s rather extravagant, preposterous fashion sense funded by the Republican Party during the 2008 Presidential Election campaign. Yet, both Crane and Shore not only display an acquired sense of humor but also, and more importantly for their profession, a high degree of advocacy and rhetoric, always facing the jury, addressing them directly in all of their trials. Shore’s main mode of defense includes a large number of rhetorical questions, which he proceeds to answer by refuting any kind of evidence or argument by the prosecution. This display of rhetoric is also indicative of the importance of the jury, especially in criminal trials: it seems as if the attorneys, prosecutors and defenders alike, are ‘performing’ for the jury, and the more convincing the ‘performance’ of the defender, the better for their client. Hence, the concepts of jury trials and of achieving ‘a reasonable doubt’ are inextricably linked in US law, which is highlighted throughout the five seasons of BL. The judges, 14 with whom Crane and Shore repeatedly struggle, are either stereotypically old, senile, often biased or not interested in the trials at hand but in their own power, or very young, beautiful, sexy women at least one of the two main characters has had an affair with. Real-life judges in the US tend to be rather old, as they have to have practiced law many years before they can actually advance up the career ladder in order to become judges; hence the (admittedly rare) depiction of young women as judges in BL seems highly unrealistic. Throughout the five seasons of BL, the importance of money is very palpable, as is the fundamental concept of the American legal system which guarantees US citizens the right to the best possible defense (they can afford) - an ideal on which all the defense attorneys at Crane, Poole & Schmidt pride themselves. Although most of the senior partners at the firm are rather conservative in their attitude toward the legal profession and their idea of how the law should be practiced, the junior partners and associates (and Crane himself at times as well) are very unconventional in their respective conduct, ranging from the overt behavior of a fat African-American cross-dresser, an attorney suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, to Shore’s sometimes risqué defense strategies and Crane’s aggressively sexual and sexist stance toward women. This makes for quite a non-PC practice, built on irony and sarcasm as well as true and very realistic legal and social issues. However, what is maybe most striking about BL is its sophisticated and wide range of legal concepts, which the audience is confronted with 14 As in all the other series discussed so far, judges only play a minor, if more elaborated role in BL, even though much of each episode is set inside courtrooms. For a more detailed analysis of three stereotypical judges frequently featured in BL see the TVCrit1: Boston Legal website. 0 1 without any further explanation, such as ‘Megan’s Law’ 15 , ‘TRO’ 16 , ‘First Amendment rights’ 17 and ‘automatism’. 18 Additionally, a wide range of socio-political issues, e.g. the US educational system, the war in Iraq, assisted suicide, gay rights, and environmental law are dealt with throughout the series. Even the nomination process and judicial powers of federal Supreme Court Justices are talked about and heavily criticized in one episode. 19 Many times, the role of the media, particularly in criminal trials, is depicted as a disturbing factor, enhancing and accelerating prejudgment by the public of oftentimes falsely accused defendants. Hence, the producer of the series presupposes a more profound knowledge of legal and social concepts among his viewers than is required in most other legal series. This is presumably only made possible by the TV audience’s constant exposure to law shows on American television, which have ‘prepared’ and sensitized them to intricate issues regarding American Law and policies. 1, ( & + ) As has been shown, legal concepts and their perception by the public are closely related to their depiction in TV series and shows. Yet, TV producers do not only reinforce legal realities and stereotypes alike, but they are also affected by and dependent on the public’s conception and interpretation of these realities and clichés. Thus, they react to their viewers’ ideas of legal concepts and their capabilities to ‘understand’ the law and legal jargon as much as they shape them. As a result of the TV viewers’ constant exposure to law-related broadcasts, notions such as ‘probable cause’, ‘Miranda Rights’ 20 and ‘Fourth Amendment Protec- 15 Megan’s Law refers to information made public about previously convicted sex offenders (see Megan’s Law website). 16 TRO stands for ‘temporary restraining order’. 17 First Amendment of the US Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances (see the US Constitution website). 18 The defense of automatism in criminal law is a defense to liability. A crime must, as mentioned above, contain two elements: the actus reus ‘guilty act’, and the mens rea ‘guilty mind’. This defense seeks to prove that the criminal defendant made only physical movements and did not “intend” to commit the act as required to prove the mens rea (see Automatism website). 19 Season 4, Episode 17: “The Court Supreme.” 20 The Miranda Rights, or Miranda Warning, are named after a Supreme Court case in 1966, Miranda v. Arizona: The police must advise suspects of their Miranda Rights - their right to remain silent, their right to an attorney, and the right to an appointed attorney if they are unable to afford counsel - prior to conducting a custodial interrogation. If a suspect is not in police custody (i.e. ‘under arrest’), the police do not have to warn them of their rights (see Miranda Rights website). & + 2 tion’ 21 have become household terms and are nowadays firmly entrenched in US national and popular culture (Rapping 2003: 120-128; Asimov and Mader 2004/ 2007: 8). Just as American society, the American legal system, and American politics and policies have undergone many changes throughout the last few decades of the 20 th century and the first decade of the 21 st , representations of the law and legal professions on TV have evolved as well. The outline above illustrates how the different turns in the development of the law have not only impacted Americans and their interpretation and construction of the domain of law, but also depictions of legal issues and professionals on television. While earlier TV series, such as Perry Mason, Matlock, and to a lesser extent L&O, contain many distortions of legal realities in the US, more recent shows represent American Law much more accurately. Since many producers of today’s law series are legal professionals themselves (most notably David E. Kelley), many of the concepts of law depicted and communicated via TV are actually rather realistic. The emphasis on advocacy in BL, for example, clearly mirrors the importance of rhetoric in real-life legal practice. Yet, in addition to showing how certain features of American Law actually work, the more recent law series on television function as a means for the producers to criticize the legal system, to display what they believe is wrong about the politics behind the system, the legal profession, and often about the US and US politics as a whole. As has been delineated above, BL in particular serves as a vehicle for its producer in this respect: current political developments are commented on in a very critical, sarcastic manner, and are very frequently referred to and incorporated in in-court arguments by the defense attorneys (e.g. the liberal anti-Bush stance displayed by Shore and Crane’s staunch Republican attitude are set against each other, often with very ironic undertones). As has been illustrated, this form of critical commentary on current affairs, together with its shift of perspective from the prosecution back to the defense, is one of the key elements that sets what I refer to as the third turn apart from the previous two. Although defense attorneys are portrayed in different, much more realistic terms in the 2000s than in Perry Mason and Matlock, for example, this emphasis on the defender’s work marks a return to legal representations intrinsic in TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, rendering the defense lawyer’s duties more noble and fundamental to the efficiency of the American legal system again. 21 The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution states the following: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized (see US Constitution website). 0 1 It remains to be seen in what direction the American legal landscape and its representation on television will develop in the future. It seems very likely, though, that TV series will continue the trend of becoming even more sophisticated in their depiction of legal issues and professions, partly because the producers of these shows tend to be former lawyers, thus insiders of the world of law, themselves, and partly because they will be able to cater to ever better informed, knowledgeable viewers. ' + * ! Asimov, Michael and Shannon Mader (2004/ 2007). Law and Popular Culture. A Course Book. New York [etc.]: Peter Lang. Bergman, Paul and Michael Asimov (2006). Reel Justice. The Courtroom goes to the Movies. Completely revised and updated. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing. Bignell, Jonathan (1997). Media Semiotics. An Introduction. Manchester & New York: Manchester UP. Gies, Lieve (2008). Law and the Media. The Future of an Uneasy Relationship. New York & London: Routledge-Cavendish. Rapping, Elayne (2003). Law and Justice as Seen on TV. New York & London: New York UP. Strinati, Dominic (1995/ 1997). An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London & New York: Routledge. Villez, Barbara (2010). Television and the Legal System. New York & London: Routledge. ; ' + * ! “Automatism (Law)” http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Automatism_%28law%29 (July 14, 2010). “Hill Street Blues” http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Hill_Street_Blues (January 22, 2011) “Megan’s Law” http: / / www.meganslaw.ca.gov/ homepage.aspx? lang=ENGLISH (July 14, 2010). “Miranda Rights” http: / / www.expertlaw.com/ library/ criminal/ miranda_rights.html (July 15, 2010). “Perry Mason (TV series)” http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Perry_Mason_(TV_series) (January 22, 2011) “Presumption of Innocence” http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Presumption_of_innocence (December 30, 2010). “The US Constitution” http: / / www.usconstitution.net/ const.html (July 12, 2010). “TVCrit1: Boston Legal” http: / / tvcrit1.blogspot.com/ 2010/ 04/ boston-legal.html (January 3, 2010). 0 1 $ - # 3 45 4 . / "&'< 7 # ' + / +& # = . > * ' 2 (& " . ! 3 = ? @* 0 6 " % 7 - " % The aim of this article is to present the subject-field or domain labels used in monolingual learner’s dictionaries. Special attention is paid to the analysis of similarities and differences between subject-field labels in different dictionaries and to the rationale for including certain subject-field labels. The first part of the article discusses the development of subject-field labels in OALD and LDOCE and pays attention to the differences in the lists of subject-field labels in print dictionaries and dictionaries on CD-ROM. The numbers of subjectfield labels listed in the print versions and on the CD-ROMs differ in some dictionaries, but an investigation into the microstructure shows that the same subject-field labels are used in each print edition and in its CD-ROM version. Another observation is the use of closely related subject-field labels in some dictionaries. Further, the results of an analysis of subject-field labels across dictionaries are presented and discussed. The conclusion is that subject-field labels should be defined and explained in detail in the front matter of each dictionary, and they should be used more consistently throughout the dictionary. Apart from that, there should be no discrepancies between the print and electronic versions. , & When starting work on any dictionary, the first step lexicographers have to take is to design the headword list. Among other things, they need to make conscious choices about different types of lexical items, especially about lexical items that do not form part of the unmarked, basic, general vocabulary and may not even be known to educated native speakers. $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # 0 6 " % 7 - " % These expressions should be considered as belonging to various types of specialized vocabulary. Some dictionaries will include a large number of specialized vocabulary items, some will be selective, some (such as pocket dictionaries) may exclude them. The final decision mostly depends on the market, the user profile and the cost of production. The use of corpora in computational lexicography means that dictionaries, including general-language dictionaries, can be updated more frequently and in a more representative way than is possible with manual methods. Apart from including new senses of already existing lemmas and new general vocabulary items, each update also contains scientific and technological neologisms, as well as more established terms. At this point, we have to define what a term is. A term is a word, an expression or an alphanumeric symbol used by experts in a specialized technical subject to designate a concept. The unity between term and concept is an essential requirement of unambiguous communication (cf. Hartmann and James 1998: 138-139, Ahmad et al. 1995: 7). However, experts as well as laypeople use the same terms or are confronted with them. This is why terms are to be found in general-language dictionaries. But what are the criteria on the basis of which the terms are included in general-language dictionaries? According to Ahmad et al. (1995: 7), this depends on the status of the term in question, since we can make a distinction between field-internal or field internal/ external terms. Fieldinternal terms are not part of the general language, since they are used in expert-to-expert communication. Terms falling into the category of field internal/ external terms are encountered and sometimes used by laypersons as well as experts, thus being the best candidates for inclusion in general-language dictionaries. Certain domains will not be covered in general-language dictionaries. It may also be expected that only subsets of terms from more accessible domains will be included and defined by their usage in communicative situations that are not exclusively fieldinternal (cf. Ahmad et al. 1995: 9). However, lexicographers should be aware that the main problem in selection is consistency. Since the mid-twentieth century the proportion of scientific and technical entries in general dictionaries has increased dramatically. Landau (2001: 33-34) estimates that more than 40 % of the entries in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (an unabridged monolingual dictionary intended for native speakers of English) and 25-35 % of those in college dictionaries are scientific or technical. These estimates made in the 1970s were quite high, and the proportion of scientific and technical entries has certainly not decreased since then. The larger general dictionaries are becoming collections of several subject-field dictionaries on top of compilations of general vocabulary, which is representing an increasingly smaller proportion of the entire work. Landau (2001: 34) gives two reasons for that: firstly, the number of scientific and technical terms is increasing more rapidly than that of general vocabulary items; secondly, ( %6 4 8 % # 0 # 8 9 2 there is the prevailing cultural view in our society that science and technology are of the highest importance. When an indication of language type is given in a dictionary, this is normally in the form of a label. In general dictionaries, terms are labelled with subject-field labels marking the field of specialization with which a particular lemma or one or more of its senses is associated (cf. Hartmann and James 1998: 133). The subject-field or domain labels used in monolingual learner’s dictionaries are the principal topic of this contribution. Special attention is paid to the analysis of similarities and differences between subject-field labels in different dictionaries and to the rationale for including certain subject-field labels. , $' &'< 7 ' The task of the monolingual dictionary is to describe the vocabulary of a language, which includes indicating whether an expression belongs to technical language. Dictionaries differ as to the extent and the manner in which they cover and label technical terms. Subject fields - as given in the preface of a general-language dictionary - are drawn very broadly: e.g., technical, scientific. But sometimes subject-field labels - even when available - are omitted for particular senses within a polysemous entry in a general-language dictionary. In OALD8, for instance, the entry for the noun bridge gives a total of eight senses, five of which could be argued to belong to specialized vocabulary (shaded in the sample entry below): bridge / ... / noun, verb noun OVER ROAD/ RIVER 1 [C] a structure that is built over a road, railway/ railroad, river, etc. so that people or vehicles can cross from one side to the other: We crossed the bridge over the river Windrush. VISUAL VOCAB pages V3, V12 see also SUSPENSION BRIDGE, SWING BRIDGE CONNECTION 2 [C] a thing that provides a connection or contact between two different things: Cultural exchanges are a way of building bridges between countries. OF SHIP 3 [C, usually sing.] (usually the bridge) the part of a ship where the captain and other officers stand when they are controlling and steering the ship VISUAL VOCAB page V44 CARD GAME 4 [U] a card game for two pairs of players who have to predict how many cards they will win. They score points if they succeed in winning that number of cards and lose points if they fail. see also CONTRACT BRIDGE 0 6 " % 7 - " % OF NOSE 5 the ~ of sb’s nose [sing.] the hard part at the top of the nose, between the eyes VISUAL VOCAB page V48 OF GLASSES 6 [C] the part of a pair of glasses that rests on your nose OF GUITAR/ VIOLIN 7 [C] a small piece of wood on a GUITAR, VIOLIN , etc. over which the strings are stretched VISUAL VOCAB page V31 FALSE TEETH 8 [C] a false tooth or false teeth, held permanently in place by being fastened to natural teeth on either side ... OALD8: 181 5 #, ) % %6 4 % , No labels are attached to any of these senses, although technical, anatomy, music and medical are included in the list of abbreviations in the front matter. One would expect the subject-field label technical in senses 1 and 3, anatomy in sense 5, music in sense 7, and medical in sense 8. More specific subject-field labels are, of course, possible in some of these senses (e.g., nautical in sense 3 or dentistry in sense 8), but such precise labelling of sub-fields is beyond the scope of monolingual learner’s dictionaries. If field marking is not indicated for a technical term, for instance on the grounds that the subject field is evident from the definition, this means that the dictionary does not differentiate between technical terms and non-technical expressions. This, in turn, will make the description in some sense incomplete (Kempcke 1989: 845). The use of available labels is therefore inconsistent, and this prevents systematic identification of terms within a particular, if broadly-defined, domain. Here is another example from OALD8 where two related entries are not treated in the same way. As can be seen from the examples below, the lemma hardware is labelled computing, whereas the lemma software fails to be labelled: hardware … noun [U] 1 (computing) the machinery and electronic parts of a computer system compare SOFTWARE … OALD8: 709 software … noun [U] the programs, etc. used to operate a computer: application/ system software design/ educational/ music-sharing, etc. software to install/ run a piece of software Will the software run on my machine? compare HARDWARE OALD8: 1467 5 #, ) % # : -82; ( %6 4 8 % # 0 # 8 9 2 , "&'< 7 ' ) +& = , . *) &'< 7 ' 8$#. #.8(? Before presenting detailed results of our research, we should first give a brief overview of the development of subject-field labels in two monolingual learner’s dictionaries: OALD and LDOCE. Historically speaking, these are the oldest among the learner’s dictionaries. OALD was the first monolingual learner’s dictionary and was first published in 1948. It has seen eight editions so far, i.e. in 1948, 1963, 1974, 1989, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010. LDOCE appeared on the market as the second monolingual learner’s dictionary in 1978 and was revised in 1987, 1995, 2003 and 2009. Since OALD is a pioneering work in the field of learner lexicography, its revised editions have witnessed numerous changes, simplifications and improvements in all aspects, including subject-field labels. A similar observation can be made with respect to LDOCE, but the number of changes this dictionary has undergone is much smaller given the fact that its lexicographers could draw ideas from OALD. On the inside cover of OALD3 (cf. Cowie 1999: 165), a list of labels and abbreviations can be found denoting ‘Specialist English registers’ (i.e. specialist or technical fields) with a further list referring to ‘Stylistic values’. Terms appearing in the ‘Specialist English registers’, such as botany (bot), nautical (naut) and rugby, are self-explanatory and refer to as many as 58 different fields or sub-fields. When going through the list of subjectfield labels in OALD3, the label computers (comp) captured our attention, since this dictionary was published in 1974, i.e., in the early days of computers. One might wonder which technical terms used in the field of computer technology would merit inclusion in a learner’s dictionary, given the fact that no corpora and consequently no frequency counts were easily available at that time. With the help of a computer expert, we compiled a list of ICT terms that were known and used at the end of the 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s, i.e., in the period of time when the headword list for this edition of OALD was compiled. These terms include: microprocessor, processor, bus, ISA bus, I/ O, drive, floppy drive, diskette, floppy diskette, printer, laser printer, FTP, CD, VoIP, mainframe, EPROM, memory, monolithic main memory, ATM, file, disc, Ethernet. These terms are either not included at all or included but without the specialized sense referring to the ICT field. On the other hand, terms such as computer, computerize, programme, programmer, hardware and software are included in the wordlist of OALD3, but they are not labelled comp. Interestingly, the lemma computer is defined as “electronic device which stores information on discs or magnetic tape, analyses it and produces information as required from the data on the tapes, etc.”, but the lemma disc is not treated in the sense of “a device for storing information on a computer, with a magnetic surface that records information received in 0 6 " % 7 - " % electronic form”. The lemma programme is another interesting example. OALD3 includes just the British English spelling as a headword and gives program as a variant spelling in brackets without further explanation. Sense 3 of the lemma programme is defined as “coded collection of information, data, etc. fed into an electronic computer”. In the fourth edition of OALD as well as in all subsequent editions of OALD, two lemmas are included: programme and program. The latter has two senses: the American English spelling for programme and the specialized sense used in computing. Considering all this, the question arises why the label comp is listed among the subject-field labels. It is not to be found in the dictionary, so it seems to be redundant. Is it there simply to impress the target user of that time, given the fact that in the early 1970s computer technology was still in its infancy at least as regards general use of computers? The fourth edition of OALD, however, does not include a list of subject-field labels, but on p. 1574 there is a short paragraph entitled “Technical fields”. The lexicographers claim that a large number of words and senses included in this dictionary are normally confined to technical use. These labels are believed to be self-explanatory; therefore, only examples of six entries with different subject-field labels are provided. Interestingly, on the inside cover of the latest (i.e. the eighth) edition, we come across only one subject-field label: technical. If, however, we browse through the dictionary, it quickly becomes evident that numerous other subject-field labels are used. Why is this so? Why are most of the subjectfield labels not enumerated in the list of labels? This topic is examined in greater detail in Section 3.2. The compilers of the first edition of LDOCE (1978) gave careful thought to the selection and categorization of labels for words or phrases whose use was in some way restricted (cf. Cowie 1999: 162-163). Among other things, the range of categories also included technical field. Nevertheless, in the second edition, as in the first, there were few labels relating to specific technical or scientific fields (with the exception of such longestablished fields as law and medicine), and not even the generic tech was applied in all cases. The latest, i.e. the fifth edition, of LDOCE also includes very few subject-field labels (see 3.2). , # &'< 7 ' * (.7 8/ In order to find more information about subject-field labels, a small-scale study has been conducted into the subject-field labels covered in the following monolingual learner’s dictionaries: OALD7 (the seventh edition is used in this study because the Advanced search of the CD-ROM of the eighth edition lacks subject-field labels), LDOCE5, CALD3, COBUILD5 and MED2. These were analysed in order to discover the degree of overlap between the inventory of fields in each publication. Account has been ( %6 4 8 % # 0 # 8 9 2 taken only of the subject fields listed in the ‘Abbreviations’ section of each dictionary. Additional ad hoc fields used in the entries have not been considered. Apart from that, the list of subject-field labels as found in the print version of each dictionary was compared to the list of subjectfield labels provided on the CD-ROM that accompanies the print version. A question posed at the beginning of our study was whether the number of subject-field labels and types of subject-field labels are similar and/ or comparable in all the dictionaries under consideration. To establish this, a list of abbreviations and labels, which is usually provided on the inside cover of each dictionary, was consulted (see Table 2). Surprisingly, we found that a very small number of subject-field labels is used in four out of five dictionaries, since OALD7, for example, gives only one subject-field label (technical), which is very general and does not refer to any specific field or sub-field (the same holds true of OALD8). OALD7 is followed by CALD3, where three subject-field labels are listed (legal, specialized, trademark), and it can be claimed that legal refers to a very specific subject field, whereas specialized is a quite general label and in this respect resembles technical as used in OALD7. The label trademark is problematic because it belongs neither to style labels nor to subject-field labels proper, but since it is used in four of these dictionaries, it can be classified as one of the subject-field labels. LDOCE5 lists 5 subject-field labels, four of them being very specific (biblical, law, medical, trademark) and one being fairly general (technical). COBUILD7 lists 7 subject-field labels, among them technical as a general label and business, computing, legal, medical, military and trademark as more specific labels. Last but not least, we should mention MED2, which cannot be compared to any other dictionary under consideration in terms of the number of subject-field labels, since it lists as many as 18 subject-field labels on the inside cover. All of them belong to the group of specific labels except for science, which can be classified in the same way as technical and specialized. One would expect the same situation as regards lists of labels on the CD-ROMs, compared with those in the print dictionaries. However, if we have a closer look at the CD-ROMs accompanying the print versions of the dictionaries under consideration (see Tables 1 and 2), we can see marked differences in some dictionaries. As opposed to one single subject-field label in the print version of OALD7, the Advanced search tool lists as many as 27 subject-field labels under “Subject areas”. The reason why not all the subject-field labels are listed in the print version may be sought in the fact that they are self-explanatory, but that does not justify their omission. Therefore, the question of why they are not included remains unanswered. The CD has to include the entire list of subject-field labels because otherwise the Advanced search function would not enable the user to find words or senses belonging to a specific subject field (this is exactly what happens in OALD8). 0 6 " % 7 - " % In CALD3, the difference between the print version and the CD-ROM lies only in the subject-field label internet, which is listed on the CD-ROM but not in the print dictionary. MED2 lists 18 subject-field labels in the print version and 19 in the CD-ROM version, the difference being negligible; LDOCE5 lists the same number of subject-field labels in the print and electronic versions, while COBUILD5 does not provide a list of subjectfield labels in the electronic version, so a comparison cannot be drawn. Dictionary Version No. of SFLs OALD7 Print dictionary 1 CD-ROM 27 LDOCE5 Print dictionary 5 CD-ROM 5 CALD3 Print dictionary 3 CD-ROM 4 COBUILD5 Print dictionary 7 CD-ROM no list included MED2 Print dictionary 18 CD-ROM 19 % ) ! *% %6 4 % + <24 &: 0, , $ ! &'< 7 ' Another point of interest is to consider which subject-field labels are used in different dictionaries. A question can be posed whether the same or similar subject-field labels are used in all five dictionaries or whether there are differences in the subject-field labels used in the dictionaries under scrutiny. ( %6 4 8 % # 0 # 8 9 2 Subject-field label OALD7 LDOCE5 CALD3 COBUILD5 MED2 PD CD PD CD PD CD PD CD PD CD anatomy n o t i n c l u d e d architecture art astronomy biblical biology T business chemistry T cinema clothing T colours T communications & technology T computing economics education T environmental issues T feelings T finance finance & business T food & drink T geology geometry grammar internet U law legal crime & law U T linguistics literature mathematics maths measures & quantities T medical medicine T military music T philosophy phonetics 0 6 " % 7 - " % Subject-field label OALD7 LDOCE5 CALD3 COBUILD5 MED2 PD CD PD CD PD CD PD CD PD CD physics T plants & animals T politics politics & government T psychology religion T science specialized U sport sports & games T statistics technical theatre tourism trademark U travel & transport T weather & climate T PD = print dictionary CD = dictionary on CD-ROM T = topic (CALD3 on CD-ROM, Advanced search) U = usage (CALD3 on CD-ROM, Advanced search) % ) ( %6 4 % * # 9 , Only two subject-field labels are used in all five dictionaries: law/ legal and medicine/ medical. These two subject-field labels refer to two wellestablished fields; therefore, it is logical to find them in all the dictionaries. Trademark is a label that appears in four dictionaries (LDOCE5, CALD3, COBUILD5 and MED2) and comes as a surprise, since it is not really a subject-field label but rather a piece of information about the etymology and use of the lemma. Seven subject-field labels (biology, business, chemistry, computing, music, physics and technical) appear in three out of five dictionaries, and nine subject-field labels (art, astronomy, economics, finance or finance & business, linguistics, mathematics/ maths, politics or politics & government, religion and sport or sports & games) are used in two dictionaries only. The greatest number of subject-field labels (24) appear in only one of the dictionaries discussed, most of them being very specific and some of them even rather unusual. The CD-ROM of CALD3 needs to be commented upon in greater detail. The Advanced search tool allows users to customize their search using “Topic” and “Usage” tools. Under “Usage”, both register and subject-field labels are listed. “Topic”, however, lists 22 items, which correspond to ( %6 4 8 % # 0 # 8 9 2 guidewords as far as typography and function are concerned, but if we take a closer look at these, we can establish that most of them could easily function as subject-field labels (e.g., biology, chemistry, finance & business, medicine, music and physics). There is, for example, a set of guidewords for the noun base: base ... noun MATHEMATICS 6 [C usually singular] SPECIALIZED the number on which a counting system is built A binary number is a number written in base 2, using the two numbers 0 and 1. ... base ... noun CHEMISTRY 7 [C] SPECIALIZED a chemical that dissolves in water and combines with an acid to create a salt ... CALD3: CD-ROM 5 #, ) = *% %6 4 % > % # %6 4 % + + , Some of these are justifiably classified as topics (e.g., clothing, colours, feelings, food & drink or travel & transport). Interestingly, the subjectfield label legal is listed under “Usage” and crime & law is enumerated under “Topic” although both refer to the same field. Browsing through the dictionary, one quickly establishes that very often, an item from the “Topic” list and a subject-field label from the “Usage” list are both used to refer to one and the same sense of the entry word. This amounts to giving the same piece of information twice, which can be regarded as redundant, as in this example: appeal ... verb … LEGAL 2 [I] LEGAL to request a higher law court to consider again a decision made by a lower court, especially in order to reduce or prevent a punishment: The teenager has been given leave (= allowed) by the High Court to appeal against her two-year sentence. They're appealing to the High Court to reduce the sentence to a fine. ... CALD3: 60 5 #, ? ) # * + * = , A comparison of a list of subject-field labels on the CD and in the printed version of the latest (i.e. fifth) edition of LDOCE shows that the number 0 6 " % 7 - " % of labels is the same. All subject-field labels used in this dictionary are predictable (law, medical, technical and trademark), with the exception of one: biblical. The Advanced search shows that only seven lemmas in this dictionary are labelled biblical (art 2 , -eth, Israelite, saith, sinner, spake and verily). One might reasonably ask why a label that is used in so few cases is used at all. The information that a specific lemma belongs to a specific subject field can be incorporated within the definition with an introductory phrase, such as “In the Bible ...” (e.g., art, sense 2). In many cases, the delimitation of two or even three seemingly related labels is unclear. Most such labels can be found in OALD7. One can wonder about the utility of the subject-field labels anatomy and medical. Is anatomy not a subfield of medicine? Is it necessary to bother a general dictionary user who is not a specialist with such specific subject fields? The same can be said of labels such as linguistics, grammar and phonetics or mathematics, geometry and statistics or economics, business or finance. On the other hand, OALD7 uses the label biology, but not, for instance, botany or zoology, which means that some subject-field labels are used more generically to refer to the entire field of the science, whereas some subject-field labels refer to sub-fields themselves. A similar lack of delimitation of two labels is encountered in MED2, an example being business and economics. In the other three dictionaries, there are no subject-field labels referring to fields of science or their sub-fields. Another label that needs to be mentioned is the generic technical. In OALD7, for instance, technical is used to label lemmas, such as denotation and antonym, which could more logically be labelled linguistics, or crustacean, mollusc, vent (sense 2), which could be labelled biology, or IVF, medial, menses, organic, which could be labelled medical given the fact that the subject-field labels linguistics, biology and medical are used in this dictionary. Similar examples can be found in CALD3, which uses the general label specialized, instead of more specific ones (which are also included in the list of subject-field labels in this dictionary), for instance biology in ammonite, legume, medicine in abdomen, anvil, bronchiole, carbuncle (sense 1), chemistry in lactose, polymer, and many more. MED2, however, uses the subject-field label science with no further explanation of its detailed use. One can only wonder about which branches of science it encompasses, since the same dictionary also uses subject-field labels, such as biology, chemistry and physics. In MED2, science is used instead of chemistry in the entries for saturation point, free radical, chromatography or instead of physics in quantum theory and gamma rays. 1, ( & After careful study of the subject-field labels in five monolingual learner’s dictionaries and the accompanying CD-ROMs, several conclusions can be ( %6 4 8 % # 0 # 8 9 2 drawn. It has come as a surprise that the numbers of subject-field labels listed in the print versions and on the CD-ROMs differ in some dictionaries. An investigation into the microstructure, however, shows that the same subject-field labels are used in each print edition and in its CD-ROM version. This discrepancy may be misleading for dictionary users, since they will find more subject-field labels than expected when browsing through the dictionary. The lists of subject-field labels in print versions and on CD-ROM should contain all the subject-field labels used in the microstructure, and there should be no differences in the number of subject-field labels listed. Another observation that can be made is the use of closely related subject-field labels (e.g., economics vs. business) in some dictionaries. A general dictionary user is not expected to recognize the subtle differences between such subject-field labels. If such labels are used, one would expect an explanation of the distinction between them, but taking account of the type of dictionary and the target audience, we can say with a high degree of certainty that this is an unnecessary complication. In monolingual learner’s dictionaries, one would expect that the subject-field labels refer to fields of science only and disregard the sub-fields. On the other hand, all the dictionaries under scrutiny make use of one general subjectfield label (technical, specialized or science), which is also only vaguely defined (if at all). It is recommendable to use this type of subject-field label only to mark entries common to several domains, i.e., as a higherlevel domain marker. Otherwise, lemmas belonging to lower-level domains should be labelled using a more specific subject-field label that is also listed as a subject-field label in a given dictionary (technical vs. biology or chemistry). A final remark concerns the labelling of a lemma by means of a definition. A dictionary user may be puzzled that some lemmas are assigned to subject-field labels whereas in other lemmas, this function is taken over by a definition. A more consistent policy in this respect should be expected. To sum up, subject-field labels should be defined and explained in detail in the front matter of each dictionary, and they should be used more consistently throughout the dictionary. Last but not least, there should be no discrepancies between the print and electronic versions. $, . Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2008). Walter, Elizabeth, Woodford, Kate (eds.). 3 rd ed. Cambridge: CUP. (= CALD3) Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (2006). Sinclair, John, Clari, Michela (eds.). 5 th ed. London: HarperCollins Publishers. (= COBUILD5) 0 6 " % 7 - " % Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2009). Mayor, Michael (ed.). 5 th ed. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited. (= LDOCE5) Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2007). Rundell, Michael (ed.). 2 nd ed. Oxford: Macmillan Education. (= MED2) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (1974). Hornby, A.S., Cowie, Anthony P., Windsor Lewis, J. (eds.). 3 rd ed. Oxford: OUP. (= OALD3) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (2005). Wehmeier, Sally (ed.). 7 th ed. Oxford: OUP. (= OALD7) Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (2010). Turnbull, Joanna (ed.). 8 th ed. Oxford: OUP. (= OALD8) , 8 & Ahmad, Khurshid, Willy Martin, Martin Hölter, Margaret Rogers (1995). “Specialist terms in general language dictionaries” http: / / 209.85.129.132/ search? q= cache: felngsLWmIMJ: ftp: / / ftp.ee.surrey.ac.uk/ pub/ research/ AI/ pointer/ diction. ps.gz+SPECIALIST+TERMS+IN+GENERAL+LANGUAGE&cd=1&hl=sl&ct= clnk&gl=si (26 June 2010). Atkins, B.T. Sue, Michael Rundell (2008). The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. Oxford: OUP. Cowie, Anthony P. (1999). English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History. Oxford: OUP. Hartmann, Reinhard R.K., Gregory James (1998). Dictionary of Lexicography. London & New York: Routledge. Kempcke, Günter (1989-91). “Probleme der Beschreibung fachsprachlicher Lexik im allgemeinen einsprachigen Wörterbuch.“ In: Franz Joseph Hausmann et al. (eds.) Wörterbücher / Dictionaries / Dictionnaires: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexikographie / An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography / Encyclopédie internationale de lexicographie I-III. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 5.1-5.3. Berlin & New York: de Gruyter. 842-849. Landau, Sidney I. (2001). Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. 2 nd ed. Cambridge: CUP. ! "# $ % ! "# & ! "# ' " " $ % ! "# & ? + * 7 & ; +& & ) 4 ! 4 - @ * Valleys Voice or Wenglish, i.e. the anglophone dialect of the formerly heavily industrialised upland area of South Wales, is seen elsewhere in the U.K. as the (stereo-)typical manifestation of Welsh English tout court. However, within Wales itself the dialect, while positively valued on affective dimensions, has traditionally enjoyed a relatively low general prestige. It is viewed as a salient anglophone marker of Welsh identity, but at the same time has continued to be closely associated with the social semiotics of the communitarian industrial heritage. However, in the wake of political devolution and post-industrial late modernity (with ever-increasing demographic mobility and ethnic mixing), Valleys Voice is now being reconstructed, reconstituted and re-positioned in the ‘New Wales’. The present paper offers a sociolinguistic analysis of these processes with reference to the critical influence that the codification, mediatisation and ‘literarisation’ of the dialect plays. , & Whereas from a general U.K. perspective, the form of English in Wales associated with the previously heavily industrialised South Wales Valleys has been generally considered to constitute the typical Welsh English accent and as such the dominant ethnolinguistic marker of (anglophone) Welshness, from a within-Wales perspective, while Valleys Voice or Wenglish is typically perceived as ‘pleasant’, ‘warm’, ‘friendly”, ‘relaxed’, ‘reassuring’ or ‘trustworthy’ (Coupland et al. 1994, Garrett et al. 2003), it traditionally has low prestige and is superseded by the English of (south-) West Wales as the most favoured marker of “truly Welsh” identity (Coupland et al. 1994, Garrett et al. 2003). However, in the trail of the 1997 political devolution and now in what can be almost termed the $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # - @ * ‘post-post-devolution’ era there has been an unmistakeable re-mapping of the biand interlingual sociocultural and sociolinguistic space of Wales such that Valleys Voice has recently gained a new public presence, the beginnings of a new standing and, above all, a new social semiotics relative to the conditions of late modernity in the Principality. It will be the purpose of the present paper to trace and analyse the changing fortunes of Valleys Voice in the context of the sociocultural conditions of early 21 st century Wales, also especially highlighting the significance of codification, mediatisation and ‘literarisation’ processes for the sociocultural standing and interpretation of this emblematic Welsh form of English. A consideration of socioculturally transforming Valleys Voice in its local setting may also shed light on other sociolinguistic scenarios in which local vernacular varieties of English are being currently re-evaluated and re-valorised in the light of ever-increasing anglophone globalisation (James 2009). , ? + ; 9 ? + ; , ! While Welsh is of course the indigenous language of the country from earliest times, English has been used in Wales since the Norman incursions of the late 11 th century. Subsequent scattered anglophone settlement located in the lowlands of South Wales and the Marches border area with England since the 12 th century led to the later concentration of English speakers into selected boroughs of South and North Wales during the 14 th century. The Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542, which effectively annexed Wales to Tudor England, served to further institutionalise English as the language of government and law in the Principality. However, it was in the trail of the industrialisation of South Wales, with its massive immigration from the other home countries and in-migration of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries that English eventually came to replace Welsh as the majority language of the country. Census figures from the late 19 th century onwards mark the decline of the number of Welsh speakers in Wales from 54.5% of the population in 1891 to 20.8% in 2001. At the same time English was rigorously promoted as the language of schooling during the latter half of the 19 th century. The linguistic homogenising effects of the First World War, followed by the economic hardship of the 1920s and 1930s with its concomitant substantial emigration from Wales further enhanced the position of English to the detriment of Welsh in the country. While in the latter half of the 20 th century English continued to strengthen its position relative to Welsh, legal and practical provision for enhancing the status of Welsh in government, education and the media was implemented via the Welsh Language Acts of 1966 and 1993, the 1 # + 4 A establishment of the Welsh language television channel S4C in 1982, the setting up of the Welsh Language Board in 1993 and not least - as the consequence of devolution - the inauguration of the Welsh Assembly and constitution of the Welsh Assembly Government in 1998. All these measures have significantly bolstered the position and status of Welsh in the country. , + ! From the earliest presence of English in Wales there has existed considerable heterogeneity in the forms of the language used. For example, the historically anglophone areas of South Pembrokeshire, Gower and to a lesser extent the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales manifest an English with certain structural influences of south-west England varieties. Also the historical Englishes of The Marches borderland with England show strong influence of geographically adjacent south-west Midlands, Shropshire and Cheshire. Additionally, the urban English of Merseyside and to a lesser extent Greater Manchester have co-shaped the Englishes of North Wales, also in more recent decades via the large scale settlement of retirees from these regions in the coastal area. In South Wales, there is some detectable linguistic influence of urban Greater Bristol/ Avon speech in the English of the Cardiff-Newport conurbation and of adjacent Gloucestershire speech in the English of Monmouthshire. And on top of all these anglophone varieties, there is of course also the presence of a standard British/ English English in the professions, law, government, education, media, etc. However, by far the most Englishes in Wales are ‘contact varieties’ arising from the interplay of Welsh and English structural influences, reflecting the historical fact that such Englishes exist as the result of the language shift of cambrophone speakers and co-exist to a greater or lesser extent in actual geolinguistic space with Welsh itself. Moreover, in ‘virtual’ terms these Englishes always co-habit sociocultural space in Wales with the Welsh language and in general derive their social legitimacy to the degree that their form- phonological and lexical - directly reflects Welsh structural influence. This results in the situation that, with the provisos just described, the Englishes of Wales are increasingly more highly valued as the location of their use moves westand northward, i.e. into the traditional heartlands of the Welsh language, ‘Y Fro Gymraeg’ (Balsom 1985). Bilingual, rural, agricultural, north and west environments are therefore positively valued in contrast to the negatively valued monolingual, urban, industrial south and east contexts in establishing the sociocultural status of Englishes in Wales and in particular for the relative Welshness of such Englishes (Garrett et al. 2003). With regard to the Englishes of immigrants to Wales, while it may be claimed that the English-speaking worker immigrants to the 19 th century - @ * coal, iron and steel industries of South Wales did indeed co-shape the form of the developing anglophone Valleys Voice, in post-industrial Wales there is evidence that immigrants linguistically adjust to the anglophone (and cambrophone) varieties present (for immigrant Cardiff speech, cf. Giles and Bourhis 1975, Jordan 2005). In analyses of the increasing ethnocultural hybridity in Wales, linguistic interest has to date been more focussed on the fact of code-switching than on the nature of the whole code being used (e.g. Williams 2002). Finally, the designation of English(es) (pl.) as opposed to Welsh (sg.) in the present section signals not only the broadly accepted anglophone diversity in Wales but at the same time also reflects the unitary conception of cambrophony, as still perpetuated in much essentialist linguistically bipolar (Welsh vs. English) rhetoric of sociopolitical discourse in the country. In sociolinguistic reality there are, not surprisingly, various “Welshes” with the distinctions between northern and southern Welsh, colloquial spoken Welsh and standard literary Welsh being the most prominent. The present pluralisation of ‘English’ not only signals the pluricentric anglophony of Wales, but also at the same time the absence of any centring, potentially standard variety of Welsh English. In conclusion, one may distinguish six broad geographical varieties of English in Wales: South Wales Valleys (i.e. Valleys Voice), Cardiff-Newport, south-west Wales, Mid-Wales, north-west Wales, and north-east Wales (Garrett et al. 2003). , " & & ) & Structural, mainly phonological, descriptions of the Englishes of Wales have by and large focussed on the varieties of South Wales: Valleys - e.g. Rhondda, Port Talbot, Abercrave; Cardiff; Vale of Glamorgan; Gower; and West Wales - Carmarthenshire, (South) Pembrokeshire (cf. the analyses collected in Coupland 1990, Penhallurick 1994 and Walters 2001, 2003). Only Penhallurick (1991) offers an analysis of North Wales English. Parry’s comprehensive Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (1977-1979, 1999) provides recordings and linguistic analysis of the English speech of mainly rural older generation speakers throughout Wales, the data now being available for consultation via the Archive of Welsh English at Swansea University. Thomas (1994) and Penhallurick (2008) analyse phonological, grammatical and lexical characteristics of most varieties of English in Wales in outline. However, it is in the pioneering sociolinguistic research of Coupland (e.g. Coupland 1988, 1990, 2006) that the structural choices and options within English in Wales have been analysed in relation to the social meanings they can express when exploited by speakers. This research explicitly links the (code) structure and (speaker) agentivity dimensions of language variation in a way compatible with Giddens’ (1984) social 1 # + 4 A theory of ‘structuration’. And while remaining within a variationist framework regarding the description of phonological variables, Coupland extends the interpretation of their social significance considerably beyond the original Labovian static pre-given social categories of class membership, level of style, etc. to a fine-grained moment-to-moment assessment of the changing identity and style values of a speaker’s structural choices in performance. The identity and style parameters explored are those of types and degrees of ‘Welshness’ as expressed via English. One major motivation for this research has been to demonstrate empirically the myth of any ‘standard Welsh English’ and to convincingly show evidence for much greater variation in use of English in Wales than previously assumed (Coupland 1990). In this respect, Coupland (2006) interprets the structural variation in ‘phonological acts of [Welsh] identity’ within their ‘discursive framing’ as ‘sociocultural’, ‘generic’ and ‘interpersonal’ communicative events, i.e. at the levels, respectively, of speech community talk, genre talk and local talk. He is thus able to reveal the great differentiation and semiotic subtlety of structural choices in the sound repertoire in use and with it, the multifarious shades of anglophone Welsh identities thus displayed. Coupland analyses variously the manifestation of different shades of Welsh identities and associations with Welshness in speeches by local political figures (1990), in Cardiff travel agency discourse (1988, 2006) and in Valleys pantomine performance (2006). In the 2006 study, shifting anglophone Welsh ethnolinguistic identities are realised via the choices of variants of the well established sociophonological variables available in the particular Welsh English lect involved: e.g. the variable (a: ) as in star ving realisable in Cardiff English as variants [a: ], [æ: ] or [ : ], or the variable (iw) as in you in Valleys English as variants [iw], [jiw] or [ju: ]. It is argued that the local social semiotics of one or the other phonological variant derives from the particular discursive framing in place at the time, i.e. according to whether the thus signalled acts of identity are interpretable within speech community talk, genre talk or interpersonal talk contexts. Thus the Cardiffian Welsh identities expressed by the travel agency assistants are realised predominately within the ‘generic’ and ‘interpersonal’ frames of reference, whereas the Valleys Welsh identities expressed by the male ‘Dame’ character in the Christmas pantomime are realised largely within ‘speech community’ and ‘generic’ frames of reference. And whereas much more could be commented on regarding these data and the analysis, suffice it to confirm here that the structural codes that constitute English(es) in Wales provide a rich source for the expression of variable social meanings and that these meanings convey degrees of identification with ethnolinguistic Welshness(es). At the same time, this is not to deny that there are also other, more global social semiotic parameters (e.g. social grouping, life seniority, gender) whose values may be manifested via Welsh English(es). - @ * ,1 $ & * + Attitudes to Welsh English(es) figured quite prominently in the earlier socio-psychological matched guise technique (MGT) research of Giles and associates on accents of English (e.g. Giles 1970, Bourhis and Giles 1976, Bourhis 1977, Price et al. 1983; for reviews see Giles 1990 and Garrett et al. 2003: 67ff.). In a large number of experiments involving mainly Valleys and Cardiff English as judged both inside and outside Wales, one overall conclusion is that “WE [= Welsh English] varieties are downgraded on competence traits generally but upgraded on those of social attractiveness within Wales” (Giles 1990: 275). However, by far the most comprehensive study of attitudes in Wales to the English(es) of Wales has been carried out by Garrett et al. (2003), who gathered secondary school teachers’ attitudes to the six regional varieties of English in Wales mentioned under 2.2. above, and the attitudes of secondary school teachers and pupils to the same varieties, as employed in recorded narratives of fifteen-year-old speakers. In the first questionnaire study, 129 teachers responded to both closed (seven-point semantic-differential scale) and open evaluative questions eliciting attitudes to the six English varieties of Wales plus a ‘Cambridge’ variety. They were formulated in terms of the dimensions ‘well-spoken’, ‘prestigious-sounding’, ‘likeable-sounding’, ‘pleasant-sounding’, ‘dynamic-sounding’, ‘lively-sounding’, and ‘truly Welsh-sounding’, (closed questions), and the question as to which single Welsh accent has wide social acceptability within and outside Wales (open question). In the second ‘narrative study’, 14 narrative extracts representing the six regional forms of English in Wales (plus Cheltenham RP) were played to 169 fifteen-year-old pupils and 47 (primary, secondary and university) teachers. All informants were asked to identify the local origin of the speakers and to evaluate the speakers/ narratives on the scales ‘you like [him/ her]? ’, ‘good at school? ’, ‘like you? ’, ‘make friends [with]? ’, ‘how Welsh? ’, ‘good laugh? ’ and ‘interesting story? ’. The six varieties investigated were represented by speakers from Merthyr Tydfil (Valleys), Cardiff, Carmarthen (S.W. Wales), Newtown (Mid-Wales), Bangor (N.W. Wales) and Wrexham (N.E. Wales). Concerning some of the main results of the study relevant for the present purposes, mention has already been made in 1. above of some of the positive values attributed to Valleys Voice and to the relative prestige accorded to the English of south-west Wales. Concentrating on the reactions to Valleys English, in teachers’ responses it is the most frequently identified and labelled English accent/ dialect area of Wales, viewed indeed positively, but at the same time acknowledged as a clichéd stereotypical variety, i.e. “what foreigners expect Welsh English to sound like” with reference to the popular Richard Llewellyn novel How Green Was My Valley (1939) and images of “boyo, beer and rugby” (Garrett et al. 2003: 120-121). With both teachers and pupils, in the evaluations of the narra- 1 # + 4 A tives, Valleys Voice scored very highly on the dimension ‘how Welsh? ’ and low on ‘like you? ’. Extrapolating further from the results, one might conclude that while there is broad agreement that Valleys Voice represents an ethnolinguistically very Welsh identity, both within and outside Wales, it is an anglophone demotic ‘image identity’ strongly associated with the social semiotics of the urban, industrial, mining and steelmaking dominated, male-defined, ‘work hard - play hard - drink hard - sing hard’ working class communities of an immediately past age. As such, it is a ‘heritage identity’ that the informants recognise but actually distance themselves from. And whereas Valleys Voice is upheld as the Welsh English of the popular imagination, it is the English of south-west Wales, while equally expressing a very Welsh identity (as well as, like Valleys Voice, scoring high on dynamism and social attractiveness) that is much more highly regarded as far as prestige is concerned (2003: 135-136). It is the Welsh accent with the widest social acceptability within and outside Wales. The fact that the English of south-west Wales manifests greater overt phonetic and lexical influence of the Welsh language than Valleys English does and is associated with a rural agricultural region are undoubtedly strong factors in its favour in this respect (see also the discussion under 2.2. above). , 4 ! 4 ) ; It has been noted that Valleys Voice can be said to constitute a ‘heritage dialect’ within the Principality, and as such must be defined relative to other, perhaps historically less loaded anglophone varieties of contemporary Wales as well as to current and historical cambrophone varieties. In this connection it is interesting to observe that the traditional South Wales dialect of Welsh itself, Gwenhwyseg, commonly referred to as Cymrâg (‘Cymreig’, ‘Welsh’), is now equally treated as a heritage dialect associated with the industrial age and is indeed rapidly fading in sociolinguistic and sociocultural significance as its remaining older generation speakers in the Valleys fail to pass it on. However, still with its one million speakers, Valleys English is under pressure to re-position itself as a still strong marker of ethnolinguistic identity under the conditions of late modern Welsh society. To the extent that this society is no longer partitioned along traditional class lines, is characterised by increasing socioeconomic mobility, at least along ‘the M4 corridor’, i.e. in the urbanised ribbon development of the South Wales coastal area, shows a new sociopolitical and sociocultural confidence of expression via the Welsh language itself, manifests ethnocultural hybridities on a hitherto unprecedented scale, and not least witnesses the markedly increased metropolitan focus of both anglophone and cambrophone socio-economic and sociocultural activity, then Valleys English indeed faces serious challenges in - @ * asserting itself and re-defining itself within the current re-constituted fabric of Welsh society. As Coupland (2009: 298) reminds us, “Late modernity tends to disembed voices from the social matrices we have taken to be primary […] and infuse new meanings into them as they are recontextualised.” A central factor in this set of changing sociocultural scenarios is the conceptualisation and significance of ‘community’. As has been already noted, Valleys Voice is strongly associated geographically as the dialect of the area immediately to the north of the coastal area in South Wales, coinciding with the historical dimensions of the traditional coalfield, and socially as the sociolect of the largely working class community engaged in the former coal and steel industries. The ethnolinguistic ‘acts of identity’ traditionally expressed via Valleys Voice have also been commented on above. Wenglish indeed was the linguistic marker of a mega-community, and in sociolinguistic terms (following Halliday 1978) constituted the dialect (variety according to user, showing lexicophonological characterisitics) as well as the register (variety according to use, showing lexicosemantic characteristics) of that community. Additionally, it constituted the genre of the community (variety according to using, showing lexicogrammatical characteristics, after James 2008, 2010). In other words, Valleys English provided a blanket set of linguistic resources for the expression of ‘community’ at the three levels of ‘speech community’ (via dialect), ‘discourse community’ (via register) and ‘action community’ (via genre), i.e. for the purposes, respectively, of ‘identification’, ‘representation’ and ‘action’ (Fairclough 2003, James 2008). In a modern interpretation of ‘community’, the language co-defining it was taken to provide the all-purpose code for the expression of its social semiotics at the levels of speaker-oriented communication, i.e. dialect, message-orientated communication, i.e. register, and listener-oriented communication, i.e. genre. This conception of community language is amply demonstrated in the discussion above (2.3.) of Coupland’s research on the manifestation of Welsh identities via Valleys Voice and Cardiff English at the levels of ‘sociocultural’ (i.e. dialect), ‘generic’ (i.e. register) and ‘interpersonal’ (i.e. genre) talk. However, by contrast in late modernity such all-encompassing singlecommunity semiotics are the exception rather than the rule and it is indeed also increasingly the case in Wales that the expression of various shades of ethnolinguistic subjectivity now typically draws selectively on linguistic resources associated with a variety of shifting, co-existing partial ‘communities’, which in Wales may of course also involve bilingual practices. Thus although code variability, as Fairclough’s ‘interdiscursivity’ (2003), is as such nothing new in anglophone expression in Wales, the extent of use of, and readiness to employ sociolinguistically diverse, including interlingual, linguistic resources has never been greater. Valleys Voice may be restricted to dialect, register or genre ‘purposes’ of expres- 1 # + 4 A sion singly or employed in different combinations with other anglophone or cambrophone ‘community’ varieties. At the same time, through these sociolinguistic processes of late modernity, Valleys Voice itself is being re-defined and re-constituted in complementary sociocultural space, while the three-way social semiotics it traditionally affords is also now being made more explicit. 1, & 4 ! 4 1, 4 A 5 + 5 + It might be noted now in passing that the here preferred designation Valleys Voice is meant to highlight the individual dimension of language use, as opposed to the more traditional geographical term for the variety, Valleys English or the hybrid, potentially pejorative appellation Wenglish (cf. analogous to Denglish, Singlish, Spanglish, etc.). It is also consistent with a late modern view of sociolinguistic patterning that recent dialect corpora, for instance, are labelled Urban Voices (1999) or Voices of the UK (2010). And while of course particular media voices are often taken to be emblematic for particular varieties (e.g. the entertainer Max Boyce for Valleys English of the 1970s and 1980s; the radio presenter Chris Needs for Valleys English of the 2000s to date - see also below), the notion voice here also incorporates reference to the performative aspect of late modern language use. It is through the voice that an individual’s (life-)style and image is articulated, but also one’s multiple identities and shifting subjectivities are expressed. However, the local social semiotics of individual voice is only interpretable with reference to a framework of the ‘sedimented’ linguistic substance of repeated performance (via Giddens’ (1984) key process of ‘structuration’, i.e. a matching of structure and agency) and as such this framework is amenable to linguistic description and codification. And while codification conventionally takes the form of a dictionary and a grammar of a ‘variety’ in the first instance as dialect, the ‘variety’ itself may be promoted via its mediated use in broadcasting, perhaps in the first instance as register. Furthermore, the ‘variety’ might to some extent be ‘canonised’ via its employment in literature, in the first instance as genre. 1, ( A major step in anchoring a new consciousness of Valleys Voice (Wenglish) in late modern post-devolution Wales has been its codification in the form of a reference work on the variety by Robert Lewis (2008), incorporating a linguistic introduction to the dialect, a glossary/ dictionary of - @ * some 2,250 entries and an extensive grammar, complete with exercises. With this work, Lewis wishes “to stimulate a keener interest in and a better appreciation of Wenglish” (2008: 10) and “sets Wenglish in its rightful place as an authentic regional dialect” (2008: 10), celebrating the differences from Standard English “of which Valleys communities should be rightly proud” (2008: 10). By offering serious linguistic description and analysis, Lewis consolidates and considerably extends the previous more ‘popular scientific’ 620 word Wenglish glossary of Edwards (1985). It is an exercise in sociolinguistic legitimisation, appropriately bolstering the status of Valleys Voice in the ‘New Wales’ of post-devolution. Indeed, Lewis comments that a number of post-devolution developments (e.g. the ‘Cool Cymru’ (Cool Wales) sociocultural phase of the late 1990s when a number of Welsh pop bands gained considerable popularity in the whole of the U.K. performing in Wenglish as well as Welsh) have facilitated the positive re-appraisal of a previously somewhat maligned popular dialect (2008: 18-19). In other words, the sociopolitical climate of post-devolution Wales has permitted an overt celebration of the diverse bilingual heritages of the newly self-governing nation in a greater plurality and diversity than ever before and in the course of this ‘re-awakening’ traditional cultural artefacts such as Wenglish are re-evaluated and re-valorised. Thus Valleys Voice achieves a new public interpretation and status both by its employment in a music genre previously closed to it and now by being ‘officially’ codified in ‘prestigious’ dictionary and grammar form. The codification is of the variety as dialect in the technical sense introduced above, as an identificational linguistic code/ semiotic resource for its users. And despite the considerable attention given to grammatical description in the volume, it is indeed the lexis and phonology of Wenglish that distinguish it most clearly from other varieties of English as dialect. Concerning lexis, of the 2,250 dictionary entries some 20% are direct borrowings from Welsh itself (e.g. the widely used bach ‘dear’, ‘little’, cariad ‘darling’, crachach ‘posh people’, cwtch ‘storage’, ‘cuddle’, didoreth ‘sloppy’, hwyl ‘spirit’, twp ‘stupid’, etc.). Interestingly, this figure exactly mirrors the percentage of speakers of Welsh (20.8%) of the total - anglophone - population of the country. Indeed this considerable lexical influence together with the phonological (and some grammatical) effects of Welsh clearly show the status of Valleys Voice as a contact variety, confirming the popular observation that “they speak Welsh in the valleys - but now, they speak it through the medium of English” (Edwards 1985: 4). In other words, part of the late modern revaluation of Wenglish is the explicit celebration of its very structural hybridity, deriving historically from the ethnographically and ethnolinguistically hybrid social contexts of its original genesis in the 19 th century. It has already been pointed out above (2.3.) in the brief discussion of Coupland (1990, 2006) that variation within Valleys English as a strong ethnolinguistic and sociopolitical marker can be deliberately exploited by 1 # + 4 A ‘performers’ for both political and comic use. And whereas Coupland limits himself in this research to the systematic analysis of phonological variables, lexical variation is equally significant for the shades of identificational expression afforded by the dialect, as in fact Coupland (1996) concedes in separate analysis of the “culturally rich points” in Welsh English as signalled by the use of Welsh lexical items, where “the perceptible richness of such forms […] hinges on the interaction between their referential semantics and their phonetic semiosis” (1996: 315). The social meanings of identification ‘performable’ via lexical and phonological choices in Valleys Voice can thus be seen to pertain to the quintessentially late modern semiotic dimensions of authenticity and ludicity. Finally, and significantly for the present discussion, the individualisation of Valleys Voice finds its confirmation on the cover of Lewis’s volume, where the title Wenglish. The Dialect of the South Wales Valleys is headed by the statement As spoken by Chris Needs. 1, / Mention has already been made above (4.1.) of the media voice of Chris Needs being taken as emblematic for Valleys English in the new millennium. The Chris Needs Show is a hugely popular late night music and chat programme on BBC Radio Wales, broadcast between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. every weeknight, with an estimated regular audience of 40,000 to 50,000 listeners. Most of the listeners who call in to talk to the host presenter are members of “The Chris Needs Friendly Garden Association”, known simply as “The Garden”, and as such are often referred to as the flowers in the garden. Chris Needs himself unabashedly employs Valleys Voice, as do the overwhelming majority of the participant audience; as Coupland (2010) formulates it “the basic indexicalities of his own and most callers’ voices are South Wales Valleys, which provides a vocal semiotic of ‘ordinariness’” (2010: 109). In the ‘Garden’ key topics are e.g. the disclosure of personal hardship, intimate and public frames for the negotiation of coping, social support, self-help and self-improvement (cf. Coupland 2010: 110), i.e. a mediatised representation of human issues typically associated with the context of under-privileged social communities and as such a media ‘community of practice’ as microcosm of the social community ‘out there’. Factors of social hardship, but also of community support and shared social values and linguistic mode of expression constitute of course at the same time some of the prominent sociocultural characteristics of the traditional industrial mega-community of the Valleys. In The Chris Needs Show this traditional community, to the extent that it still is in effect as a functioning social entity, finds a late modern manifestation as a mediatised discourse community, consistent with the contemporary predilections for individualisation and media revelation and intimacy. The horticultural metaphorisation of the media community is completely consist- - @ * ent with its sociolinguistic status as manifesting a register variety (i.e. of use as opposed to user) , characterised indeed by lexicosemantic salience (see above). It is a linguistic code with a social semiotics of representation, with existing words, as lexicosemantic complexes, being given a new contextual interpretation as they represent a particular alternative or complementary discourse ‘world’. The vocal semiotic of ‘ordinariness’ referred to is consistent with the somewhat self-deprecatory reflexive style of traditional Valleys Voice, with elements of potential ludicity. However, Chris Needs himself re-valorises the ‘ordinariness’ of Valleys Voice by displaying as an ‘ordinary celebrity’ his homosexuality, his love of bling, disco, sun-worshipping and camp as being consistent with his use of Wenglish, a variety in industrial ‘Old Wales’ strongly associated with traditional manual-work-based masculinities (see 2.4. above). At the same time there is not the slightest doubt concerning the authenticity of the Valleys Voice he uses. Coupland (2010: 110-111) concludes that: The Chris Needs Show gives us an instance of discursive practice functioning simultaneously to create community-as-value and to critically deconstruct and reformat the social footings on which community is based. In his self-presentation Chris deauthenticates himself relative to old certainties of class and gender, but proposes new criteria that might be more valid in the shifted social circumstances of Valleys life in the twenty-first century. 1,1 # The representation of Valleys Voice in Welsh writing in English is first and foremost associated with the speech of characters in the Great Industrial Novels of the 1930s, which depicted working and living conditions in the 19 th century and early 20 th century coalfield. Indeed, to a greater or lesser degree Wenglish is used as the language of the working class characters in novels such as Rhondda Roundabout (1934) by Jack Jones, Times Like These (1936) by Gwyn Jones, Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939) by Lewis Jones, and famously in How Green Was My Valley (1939) by Richard Llewellyn. As a continuation of this social realist tradition, also more recent fiction writing represents Valleys English as the speech of the socially deprived, e.g. as in the novel The Fugitive Three (2008) by Mike Jenkins, which depicts the lives of underprivileged teenagers in a Valleys community. However, in all such writing Valleys Voice is represented as a relatively monochrome variety, essentially invariable and typified above all by its lexicogrammatical characteristics, i.e. in the present framework constituting a variety of using, a genre, for actional (interand transactional) purposes, for doing things with the language. However, it is in the burlesque novel Yeah, Dai Dando (2008) by Meic Stephens that Valleys Voice is most clearly positioned in the centre of 1 # + 4 A post-devolution, late modern Welsh society. In a densely intertextual, intermedial and interlingual text thick with very local and very Welsh cultural references, the novel depicts the life of the hero in his twenties, Dai Dando, as he tries to make sense of the bafflingly diverse contemporary society he finds himself in. He attempts to navigate his way through this Welsh urban jungle with its conflicting and confusing dichotomies of Cardiff (where he works) vs. Valleys (where he comes from), Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist Party) vs. Old Labour, Welsh vs. English, Cymro (cambrophone Welshman) vs. Taffy (anglophone Welshman), North Walians (‘Gogs’) vs. South Walians, ‘Cymreig’ (standard Welsh) vs. ‘Cymrâg’ (South Wales dialect), etc., but also global (cosmopolitan and immigrant) vs. local (indigenous) cultural influences in the public life of Cardiff. More or less all of these dichotomies, are associated, respectively, with the opposition between ‘New Wales’ vs.’ Old Wales’, i.e. between late modern and traditional Wales. In his own words, the protagonist’s wish is indeed “To understand myself, to find out who I am” (2008: 93), because, significantly, “there’s more ways than one of bein’ Welsh” (2008: 211). This severe disorientation felt by Dai Dando in the shifting, re-aligning and re-constituting sociocultural confusion of contemporary urban Welsh society requires him to re-position and to complement the identity he has inherited via his socialisation in the Valleys. Also sociolinguistically he is constantly forced to reflect on where in the New Wales his Valleys Voice has its place. This ambiguity and confusion in identity is well mirrored in the many intertextual references to A.E. Houseman’s (1896) A Shropshire Lad, the poet himself hailing from the Marches border area between Wales and England and, it is claimed, of ambivalent sexual orientation. Also the hero himself is variously identified as Dai, Dave, David or even Dafydd through the novel. However, as a corrective to this uncertainty and by way of historical legitimisation of a particular Welsh identity, Dai and especially his father covet the memory of the Ancient British warrior hero of south-east Wales, Caractacus (which happens to be Dai’s second forename), and that of the Silures tribe of the same (now Valleys) area. The novel thus highlights a whole range of issues relevant to an understanding of post-devolution late modern Wales. The questions of identity and identification are central, but also ambivalence and ambiguity, hybridity and indeed liminality. Moreover, Dai is crucially concerned with matters of authenticity (with regard to himself, but also with regard to the many other Welshnesses manifested by characters in the plot), and he shows a constant sociocultural reflexivity in his actions. Linguistically there is a dazzling array of different Englishes and Welshes employed differentially by the characters, indicating the pluralistic realities of late modern language use, particularly in the metropolis. Dai maintains his Valleys Voice, but also variously adopts more Cardiff forms and more standard forms of English selectively. He also maintains his school Welsh. In this dense version of lived sociolinguistic reality, Valleys - @ * Voice has its place indeed predominantly as genre, i.e. as a variety for getting things done, for acting and doing in everyday contexts. By way of illustration, the back cover text of the novel in which Dai introduces himself reads thus: Hiya, I’m Dai Dando. From up the Coeca estate in Ponty. Work down year in Cardiff at the Gwalia. Love it down ere in Cardiff, I do. The City on the Bay. I got a poncy brother who’s a lecturer up England way. I do go out most nights for a few bevvies with the lads. Then we go on the pull in the clubs. Nah, aven’t ad any since comin back from Lanzarote. That Eleri Vaughan Jones was somethin else though. Called me Dafydd, Nearly ad it off with er up on the Garth. I dunno about er, mind. She do do my ead in, like. Speaks Welsh she does, like that poxy Peredur, my line-manager, a North Walian git who carn pronounce the letter z. Nah I don speak it, but I gorra GCSE in it. While remembering that this text is a purely fictional version of Valleys Voice, but checking the novelist’s linguistic reproduction accuracy by confirming its authenticity with Lewis’s reference description, it can be observed that the variety is indeed most saliently characterised by lexicogrammatical choices as genre: e.g. the use of the do verb form to express habitual meaning (“I do go out most nights”, “she do do my ead in”), right dislocation or ‘tailing’ as in “Love it down ere in Cardiff, I do”, “Speaks Welsh she does”, the use of utterance-final discourse particles mind and like, the prepositional phrases “From up the Coeca estate”, “up England way” and the idiomatic “on the pull”, as well as ellipsis of utterance-initial subject pronoun as in “Work down year”, “Love it down ere”, “aven’t ad any”, “Speaks Welsh.” And while these structural features are also found in other spoken varieties of English, this particular combination characterises Valleys Voice. Whereas the lexical choices Hiya, poncy, bevvies, poxy, git are typical of general young male slang, there is also some indication in the orthography of phonological characteristics of Valleys Voice such as year for standard here, ‘h-dropping’ in ere and er, nah for standard no and gorra for standard got a. Concerning the content of the passage, Dai here positions himself as a reflexive working classstyle ‘ordinary’ Valleys lad, professionally located and socially active in the metropolis (commodified as “The City on the Bay”), confronted by other Welshnesses as ‘performed’ by his emigrated brother and the cambrophone Eleri and North Walian Peredur [in the body of the novel Pryderi - another ambiguity? ], as well the remnants of his own cambrophony as learned in school. ( & The sociolinguistic situation of Valleys Voice is paradigmatic for the situation of other regional varieties of English, whether in the historically anglophone countries themselves or in postcolonial contexts worldwide. 1 # + 4 A Under the sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical pressures of globalisation resulting in a tendency to linguistic homogenisation such varieties have to be seriously revaluated, re-valorised and re-positioned in the ever more competitive sociolinguistic space they occupy. On the other hand, as has been argued in James (2009), linguistic globalisation can equally take the local forms of structural heterogenisation and hybridisation, and this applies as much within the historically anglophone countries as in the postcolonial or even historically non-anglophone environments (cf. also Pennycook 2010). However, in the case of Wales the conditions of late modernity are compounded by the sociocultural effects of political devolution which has led to the re-positioning of all indigenous lects of the country, anglophone as well as cambrophone. In this ‘New Wales’, the ethnolinguistic expression of identity and community is now via a plurilithicity as well as partiality of codes and resources, which have been re-constituted in the wake of de-industrialisation and metropolitanisation. As such, Valleys Voice now has its place sociolinguistically not only in the Valleys themselves, but also in the metropolis, while Cardiff English, the metropolitan variety, has a new sociolinguistic pulling power in the Valleys. It has been shown that the sociocultural legitimising processes of codification, mediatisation and literarisation have been instrumental in re-defining the social semiotics of Valleys Voice and indeed have infused this traditional variety of English in Wales with a new sociolinguistic significance. Balsom, Dennis (1985). “The three-Wales model.” In: James Osmond (ed.). The National Question Again. Welsh Political Identity in the 1980s. Llandysul: Gomer. 1-17. Bourhis, Richard (1977). “Language and social evaluation in Wales.” Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Bristol. Bourhis, Richard and Howard Giles (1976). “The language of cooperation in Wales: A field study.” Language Sciences 42. 13-16. Coupland, Nikolas (1988). Dialect in Use: Sociolinguistic Variation in Cardiff English. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Coupland, Nikolas (1990). “‘Standard Welsh English’: A variable semiotic.” In: Nikolas Coupland (ed.). English in Wales. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 232- 257. Coupland, Nikolas (1996). “Pronunciation and the rich points of culture.” In: Jack Windsor Lewis (ed.). Studies in General and English Phonetics. Essays in Honour of Prof. J.D. O’Connor. London: Routledge. 310-319. Coupland, Nikolas (2006). “The discursive framing of phonological acts of identity: Welshness through English.” In: Janina Grutt-Griffler/ Catherine Evans Davies (eds.). English and Ethnicity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 19-48. Coupland, Nikolas (2009). “The mediated performance of vernaculars.” Journal of English Linguistics 37. 284-300. - @ * Coupland, Nikolas (2010). “The authentic speaker and the speech community.” In: Carmen Llames/ Dominic Watt (eds.). Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 99-112. Coupland, Nikolas, Angie Williams and Peter Garrett (1994). “The social meaning of Welsh English: Teachers’ stereotyped judgements.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15. 471-489. Edwards, John (1985). ‘Talk Tidy’. The Art of Speaking Wenglish. Cowbridge: Brown. Fairclough, Norman (2003). Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Foulkes, Paul and Gerard Docherty (1999). Urban Voices. Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold. Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland and Angie Williams (2003). Investigating Language Attitudes. Social Meanings of Dialect, Ethnicity and Performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Giddens, Anthony (1984). The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giles, Howard (1970). “Evaluative reactions to accents.” Educational Review 22. 211-227. Giles, Howard (1990). “Social meanings of Welsh English.” In: Nikolas Coupland (ed.). English in Wales. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 258-282. Giles, Howard and Richard Bourhis (1975). “Linguistic assimilation: West Indians in Cardiff.” Language Sciences 38. 9-12. Halliday, Michael A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. London: Arnold. Houseman, Alfred (1896). A Shropshire Lad. London: Paul, Trench, Treubner. James, Allan (2008). “New Englishes as post-geographic Englishes in lingua franca use: Genre, interdiscursivity and late modernity.” European Journal of English Studies 12. 97-112. James, Allan (2009). “Theorising English and globalisation: semiodiversity and linguistic structure in Global English, World Englishes and Lingua Franca English.” Apples - Journal of Applied Language Studies 3. 79-92. James, Allan (2010). “Gemeinschaft, Identität und Sprache. Wales und Irland als soziolinguistische Räume.” In: Reinhard Kacianka/ Johann Strutz (eds.). Sprachlandschaften. Regionale Literaturwissenschaft im europäischem Kontext. Klagenfurt: Hermagoras. 132-145. Jenkins, Mike (2008). The Fugitive Three. Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon. Jones, Gwyn (1936). Times Like These. London: Gollancz. Jones, Jack (1934). Rhondda Roundabout. London: Faber & Faber. Jones, Lewis (1937). Cwmardy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jones, Lewis (1939). We Live. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jordan, Glenn (2005). “‘We never really noticed you were coloured’: Postcolonialist reflections on immigrants and minorities in Wales.” In: Jane Aaron/ Chris Williams (eds.) Postcolonial Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 55-81. Lewis, Robert (2008). Wenglish. The Dialect of the South Wales Valleys. Talybont: Y Lolfa. Llewellyn, Richard (1939). How Green Was My Valley. London: Joseph. Parry, David (1977-1979). The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. Vols. 1 and 2. Swansea: University College. Parry, David (1999). A Grammar and Glossary of the Conservative Anglo-Welsh Dialects of Rural Wales. Sheffield: National Centre for English Cultural Tradition. 1 # + 4 A Penhallurick, Robert (1991). The Anglo-Welsh Dialects of North Wales: A Survey of Conservative Rural Spoken English in the Counties of Gwynedd and Clwyd. Frankfurt: Lang. Penhallurick, Robert (1994). Gowerland and its Language: A History of the English Speech of the Gower Peninsula. Frankfurt: Lang. Penhallurick, Robert (2008). “English in Wales.” In: David Britain (ed.). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: CUP. 152-170. Pennycook, Alistair (2010). Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge. Price, Stephen, Manfred Fluck and Howard Giles (1983). “The effects of language testing on bilingual pre-adolescents’ attitudes towards Welsh and varieties of English.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 4. 149-161. Stephens, Meic (2008). Yeah, Dai Dando. Blaenau Ffestiniog: Cinnamon. Thomas, Alan (1994). “English in Wales.” In: Robert Burchfield (ed.). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. V. Cambridge: CUP. 94-145 Voices of the UK. Accents and Dialects of English (2010). London: British Library. Walters, Roderick (2001). “English in Wales and a ‘Welsh Valleys’ accent.” World Englishes 20. 285-304. Walters, Roderick (2003). “A study of the prosody of a South East Wales ‘Valleys Accent’. In: Hildegard Tristram (ed.). The Celtic Englishes III. Heidelberg: Winter. 224-239. Williams, Charlotte (2002). Sugar and Slate. Aberystwyth: Planet. - @ * $ - # -* - + 4- 4. / 3 # Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Jürgen Kramer Taking Stock 35 Essays from 35 Years of Studying English-Speaking Cultures 2011, VI, 506 Seiten, €[D] 88,00/ SFr 124,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6621-8 This volume collects 35 essays from 35 years of teaching and researching English-speaking literatures and cultures. It documents the author’s contribution to the founding and development of the cultural dimension of English Studies in Germany since the mid-seventies of the last century and chronicles his intellectual development. The author’s most important motive, however, is to account for what he was allowed to do in what he still regards as one of the privileged spheres of work in our society. 033411 Auslieferung April 2011 2 08.04.11 13: 51 B + ' C $ & ( / # +& + $ $) 5 69 $ D & % ! " 8 = # 2 # “The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context,” a theme of permanent significance, provided the frame of reference for the 125 th MLA Annual Convention held in Philadelphia, December 27-30, 2009. The Presidential Address, Forum, and Theme Sessions directly related to the convention theme. President Catherine Porter sounded the keynote in her Address, demonstrating why “English Is Not Enough” (appearing in PMLA 125: 3, May 2010: 546-555). Papers not immediately connecting to the frame explored aspects of translation whenever pertinent. Out of a program of over 500 individual listings (appearing in PMLA 124: 6, November 2009: 2015-2132), the present report will highlight selected poetry sessions, obviously based on the reporter’s personal convention program but concentrating on issues of wider importance to the field of poetry studies. A session of poetry in performance was featured in celebration of the 20 th anniversary of what has developed into an MLA institution by now: the Off-Site Poetry Reading, an event offering North American poetry in progress or forthcoming, this time including work by Laura Moriarty and Charles Bernstein. The sessions in poetry scholarship reviewed here approached their subject from one or more of the following angles: epistemology, ethnicity, ideology, and pedagogy. In the following cross sections of each category, the broadest common denominator is a notable interest in the aesthetics of poetry, particularly in its prosodic dimensions. “Poetry and Epistemology” as a research paradigm informed the meeting of the Division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, entitled “The Thinking Proper to Poetry.” Examining poetic knowledge in two sonnets by Wordsworth, “Composed after a Journey across the Hamilton Hills, Yorkshire” (publ. 1807) and “These words were uttered in a pensive mood” (publ. 1807), Charles Waite $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # 8 = # 2 # Mahoney regarded the “surmise” as the “figure of thinking in Romantic poetry,” a figuration of time, and the quintessential activity of the poetic speaker. Revisiting Mörike’s classic “Auf eine Lampe” (1846), Marshall J. Brown, in pursuing the lead question “How do poets think? ”, interpreted thought as an imperilment of the poetic speaker’s “Biedermeier sensibility.” Yet the poem reflects Leibniz’s idea of God “who makes art out of every irregularity,” and ranks as “the perfect Kantian artwork,” an embodiment of interesseloses Wohlgefallen. Brown offered his own translation of the original, as did Kristina Mendicino for her presentation, an ambitious reading of one of Hölderlin’s later hymns (1803): “Hölderlin’s ‘Patmos’ and Meter’s ó o : The Philosophical Content of Meter.” Mendicino found the “philosophical content” to be a symbolic representation of Pindar’s concept of the metron as a “movement between two extremes.” In analogy to the poem’s prosody ‘moving’ between adapted Greek quantitative and German(ic) accentualsyllabic versification, its speaker is ‘moving’ between the “extremes” of encountering the human and the divine. Mendicino referenced Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and his commentaries on Sophocles in explicating his own poetic practice: thus the notion of measure - Pindar’s metron, Hölderlin’s Maas - in “Patmos” figures in the senses both of ‘existential order’ and ‘meter,’ and evokes a sonic landscape evolving from a state of dearth to one of plenitude. The ethnopoetries were represented by a panel on African American prosody, described as the first on this subject at MLA, and arranged as a special session (i.e., not by a specific Society, Division or Discussion Group). The panelists perceived the analysis of prosody as an approach to understanding African American culture at large. Keisha Bowman viewed as “generic restlessness” the transformation of Ovid’s text from Metamorphoses in colonial poet Phillis Wheatley’s “Niobe in Distress” (1773), which in turn went through its twentieth-century re-interpretations in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Annie Allan (1949) and Rita Dove’s Mother Love (1995). Respondent Aldon Lynn Nielsen recognized in Bowman’s paper the “beginning of the long-needed work on the African American long poem.” Shanna Greene Benjamin pursued negotiations of the “Whiteness” of the sonnet as a fixed, architectural structure versus its African American potential for communalism, performativity, and vernacularism. She described the meter and syntax of Claude McKay’s “The Mulatto” (1925) as a “containment of protest,” then examined “the lurid confessions of an ex-cake junky,” the first of Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets (1994), a collection in a tradition that Coleman terms the “jazz sonnet.” Meta DuEwa Jones tackled Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) and C.S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road (1998), which employ photography and mapping, respectively, for their structural paradigms. In Trethewey’s “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971” (a poem about the killing of the poet’s mother by her stepfather) the “photograph” creates a stylized “frame” to 3 # % the landscapes of male violence and the suffering of the mother. The title of Giscombe’s Giscome Road refers to a British Columbia wilderness road built by a nineteenth-century near-namesake of the poet, Jamaican-born immigrant John Robert Giscome. According to Jones, the typographic and topographic patterns, or “fictions of photography and cartography,” are transformed in their “prosodic enaction” and “mediated by race and gender.” Jones concluded that “the place of the poem is the theme of the poem.” Perhaps it should be added, however, that the strategies used by Trethewey and Giscombe are their individual, innovative applications of techniques that have long been familiar in concrete and visual poetry. “Poetry and Ideology” provided the angle of discussion in a gathering of the Langston Hughes Society. Taken together, the three contributions made for a comprehensive account of Hughes as a proponent of political and literary transnationalism who in turn benefited from his contacts with autochthonous cultures in West Africa (1923, 1954, 1966), Cuba and Haiti (1929-1930), the former Soviet Union (1932-1933), and Spain (1937). Tara T. Green stressed Hughes’ “double consciousness” of Africanity and African Americanness. In her perception, Hughes helped instigate a modern, independent African and Caribbean literature, as in the cases of Senegal’s Léopold Sédar-Senghor and Martinique’s Nardal Sisters (Paulette and Jane), and advocated a global African American aesthetics, as in the case of Negritude/ négritude, a movement created by U.S. Blacks in France. Conversely, Green noted the emergence of a political stance in Hughes’ own poetry (“Lumumba’s Grave,” 1961). She named ancient African rhythms and Ashanti stories as influences on his work and drew attention in passing to the German translations of his poetry (by Hanna Meuter, Eva Hesse, and Stephan Hermlin, among others). Similarly, from an anti-hegemonic stance, Karima K. Jeffrey considered Hughes a “postcolonial” author (on the side alerting her audience to new digital photographic materials of him that are now becoming available through Yale’s Beinecke Library). Char Prieto thematized Hughes’ position in Civil War Spain. There, the African American author supported the interracial anti-Fascist forces, including U.S. Blacks who, in a conflict of loyalties, saw themselves pitted against North Africans pressed into Franco’s army in order to maintain Fascist rule in their home countries. Hughes drew parallels between fascist-racists in Spain and in the United States (“Letter from Spain: Addressed to Alabama,” 1937). He detected affinities with Spanish intellectuals not only in ideology but also in artistry, as manifested in Gypsy Ballads (1951), his translation of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano (1928), and in his borrowings from the flamenco, which he thought congenial to jazz and the blues in mood and sensibility. Challenges of teaching a cosmopolitan author were foregrounded in a panel of the Ezra Pound Society. Ira Nadel established connections between Pound and Thomas Jefferson, identifying the nexus of politics and 8 = # 2 # a “culture of performance” as the defining linkage. To Pound, Jefferson represented the humanist in the intellectual tradition of the eighteenthcentury encyclopedists. The two Americans shared an interest in a number of ideas: the origins of culture; proportionality (to Jefferson, “a moral concept”); accuracy; music; and language and discourse (the latter perhaps due to both men’s interest in Homer). John Gery then studied Pound’s exile as his formative experience. Facing the loss of home, Pound gained authenticity in his “sinceritas of style,” which provided stability to the poet in “fear of erasure.” Amazingly (at least to the present writer), over time even Pound, the master of language(s), “lost some of his American English” in exile. In Personae (1909, 1926), the poet’s collection of his early short poems, Gery found “the signature of his artistry” already. Aspects of Pound’s style also came to the fore as Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos traced types of intertextuality, such as translating rhetorical devices, rather than words, in order to achieve textual cohesion; complicated quotation techniques; ironical mistranscriptions; or testing the reader’s command of classical Greek - something Pound enjoyed doing. Tryphonopoulos suggested using such exercises in the classroom to give students a glimpse into Pound’s workshop who, unlike Eliot, does not supply commentary on his allusions, rather leaving the “spade work” to his readers. Summing up, emphasis in the sessions under review lay on comparative and transnational approaches and issues; on poetic knowledge; and on the modern and contemporary periods, including a number of emerging poets. As noted above, prosody served as the connecting link. While all of the presentations were substantial, obviously not every aspect discussed was new altogether. From an Americanist vantage point, the poetry sessions at large paid regrettably scant attention to fields such as early American poetry; Native American poetry; or the poetry of the environment - work suggested by Angus Fletcher’s subtle design of A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Harvard UP, 2004). Looking ahead: Unquestionably, the internationality of the large convention as a conference format is one of its assets and makes for its academic attraction, as an eye-opener and an inspiration, for richness of results and discernment of research needs and opportunities. In the 2009 poetry sessions sampled here, some potential future directions for prosody - the category most germane to poetry, and more germane to poetry than to any other literary or rhetorical genre - became evident. Through and beyond particulars and specifics, long-term desiderata in prosody scholarship are cross-disciplinary and translingual methodologies, as well as syntheses of linguistic and literary prosody studies. The future study of prosody, ideally, would bring together scholars from a variety of fields, at least including acoustic phonetics, diachronic and sociolinguistic phonol- 3 # % ogy, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology, classics, historical rhetoric, and translation studies. From an American Studies perspective, a ‘comparative prosody’ of American ‘ethnoprosodies’ would be at the center of desiderata. For example, precisely which distinctive phonic features occur in ancient Ashanti and its verse, and how do they appear in African American poetry, beginnings to present? From a General and Comparative Linguistics and Poetics perspective, the description of ‘prosodic universals’ would be foremost. Translingual approaches would further insight into the functions of prosodemes across language types - the phenomena at work in the speech process as sound production and poetry recital. How are suprasegmental cohesion and its aesthetic and rhetorical effects different in pre-Confucian song and chant; the Shoalwater, Chinook and Kathlamet oral texts collected by Franz Boas in the Pacific Northwest; Hellenic choric lyric; Pound’s Cantos; or experimental performance poetry? What are the similarities and differences in the way “poeticity” is constituted across languages, literatures and cultures? To work on these and related questions, “English Is Not Enough” indeed: President Catherine Porter’s call for a new agenda thus could not have been timelier. Apropos of time: the Association has changed its convention schedule. Philadelphia 2009 marked the last meeting in December, no meeting took place in 2010. From Los Angeles 2011 onward, January is the month of the MLA Annual Convention. 8 = # 2 # 8 4 5 # # % -* 3 &A - Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Isabell Ludewig Lebenskunst in der Literatur Zeitgenössische fiktionale Autobiographien und Dimensionen moderner Ethiken des guten Lebens Mannheimer Beiträge zur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 78 2011, VIII, 229 Seiten €[D] 58,00/ SFr 77,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-6672-0 Wie kann ich ein gutes Leben führen? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage muss das Individuum sich auf sich selbst besinnen, um zu erfahren, was ihm bejahenswert erscheint. Die Reflexion geschieht oft narrativ, indem das Individuum seine bisherige Lebensgeschichte erzählt. Literarische Lebensgeschichten, insbesondere fiktionale Autobiographien, eignen sich daher für die literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung unter dem Aspekt des guten Lebens. Auf diese Weise wird eine literaturethische Perspektive etabliert, bei der die Diskurse der Literatur und der modernen Ethik des guten Lebens wechselseitig befruchtend aufeinander bezogen werden. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Interpretationen der Romane Room at the Top von John Braine, Lady Oracle von Margaret Atwood und The Remains of the Day von Kazuo Ishiguro. 077211 Auslieferung August 2011.indd 12 24.08.11 19: 48 - = (, ( & , ( ) ! - $ 7> - " 9 ) )' + & ? ! , -* ( B - 0 # + ( ; , % #) A " #> , 2 0 This book wades into a complex critical and metacritical discourse that has expanded seemingly exponentially in recent years, namely the examination of the ways in which the Holocaust serves as subject matter for artistic works in literature, the visual arts, film, and architecture. Not only does this topic inherently engage a range of intense personal and cultural debates (many of which the authors directly address in their introduction), but the particular subtopic on which Gross and Rohr have chosen to focus - the roles of comedy, irony, and formal innovation in Holocaust-themed art - is fraught with the peril of having one’s interpretive argument obscured within a maelstrom of emotion and political controversy. It is this very fact, though, that contributes to the overall quality of this study. Gross and Rohr neither simply condemn nor extol such works as Melvin James Bukiet’s novel After, Radu Mihaileanu’s film Train of Life, or Alan Schechner’s digitally manipulated photograph “It’s the Real Thing - Self-Portrait at Buchenwald” that have “courted controversy” (9) in using the Holocaust to make art. They instead contextualize their close readings of representative texts within a broad spectrum of cultural, historical, and psychological discourses in order to move beyond the moral and ethical quandaries of representation and toward a critical perspective that attempts to explain why the end of the Cold War touched off “the most recent episode of a recurring aesthetic preoccupation with the so-called limits of representation [of the Holocaust]” (12). Their answer is that “[m]emory has, in a sense, taken the place of Cold War historical narratives as a stabilizing force in international relations” (21), and that memory as a mode of understanding the world “inevitably leads to issues of origin and provenance, but also to issues involving the social construction of the past” (23) that become part of the metaphorical foundation for artistic works. Building on a broad range of critical voices including Francis Fukuya- $$$ - $ ' & $ + & $) ! " # $% # & ma, Walter Benn Michaels, Susan Gubar, Shoshana Felman, Dominick La- Capra, and Terrence Des Pres, the authors make a compelling case that “[t]he commemorative art of the long 1990s is less concerned with verisimilitude or historical accuracy than with feeling or sentiment, often activated through the deliberately scandalous disregard of tradition, and assumed to link nonwitnesses with survivors and the events they experienced” (27). There are few areas of complaint to be found with this volume, but the one that stands out is the relative brevity of the discussions of the various primary texts the authors have chosen as examples in each of the categories of artistic expression that they examine. Gross and Rohr handle the intricacies of the critical and cultural debates surrounding Holocaust art in the past couple of decades with great skill, but at times also belabor their points somewhat in articulating their critical lens prior to directing it at actual examples of Holocaust-themed art. The chapter on film is especially noteworthy for this imbalance, with a rather cursory eight-page discussion of Mihaileanu’s film taking place only after twenty-four pages of expository context. Although this exposition is usually quite relevant - especially, but by no means exclusively, for readers unfamiliar with the complexities and controversies of trauma criticism - it dominates in the film and visual art chapters to an extent that the authors’ tone verges on becoming ethically persuasive rather than analytical. With their chosen subject matter, this distinction is inherently problematic (a point the authors themselves raise several times in the book), but it seems unnecessarily magnified in the chapters that so heavily emphasize the critical debates over the artistic creations that are the presumed subject of those debates. Furthermore, there is a repetitiveness that enters these lengthy contextual discussions by the fourth chapter of the book as the authors rehash many of the critical positions developed earlier in the book in preparation for applying them to a new category of artistic expression. Again, brief reminders of this sort are not only appropriate but also welcome in such intricate critical discourses, but these “refreshers” often occupy as much space as the interpretations of primary texts. Given the comparatively small audiences with first-hand experience of Bukiet’s After or Mihaileanu’s Train of Life or even the Jewish Museum’s Mirroring Evil exhibition of 2002 (in contrast to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, and other more canonical Holocaust art), it seems essential to treat the texts that Gross and Rohr have chosen as representative in greater depth in order to explicate how and why they perform the empathetic memorial function that the authors attribute to them. What critical effort they do expend in analyzing their primary texts is almost without exception insightful, but in only a few instances does it delve as deeply as in their discussions of important secondary texts. With that mild grievance now lodged, let me turn to the strengths of the individual sections of the book, because this is a study whose successes far outweigh its shortcomings. A succinct introductory chapter presents Gross and Rohr’s aforementioned thesis within a historical framework for the larger debate about Holocaust-related art from what the authors call the “long 1990s - that period extending from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 11-9-1989 to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9-11-2001” (12). Negotiating a & space within psychoanalytical, cultural, and aesthetic critical discourses, they develop their claim that the provocative Holocaust art of the “long 1990s” is “part of a widespread strategy of approximating, through emotional intensity, an event whose enormity seems to place it beyond our representational means,” and that this strategy “depend[s] on the dissonance between representational conventions and material […] to encourage sympathy between the suffering of the victim and the discomfort of the viewer” (12). This is followed by another contextualizing chapter focused specifically on the issue of the “Americanization” of the Holocaust and whether or not popular representations of the Holocaust such as The Diary of Anne Frank, Stanley Kramer’s 1965 film Judgment at Nuremberg, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have (mis)appropriated the Holocaust as a memory. Without explicitly taking a side in this ongoing debate, Gross and Rohr posit that what has been called ‘Americanization’ by such scholars as Peter Novick, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Tim Cole is not necessarily a “self-serving and thus disrespectful” (29) attempt to co-opt the rhetorical power of the Holocaust for political expedience. Instead, they argue that it sometimes marks a universalizing expansion of the Holocaust’s significance beyond the limited historical framework imposed upon it by the Cold War: “[B]y the mid-1960s [memory] has become a symbol (and symptom) of personal disruption that cannot be resolved through justice or sympathy but for that very reason is taken to have universal significance” (41). By the “long 1990s” this has become the “preferred metaphor of the traumatic past” in which the “authenticating principle” of memorial art is its “difference from more traditional representational forms” (63). Though intellectually dense and morally complicated, their argument in this regard holds together well and sets the stage effectively for their examination of particular artistic forms. The first of these subsequent chapters is perhaps also the strongest, in part because it contains the most substantive engagement with primary sources in support of the authors’ claims about the relationships between provocative form and memorializing function. In their discussion of Bukiet’s After and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Gross and Rohr suggest that both novels transcend the heavily prescribed role to which comic representations were limited in the 1980s: “[C]omedy functioned as a structural analogy to history - either its mirror image or its inversion - and was therefore taken as evincing a respect for the victims or dismissed as inadequate to evoking their trauma” (97). Both works express a “new symbolic etiquette” that is “marked by the continuity of emotion, measured as intensity, rather than by the degree of similarity between symbol and historical event,” which results in a situation in which “the real […] is what we feel” and “irony is an attempt […] to reinvoke the emotional intensity of an event that has receded into history” (80). The difference in the two books arises out of the intentions Gross and Rohr ascribe to them in using such a comic and ironic mode of representation: “Bukiet demonstrates the limits of understanding and representation and evokes laughter as an embodied but ultimately insufficient form of memory; Foer forges memorial communities or collective memories through laughter” (86). & The next two chapters apply a similar formulation of this “new symbolic etiquette” to, respectively, the visual arts and to film, using the controversial exhibition Mirroring Evil and the film Train of Life as their exemplars. As noted before, both of these chapters (especially the latter) are hampered rhetorically by a relative paucity of detail regarding primary sources. Nevertheless, Gross and Rohr still produce a convincing argument that provocative Holocaust-themed visual art performs a similar function to that found in the novels by Bukiet and Foer: “[C]ontemporary art commemorates the Holocaust by first claiming representation to be impossible. This impossibility is materialized in our own discomfort and in the rituals of scandal and protest that inevitably accompany exhibitions like Mirroring Evil” (130). Likewise, the chapter on film discusses Train of Life not just as an artistic statement in its own right but as part of a group of “[c]ontemporary representations of the Holocaust [that] are interested in calling into question even […] the seemingly objective documentary productions responsible for establishing ‘objective’ forms and standards in the first place” (139). Their contention that the film thus functions as a postmodern historiographic metanarrative parody (although Linda Hutcheon is not among the plenitude of critics mentioned in this chapter) stands up reasonably well on its own, but could certainly stand to be bolstered with further evidence. The final chapter feels at first like something of a red herring, given that it focuses primarily on a memorial devoted to the victims of the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks and not the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Gross and Rohr skillfully weave their discussion of architect Daniel Libeskind’s design for a skyscraper at the former World Trade Center site into a wider analysis of Libeskind’s commemorative architecture and its use of “void” spaces, a technique they associate with his earlier design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They claim that Libeskind’s “Memory Foundations” design for lower Manhattan “adapts an international idiom of trauma, witnessing, and victimization developed largely in the 1990s to denote the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, to what are arguably national-commemorative ends” (163). Through extended discussion of the architectural design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Gross and Rohr articulate the means by which “the memorial architecture developed by Libeskind in Berlin, and by other architects around the world has emerged as a spatial strategy for managing national political problems in terms of international moral consensus” (180). Importantly, this style of architecture “posits feeling as a point of moral consensus preceding political consensus” (180), thereby linking it to the other emotive memorial processes they outline in the previous chapters. On the whole, this is a cogent and coherent work that treats emotionally and intellectually complex material in a manner that is simultaneously respectful and intellectually honest. As such, it is a valuable contribution to a burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry. 2 0 ( . ' ! = C D *> ! C> .(- & --- 5 1 D > / = , ( & % ! ? ! / @ , - # 5 # E? , 4 % #) A , E, # 3 + Frank Erik Pointners Millers’ Tales verfolgt eine - im Prinzip begrüßenswerte - zweifache Zielsetzung: Zum einen wird hier der Versuch unternommen, die ‘diskursive Konstruktion' des Müllers als eines zentralen vorindustriellen Berufs und seiner Rolle im England des späten Mittelalters und vor allem der Frühen Neuzeit nachzuzeichnen, d.h. von Chaucers notorischen Müllergestalten der Canterbury Tales - des polternden Trunkenbolds Robyn der Prologe sowie des betrogenen Betrügers Symkyn der “Reeve’s Tale” - bis zu jenem Punkt, wo mit der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert europaweit romantische Zuschreibungen und Projektionen das Bild des Müllers und seiner Mühle in entscheidender Weise umzugestalten, ja geradezu ins Gegenteil zu verkehren begannen. Zum anderen stellt der Band eine laut Verfasser ‘kritisch edierte’ Anthologie vor allem kürzerer narrativer Verstexte des nämlichen Zeitraums bereit, in erster Linie von (folk) songs und (street) ballads - dies ein Aspekt, auf den merkwürdigerweise jedoch weder im Titel noch im Untertitel hingewiesen wird, ein bedauerliches Versäumnis im Hinblick auf die Verbreitung des Buchs insgesamt. Der expositorisch-analytische Teil des Bandes widmet sich auf gut 140 Seiten der detaillierten Untersuchung der stereotypen Rolle des Müllers, wie sie sich in kürzeren narrativen Verstexten im Laufe der Frühen Neuzeit herausgebildet hat (genuin mittelalterliche Texte spielen de facto keine Rolle), wobei der Schwerpunkt der Betrachtung - methodisch nachvollziehbar - vorwiegend auf den abgedruckten Texten liegt, darüber hinaus aber auch anderes Material einbezogen wird, u.a. auch zwei einschlägig relevante Dramen. Zunächst jedoch wird in einem Einleitungskapitel in zwar kritischer, zugleich aber doch ein wenig überehrfürchtiger Auseinandersetzung mit Stuart Hall, Clifford Geertz und anderen themenrelevanten ‘Klassikern’ ein methodisch-theoretischer Rahmen skizziert, der emphatisch die diskursive Dialektik und Konstruiertheit derartiger Rollenbilder herausarbeitet, wobei man ein wenig den Eindruck gewinnt, dass hier - angesichts des heutigen Standes der Diskussion - mit engagierter Vehemenz offene Türen eingerannt werden. Dem entspricht auch in der Folge eine nachgerade aufreibend explizite, letztlich redundante Insistenz auf dem konstruktiven Charakter einzelner Diskurse, den Verf. nicht müde wird, bei jeder sich nur entfernt bietenden Gelegenheit hervorzuheben. Als weiteres Kapitel folgt eine Fortführung der einführenden Überlegungen mit Blick vor allem auf die Verbreitung der einschlägigen (literarischen) Diskurse zum man of flour, speziell im Kontext der Balladen- und Songtradition, womit einerseits zwar eine sinnvolle Basis für die folgenden Analysen gelegt ist, in sachlicher Hinsicht aber doch auch Fragen aufgeworfen werden (vgl. dazu weiter unten). Demgegenüber wird die Darstellung der historischen Fakten und Hintergründe, nicht zuletzt auch auf & Basis außerliterarischer Diskurse, zwar nicht gänzlich ausgespart, gerät aber doch merklich ins Hintertreffen, zumal diesbezügliche Informationen in diesen Belangen nicht einführend umrissen, sondern - sofern überhaupt - erst im späteren Verlauf der Arbeit ins Spiel gebracht werden, und dies überwiegend en passant. Dies erscheint wenig günstig: Dem Rezensenten jedenfalls, der sich zwar für die Thematik interessiert, für sich selbst aber kein spezielles, geschweige denn historisches Detailwissen im Bereich des Müllerei- und Mühlenwesens in Anspruch nehmen kann, ist eine systematische, grundlegende Einführung in die realweltliche Dimension der Thematik abgegangen und hätte vermutlich auch den meisten anderen Rezipienten ein besseres Verständnis der Textanalysen bzw. bestimmter textlicher Details und Bezüge ermöglicht. Denn wer weiß heutzutage schon Bescheid über die Anlage von Mühlen, die Wohnverhältnisse ihrer Betreiber, maschinell-technische Aspekte und die dazugehörigen Termini wie hopper etc., die allenfalls à propos, manchmal irritierenderweise auch erst nachträglich erklärt werden, vielfach aber ganz dem guesswork bzw. der Eigeninitiative der Leser überlassen bleiben. Hier möchte man doch auf einer Bringschuld des Autors insistieren. Eine - vielleicht glossarartig angelegte - Erörterung des Grundlegenden, eventuell auch illustrative Skizzen, hätte man hier als hilfreich empfunden. Denn selbst wenn man weiß oder leicht herausfinden kann, dass etwa der vielzitierte hopper der Müllerdiskurse der Mühltrichter ist und (hierzulande wohl aus Max und Moritz) eine vage Vorstellung des Teils haben kann, erklärt dies noch lange nicht dessen spezifische Funktionsweise, vor allem aber Bewegungen, welche die wahre Grundlage etwa der sexuellen Metaphorik bzw. Symbolik vieler Müllerslieder ist. Auch methodisch scheint es nicht ganz unproblematisch, so entschieden wie Pointner auf die recht eigenständige Konstruiertheit der literarischen Diskurse zu bestehen, ohne den Lesern zugleich auch die realweltlichen Zusammenhänge entsprechend nahezubringen. Den Abschnitten zur Konstruktion ‘des Müllers’ als eines literarischen Rollenstereotyps folgt die - den größten Teil der Arbeit beanspruchende - Analyse ausgewählter Texte. Hier wird der Müller zunächst in seiner (seit Chaucer fest etablierten) Rolle als “miscreant” abgehandelt (Kap. II.1), d.h. als Räuber und Dieb (“thief"; Kap. II.1.1), als oft grobschlächtiger Schuft, Schelm oder Schurke und/ oder als “lecher” (II.1.2) und womanizer, als gewissenloser, geriebener Verführer, ja Vergewaltiger, auch in der Spielart des schlauen bzw. großsprecherischen Aufschneiders etc., als unersättlicher, meist höchst potenter Lüstling, der seiner ‘Beute’ gleichwohl nicht selten die sexuelle Begegnung ihres Lebens beschert. Dass die gesellschaftliche wie topographische Randständigkeit der Mühle und ihres zur unter(st)en Schicht zählenden Betreibers (und oftmals auch seiner Tochter, Frau und/ oder des umtriebigen oder auch tumben Müllersburschen) derlei Konstruktionen Vorschub leisteten, auch als recht frei verfügbare Projektionsflächen kollektiver Wünsche, Sehnsüchte und Ängste der übrigen Kommunität fungieren konnten, liegt auf der Hand. Ebenso einleuchtend ist der Umstand, dass die so zentrale Funktion und schwer kontrollierbare Schlüsselstellung des man of flour und seiner Mühle in der Produktionskette der Nahrungsmittelversorgung, speziell in Verbindung mit der strikt regulierten, extrem schlechten Entlohnung seiner Anstrengungen, & auch die Möglichkeiten der unrechtmäßigen Bereicherung in besonderem Maße fokussierten (ähnlich wie bei Schneider und Weber, die nicht selten mit dem Müller zu einer Gruppe besonders zweifelhafter Zeitgenossen zusammengefasst wurden). Und hier mag auch der Ursprung dieses offenbar integralen Teils solch diskursiver Konstruktionen gelegen sein, denen gleichwohl eine gewisse Verankerung in der empirischen Realität gegenübergestanden haben wird. Aus derlei überwiegend negativ besetzten Rollenstereotypen bezieht umgekehrt freilich - wiewohl in vergleichsweise seltenen Fällen - auch das Gegenbild des tatsächlich ehrlichen Müllers seine Kraft und Signifikanz, meist natürlich in ironischer Funktion, oder aber auch nur als irreführende Beteuerung im Rahmen abgefeimter Persuasionsstrategien. Auf Grundlage des skizzierten Textkorpus wird all dies anhand zahlreicher Textbeispiele detailliert ausgeführt, und auch das folgende Kapitel (II.2), das den Müller in der Rolle des leidenden Opfers (“as Sufferer“) zeigt, nämlich als scapegoat bzw. cuckold (cf. II.2.1 und II.2.2), geht in ähnlicher Weise und Detailliebe vor, wobei man sich allerdings fragen mag, ob Pointners Designation des Müllers als scapegoat eine glückliche Wortwahl darstellt, handelt es sich in den hier diskutierten Fällen doch fast ausnahmslos um die verdiente Bestrafung zuvor schuldig gewordener, schurkischer Müllergestalten. Anhand zweier Dramen, nämlich Robert Dodsleys The King and the Miller of Mansfield (publ. 1737; hier unter Einbezug der als Stückvorlage dienenden Ballade “Henry, our Royal King, Would Go on Hunting“) sowie The Maid in the Mill (Beaumont/ Fletcher-Kanon) wird sodann in einem abschließenden Abschnitt (III) die Konstruktion und dramatische Funktionalisierung (cf. p. 109) vergleichbarer Stereotypen im Theater der Zeit dargestellt, einem weiteren Medium, das nicht zuletzt aufgrund seiner spezifischen, kollektiven Rezeptionsweise für die weite(re) Verbreitung und Festigung derartiger Rollenbilder gesorgt haben mag. Die interdiskursive Vorgehensweise der Analyse (interdiscourse analysis; cf. ibid. u.ö.), deren unübertreffliche Leistungsfähigkeit Verf. freilich arg überbetont, erhellt, wie hier das konventionelle Rollenbild des Müllers mit dem in wesentlichen Zügen ganz ähnlichen, freilich aber (und diskursintern zu Recht) noch weit übler beleumundeten Typus des Höflings konfrontiert wird, woraus sich aufschlussreiche Parallelwie Kontrasteffekte ergeben: so etwa die auch als Plotmechanismus fungierende Gegenüberstellung des hier in der Tat ehrlichen Müllers mit den durch und durch verkommenen Höflingen des jeweiligen Herrschers (die in The Maid in the Mill aufgrund des spanischen setting freilich der empirischen Realität des englischen Müllers wie auch der Alltagswelt des Zielpublikums ins eher Fantastische entrückt scheint). Der Anthologieteil schließlich bietet eine Art original-spelling edition von insgesamt 38 Texten, überwiegend Balladen bzw. broadsides, die zum guten Teil aus bekannten Sammlungen wie Pepys, Roxburghe etc. stammen und in acht thematischen Sektionen dargeboten werden, wie z.B. “The Miller He Stole Corn” (2) oder “There Was a Maid, and She Went to the Mill” (3). Dies gewährt eine durchaus hilfreiche inhaltliche Orientierung; wie Pointner einräumt (cf. p. 213), ist dabei allerdings infolge meist enger motivlicher Verflechtungen mit zahlreichen Überschneidungen zu rechnen, welche die säu- & berliche thematische Kompartmentalisierung der jeweils präsentierten Texte vielfach unterlaufen, ebenso wie auch für die sequenzielle Anordnung kein geeignetes Kriterium gefunden werden konnte, weshalb die Abfolge innerhalb der einzelnen Abschnitte der Reihenfolge der Entdeckung des jeweiligen Textes durch Pointner entspricht, wie dieser entwaffnend offen eingesteht (cf. p. 214). Die Annotationen geben in erster Linie Informationen zu Quellen, Provenienz und ggf. Alternativversionen der Texte, liefern mitunter auch Wort- und Sacherklärungen bzw. Glossierungen, die freilich zu erheblichen Teilen aus früheren Editionen übernommen sind. Hier wäre nach Ansicht des Rezensenten noch einige philologische Knochenarbeit zu leisten gewesen, denn für gar nicht wenige Stellen wäre - wie auch interpretatorische und sachliche Lakunen des explikativen Teils zeigen - durchaus Bedarf für weitere Erklärungen gegeben, der jedoch ungeachtet zahlreicher sonstiger Redundanzen nicht immer zufriedenstellend gedeckt wird. Ein Index erschließt die Primärtexte und ermöglicht ein rasches Auffinden ihrer Erörterung speziell auch im ersten Teil. Insgesamt wird man den meisten Einsichten Pointners, die unbeschadet ihrer modischen Einkleidung überwiegend dem common sense entsprechen, nicht grundsätzlich widersprechen wollen. Zudem wird den Lesern in der Tat eine beträchtliche Fülle nützlicher Einsichten in ein Berufsbild und dessen literarische Gestalt bzw. ‘Konstruktion’ ermöglicht, die zu dessen besserem Verständnis beizutragen vermögen, ja manches daran vielleicht auch überhaupt erst ganz verständlich machen, wie Pointner nicht müde wird zu betonen. Bedauerlicherweise lässt sich darüber hinaus wenig Lobendes zu diesem Band sagen, speziell was die Art und Sorgfalt der Darstellung sowie die argumentative und sprachliche Durchführung betrifft, freilich aber auch in Bezug auf einzelne Detailfragen. Um nur einige der wesentlichsten Einwände kurz zu skizzieren, sei zunächst darauf hingewiesen, dass Pointners Tendenz, folk songs und Volksballaden in einen Topf mit street ballads zu werfen, im günstigsten Falle fragwürdig ist, jedenfalls aber nicht dem Forschungsstand seit Würzbach (1981) entspricht. Wiewohl einzuräumen ist, dass manche traditional ballads als broadsides verschriftlicht und gedruckt wurden oder mitunter auch umgekehrt auf diesem Umweg wieder zurück in die oral tradition gefunden haben, ist doch die schaustellerische Prägung und speziell die Doppelexistenz der street ballad als performativer (gesungener/ rezitierter) und als gedruckter, meist illustrierter Text ein so entscheidendes Charakteristikum dieser Gattung, dass die damit zusammenhängenden generischen wie auch rezeptionssoziologischen Distinktionen nicht leichtfertig aufgegeben werden dürfen. Mag sein, dass für Pointners Belange ähnliche Effekte hinsichtlich der Disseminationsdichte der Müllerdiskurse argumentierbar wären, oder vielleicht auch bezüglich ihrer tendenziell eher ‘einfacher gestrickten’ Rezipientenschichten als primäre Adressaten - was man mit Blick auf die Lesefähigkeit zumindest eines Gutteils der Käufer (und wohl auch vieler Konsumenten) von street ballads bzw. broadsides und deren buchstäblich literarischen Charakter allerdings auch bezweifeln mag (man denke etwa nur an Pepys selbst), ganz abgesehen von der gleichermaßen wesentlichen Differenz zwischen vorwiegend urbaner (und literarischer) vs. ländlich-oraler Prove- & nienz, (Re-)Produktion bzw. auch Rezeption. Deshalb jedoch die aufwendig und aus guten Gründen etablierten generischen Unterscheidungen dieser Textsorten leichtfertig zu verwischen oder ganz preiszugeben, wie Pointner dies unter Bezug auf ältere, eher oberflächlich überblickshafte Literatur wie De Sola Pinto/ Rodway (1965) vorschlägt (vgl. p. 23ff.; 26) und dann auch praktiziert, ist gleichwohl entschieden abzulehnen, da ein solcher Zugang keinen zusätzlichen Erkenntnisgewinn abwirft, wohl aber analytische Trennschärfe verspielt, die zudem durchaus themenrelevant ist. Dies zeigt sich denn auch darin, dass Pointner mit den diversen Balladen- und Songtraditionen und deren eigentümlichen Konventionen irritierenderweise wenig vertraut bzw. auf deren Beachtung nicht viel Wert zu legen scheint. Denn unbeschadet seiner nachgerade aufdringlichen verbalen Insistenz auf der Konstruiertheit und Konventionalität diverser Diskurse (was natürlich erst recht und mit besonderem Nachdruck deren spezifische Gattungskonventionen einschließen müsste) übersieht er in seinen Analysen nicht selten gerade den konventionellen Charakter bestimmter, z.T. genrespezifischer diskursiver Elemente, wie etwa von burdens, füllselhaften Phrasen und Nonsenswendungen, nicht zuletzt auch in weak lines, die als Indiz für Tanzlieder fehlgedeutet werden, wie auch umgekehrt unverkennbar schaustellerische Merkmale der street ballad verkannt werden (vgl. etwa p. 76 u.ö.) oder auch die - balladentypisch - fehlende Handlungsmotivation bzw. sprunghaft-elliptische Handlungsentwicklung, deren ‘fehlende’ Details Pointner im Falle der als Quelle Dodsleys erwähnten Ballade “Henry, our Royal King” groteskerweise gar aus Dodsleys über hundert Jahre jüngerem Drama ergänzen zu können glaubt (vgl. p. 119). Derlei Fehldeutungen dessen, was gerade als diskursspezifisches Konstruktionselement zu werten und ganz oder im Wesentlichen im Rahmen des jeweiligen Diskurses und seiner genretypischen Konventionen zu analysieren wäre, legen eine eher schon peinliche Diskrepanz zwischen hochtrabendem methodisch-theoretischem Anspruch und einer geradezu rührend naiven Interpretationspraxis bloß. Gerade auch deshalb scheint mir die Frage der tatsächlichen Reichweite der hier vorgefundenen, in hohem Maße diskursspezifischen, zum Teil auch volksliterarisch geprägten Stereotypen hinein ins wirkliche Alltagsdenken und -empfinden ‘der Leute’ nach wie vor ungelöst, zumindest aber diskutierenswert, insbesondere im Sinne des Problems, inwieweit z.B. die ‘schwarze Köchin’ oder ‘Müllers Esel / Kuh’ der Kinder- und Auszählreime - eine weitere relevante Gattung, auf die Verf. als besonders ‘innocent’ verweist - überhaupt irgendwelche spürbaren Auswirkungen auf unsere Wahrnehmung oder Konstruktion der Realität, d.h. von tatsächlichen Köchinnen und Müllern oder Eseln und Kühen hat. Generell muss leider zudem konstatiert werden, dass Pointners Argumentations- und Vorgangsweise, wie auch die Qualität und Beherrschung des Englischen, über weite Strecken eher auf dem Niveau einer durchschnittlichen Diplomarbeit angesiedelt sind. So wird in letztlich ermüdender, mitunter höchst irritierender Weise fast durchgehend eine übertrieben betuliche argumentative Dramaturgie der Enthüllung verfolgt, die in der x-fach wiederholten Sequenz von umstandsmeierndem Spannungsaufbau, ausführlichem Textzitat und - Tusch - Offenlegung des Resultats meist nur das längst Offen- & kundige aufdeckt, im Gegenzug aber so manch Erklärungswürdiges, etwa was gewisse Details bestimmter Textzitate anlangt, unbeachtet lässt (so etwa p. 63, wo in Text 4.3, Z. 10, der genaue Stellenwert, vor allem aber der idiomatische bzw. konventionelle Charakter einer Wendung wie “or he would know why” durchaus genauerer Erläuterung bedürfte, ebenso wie etwa die Implikationen des Begriffs vice, p. 69). Besonders enervierend ist die beschriebene Strategie bei der sich im mehrfach repetitiven overkill totlaufenden ‘Beweisführung’, dass die Mühle als Quelle bestimmter Formeln des bawdy diente (vgl. p. 68ff.). Angesichts des jeweiligen Kontexts und der Formulierung (wenn z.B. in Bezug auf eine willfährige Besucherin der Mühle einschlägig von her mill die Rede ist), fragt man sich, wo sonst die Bedeutung der Wendung liegen könnte, und dies umso eher, wenn man mit Pauken und Trompeten zum x-ten Mal in schwer verdaulicher Detailargumentation, die gleichwohl überwiegend verschleiert-andeutend daherkommt, darauf hingewiesen wird, dass grind(ing) hier nun wirklich wohl ohne Zweifel für ‘Kopulieren’ stünde, oder dass nunmehr zumindest hinreichend “reason to believe” für eine solche Annahme gegeben sei (dies eine Phrase übrigens, die sich speziell in den Anfangskapiteln auf fast jeder Seite mindestens einmal findet). All dies zu diskutieren ist gut und wichtig, auch eine ordentliche, kontextuelle Beweisführung ist selbst heute noch mehr als angebracht. Dennoch kann man alles übertreiben, zumal die Konsultation von Gordon Williams’ einschlägigem Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespeare and Stuart Literature (1994), auf welches sich nirgends Hinweise finden, hier vielfach Klarheit erbracht hätte, aber auch manch aufschlussreiche Zusatzinformation, etwa zur biblischen Provenienz und generellen Verbreitung von grind auch außerhalb der Müllerdiskurse (vgl. Williams, s.v. ‘grind’, sowie ‘mill’ und ‘stone’). Überhaupt strotzt der expositorische Teil der Studie von vielfältigsten Redundanzen, zirkulären Argumenten und Wiederholungen auch längerer Zitate, mitunter fast wörtlich inklusive der zugehörigen Erörterungen - dies besonders störend in den Kapiteln II.2.1 und II.2.2, deren zweites den Lesern eine Serie meist ‘unmarkierter’ Déja-vus des vorangegangenen Abschnitts beschert (vgl. u.a. p. 79/ 104f. oder 62f./ 94 u.ö.) - all dies Merkmale einer wenig sorgsamen, vielfach dilettantisch anmutenden Konzeption und Redaktion. Dazu gesellen sich zahlreiche Tippfehler oder sonstige Irrtümer. Auch die Wortwahl ist an mitunter zentraler Stelle problematisch: So ist etwa der fast durchgängige Gebrauch von idiosnycrasies (p. 86 und passim) in Anwendung auf Eigenschaften einer ganzen Berufsgruppe und deren Rollenstereotype gerade die falsche Wahl (vgl. u.a. das NOED, s.v.), etwa gegenüber characteristics; auch ratiocination (p. 65) statt rationale klingt im Kontext merkwürdig und deplatziert, ebenso wie “invokes the three craftsmen", p. 90 (statt addresses). Nicht selten gewinnt man den Eindruck, in vielen der eher gesuchteren Begriffe des Textes sei ohne entsprechende Nachprüfung den Vorschlägen eines Thesaurus oder gar eines zweisprachigen Wörterbuchs gefolgt worden. Noch schwerer wiegen freilich terminologische Fragwürdigkeiten. Beispielsweise handelt es sich auf Seite 76f. beim mehrfach zitierten sack auch im letzten Beispiel - sofern hier, rhetorisch gesehen, überhaupt von & Metaphorik gesprochen werden kann - gerade nicht um das Tertium comparationis, welches wohl in der Füllung des Sacks läge (cf. 76: “[…] strictly speaking, the sack is not a metaphor but a tertium comparationis, with the miller filling her as full as her sack“). Zweifelhaft scheint mir im gegebenen Kontext auch die Verwendung von allegory in Bezug auf sprichwörtliche Wendungen zu Müller und Mühle (p. 61), wohingegen dem auf Seite 98 (übrigens zum zweiten Mal) detailliert geschilderten Hornschmuck des hellbound miller durchaus ein (hier nun freilich nicht so benannter) allegorischer Zusammenhang zugrundeliegen dürfte. Das grundlegende Konzept des argument im Sinne der älteren Texten vorangestellten plot summaries scheint Verf. im aktiven Sinne ebenfalls unvertraut, hätte aber immer wieder der Präzision der Beschreibung und dem tieferen Verständnis einer fundamentalen Konvention der Zeit dienen können (so etwa p. 66, wo umständlich paraphrasiert wird: “The usual short rendering of the ballad’s contents”). John Heywood, der immerhin mit Sir Thomas Mores Nichte, der Tochter John Rastells, verheiratet und zudem John Donnes Großvater war, ist auch als früher Tudor- Dramatiker kein solcher Nobody, dass man ihn als “one Jhon Heywoode” abtun sollte, und auch sein als bedeutendes Interlude bekanntes Play of the Wether ist wohl um 1532 entstanden (gedruckt 1533), daher nicht, wie Pointner dies tut, mit Ende des 16. oder gar Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts zu datieren (vgl. p. 42). Dies ist aber nicht nebensächlich, geht es Pointner, der das Stück auch kurz diskutiert, doch um die Etablierung bestimmter Rollenbilder des Müllers im Verlaufe der Frühen Neuzeit. Selbstverständlich gibt es auch nur das eine Stück des Titels Grim the Collier of Croydon, nicht ‘of London’, wie auf Seite 62 als scheinbarer Verweis auf einen weiteren Grim-Text suggeriert wird. Im Übrigen könnte in Anbetracht des kontrovers diskutierten Entstehungsdatums dieses Stücks das hier angegebene Publikationsdatum 1662 irreführend sein, sollte aber jedenfalls im Sinne historischer Akkuratesse speziell hinsichtlich möglicher Stoffwanderungen so nicht unkommentiert stehen. In erheblichen Teilen wirkt das Englisch der Arbeit recht ungelenk; zahlreiche unidiomatische Wendungen und schwerfällige Formulierungen machen die Lektüre oft mühsam, nicht selten zäh, wie - leider durchaus repräsentativ - in folgenden Zitaten: “After Molly’s having asked her sister where she has been Jenny answers” (p. 62) oder: “When having in mind the miller poems referred to so far, one can hardly read the Dutch miller’s endeavour ‘to Grind all sorts of Women’ other than in sexual terms. What the ballad thus seems to convey is that […]” (p. 75). Schwer nachvollziehbar ist immer wieder auch die Erörterung von Sachzusammenhängen, so etwa auf Seite 95f. die zentrale Wohn- und Arbeitssituation des fremdgehenden Müllers, die man aufgrund ihrer verwirrenden Darstellung als Leser selbst unter Rekurs auf den - in diesem Punkt völlig eindeutigen - anthologisierten Text 5.2 zu klären hat. Nachgerade kommunikationsstörend ist die auch nach lockeren Maßstäben vielfach unkorrekte Kommasetzung, speziell aber die konsequente Nichtsetzung von Kommata bei non-defining relative clauses (wohingegen vor that [‘dass’] des Objektsatzes mitunter Komma gesetzt wird: cf. p. 25 u.ö.). & --- All dies ist eine kleine Blütenlese oftmals gravierender Irrtümer oder auch ärgerlicher, durchweg vermeidbarer Schlampereien, die - in den Augen des Rezensenten - den Gesamteindruck und -wert der Publikation deutlich schmälern und die Lektüre über weite Strecken unnötig mühsam, nicht selten nervtötend machen, was die Studie gerade mit Blick auf den internationalen Markt nicht eben als Aushängeschild deutscher Anglistik empfiehlt. Schade, denn ein so spannendes, anregendes Thema wie die Millers’ Tales hätte es wahrhaftig verdient, auch in Durchführung und Detail mit der nötigen Sorgfalt und Kompetenz präsentiert zu werden. So bleibt leider ein höchst zwiespältiger Eindruck, zerrissen zwischen den zweifellos wertvollen Informationen, inklusive der durchaus nützlichen Anthologie, die uns der Band bietet, und der im Einzelnen doch dürftigen Darbietung und Kommentierung der Materie. # 3 + $ - # 3 45 4. / D ++ > # +& + E$ - $ * ' 2 % ! 5 ( * 4 & E , ) A" > E, & We have been inundated by a flood of studies on visual culture and on the relationship between words and images in particular in recent years. For this reason one approaches a book with this title warily. However, Horst’s study has circumscribed its domain to a very specific relationship. It aims to analyse works of art “that are realized in two core media - language and the visual” (8). Further criteria for the selection of its set of case studies are firstly, “conscious intermediality”, i.e. deliberate use of different media according to Horst, secondly, meta-mediality, i.e. reflection of the use of media within the work of art, and thirdly, a political message (10). Although the first parameter for selection seems almost repetitive and unnecessary given the title of the study, it turns out to be the least explicit. The structure of the book is based on the author’s heuristic assumption about successive stages in the development of intermedial art in the 20 th century - modernism, conceptualism and new media art. These are doubtless major artistic currents. But the artists and works examined represent quite a narrow spectrum for the author’s wideranging conclusions about the progressive modification in visual-verbalrelationships in the 20 th century (179). By and large, we are currently seeing advances in communication technology which result in ever more complex and inextricable fusions of medial and representational systems; as a result, the category “intermediality” may & well prove inadequate. Moreover, the study of art in all its different and various manifestations has recently corrected its former emphasis on structures and semantics and paid more attention to experiential factors, attempting to include the impact of art works in terms of individual effect and social function. Terms that rely exclusively on the properties of a work can no longer do justice to the complicated phenomena we are dealing with. Horst’s book contributes little towards the development of theory in this respect. It introduces some terminological distinctions which are initially confusing and later discarded (24).Admittedly, the field of intermedial studies itself is fraught with controversies over definitions, and in view of unresolved terminological vagueness, the book opts for Friedrich Block’s conceptualization of “language art” as the common denominator of its diverse examples, i.e. a concept of art works in which the poetic language is integrated into visual media to such an extent that a new genre is constituted (24). Unsurprisingly then, the main argument put forward by this study is that the last century has seen an increasing interplay of linguistic and visual elements which merge in some art works to the point of inseparability. For Horst, this argument invalidates the idea of the pictorial turn, a concept which he has evidently misunderstood to mean a shift from primarily verbal to visual modes of representation. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the conclusion that a successive increase in media-fusion has taken place. But the assumption of a progression in three successive stages from a dominant mediality to a balanced intermediality and finally to an inseparable mixture of media seems a constraint on the discussion. By limiting observation to certain works within the three art movements, the trajectory can be demonstrated quite neatly with regard to the selected works. As soon as one speculates outside the framework, however, counterexamples as well as instances from outside the stipulated periods come to mind. The book is divided into three sections, which deal with the movements modernism, concept art and new media art separately, each defining not only different periods of production but also different concepts and modes of creation. In treating modernist art, it treads well-worn paths, discussing canonical art works such as Duchamp’s readymades as examples of art that “incorporated the verbal and the visual” (102). The chapter includes these installations on the grounds that conceptual art is not about forms and materials but about ideas and meanings, and therefore according to Horst “language art”. Subsequently, a longish discussion of poems by William Carlos Williams (65-101) claims that Williams’s poetry “creates in the field of literature what Marcel Duchamp had done for art” (92). By way of these case studies, which necessitate a very liberal interpretation of the initial proposition to investigate works in two core media, modernist art can be perceived to remain “fixed” in its mediality (102) in spite of a great influence of visual on verbal art and vice versa. As the study progresses through the periods its arguments grow more convincing. Conceptual Art is the subject of the second part, which ranges from Jenny Holzer’s language games in public urban spaces to Susan Howe’s spatial poems. This section presents some incisive readings of both literature & and the visual arts. At any rate, these examples do not require a revision of what was initially claimed to be the scope of the investigation. They serve to demonstrate that conceptual art integrates visual and verbal media without hierarchy, thus conforming to the criteria of selection stipulated earlier. In the case of Susan Howe’s visual poetry this alleged lack of hierarchy is somewhat dubious and poems with a signifying surface layout have been produced by poets quite removed from conceptualism, such as Gerald Manley Hopkins, for instance. The most interesting discussion is that of new media art in the last section. In presenting an emergent art form which is not readily accessible, though available on the internet, it covers new ground and presents truly avant-garde work. The radically new aspect of digital or code poems created by net artists such as Jaromil or Florian Cramer is their means of signifying in two codes: on the one hand, they work as written poetry complicated by signs that are not normally intelligible to the general reader; on the other, they function as algorithmic codes which will prompt the computer to generate further text, i.e. this ‘net art’ works as both software and text. The complete sign system of the poem will have meaning only for a reader conversant with computer programming languages such as “perl”. For the general reader the poem will consist of visual and verbal signs which can be altered on screen according to instructions. Thus this type of language art is genuinely participatory and performative, generating in its interactive work with the reader a new form of text/ poem. In coming to terms with this processual art, where the reader has to execute simple programming in order to set the automatic text production in motion, the study acknowledges the need to investigate the singularity of the aesthetic experience in terms of receptive effect. Its observations on the current state of web literacy and its speculations on future developments on the growth of digital articulations and the adaptation of readerships are intriguing and instructive (172-73). I wish the study had been confined to its most contemporary subject matter, since its treatment of earlier art movements is derivative, too limited and vague to add much to our understanding of either modernism or conceptualism. The author seems uncertain about the intended audience of his book, most of the time addressing cultural beginners, e.g. when concepts like “gender” (36) and “imagism” (66) are explained, but sometimes also demanding a lot of prior knowledge for its rather generalized theoretical discussions. & $ - # . / ( # & --- # 4 : > $ & # / ? + , 1 % # F % 1 # 8 # # , 1 % # ) 1 % # . ' D > E, 0 / Late Modern English, which was considered a period of comparatively little linguistic interest as late as the 1970s, has received increasing scholarly attention from the 1990s, with publications such as Bailey (1996), Nineteenth- Century English, Görlach (1999), English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction, and Beal (2004), English in Modern Times, as well as conference proceedings. Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s book is a welcome addition to the existing textbooks, as it complements rather than duplicates their contents. It is divided into seven chapters, followed by a bibliography ( including an excellent section on weblinks) and an index. Each chapter ends with sections on “Research Questions” and “Further Reading”. The book’s focus is on language use rather than system, and it takes a sociolinguistic approach, with a special emphasis on the role of social networks in linguistic variation and change. Chapter 1 “English in the Late Modern Period” (1-15) introduces the most important factors regarding language use in late modern society (social aspiration, linguistic guidance, and education and teaching of literacy). Chapter 2 “Evidence of Pronunciation” (16-36) describes the evidence used by scholars to reconstruct Late Modern English pronunciation (transcripts of spoken language, rhyme in verse, comments by contemporaries, representation in literature, phonetic spelling in the writing of minimally schooled people) and the interpretation problems inherent in each of these methods. This chapter is the only one that draws more on research by others than on Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s own research. Chapter 3 “Spelling Systems” (37-52) is innovative in its differentiation between the spelling systems of an individual’s private writing, an individual’s public writing, and the writing system of printers. This chapter also describes how spelling was taught and how teaching methods influenced the spelling of individuals, as well as illustrating the adoption by individuals of the spellings of other writers. Chapter 4 “Writers and the Lexicon” (53-75) investigates vocabulary changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, taking the Oxford English Dictionary as its source. Here Tieken-Boon van Ostade looks at vocabulary increase and loss, as well as at the contribution of individuals to the texts given for illustration in the OED. Those whose contributions are selected for investigation belong to two groups, one consisting primarily of novelists, and one consisting of the “Lunar Men”, predominantly people working in the areas of natural science and technology. In addition, the author studies the contribution of dictionary makers, in particular James A.H. Murray, the chief editor of the OED, Samuel Johnson, and Noah Webster. Chapter 5 “Grammar and Grammars” (76-99) investigates grammatical structures used by individuals on the one hand, distinguishing, as in the case of spelling (chapter 3), between private and public writing, and normative grammar and its influence on the other. & Tieken-Boon van Ostade shows that many changes attributed to normative grammars were well under way before they were prescribed. Chapter 6 “Language and Social Networks” (100-118) introduces the social network model developed by Lesley Milroy (Milroy 1980) for Belfast, which distinguishes between close-knit and loose networks and peripheral and central members of networks. Tieken-Boon van Ostade identifies social networks of people corresponding with each other and shows which members of the networks functioned as innovators and which as early adopters with regard to spellings, words and grammatical constructions. Chapter 7 “The Language of Letters and Other Text Types” (119-146) discusses the following text types: letters, journals, memoirs, depositions, wills, recipes, and newspapers. The main focus is on letters and journals, as these are the text types that are closest to spoken language and least monitored by writers. But Tieken-Boon van Ostade also shows that these are highly conventionalised in the opening and closing sections (cf. the example of the spelling of your’s mentioned below) and that the degree of monitoring varied between people and also in the same individual’s usage, depending on the addressee. The book clearly profits from Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s extensive knowledge of this period, which encompasses literature, society and culture, as well as language, and her meticulous analytical methodology. Her background knowledge allows her to see why people use grammatical structures or spellings where other scholars failed to do so (e.g. Görlach’s surprise at the use of ‘incorrect’ possessive your’s in the closing of letters, which Tieken-Boon van Ostade identified as a spelling prescribed in letter manuals (46). In chapter 4 (53) she shows that the two peaks in the chronology of new vocabulary in the Late Modern English period identified by Görlach might be an artefact. She points out that the chronology and frequency distribution of new words in the OED is biased by two factors: (1.) the editors’ tendency to use recent texts for illustration, as a result of which the OED contains c. 8 million quotations from the nineteenth century, but only c. 3 million from the eighteenth, and (2.) the fact that quotations from Johnson’s dictionary are dated to the dictionary’s publication rather than to the origins of its sources, which were considerably earlier, as Johnson avoided quoting living authors. Similarly her careful analysis of social networks shows that women could not only be early adopters of changes introduced by educated men, and that, if they were, this did not in all cases indicate linguistic insecurity (cf. the counterexample of Lady Wortley Montagu), but that they could also adopt changes from below through frequent interaction with servants (115-116). Unfortunately too little space is devoted to the latter observation, which is only briefly mentioned in the “Concluding Remarks” (116). It appears that Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s research throws more doubts on the unmodified applicability of this model than she is prepared to admit. As pointed out above, chapter 2 stands out by being largely a summary of other scholars’ work. Here Tieken-Boon van Ostade uncritically takes over her sources’ interpretation of h-insertion as hypercorrection (23-25), while the kind of rigorous close analysis applied in her other chapters would have shown that this does not hold true for either Dickens’ Cockney characters or & for minimally schooled writers (see Häcker 2003, 2005, 2006: 174-220). The same may be true for other spellings that are interpreted as hypercorrection, where it would have been essential to differentiate between the usage of people with social aspirations (who might use hypercorrect forms) and those without (who were unlikely to do so). It would have also been advisable to give a chronological distribution of the many variants in Martha Ballard’s spelling of the word daughter rather than the list provided on p. 33. This might have thrown some light on ongoing change in pronunciation. It would also have been nice to have been provided with the complete list of the first group of individuals whose names were searched in the OED (chapter 4, p. 58) rather than being referred to the author’s chapter in a handbook, but this may be due to pressures of space. The book contains a few typos. Most of these are clearly identifiable as such, e.g. the long life of Edward Phillips “(1630-c.1796)” (71). The use of proscription (twice on page 91), however, is more confusing, as the reader wonders whether proscription is different from prescription and if so, what the difference is. There are also some (minor) omissions in the index (e.g. there is no entry “apostrophe” nor is the form your’s listed under spelling). Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s analyses are frequently based on electronic resources. Her explanations of her methodology are user-friendly; she always gives search path and search word, so that the reader is able to use her descriptions as instructions for his or her own research. The “Research Questions” encourage follow-up research that in many cases involves the use of electronic resources as a database. The book is a most inspiring textbook, as Tieken-Boon van Ostade not only provides facts about Late Modern English language, but also an understanding, if not love, for the people whose language is described. Yet it is not an easy read; it is densely written with complex syntax, and it presupposes basic linguistic knowledge (IPA symbols, phonological terminology and grammatical categories) and at times considerable general knowledge (e.g. references to manuscripts are given with superscript r and v, without explaining the convention, p. 72). A list of phonetic symbols would have been useful for the non-linguists among the readers and a glossary and an author index would have been a helpful addition, even if there is an index and the book is carefully cross-referenced. The book is the most informative textbook on Late Modern English to date. It is particularly suitable as a textbook for advanced students, as it invites its readers to carry out research in each of the areas discussed. But it is equally recommendable as a source for scholars. Due to its sociolinguistic focus it is also of interest to non-linguists with an interest in the Late Modern English period. Bailey, Richard (1996). Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beal, Joan C. (2004). English in Modern Times 1700-1945. London: Arnold. & --- Görlach, Manfred (1999). English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Häcker, Martina (2003). “From Linking [h] to Glottal Stop: Changes in the Phonotactic System of 20th-Century Cockney”. In: Cornelia Tschichold (ed). English Core Linguistics: Essays in Honour of D.J. Allerton. Bern: Lang. 31-53. Häcker, Martina (2005). “Linking [h] and the Variation between Linking [r] and Glottal Onsets in South African English. In: Cornelia Tschichold and David Spurr (eds.). The Space of English. (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 17). Tübingen: Narr. 207-227. Häcker, Martina (2006). “The Origins and History of [h]-insertion and [h]-loss in English: A Corpus-Based Investigation”. [Unpublished Habilitation dissertation, University of Freiburg]. Milroy, Lesley (1980). Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell. 0 / - # (+ = . / 2 * < G > D 9 D ) + $) 7 ) F6 6 , - ( 1 # , A ) *$ > , ( DH * The study of beginnings of literary texts is as notoriously complex as it is rewarding, since beginnings prove to be very elusive on just about every conceptual level. Beginnings can be made, experienced or determined, they can be points in time as well as longer durations, and they can be actions, too - and this is just the beginning of it. Yet what makes them valuable subjects of analysis is that they are always “over-determined moments in narrative performance” (151), sites of an excess of meaning, always important nodes in the network of what follows them. Every student must have learned in school that the first line of any text deserves special attention, and every journalist knows that this is the line you have to get right, no matter what follows. Yet literary studies has considered beginnings in many more ways than these, and the study under review here - Interfaces of Fiction: Initial Framings in the American Novel from 1790 to 1900 by Christian Quendler - is an excellent example of just how varied and fruitful these considerations can be. Quendler offers a very insightful and thorough analysis of framing practices in American novels published in the Early Republic, the American Renaissance and the Gilded Age (a time line according to which his book is structured). Focusing on beginnings as well as paratextual framings and material aspects of books, he considers them as “historical and culture-specific signposts that illuminate the positions and functions of novelistic fiction in the social and literary landscape of the nine- & teenth century” (1), although his study points beyond that time frame towards modernist and postmodernist fiction as well. Broadly speaking, he defines frames as “cognitive tools by which we navigate through our symbolic universe” (9), though he also emphasizes that this cognitive element must be understood to be social as well. Frames have the function of establishing coherence within a given system and thus also enable communication; in the case of novels, this means that their framings set the discursive stage for a certain relation between text, writer and reader while emplacing them within their respective cultural and historical contexts. While these framings are certainly not limited to beginnings, Quendler is especially interested in initial framings, since he identifies them as special sites where “the desire to explore new functions of novelistic fiction and to make new inroads into hitherto unexplored realms of social discourse” (25) is most pertinent. Methodologically, Quendler moves elegantly between the fields of material and visual culture, frame theory, history, and literary studies (with a special focus on narratology); he is as comfortable carrying out close readings of texts as he is outlining the historical and economic context of writing and publishing novels in broad strokes. His analysis of framing practices is based on some 450 novels published in the time span under consideration, and Quendler has found the appropriate way of dealing with this large corpus. He avoids the danger of overwhelming readers with a statistical or numerical approach; instead, he directly offers the conclusions he draws from his material and supports them by focusing on an example that illustrates the larger argument for the reader. It is no drawback that Quendler keeps his readers somewhat removed from the corpus of texts by avoiding quantitative data, but it is rather an asset that makes this study a compelling and entertaining read. The thesis quoted above is itself the beginning of many others: Quendler’s study proves to be as rich as it is versatile. For example, it is a narrative of the rise of the American novel as it moves from its struggle with Puritan “antifictional prejudice” (46) towards a nationalist agenda and ultimately an assertion of its own aesthetic autonomy. The frames of illustrations, epigraphs, dedications, title pages, etc. indicate how American fiction moved away from its early “low prestige” (31) and dependence on English conventions as well as on the “generic frames of history and (auto-)biography” (40) towards the literary products that catered to a growing mass market as they increasingly diversified and sought to play “a more active part in the constitution of reality” (128). Quendler manages to tell this overarching story of the American novel while at the same time offering many noteworthy details along the way, so that the book successfully combines two levels that are all too often separated in critical texts. It would certainly serve well in any class on the American novel as an introduction to its historical, social, political, economic and aesthetic context, and despite its specialization on a particular approach to literature will give a useful overview of its subject to newcomers, especially as it is written in an accessible and lucid style; at the same time, it offers many new insights even to advanced readers, or refreshes familiar arguments by supporting them from an angle that is often unduly ignored. & A brief enumeration, by no means complete, may indicate this scope. Along the way on the path of this literary history told via frame theory, Quendler offers new perspectives on the problematic distinction between novel and romance by looking at the way these terms were used together in prefaces of the Early Republic period to serve the function of legitimization. He also convincingly discusses the changing concept of authorship, which especially during the American Renaissance began to receive a “positive acknowledgement” that is interpreted as a sign of the “growing independence of fiction as a social discourse” (88). This is in turn related to economic aspects, in particular to practices of publishing, marketing and selling fiction to a large audience, all of which is indicated by contemporary framing practices that also attest to the respective power of the writer, publisher or printer. (It is only regrettable that advertising is not granted a more central role in this section.) Especially the titles of novels prove to be a very fertile ground for interpretation, since they speak of (changes of) concerns, thought and representation that are important in a literary, social, and even philosophical respect: the “continuous development of diminishing titular references to human agents in the history of the American novel” (83-84) which Quendler identifies implies a fundamental change in the conception of not only what a novel does or should be concerned with, but also of the human subject in relation to the world. Observations such as these show that the study is not limited to details of framing that only pertain to a particular text, but that these beginnings can indeed be used to gain insight about a larger context without making hasty generalizations. Very importantly, Quendler presents literary texts throughout as artefacts of visual culture, not only with regard to illustrations, but also in terms of textual materiality. This is especially instructive as such visual elements are all too often only considered by critics when the text in question obviously seems to be ‘out of the ordinary’ or ‘experimental’ while it is usually not taken into account that this is based on assumptions of what we have come to expect of a ‘normal’ novel, and that these conventions have not only changed through time, but also carry meaning. Quendler also offers many interpretations on a textual level that combine a narratological with a New Historicist approach. He is especially interested in how framings negotiate or “reconcile private and individual aspects of reading fiction with its social functions as a practice of cultural communication” (61), thereby becoming the ‘interfaces of fiction’ which the title promises. In order to address this question, Quendler traces the changing role of framings as intermediate spaces between fiction and reality, arguing for example that techniques such as the epistolary form in the Early Republic served to downplay precisely the fictionality of the narration, while novels in the American Renaissance would rather simulate oral storytelling (103), often employing the technique of the “magic script,” which Quendler defines as an object of scripture that serves to forge “a link between the story and its mediation” (105), citing The Scarlet Letter as an example. Other novels of the period would parody traditional frames in order to engage the reader in an ontological play that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction in a way & that seems more postmodernist than Romantic; especially Quendler’s discussion of Melville gives a noteworthy example of such transgressive modes of framing. While Twain continues in a similar mode in the Gilded Age, particularly realist novels instead often aspire to effect “a seamless continuation of an extrafictional referential reality” (135) by “the subduing of narratorial framings” (163). At the same time, writers such as Henry James emphasize the “presentational craft of language” by insisting on the uniqueness of text in comparison to other media, thereby already pointing towards “the modernist preoccupation with the materiality of language” (121). In the conclusion to his study, Quendler follows this outlook on 20 th -century fiction further, outlining future possibilities of an “integrative study that is both textcentered and sensitive to historical and cultural contexts” (150) by virtue of its consideration of the beginnings, framings and interfaces of fiction. Indeed, readers of modernist and postmodernist fiction will often find cause to wonder throughout this work about the implications of this particular approach for these texts. They will find Quendler’s project a useful model for their own studies, itself a frame for future frame analysis; even though the theorization of frames and especially beginnings in the first chapter could have been more expansive, this minor deficit is balanced out by the profound practical analysis in the three main chapters. All in all, Interfaces of Fiction offers both novice and expert readers of American fiction a fascinating and well-written study that tells the story of the novel in the USA until 1900 from an unconventional angle. It can be read as a literary history as well as a narratological analysis, as a study in visual culture as well as in the materiality of the book and its contexts. This variety of perspectives, along with the massive corpus of texts considered, enables Quendler to provide readers with fresh insight even where he covers familiar territory; true to its concern with beginnings, the text itself shows that, in literary studies as in other disciplines, it is always worthwhile to begin again by taking a new look at what only seemed familiar. ( DH * -* 8 # 8 = #40 F * 4. / 0$ & --- - = 5 5 > # +& + )* , ? & - "! ) - . & ( 8 ) 1I F> , 2 A = In his book The Language Impact Alwin Fill, Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, takes his readers on an enlightening journey through time and space: He sets himself the ambitious task of giving a survey of the impact, i.e. “the sum of all the effects language has ‘on the world’” (2) at three levels: (a.) the evolutionary level, (b.) the level of the language system, and (c.) the level of discourse (2-3). This is reflected in the tripartite structure of the book. Each of the parts is a very concise overview and summary of the state of the art of linguistic research, often enriched by findings from other disciplines and with comprehensive accounts of what philosophers and thinkers have written about language. The book contains two appendices: a glossary of terms (Appendix I) and a commented list of thinkers on language impact (229) (Appendix II), from “Agricola, Rudolph (1443-1485)” (229) to “Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951)” (248). It provides readers with an excellent short overview of great thinkers’ views on language. In the first part of his book, Fill compares the impact of speech on the earth to the effects of a meteorite with regard to the scope of its influence: When language evolved, humans had a unique “device usable for at least three macro-purposes: (1) exchanging information; (2) recording achievements […] and passing them on to other groups; and (3) resolving conflicts” (7). This is explored further in three chapters: In the first, Fill discusses various theories of the origins of language and language evolution and closes with a summary and brief assessment. “[T]he needs to be fulfilled which caused language to emerge” (20) leads the author to introduce functional models of language in chapter 2: Ogden and Richards, Bühler, Jakobson and Halliday. The following chapter 3 discusses “Religion, Philosophy and Language Impact Theories” (28), starting with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9) and ending with a reference to the important role language played in the New Testament. After that, views on language by well-known philosophers and scholars are introduced, from Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle to Humboldt, Wittgenstein and Chomsky. Fill closes with the remark that the study of “the uses and effects of language […] is increasingly becoming one of the central tasks of linguistics” (35). And at this point the author clearly deliminates “Impact Linguistics” from Pragmatics: “While Pragmatics studies the uses and effects of language mainly on the discourse level, the present book has a much wider perspective: it looks at the ‘impact’ of language, i.e. its long-term and short-term effects on the levels of evolution, system and discourse.” (35-36). The second part of the book is devoted to “The Impact of Language as a System” (37). It contains six chapters and the major focus of the outline here is an overview and discussion of the relations between language, thought and & reality in the widest sense: Chapter four introduces Humboldt’s ideas on language as energeia (39), chapter five “Language, Thought, Reality” (49) closes with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, chapter six (64) deals with harmful impacts of language. Here, mainly critical views on language by thinkers such as Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mauthner and Kainz are discussed. The chapter closes with a critical assessment of language criticism (80). Chapter seven is a summary of major debates in the field of general semantics with a major focus on the positions of Korzybski, Hayakawa and Stuart Chase (82). Chapter eight is about linguistic constructivism (88): Its roots in philosophy and art are introduced (88), before the general role of language in the construction of our world(s) is explained (89). In the final part (95), the construction of gender and sexuality through language is discussed, highlighting some of the major classic approaches in the field of linguistic gender studies like the deficit, dominance, difference and social constructionist approaches (95). The second part of the book closes with a chapter (9., 102) on cognitive linguistics, focusing on metaphor and framing, and a short summary (10., 110), in which the author points out: Representatives of the ‘construing force’ approach see in language a power strong enough to effect certain changes in our society. The position taken in this book concerning this is that we have to imagine a bidirectional interaction between language and society, in which it is impossible to say whether language mirrors social changes or triggers them. (110) The third and most extensive part of the book deals with the impact of discourse on the world. First, language as discourse is introduced (ch. 11, 113), then precursors of pragmatics are presented (ch. 12, 115) before the author provides a short overview of the field of pragmatics (ch. 13, 120), concentrating mainly on speech act theory and Grice’s maxims. In the following chapter 14 (124), further prominent topics in pragmatics are introduced like interactional patterns and language pathologies (123), humorous effects of language (125) and forensic linguistics (127). An interesting hypothesis brought forward here is that the “movement of Political Correctness has led to the avoidance of jokes about groups and of […] ‘tendentious jokes’ […]” (127) and that because of this “verbal humour played a greater role in the past than it does now […]” (127). The impact of the internet in general (e.g. “Making ideas known globally” (130), “Providing dictionary information for everyone” (130)) and the impact of literary texts in terms of for example their aesthetic (“pleasure and entertainment”, 133), social (“anger, aggression, sympathy, solidarity with underprivileged groups”, 133) and sexual effects (“arousal”, 133) are discussed in chapter 15. Chapter 16 is on discourse ethics and dialogue. Discourse strategies and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) are introduced in chapters 17 and 18. CDA is considered to be “an important contribution to showing the impact of language (as discourse) on human societies” (164). Chapter 19 (165) deals with the discourse of women and men: Typical features, discourse and miscommunication between the sexes and discourses about them are discussed and the impact of gender-biased language is revealed. Ecological linguistics or the interaction between language and the & world is critically assessed in chapter 20 (176). Language is described as a “buffer-zone” (179), i.e. it “positions itself between anger and aggression on the one hand and physical violence on the other” (179), but also as a potential trigger for conflict escalation. In the following section (20.2, 181), the author draws the reader’s attention to ecological and unecological elements of language: Languages “represent reality ‘unecologically’, i.e. with a twovalued logic, but also in terms of subject/ predicate/ object” (182). This “fragmented” thinking (182) leads us to believe, according to this view, that the resources of the earth are limitless and thus is seen to be at least partly responsible for our ecological problems. In the following section (20.3) the anthropocentrism of language is criticized, i.e. representing the world only from humans’ point of view (cf. 184): Calling land which ‘yields’ wood or water ‘a resource’ stresses the fact that it is there only to be used by humans. The alternatives (a forest, land, people, a river, water, etc.) name nature as nature, not as things usable for humans. (184) Section 20.4 (186) then contains a major criticism of eco-criticism. The last four sections of chapter 20 deal with discourse on the environment (20.5), the functions of linguistic diversity (20.6), diversity as a resource and prerequisite for creativity (20.7) and the revival of small languages (20.7). In the last chapter (21., 196), the combination of language with other modes and media is shortly discussed in terms of intermodality and intermediality. The book closes with a summary of its major purposes and an important caveat: While the book […] starts from the assumption that language is an all encompassing, extremely powerful tool (and process), the author has taken care not to overrate this power. He has, at various points, given space to voices which warn of overestimating the impact of language […]. Making students of language avoid the fallacy of blaming on language all the problems of the world […] is an important concern of the book. (201) The strengths of Fill’s book are numerous: the impressively wide range of topics being covered, combined with many thought provoking discussions. The author manages to provide concise and reader-friendly overviews and introductions to major fields and discussions in linguistics, stimulating the interest of the reader to further investigate and look into them. In addition, Fill provides a nicely compiled and condensed account of what major thinkers of past and present times have said about language. The book is thus a valuable resource book for students, experts and all people interested in language alike. Fill has an agreeable way of presenting both sides of an argument when it comes to controversial debates in linguistics so that readers will be able to make up their own minds. He thus provides the best example of a dialogue into which he enters with his readers and which he characterizes himself as follows at one point in his book: Dialogue welds people together and makes the free flowing of opinions and a new understanding possible […]. Dialogue is open and leisurely, people sit in a circle and do not have to come to a ‘result’. The give and take of opinions is & the important thing, there is no ‘dialogue leader’, only someone who guides and accompanies the dialogue. (138) And Fill has done an excellent job in guiding and accompanying the linguistic dialogue with his readers, who will certainly be stimulated to continue and extend it. 2 A = . ' D Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de NEUERSCHEINUNG JETZT BESTELLEN! Björn Rothstein Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten für Linguisten narr studienbücher 2011, 218 Seiten €[D] 19,90/ SFr 30,50 ISBN 978-3-8233-6630-0 Wenn es um „linguistisches Arbeiten“ geht, bestehen bei den Studierenden oftmals große Unsicherheiten bezüglich Inhalt, Form und Methode. Dieses Studienbuch vermittelt Schritt für Schritt die notwendigen Arbeitstechniken, um erfolgreich sprachwissenschaftliche Studien durchführen, präsentieren und verschriftlichen zu können. Klassische Bereiche wie Themenfindung, Informationsbeschaffung, Besonderheiten wissenschaftlicher Textsorten und bibliographische Konventionen werden genauso thematisiert wie die Probleme, vor denen Studierende üblicherweise im Bereich der Linguistik stehen: Lektüre und Überprüfung von linguistischen Texten, Argumentationstechniken, Beweisführungen und die Datenerhebung, -verwaltung und -notation. Zahlreiche Schaubilder und Beispiele veranschaulichen den Text. Für die praktische Anwendbarkeit sorgen die am Ende jedes Kapitels angefügten Checklisten. 013411 Auslieferung Februar 2011.indd 2 10.02.11 12: 00