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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel : Alice Rothkirch “I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul”: Ethics in Early Detective Fiction .............................3 Pascal Fischer Die gebogene Nase: Bedeutungszuschreibungen von Matthew Lewis’ The Monk bis Bram Stokers Dracula ..............................................................29 Mojca Krevel Ghost Busting: The Role of Literary Cyberpunk in the Development of Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century .................................................49 Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko The Language of Alternative Lifestyles: A Critical Analysis of the Discourses of Emos and LOHAS ....................................................................69 Eva Triebl In the Hands of Morpheus: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep ................95 Rezensionen: Maria Löschnigg Michelle Gadpaille, “As She Should Be”: Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing ...............................................................119 Wolfgang Riehle Christa Jansohn, Eta Harich-Schneider: Die Sonette William Shakespeares und die Lyrik der „Rekusanten“. Erlebnisse und Übersetzung einer reisenden Musikerin: 1941-1982 ........................................122 Inhaltsverzeichnis 2 Günther Blaicher Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited ...........................................125 Daniella Jansco Sonja Fielitz (ed.), Shakespare’s Sonnets. Loves, Layers, Language ................128 Birgit Neumann Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology. Approaches and Analyses ..............................................................................132 Sabine Schülting Anne-Julia Zwierlein, (ed.), Gender and Creation. Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority and Authorship ................................135 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,-. 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Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 “I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul” Ethics in Detective Fiction Alyce von Rothkirch This essay deals with the contentious notion that ethical criticism can be fruitfully applied to genre fiction, in this case detective fiction written between 1892 and 1930. An argument is made that an analysis of the ethical frameworks in which detectives and villains act and the scope for ethical decisionmaking that detectives have reveals the cultural assumptions made by authors, editors and readers and allows important insights into genre development. 1. Introduction Ethics is one of the main branches of philosophy and, if a vast generalisation be permitted at the beginning of this essay, it deals with various conceptions of ‘the good life’. The ‘good life’ refers to the worthwhile rather than the merely pleasurable life, and philosophers like Kant have developed frameworks whose observance makes the ‘good life’ possible, whereas Aristotle and followers have focused on the qualities a person needs to develop, so-called ‘virtues’, which allow him or her to live the ‘good life’. Ethical thought in its many variants lends itself to application to everyday contexts, as a cursory glance in any textbook on ethics shows (see, e.g., Singer 1993, Vardy & Grosch 1999). This applies even to the study of literature. Indeed, readers intuitively apply ethical categories to their interpretation of what they read when they ask themselves questions like: “Did Adam Bede do the right thing when he forgave Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot’s Adam Bede? ”, “Is all that violence in Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho really necessary for the point of the book to come across? ” and “What can I learn from Pip’s experiences in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations? ” AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Alyce von Rothkirch 4 Ethical criticism is so ingrained that for the most part of several hundred if not thousand years of literary criticism it was simply called ‘criticism’. However, in the 20 th century ethical criticism fell, in Booth’s words (1988, chapter 2), on hard times. Critics began asking suspiciously whether ethical readings of texts might not end up encouraging readers to think that there was a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way to read a book, that there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ books highlighting ‘good’ and ‘bad’ morality while disguising that it was a particular gendered, political, class-based, etc. viewpoint that was thus privileged. Other critics feared censorship, i.e. the elision of texts from reading lists, library catalogues etc. if they were considered to be morally corrupting, something which did and does, of course, happen. The Leavisite stance, which was at least partly informed by ethical criticism, had become deeply unfashionable, partly because of the assumption that there was one common standard by which to judge books, and partly because of the snobbishness displayed by Q.D. Leavis, who wrote with some exasperation in her report about public libraries entitled Fiction and the Reading Public (1939) that “the bookborrowing public ha[d] acquired the reading habit while somehow failing to exercise any critical intelligence about its reading” (Leavis 1939: 7). Furthermore, ethical critics looking for a ‘message’ sometimes forget that they are dealing with a literary text, which may not directly reflect the author’s point of view. Thus, Brett Easton Ellis, the author of the aforementioned American Psycho, often found himself accused of the misogyny displayed by the central character Patrick Bateman, an accusation which can ultimately not be proved either way (see Aitkenhead 2010). Despite these valid criticisms, ethical criticism is experiencing something of a resurgence, perhaps because of a return of the ethical into the general social (particularly the political) context (e.g. Robin Cook’s attempt at an ‘ethical’ foreign policy in the UK after Labour’s victory in 1997 or George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’, which also framed foreign policy in terms of ethical categories), perhaps because literary critics were becoming tired of some aspects of postmodern theory, which appeared to lose sight of meaning in the free play of signifiers. The many facets of the argument for or against the possibility, viability, desirability and form of ethical criticism have been summarised by Noël Carroll (2000). The main arguments for and against ethical criticism were made by Richard Posner (1997, 1998), Martha C. Nussbaum (1998) and Wayne C. Booth (1998) in their somewhat heated exchange in Philosophy and Literature. In the following, I will assume that the value of ethical criticism for the study of literature has been established pace Posner. I will, instead, focus on another contentious issue: namely the question of whether ethical criticism is possible or meaningful when applied to formula fiction, in this case English detective fiction published between 1892 and 1930. Why is this a contentious issue? Most philosophers and literary critics who endorse ethical literary criticism, like Booth and Nussbaum, apply it Ethics in Detective Fiction 5 to multi-layered narratives with psychologically complex characters. Nussbaum, for instance, can readily derive moral insights for real life by reading Henry James (1990). Booth differentiates what he regards as ‘good’ literature from ‘bad’ literature by arguing that ‘good’ literature allows a meaningful, deep engagement, something he describes in terms of friendship between reader and text. ‘Bad’ literature, in his view, trivialises moral issues. Thus he is outraged at Agatha Christie’s Curtain (1975) because “its conclusion, celebrating altruistic suicide, is not only predictable but to me morally superficial and offensive” (Booth 1988: 59). The implication is that formula fiction like Christie’s is simply not capable of sustaining any meaningful ethical engagement. Booth is clearly right to suggest that formula fiction does not deal with ethical issues in the same way as non-formula fiction can (but not always does). The implication, though, that an analysis of ethical issues in formula fiction is therefore fruitless does not follow. I would endorse Chesterton’s slightly tongue in cheek remark that “[a]ny form of art, however trivial, refers back to some serious truths” (Chesterton 1925) - or at least it can do. There is nothing inherent in the detective fiction formula, which makes this type of fiction inevitably trivial or unsusceptible to an ethical reading: The essence of a mystery tale is that we are suddenly confronted with a truth which we have never suspected and yet can see to be true. There is no reason, in logic, why this truth should not be a profound and convincing one as much as a shallow and conventional one. (Chesterton 1930) Formula fiction is badly served if the critic approaches it with the critical toolkit that is meant to enable her to read multi-layered, non-formulaic fiction with complex characters. It is my aim to explore what kind of critical analysis deals adequately with ethics in early detective fiction. My examples will come from the short stories and novels of the pre-golden age period by Arthur Conan Doyle, who established one of the most powerful detective stereotypes in Sherlock Holmes, R. Austin Freeman, who developed the Holmes stereotype in ways which replicate the cultural assumptions of his time in fascinating ways, and Arthur Morrison, whose rogue detective Horace Dorrington appears, at first glance, to be written in opposition to all that is holy to the Holmes type. A comparison of the ethical frameworks and modus operandi of these three characters will enrich the study of the genre within the cultural context of its time. I will use the term ‘detective fiction’ to describe a particular subset of crime fiction, namely that involving a clearly recognisable amateur detective agent. To explore the possibilities, I will first describe the nature of formula fiction. Cawelti defines ‘formula’ in terms of cultural stereotypes and larger plot patterns. Formulas that are cultural stereotypes refer “to patterns of convention which are usually quite specific to a particular culture Alyce von Rothkirch 6 and period and do not mean the same outside this specific context” (1977: 5). Thus, the stereotype of the ratiocinative detective developed by Conan Doyle, while based on Poe and Gaboriau, emerged from a specific, late 19 th -century British context, which saw the loss of the power of religion to define morality, the rise of science as a provider of truth and explicator of life in general, a redefinition of the nature of crime, the rise of consumer society and, as the century closed, a concern regarding the possible ‘disenchantment’ (Max Weber) with the strictly rational, positivist view of the world (see Saler 2003, 2004, Jackson 1939). A formulaic plot pattern “will be in existence for a considerable period of time before it is conceived by its creators and audience as a genre” (Cawelti 1977: 8). Anne Katherine Green, Poe and Gaboriau were the pioneers, but it took time before crime fiction became recognisable as a genre rather than as fiction with crime elements. It can thus be argued that Conan Doyle and Arthur Morrison wrote at a time when the genre was still in flux, thus allowing them to conceive of detectives with radically different moral outlooks. Formulas do not appear in isolation. Textbooks on crime fiction (e.g. Priestman 1998) show that the formula owed much to the treatment of crime in sensation fiction, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Links can also be made to adventure fiction, e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson, and spy fiction, e.g. William LeQueux or E. Phillips Oppenheimer (see Haynsworth 2001). Chandler has argued that the balance of popularity between rogue story and detective story tipped over in favour of the detective story when the rogue story lost its appeal at the end of the 19 th century, which makes the detective a close relative of the literary rogue such as E.W. Hornung’s Raffles (F.W. Chandler 1907: 524ff.). Finally, Holbrook Jackson draws attention to the elements detective fiction shares with romance, stories which follow a predetermined pattern and which generally end ‘well’, numbering Conan Doyle as one of the writers of the ‘new romance’, which “owed its renaissance to Science” (Jackson 1939: 202; see also Saler 2004: 611). The detective story emerged from a variety of literary formulas and genres at a particular point in time and has proved flexible enough to persist in a range of genre variations to this day. Formula fiction is a type of mass art, which Carroll defines as “the art of mass society, predicated on addressing mass audiences by means of the of the opportunities afforded by mass technologies” (Carroll 1997: 189). They are accessible and readily assimilated by ‘untutored’ audiences - untutored, that is, in literary knowledge (Carroll 1998: 196). The detective story was shaped by the opportunities and pressures of the new literary mass market in literary magazines like The Strand, Windsor Magazine or Pall Mall Gazette and mass-produced books, i.e. largely by the literary tastes and expectations of editors and a mass readership. This had and still has repercussions for the ethical frameworks of the narratives and for Ethics in Detective Fiction 7 the scope of ethical decision-making given to detectives. The accessibility criterion means that complex moral issues are often simplified to stark moral choices, although more recent crime fiction has aimed at a more subtle treatment of ethical issues. Authors are likely to write according to established ethical schemata, which allow readers to understand moral issues and dilemmas with reference to their own life experience and which readers usually endorse. Moral learning occurs largely by activating and modifying existing beliefs rather than by adding new schemata (Carroll 1998: 323). Going completely against the grain of readers’ moral convictions, as non-formulaic fiction often does, is usually not encouraged by editors or publishers, nor are books like that likely to sell well. Again exceptions, which confound conventional moral expectations exist, like Patricia Highsmith’s Mr Ripley. More usually, though, reader reactions and buying habits lead to standardisation. In this way genres and the rules that govern them are shaped by an ethical criticism of the book buying public and literary editors, who try to satisfy what they regard as public demand. Usually ethical criticism of literature focuses on the way readers identify with characters. Currie has proposed a model by which such identification is possible by simulation. He assumes that readers temporarily take on the beliefs and desires of main characters (1995: 252). I share Carroll’s doubts that simulation actually describes our reading experience. Instead, readers are more likely to observe characters in action and compare their lives with their own (1998: 342-356). More importantly, though, the idea that readers gain moral knowledge through identification makes an ethical reading of formula fiction impossible as formula fiction consists of stereotypical characters and situations, which do not encourage identification. In pre-golden age detective stories readers cannot identify with the detective, who tends to be presented as brilliant and remote. Villains only appear very briefly and are drawn to be unlike the readers. Victims are passive. The only character who is at all close to the readers is usually the narrator, and it is not his morality we are interested in. Problematic as it is in other types of fiction, identification is clearly not the right approach for formula fiction like early detective fiction. What can an ethical criticism achieve? Main characters in formula fiction are based on stereotypes but they are not necessarily simple creations. Successful formula characters like Sherlock Holmes consist of striking, often contradictory elements. They represent cultural characteristics of their time and those that transcend it. Holmes embodies the late 19 th century faith in the scientific method but he is also a romantic knighterrant, who is motivated by his sense of chivalric duty and valour. An ethical reading can disentangle the various motives of detectives and provide explanations why stereotypes work for historical as well as contemporary readerships. Alyce von Rothkirch 8 Moreover, and pace the many theorists who see the reader/ viewer of mass art as a purely passive consumer of pre-fabricated pap, I would agree with Carroll, who argues that mass art does not induce mere passivity in audiences: Reading a novel […] is itself generally a moral activity in so far as reading narrative literature - from Thackeray to Patricia Cornwell - typically involves us in a continuous process of moral judgment, which […] itself can contribute to the expansion of our moral understanding. (1998: 331, italics in the original) A great deal of the success of the formula is predicated upon the reader accepting its key elements as interesting, entertaining and being within acceptable limits of morality. The reader who disapproves of Dashiell Hammett’s portrayal of the forces of the law as corrupt is unlikely to pick up another hard-boiled detective novel. The task of the ethical critic of formula fiction is to map out the ethical choices open to significant and successful formula characters and to determine implied and actual audience reactions. As Raymond Williams has so successfully argued, a work of art does not exist in isolation: it is written in line with or against other works of art and exists in an environment made up of authors, editors, readers and even non-readers who are aware of the stereotype developed in a story. It was to describe “this essential relationship” between a work of art and its environment, and the power of a work of art to influence that environment, that Williams coined the term “structure of feeling”, writing: “What I am seeking to describe is the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period” (1964: 9). A detective story is read by many people, discussed, forgotten (most of the time), anthologised and thus canonised (some of the time) and perhaps even adapted for other media. Some stereotypes, such as the Holmes formula, survive and determine the general shape of what later becomes known as a genre. An analysis of the ethical framework of detective stories as well as the detectives’ scope for ethical decision making is thus a powerful tool to gain insights into contemporary cultural attitudes as well as the mechanics of genre development. 2. Sherlock Holmes: the scientific artist at work Sherlock Holmes first appeared in the novella A Study in Scarlet (1887) and since then has never left public consciousness. He has had an interesting career in fiction, on stage and on screen, the latest example being the radical re-interpretation by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss for BBC TV in 2010. Holmes is an unofficial consulting detective, who is engaged by the police on a case by case basis and by an ever increasing number of pri- Ethics in Detective Fiction 9 vate clients. He is a university-educated gentleman, who, despite his professional manner, continues the tradition of the Victorian amateur scientist. For Raymond Chandler, Holmes is “mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue” (1960). Indeed, he is not a realistic character: he has no depth, does not develop and is made up of easily identifiable characteristics - he has a brilliant mind, is emotionally cold, is egocentric and has a Bohemian disregard for ordinary middle-class lifestyles despite holding up middle-class virtues to the villains he encounters (see Knight 1980: 92). He is also unfailingly chivalrous, being imprinted with Conan Doyle’s concept of the knightly honour code (see Carr 1953: 63). He is a man of his time and a timeless romantic hero, and, of course, the perfect English gentleman. An interesting question is whether Holmes’s gentlemanly honour code is based on purely class-based characteristics or whether it is primarily ethical in nature. In his analysis of the Raffles stories, for instance, Orwell reads the gentleman’s code as “merely certain rules of behaviour” which are observed “semi-instinctively” and thus do not constitute actual ethical choices (1965: 66). Holmes has internalised this code, but he also reflects on the ethical choices he makes - usually at the end of a case when he decides whether to give up the villain to the police or not. His scope of ethical decision-making thus goes beyond an unthinking application of a class-based code of behaviour. Holmes’s sense of justice is based on Victorian Utilitarianism according to the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who in his immensely influential Methods of Ethics (1874) aimed to provide an ethical framework without recourse to God (see also Schneewind 1977). Holmes’s work is largely determined by the principle of securing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. His motivation to do his job, on the other hand, is based on hedonism tempered by his chivalric honour code: he is a detective because he enjoys solving puzzles and feels honour-bound to aid needy clients. In this way, he embodies the strangely schizophrenic world of the Decadent 1890s: he is deeply moral, but also filled with ennui at stuffy Victorian moral conventions. Sherlock Holmes’s Utilitarian principles are most obvious when he, acting unofficially, has determined the identity of the villain and has to decide whether to alert the police. In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (1892), the morally weak hotel attendant James Ryder succumbs to the lure of the jewel, steals it, panics, and makes a mess out of trying to rid himself of the jewel to evade arrest. He breaks down when Holmes confronts him. Holmes lets him go and reflects: “After all […] I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner [another suspect arrested by the police] were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too Alyce von Rothkirch 10 terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now, and you make him a gaol-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.” (126) Holmes reasons that no useful purpose can be served by having Ryder arrested. Indeed, Ryder might be turned into a real criminal by his prison experience, which would not serve the principle of utility. Importantly for the development of the formula, it is Holmes who dispenses justice rather than the forces of the law. In “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” (1903), he holds an impromptu jury trial with him in the role of judge and the English everyman Watson as jury. As the victim, Sir Eustace Brackenstall, turns out to have been the villain - a favourite plot twist of Conan Doyle’s - and as he had died by misadventure rather than murder, the accused, Captain Croker, who is in love with the widow, is acquitted by this jury. Holmes pronounces a fitting sentence: if nobody else is arrested by mistake, he will keep quiet. Croker, in turn, has to promise to only return after a decent interval to marry Lady Brackenstall. Holmes thus ensures that Lady Brackenstall’s innocence is in no way questioned, e.g. by an overly hasty remarriage, and that her honour is left intact. The principles of utility and of chivalry are observed. And, as no other person is concerned, the affair can be kept out of the public eye. Preventing public scandal is a major concern for Holmes, and this reflects how the birth of an intrusive mass journalism in the 1890s had changed the nature of the public sphere. A number of stories feature exalted aristocratic clients, whose problems are to be kept out of the public arena, but whom Holmes feels free to castigate in private. “The Adventure of the Priory School” (1903) is typical: it is a preparatory school for the privileged and the Duke of Holdernesse, a great man of public affairs, has his son Lord Saltire educated there. The boy disappears, and the German master Heidegger, who mysteriously disappeared at the same time as the boy, is found dead. Holmes shows that James Wilder, the Duke’s secretary, was responsible for the kidnapping and that the Duke colluded with him. What comes as a surprise even to him is the Duke’s confession that Wilder is his illegitimate son. Holmes’s manner towards the Duke is designed to deflate the man’s immense arrogance in private. An astonished Watson reports how Holmes “stepped forward and touched the Duke on the shoulder. “I accuse YOU […] . And now, your Grace, I’ll trouble you for that cheque’” (94). Holmes is not an effusive man and by touching such an elevated personage he asserts his moral superiority. Holmes also uses the address ‘your Grace’ with a frequency that makes the reader suspect that he is being ironic. Finally, the reader knows that Holmes only insists on being paid when he deals with a client whom he is required to respect socially, but whom he despises morally: Ethics in Detective Fiction 11 In the first place, your Grace, I am bound to tell you that you have placed yourself in a most serious position in the eyes of the law. You have condoned a felony and you have aided the escape of a murderer; for I cannot doubt that any money which was taken by James Wilder to aid his accomplice in his flight came from your Grace’s purse. […] Even more culpable, in my opinion, your Grace, is your attitude towards your younger son. […] To humour your elder son you have exposed your innocent younger son to imminent and unnecessary danger. It was a most unjustifiable action. (87) Again, Holmes is shown to be concerned with a more general justice than mere justice in the eyes of the law: Wilder is held morally culpable for Heidegger’s death but, more importantly, the Duke is held responsible for exposing his legitimate son to unnecessary danger. Holmes’s critique is that of a social conservative who is offended that the Duke has not fulfilled the role of moral leader predicated by his noble birth. Once the child is out of danger Holmes suggests that the Duke should separate himself from Wilder and seek forgiveness from his estranged wife, so that the nuclear family unit can be restored and fulfil the function of social and moral leadership that the middle class expects of them. The degree of Holmes’s meddling in the Duke’s private affairs and the Duke’s meek acquiescence shows the power of a middle class in the ascendancy as well as the workings of Holmes’s Utilitarian ethics: once the innocent are protected and the transgressive elements are removed, Holmes can afford to drop the inquiry. Holmes often follows the principle of Act Utilitarianism: actions that are commonly regarded as morally bad - such as burglary or theft - can turn out to lead to good ends, for instance when the burglary is committed in the house of a well-known blackmailer and the theft concerns indiscrete letters from an otherwise blameless victim. This is the plot of “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” (1903), in which Holmes resorts to burglary when his attempts to reason with Milverton fail. Interestingly, the story is written to resemble a typical Raffles story, but one that is morally improved as the burglary is justified. Conan Doyle never approved of his brother in law E.W. Hornung’s Raffles stories. Conan Doyle himself felt so uncomfortable about writing crime stories that he often twisted the plots so that no crime actually occurred. He did not like the idea that the Raffles stories, which feature the aristocratic gentleman burglar and his sidekick Bunny, might superficially resemble his own stories, arguing that a hero should not be an unrepentant criminal (see Carr 1953). But Doyle was not insensible to the value of a good adventure yarn. Watson records: My first feeling of fear had passed away, and I thrilled now with a keener zest than I had ever enjoyed when we were the defenders of the law instead of its defiers. The high object of our mission, the consciousness that it was unselfish and chivalrous, the villainous character of our opponent, Alyce von Rothkirch 12 all added to the sporting interest of the adventure. Far from feeling guilty, I rejoiced and exulted in our dangers. (124) Watson’s keen enjoyment replicates Bunny’s emotions on the occasion of the latter’s first burglary almost verbatim: The romance and the peril of the whole proceeding held me spellbound and entranced. My moral sense and my sense of fear were stricken by a common paralysis. And there I stood, shining my light and holding my phial with a keener interest than I had ever brought to an honest occupation. (Hornung 1899: 22-23) However, the thrill, which reveals Bunny’s moral bankruptcy, is heightened in Watson’s case by being entirely justified. The interests of utility allow Holmes and Watson to briefly cross the line into lawlessness in order to establish justice. Holmes’s stance towards his profession is that of a hedonist: the thrill of the chase, the complexity of the problem, and the chance of a “sporting duel” with a cunning villain outweigh other considerations (“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”, 121). This hedonism is expressed in an unflattering egocentrism and vanity, but it does not compromise the outcome of his cases. Schultz interprets Sidgwick’s Utilitarianism as not being based “on pure reason alone” and thus as being different from Kantian ethics (2006: np). Holmes proves the point that a mixture of hedonist enjoyment and Act Utilitarian ethics can lead to moral outcomes. The Sherlock Holmes stories thus weave together elements of knightly romance narratives with elements of adventure stories and elements of the emerging formula of the ratiocinative detective (see Arthur Bartlett Maurice - no bibliographical details of the source given - quoted in Wells 2007: np). Saler comments that this mixture was characteristic for a time, which “mourned the apparent absence of communal beliefs and higher ideals in an age that seemed dominated by positivism and materialism” (Saler 2003: 602). Holmes’s scope for ethical decision-making fully reflects the culture of the 1890s in England. His tendency to take the law into his own hands reflects not only a prevailing distrust of the police following the Jack the Ripper fiasco in 1888 (see Flanders 2011: 425ff.) but also the sureness of his moral instincts, which were (and probably are) largely endorsed by the reading public. 3. Dr Thorndyke and the duty of a citizen Like Conan Doyle, R. Austin Freeman was a medical doctor who, however, was forced to give up practising due to ill-health and who wrote detective fiction as a way to make a living. When the first stories featuring his series hero Dr Thorndyke appeared, he had already acquired something of a name for himself as the author of the acclaimed travel Ethics in Detective Fiction 13 narrative Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman (1898), which drew on his experiences as an army doctor in Africa. He had also published stories about the rogue Romney Pringle, a more middle-class version of Raffles, with J.J. Pitcairn under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown. The Red Thumb Mark appeared in 1907 and already has all the ingredients which were to characterise all further novels and short stories, which were published until well into the 1940s. Even though the period of Freeman’s writing thus overlaps with the development of the golden age detective novel, he continued to employ a formula that was pre-war and was more closely related to the Holmesian formula than to that of contemporary writers. When looking at Thorndyke, one cannot help but discern the angular outline of the shadow of Sherlock Holmes behind him. Reviewing Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes in 1933, Marcus Magill writes approvingly: But pride of place among those in the Holmes tradition belongs without question to Dr. Thorndyke. He was one of the first in the field and he remains pre-eminent. Dr. Freeman’s medico-legal expert is more human and less showy than his great predecessor; his knowledge of forensic medicine and his use of scientific deduction are fully as sound. An Austin Freeman book has a flavour as precise and individual as had the Conan Doyle series and it is not surprising to find his novels on the bookshelves of serious students of crime. (Magill 1933: 412) Freeman always denied that Thorndyke was based on Holmes, protesting (too much? ) that [h]e was deliberately invented. [… H]is personality was designed in accordance with certain principles and what I believed to be the probabilities as to what such a man would be like. As mental and bodily characters are usually in harmony, a fine intellect tending to be associated with a fine physique, I made him tall, strong, active and keen-sighted. As he was a man of acute intellect and sound judgment, I decided to keep him free from eccentricities, such as usually are associated with an ill-balanced mind, and to endow him with the dignity of presence, appearance and manner appropriate to his high professional and social standing. Especially I decided to keep him perfectly sane and normal. (cited in Donaldson 1971: 65) In other words, this is a character with the brain of a Holmes but with none of his eccentricities. Freeman was a supporter of the Eugenics movement and a critic of what he believed to be modern degeneracy (see his Social Decay and Regeneration 1921). Thorndyke, a medico-legal expert, was based on thoroughly modern and rational principles. Freeman delighted in rewriting some of Conan Doyle’s plots to debunk the scientific mystification upon which they rested and to base them on science that actually worked. Thus The Red Thumb Mark (1907) takes the evidence of a faked bloody thumb print in Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” (1903), disproves that it could have been faked in the way Doyle suggests and demonstrates another way in which finger- Alyce von Rothkirch 14 prints can be faked. In “A Case of Premeditation”, he shows how the apparently fail-safe sense of smell of the bloodhound, used to great effect in The Sign of the Four (1890, later The Sign of Four), can be misled. Similarly, in “The Anthropologist at Large” (1909), Thorndyke makes short work of Holmes’s complicated deductions of the evidence of an old hat in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (1892) by suggesting that the hat could have been purchased second-hand before commencing on his rather more believable deductions. Thorndyke is evidently meant as an improvement of Holmes. This includes a changed ethical outlook. Where Holmes puts his enjoyment and the principle of Utility above everything else, Thorndyke follows an ethical code based on a priori ethical principles. His duty is to establish the truth regardless of consequences. Where Holmes had emerged out of the decadent 1890s, Thorndyke is a thoroughly modern Edwardian. A further motivation is that of being a good citizen, which usually entails assisting the police and acting in a lawful way - unlike Holmes. In “A Message from the Deep Sea”, he observes a policeman inadvertently destroy vital evidence with some chagrin, but, nevertheless he pledges that “I need not say that I shall do anything that seems necessary to assist the authorities. That is a matter of common citizenship” (1909: 178). Also unlike Holmes, Thorndyke rarely acts unless he is professionally instructed. As a professional, he always puts duty before inclination, but one senses that duty and inclination are one and the same thing. His goal is to make sure that the case is solved and the guilty party is punished. Usually his stance is reassuring to friends and clients, but sometimes it frightens characters, particularly if they suffer from a guilty conscience, however unmerited. Helen Vardon’s Confession (1922) is narrated by Helen Otway, née Vardon, who, through a series of strange coincidences, is the last to see her estranged husband alive. Helen, who married Otway against her will and separated from him almost immediately, has good reasons to want to be free of him: she has fallen in love with someone else. When Otway, his health wrecked by a campaign of threatening letters, confesses to a fear of committing suicide, Helen is tempted to subconsciously try to influence his thoughts, having previously experienced the power of hypnotic suggestion. When Otway dies, Helen is terrified. To her guilty conscience, Thorndyke appears as an avenging angel, who dispenses justice without mercy. “Dr. Thorndyke was not a guesser. If he had penetrated to that secret he would offer no speculative probabilities, but definite evidence, which would reduce the matter to certainty” (311). In the end, Thorndyke proves that Otway was killed by his previous mistress and housekeeper Mrs Gregg and he thoroughly debunks the pseudoscience of hypnotic suggestion. However, the impression is that if Helen had been guilty, Thorndyke would not have hesitated to pronounce the truth. Ethics in Detective Fiction 15 Thorndyke’s working methods express his ethics practically. The truth is established by a confirmation of facts, which are then logically linked. In this, Thorndyke is a materialist and positivist. Facts and logical reasoning are always to be preferred to mere testimonial. This is a metaphor of some importance in The Eye of Osiris (1911), in which the issue of fact versus testimonial comes to stand for a struggle between a priori moral principles versus moral relativism, which, in Thorndyke’s view, would shatter English civilisation. John Bellingham, a rich collector of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, dies naturally if unexpectedly in the house of the lawyer Mr Jellicoe. Bellingham’s unfortunate will dictates that his brother Godfrey can only inherit if John’s body is buried in one of three specific sites - otherwise his cousin George Hurst inherits. Jellicoe has some financial interest in Hurst inheriting the money and decides to hide the body so that it cannot be buried. He mummifies it and hides it in a mummy case, which Bellingham had planned to give to the British Museum. Jellicoe is finally foiled by Thorndyke, who, with the aid of x-ray photography, proves that the body in the case is Bellingham’s. Jellicoe is the perfect villain as he constitutes Thorndyke’s moral opposite. He is a moral relativist who believes that the stronger argument necessarily wins. He expounds his views to Dr Berkeley, the narrator: The scientific outlook is radically different from the legal. The man of science relies on his own knowledge and observation and judgment, and disregards testimony […]. A court of law must decide according to the evidence which is before it; and that evidence is of the nature of sworn testimony. If a witness is prepared to swear that black is white and no evidence to the contrary is offered, the evidence before the Court is that black is white, and the Court must decide accordingly. The judge and the jury may think otherwise - they may even have private knowledge to the contrary - but they have to decide according to the evidence. (79-80) When Berkely inquires if that does not make miscarriages of justice possible, Jellicoe replies smoothly: “Certainly […] There is a case of a judge who sentenced a man to death and allowed the execution to take place, notwithstanding that he - the judge - had actually seen the murder committed by another man. But that was carrying correctness of procedure to the verge of pedantry” (80). Even allowing for irony, Jellicoe is inhumanly cold and amoral. At the end of the novel, he is forced to admit defeat, which, characteristically, is worded in terms of a defeat of method: Jellicoe admits to the lawyer’s “incurable habit of underestimating the scientific expert” (212). While Holmes is happy to set himself up as judge, Thorndyke rarely does so. Instead, he tends to appear as the expert witness on the side of the defence. This is not to say that Thorndyke is never tempted to take the law into his own hands. In The Eye of Osiris (1911) he guesses that Jellicoe is planning to kill himself after his confession, but does nothing to prevent it. And in one of the few times when he is not professionally Alyce von Rothkirch 16 engaged to solve the crime, he acts like Holmes and dispenses justice as he sees fit. The novel Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) reworks a plot originally developed for the short story “A Case of Premeditation” (1912). This is an ‘inverted’ detective story - an invention by Freeman - in which the reader observes the villain do his deed and then watches Thorndyke solve the crime - a way of telling the story which is now used to greater effect by writers of thrillers, particularly those which feature serial killers. In the short story, the convict Rufus Pembury, a “man of strong character and intelligence” (50) succeeds in escaping from prison and then, sensibly, turns his back on his life of crime and earns his fortune by hard work in America. He returns to England to retire, but encounters a man who used to be warder at his prison. The man attempts to blackmail him and Pembury realises immediately that the only way to escape his tormentor is to kill him. Thorndyke, acting professionally, solves the case. Pembury escapes, however, and Thorndyke sympathises: “he deserved to escape. It was clearly a case of blackmail, and to kill a blackmailer - when you have no other defence against him - is hardly murder” (81). In Mr Pottermack’s Oversight, the central moral question “Can killing a blackmailer be justified? ” is made clearer by disambiguating the circumstances of the murder. Here, the ex-convict and prison escapee Marcus Pottermack is a victim of a miscarriage of justice, while the blackmailer James Lewson, a former friend and colleague of Pottermack’s, is guilty of the original crime as well. James Lewson is a particularly bad man, as he also draws in Pottermack’s former fiancée Alice, marries her for her money, and then slowly drains her financial resources as far as her settlement will allow. Alice now lives separated from her husband and allows other people to believe that she is a widow. Pottermack, having gone to America, made his money and returned like Pembury, recognises Alice in the street and determines to live near her in the hope of rekindling their former love. Lewson recognises him as well and blackmails him. As the novel opens, Pottermack realises that he must somehow rid himself of this incubus before he can declare his love to Alice. Despite his revulsion, he kills Lewson. The justice of the killing and his subsequent actions are explained in the following way: “His previous experiences of the law had taught him that mere innocence is of no avail” (105), and being an escaped convict, he was not able to go to the police even if he had wanted to. Thorndyke believes that Pottermack’s deed is condonable from the beginning and studiously avoids being called in as an expert witness, which would force him to represent the side of the law against Pottermack. A complicated plot twist, however, forces Pottermack to produce a body, so that Lewson can be pronounced officially dead and Alice can marry again. Once the body, an Egyptian mummy carefully de-mummified by Pottermack, turns up, Thorndyke has momentary misgivings: Ethics in Detective Fiction 17 It was here that the question of public policy arose. For here was undoubtedly a dead person. If that person proved to be James Lewson, there was nothing more to be said. But if he were not James Lewson, then it became his, Thorndyke’s, duty as a citizen and a barrister to ascertain who he was and how his body came to be dressed in Lewson’s clothes; or, at least, to set going inquiries to that effect. (120) Having ascertained, though, that Pottermack managed to fool the coroner and the doctor into believing that the body of an Egyptian mummy was the corpse of James Lewson, Thorndyke permits himself to admire his skill and does not intervene. This is Thorndyke at his most Holmesian, as he carefully considers the effects of his actions and decides that - as nobody except the blackmailer was in any way injured - he could afford to let Pottermack go. However, only the fact that the murdered man was a blackmailer and the killer so entirely wronged allows Thorndyke to come to this decision. Thorndyke’s ethical stance, predicated as it is upon a secular Kantian ethics, makes Thorndyke a highly principled character, whose principles must not be sacrificed even if that would make for a more interesting narrative. Contrary to other fictional detectives, he never reveals his hunches, intuitions and deductions until the end. In this he follows Holmes and other detectives who still follow the adventure formula, but Thorndyke is no adventure hero. Neither does he satisfy readers’ interest in dashing, romantic or eccentric qualities of fictional detectives. Given Freeman’s tendency to indulge in lengthy descriptions of scientific methods, it is perhaps surprising that the stories and novels are not boring. Raymond Chandler writes that Freeman “has no equal in his genre […] because he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected. The apparatus of his writing makes for dullness, but he is not dull” (cited in Donaldson 1971: 65-66). Freeman is a skilful creator of suspense and he, wisely perhaps, includes strong narrators, who bring humour and romance into the stories. Thorndyke is perhaps unique among the literary detectives for expressing the somewhat strident confidence and optimism of the Edwardian years, and also the peculiar way in which personal and public duty are often indivisible for Edwardian writers. Thorndyke is a man of science working for the universal betterment of humankind. This sense of confidence in rationalism and scientific method is now dated in two ways. Firstly, it is based on eugenicist teachings and a good dose of anti-semitism, which are unacceptable now. Secondly, this implicit faith in positivist materialism and the stridently optimistic tone of the time were shaken during the First and shattered during the Second World War. Thorndyke did not transcend the ethical mores of his time: he was the end of a line rather than a progenitor of a new stereotype, and, today, he is rather a museum piece. Alyce von Rothkirch 18 4. Horace Dorrington: the detective as rogue Arthur Morrison, a journalist and writer primarily known for his realist depictions of slum life in London’s East End (e.g. Child of the Jago 1896), also created two detectives: Martin Hewitt, who resembled Holmes closely except in outward appearance, and Horace Dorrington, a shady rogue detective and confidence trickster. Both characters were created in the wake of Sherlock Holmes’s spectacular disappearance down the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, which evidently created a need for new detective fiction. In this essay I want to focus on Dorrington, as his rogue characteristics at first seem to be at odds with the detective formula. Clarke has argued that “the detective/ criminal binary becomes blurred [in the Dorrington stories]; and the rule of law is almost completely absent, thus destabilizing the genre’s reassuring nature and readers’ conception of trust, morality, justice, and the way that society operates” (2010: 8). It seems to me, though, that Dorrington is not so much a misfit in a mostly coherent genre, but that the genre displayed considerable fluidity in the 1890s. At the outset the detective formula - close as it is to that of the literary rogue and the real-life police thief-taker - evidently did not prescribe the ethical outlook of the detective. Dorrington shares characteristics with rogues like Raffles, Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay, Guy Boothby’s Simon Carne and Clifford Ashdown’s Romney Pringle. Nor is Dorrington the only detective who is a crook, although it must be noted that detective-crooks tend to appear in stories which are either parodies or at least mildly ironic. In Grant Allen’s “The Great Ruby Robbery: A Detective Story” (1892), the police detective Mr Gregory is the villain, as is Mr Grodman, the retired policeman in Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1895). In Guy Boothby’s “The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds” (1897), Simon Carne successfully pretends to be the celebrated detective Klimo, who ‘solves’ the case of the disappearing diamonds without actually returning them to the Duchess. Victorian novels with detective elements nearly always express a distrust of police officers, who tend to be incompetent bunglers, e.g. Frances Trollope’s Hargrave, or the Adventures of a Man of Fashion (1843). Even narratives written by authors who are impressed with the efficiency of the newly founded detective force, such as Charles Dickens (Bleak House 1852-53) or Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone 1868; for the relationship of both novels with the Road murder case see Summerscale 2008 and Flanders 2010), express a deep unease about the way in which the detectives, who are regarded as lower-class interlopers, meddle with the private affairs of the middle class with little regard for social conventions. Just a few decades earlier, members of the police force had been thief-takers and had often been just one step removed from criminality themselves. It appears that a spectrum of more or less ethically dubious detectives existed in the 1890s before the literary marketplace decided that it preferred the Holmesian formula. Ethics in Detective Fiction 19 The reviews of the Dorrington Deed-Box, the collection of the six Dorrington stories that appeared in the Windsor Magazine in 1897, bear this out. The anonymous reviewer in The Bookman enthuses: The private inquiry agent is generally a noble hero, according to the modern story-teller. Mr. Morrison, in this exciting tale, shows how formidable a villain he can be with his unusual opportunities. You may positively ensure a lively hour by the perusal of “The Dorrington Deed-Box”. (1897: 54) Not only is the reviewer completely unshocked by Dorrington’s amoral behaviour - he or she is positively delighted by Morrison’s ingenuity in twisting the emerging genre conventions. The reviewer for The Graphic concurs: Without professing an exhaustive knowledge of all the stories of criminal mystery that have ever appeared, it is pretty safe to say that “The Dorrington Deed-Box” […], by Mr. Arthur Morrison, will be found very hard to beat indeed - even by Mr. Arthur Morrison. He has found virtually fresh direction for his inventive powers in making his detective the hero of six separate cases, his premier criminal also. (1897: 804, see similar comments by the anonymous reviewer for Academy 1897: 127) The reviewers applaud Morrison for having invented a new variation on what was rapidly coalescing as stereotypical characteristics of a literary detective. By contrast, in the 1920s, when the genre had established its rules, reviewers would mock-scold G.K. Chesterton for not conforming to them (McQuilland 1927: 443). However, writing about a rogue detective does not necessarily mean endorsing an amoral ethical framework. “The Case of Janissary” (1897) begins with Dorrington doing a straightforward piece of detective work on behalf of the owner of a stable, who hires him because he is afraid that his best horse might be ‘nobbled’. Dorrington astutely prevents the shady bookmaker Naylor from incapacitating the horse. The second half of the story deals with Naylor and his attempt to kill the stable owner’s nephew because he cannot afford to pay out his winnings. Dorrington interrupts Naylor’s attempt at murder and blackmails him into working for him and, if necessary, to kill people on demand. The ethical implications are obvious: Dorrington is honest when it suits him, and it is only by chance that he prevents two murders. His blackmailing another crook into becoming his hired killer is chilling in its implications. But it is quite clear, firstly, that the reader is not to endorse his behaviour and, secondly, that the actual outcome of this story is that Dorrington prevents two crimes. The story also shows that Dorrington usually plays fair with ordinary people, whereas he tricks people who are crooks themselves. “The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co. Limited’” uses a similar principle. It is a fascinating story because it deals with a relatively new technology Alyce von Rothkirch 20 - upright bicycles, also referred to as safety bicycles - and with a particular type of white-collar crime: stock market fraud. The outwardly respectable manager of the “Indestructible” bicycle company, Mr Mallows, is involved in shady business dealings on the side. He and confederates set up the fictitious firm “Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co. Limited”, re-label a few bicycles, and begin a marketing campaign that is to culminate in the company’s entry into the stock market. Their plan is to let the company disappear overnight and to escape with the profits. Dorrington, curious if he can make money out of the new craze, uses a minor case as a way into the “Indestructible” company to gain insider information. By chance he realises that Mallows is up to no good, sets up a trap and offers Mallows a deal. Characteristically, Dorrington sees nothing wrong with the scam as such but wants to share in the profits. Mallows resists and nearly kills Dorrington, who promptly revenges himself by exposing Mallows to the newspapers. This story is typical in that it is made quite clear that Mallows’s and Dorrington’s actions are reprehensible. The reader derives entertainment from seeing two crooks fight, and, while Dorrington gets away with some money, it is by no means the large profit he was aiming for. Crime does not pay, and there is no ‘honour among thieves’. From an ethical point of view the most interesting story is the first, “The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby”, which introduces the reader to Dorrington and provides the frame narrative for all subsequent stories. In a striking breach of the usual convention of either employing a Watson character as first-person narrator or an omniscient third-person narrator, this story is told as a first-person narrative from the point of view of the victim. This is unusual because the reader is not normally induced to have much sympathy with the victim (Cawelti 1977: 91). Here, the reader witnesses how the crook-detective carefully ensnares his victim and almost succeeds in killing him. Rigby escapes to tell the tale, however, and even though Dorrington has long escaped when the police raid his office, Rigby finds his ‘deed box’, which gives him his material for the subsequent narratives. James Rigby, an impossibly naïve Australian, is emigrating ‘back’ to England. Being “without a friend in the world” (248) after his mother’s death, he is lured into telling his life story to the charming Dorrington, whom he meets on the boat. In fact, Rigby’s unreserved admiration for Dorrington has something of the homoeroticism of Bunny’s descriptions of Raffles: He was a tall, well-built fellow, rather handsome, perhaps, except for a certain extreme roundness of face and fulness of feature; he had a dark military moustache, and carried himself erect, with a swing as of a cavalryman, and his eyes had, I think, the most penetrating quality I ever knew. His manners were extremely engaging, and he was the only good talker I had ever met. (248) Ethics in Detective Fiction 21 What is interesting about this description of Dorrington is that it contradicts the central assumption of Victorian criminology following Cesare Lombroso (L’uomo deliquente 1878, translated as Criminal Man by his daughter Gina Lombroso-Ferrero) and, to an extent, Havelock Ellis (The Criminal 1892) - an assumption replicated in popular melodrama and sensation fiction - that criminals are instantly recognisable by their outward appearance and manners. Dorrington’s manners and appearance proclaim him to be a gentleman, but he is merely a clever actor, who understands the value of making a good impression. When they arrive in England, Dorrington induces Rigby to fear for his life and, in an apparently generous gesture, proposes to change identity with him temporarily in order to deal with the danger while Rigby stays in a safe house and waits until the danger has passed. In fact, Dorrington not only pockets Rigby’s money, identity papers and the deeds to his property in Australia, but brings him to the Naylors - his hired assassins introduced in “The Case of Janissary” - to be killed. It is here that the first person narrative is employed most strikingly: the Naylors drug him and leave him to drown in the water cistern of the house. Rigby’s painful struggles to free himself before the water reaches his head is almost inappropriately harrowing for the formula. The suffering of the innocent narrator, Dorrington’s cold-hearted calculation and the effect created by the narrative point of view make it abundantly clear that Dorrington is not to be trusted. For all his undoubted intelligence, wit and charm, which is demonstrated again and again in the stories, this first story alerts the reader early on in the series that Dorrington’s amoral behaviour is not endorsed. Even though Dorrington is allowed to escape justice, the stories make it clear that his actions are morally reprehensible and that the reader is to disapprove of him, however much she is likely to enjoy reading about his exploits. Compared to the more light-hearted Simon Carne stories, for instance, the Dorrington tales support the existing moral code of the Holmesian formula and the character only appears to subvert it. And the fact that Dorrington only appears in one collection, whereas several collections featuring the more conventional Martin Hewitt exist, points to the fact that Dorrington, for all his charm, may not have charmed his audience enough. 5. Conclusion I have argued that pre-golden age detective stories are capable of sustaining meaningful ethical engagement and that they do that by creating stereotypical detective characters and situations with specific ethical outlooks, which respond to widely available ethical schemata which author and audience share or at least know. Holmes judges the means largely by the ends they serve, Thorndyke follows apriori ethical rules, which regu- Alyce von Rothkirch 22 late his behaviour, and Dorrington is an amoral character who offends common ethical conceptions. Rather than by means of identification, ethical viewpoints and actions are judged by the way they activate readers’ existing moral schemata, and it is likely that a reader will continue to buy magazines that contain stories which confirm his schemata. Obviously the primary function of detective stories is to provide enjoyable escapism. However, given that readers enjoy recognition of their ethical schemata in popular stories, that this enjoyment shapes their purchasing decisions and, consequently, editorial decisions, the scholar can learn how public attitudes influence the representation of ethics in popular genres and the development of the genre. Sherlock Holmes was not the first detective, but he became the stereotype that other writers responded to from the 1890s onwards. He is a kind of Janus-figure, as he faces forward as a progressive man of science and backward as a romantic knightly hero. His Bohemian eccentricity is almost a camouflage which has little bearing on his ethical stance, and Conan Doyle was able to progressively rid his hero of the more conspicuous eccentricities, e.g. his drug habit, as time went on. In this way, he embodies the complicated 1890s, both a time of revolt against staid Victorian culture and a millenarian fear of a seemingly inescapable cultural decline. In a way, Holmes himself, his presence in print, on stage and later in film, and the many rewritings and parodies he inspired nationally and internationally, e.g. Maximilian Böttcher’s Der Detektiv (1899) or John Kendrick Bangs’s R. Holmes & Co.: Being the Remarkable Adventures of Raffles Holmes, Esq., Detective and Amateur Cracksman by Birth (1906) can be said to have impressed themselves upon literary culture more broadly. He inspired a change in the structure of feeling of popular literature. Arthur Morrison created Martin Hewitt and Horace Dorrington, the good and the bad detective, virtually at the same time. His other writing shows that he was not afraid to describe the darker side of English society, but I would argue that Dorrington is not a realistic creation responding to real social problems. Instead, I see Dorrington as a literary experiment: would a detective, who is also a thorough crook in the manner of existing rogue literature, be accepted by a wider readership? It appears that the genre was flexible enough to accommodate Dorrington, as reviewers were almost unanimous in their delight at the way in which the formula had been varied. Comparing the many Martin Hewitt stories to the six existing Dorrington stories, however, it seems that magazine editors and readership might not have agreed. While the word ‘evil’ never appears in the stories, Dorrington comes uncomfortably close to being evil as he has no sense of remorse. Many years later, Ronald Knox put “The detective himself must not commit the crime” as his seventh commandment of detective fiction (see Ronald Knox Society of North America 2005), which is not only a question of ‘fair play’ but also rules out the Ethics in Detective Fiction 23 possibility that the detective is evil. By the time of golden age detective fiction, a detective like Dorrington no longer fitted in with acceptable structures for writing detective fiction. Indeed, even though some contemporary detectives, such as Ian Rankin’s John Rebus, flirt with crossing the invisible line to ‘the dark side’, they always end up coming back to the right side of the law. The time for thorough-going rogues who were also detectives had gone before the 19 th century was out. Dr Thorndyke represents an evolutionary dead end in terms of genre development, as the particular nature of the a priori ethical principles on which his actions are based did not survive long beyond the First World War, even though, Freeman, of course, continued to write in the same vein until much later. Eschewing consequentialism and basing his decisions purely on a rational materialism, Thorndyke embodies a faith in the ability to derive complete explanations from material facts, which was shattered during and after the War years. Even in Agatha Christie’s world material clues can lead astray and the truth is only known by careful observation of human relationships, particularly with regard to interlopers whose history is not known. Similarly, detectives such as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion derive their ethical stance from (Christian) a priori principles, but they no longer believe that solutions to crimes can be found by following material clues alone, much like the most eccentric of all detectives, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. More literary crime fiction like Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943) does away with material and other clues completely, as the central character stumbles through the narrative unable to make sense of signs and clues, which have lost all fixed meaning, something which also goes for hard-boiled detective fiction like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Indeed, Philip Marlowe is closer to Sherlock Holmes than to Dr Thorndyke in many ways, as his sense of ethics in an unethical world is solely based upon an inner moral code and not on a priori principles. Pre-golden-age fiction can be shown to be infused with ethical concerns, which provide the raison d’être for the way characters act and the logic in which the story progresses from transgression, to detection and thence to solution and restoration of order. An ethical reading of these stories is meaningful not despite but because of the popularity of the genre. By carefully analysing popular, often unchallenging, perhaps not terribly distinguished texts and by correlating them with other popular writing, today’s scholar can begin to establish a true sense of the cultural life of the many rather than that of the privileged few. Alyce von Rothkirch 24 Bibliography Primary Sources Allen, Grant (1892/ 2010). “The Great Ruby Robbery: A Detective Story.” Manybooks e-text no. 28361. [Online] http: / / manybooks.net/ (10 Dec 2010). Boothby, Guy (1970). “The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds.” The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Early Detective Stories. Ed. Hugh Greene. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 71-97. Collins, Wilkie (1868/ 2003). The Moonstone. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Conan Doyle, Arthur (1890/ 2005). The Sign of Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Conan Doyle, Arthur (1892/ 1999). “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Project Gutenberg e-book no1661. [Online] http: / / www.gutenberg.org/ wiki/ Main_Page. 110-126 (10 Dec 2010). Conan Doyle, Arthur (1903/ 2008). “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Project Gutenberg e-book no. 221. [Online] http: / / www.gutenberg.org/ wiki/ Main_Page. 116-130. (10 Dec 2010). Conan Doyle, Arthur (1903/ 2008). “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Project Gutenberg e-book no. 221. [Online] http: / / www.gutenberg.org/ wiki/ Main_Page. 195-214. (10 Dec 2010). Conan Doyle, Arthur (1903/ 2008). “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.” The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Project Gutenberg e-book no. 221. [Online] http: / / www.gutenberg.org/ wiki/ Main_Page. 19-39. (10 Dec 2010). Conan Doyle, Arthur (1903/ 2008). “The Adventure of the Priory School.” The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Project Gutenberg e-book no. 221. [Online] http: / / www.gutenberg.org/ wiki/ Main_Page. 75-99. (10 Dec 2010). Dickens, Charles (1853-53/ 2003). Bleak House. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freeman, R. Austin (1907). The Red Thumb Mark. Feedbooks e-book. [Online] http: / / www.feedbooks.com/ (10 Dec 2010). Freeman, R. Austin (1909). “The Anthropologist at Large.” Dr. Thorndyke’s Cases. Feedbooks e-book. [Online] http: / / www.feedbooks.com/ . 67-84. (10 Dec 2010). Freeman, R. Austin (1909). “Message from the Deep Sea.” Dr. Thorndyke’s Cases. Feedbooks e-book. 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London: Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd. 370-382. Ethics in Detective Fiction 25 Morrison, Arthur (1897). “The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby.” The Windsor Magazine. 5. Dec 1896-May 1897. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Ltd. 244-258. Trollope, Frances (1843/ 1996). Hargrave, or the Adventures of a Man of Fashion. London: Sutton. Zangwill, Israel (1895). The Big Bow Mystery. Feedbooks e-book. [Online] http: / / www.feedbooks.com/ (1 May 2010). Secondary Sources Anon (1897). “New Novels.” The Graphic. 1464. 18 December. 804. Anon (1897). “The Dorrington Deed-Box.” Academy. 1337. 18 December. 127. Anon. (1897) “The New Books of the Month.” The Bookman 13/ 74, November. 53-55. Aitkenhead, Decca (2010). “Bret Easton Ellis: ‘So you’re a misogynist, a racist - so what? Does it make your art less interesting? ’” The Guardian 26 July. [Online] http: / / www.guardian.co.uk/ books/ 2010/ jul/ 26/ bret-easton-ellis-painmisogyny-drugs (15 Sep 2010). Booth, Wayne (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. 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(1925). “How to Write a Detective Story.” The American Chesterton Society. [Online] http: / / chesterton.org/ gkc/ murderer/ the_ideal.htm (10 Dec 2009). Chesterton, G.K. (1930). “The Ideal Detective Story.” The American Chesterton Society. [Online] http: / / chesterton.org/ gkc/ murderer/ the_ideal.htm (10 Dec 2009). Clarke, Clare (2010). “Horace Dorrington, Criminal-Detective: Investigating the Re-Emergence of the Rogue in Arthur Morrison’s The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897).” Clues: A Journal of Detection 28/ 2. 7-18. Currie, Gregory (1995). “The Moral Psychology of Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 73: 2. 250-259. Donaldson, Norman (1971). In Search of Dr Thorndyke: The Story of R. Austin Freeman’s Great Scientific Investigator and His Creator. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press. Ellis, Havelock (1892). The Criminal. London: Walter Scott; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Alyce von Rothkirch 26 Flanders, Judith (2011). The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. London: Harper. Freeman, R. Austin (1921). Social Decay and Regeneration. Introd. by Havelock Ellis. London: Constable and Co. Haynsworth, Leslie (2001). “Sensational Adventures: Sherlock Holmes and His Generic Past.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 44/ 4. 459-485. Hitchener, Thomas (2010). “Edwardian Spy Literature and the Ethos of Sportsmanship: The Sport of Spying.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 53: 4. 413-430. Jackson, Holbrook (1913/ 1939). The Nineteen Eighties. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Knight, Stephen (1980). Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan. Leavis, Q.D. (1939). Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus. Lombroso-Ferrero, Gina (1911). Criminal Man. Trans. of Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo deliquente. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Magill, Marcus (1933). “The Sherlock Holmes Tradition.” Review. The Bookman 85/ 507. Dec. 412. McQuilland, L.J. (1927/ 1976) “The Sinister and the Unsophisticated.” Review. The Bookman. October 1927. G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments. Part I: 900-1937. Ed. D.J. Conlon. Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature. 443. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: OUP. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1998). “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism.” Philosophy and Literature 22/ 2. 343-365. Orwell, George (1944/ 1965). “Raffles and Miss Blandish.” Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 63-79. Posner, Richard A. (1997). “Against Ethical Criticism.” Philosophy and Literature. 21/ 1. 1-27. Posner, Richard A. (1998). “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two.” Philosophy and Literature 22/ 2. 394-412. Priestman, Martin (1998). Crime Fiction: from Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House. Ronald Knox Society of North America (2005). “Detective Novelist.” [Online] http: / / ronaldknoxsociety.com/ detective.html (10 Oct 2011). Saler, Michael (2003). “‘Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-c. 1940.” The Historical Journal, 46/ 3. 599-622. Saler, Michael (2004). “Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Ironic Imagination.” Philosophy and Literature 28/ 1. 137-149. Schneewind, J.B (1977). Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schultz, Barton (2006). “Henry Sidgwick.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Online] http: / / plato.stanford.edu/ entries/ sidgwick/ (1 Jan 2011). Sidgwick, Henry (1874/ 1922). Methods of Ethics. London: Macmillan. Singer, Peter (ed.) (1991/ 1993). A Companion to Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Summerscale, Kate (2008). The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, or the Murder at Road Hill House. London: Bloomsbury. Vardy, Peter and Paul Grosch (1999). The Puzzle of Ethics. Rev. ed. London: Fount. Ethics in Detective Fiction 27 Wells, Carolyn (1913/ 2007). The Technique of the Mystery Story. Project Gutenberg Australia e-book no. 070775h.html. [Online] http: / / www.gutenberg.net.au/ ebooks07/ 0701151h.html (1 Jan 2011). Williams, Raymond (1964). Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Alyce von Rothkirch Department of Adult Continuing Education Swansea University/ Wales Die gebogene Nase Bedeutungszuschreibungen von Matthew Lewis’ The Monk bis Bram Stokers Dracula Pascal Fischer The article sheds light on the various meanings ascribed to the convexly shaped nose in Anglophone literature and culture from the late 18 th to the late 19 th centuries. Starting from the scholarly discussion about the alleged Jewishness of Dracula’s aquiline nose in Bram Stoker’s novel, the study turns to the central figure of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, who is characterized by the same physiognomic feature. A consideration of several other narrative texts from the Gothic as well as sentimental traditions shows that the curved shape of the nose was on the one hand associated with physical and mental strength, a commanding personality and noble descent and on the other with the stereotypical image of the shrewd and greedy Jew. These two dominant evaluative schemas, which are usually discrete, but can occasionally overlap and are sometimes questioned, also appear in the pseudo-scientific physiognomic studies of the 19 th century. Their laboured distinctions between Roman and Jewish noses betray the attempt to deny the Jews the positive appraisal generally assigned to the aquiline nose. In view of these findings, the article argues for regarding this type of nose as a complex semiotic sign in novels like Dracula. Die konvex gebogene Nase fungiert in der Literatur als ein beachtenswerter Bedeutungsträger. Der jeweilige Sinngehalt, der dieser Nasenform zugeschrieben wird, ist nicht einheitlich, sondern kann nach den individuellen Auffassungen der Autoren durchaus schwanken. Vor allem aber unterliegt er dem historischen Wandel. Der Beitrag zeigt an englischsprachiger Literatur vom Ende des 18. bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, welchen Rang fiktionale Werke für das Aufkommen und Bewusstmachen klischeehafter Ansichten über gewisse physiognomische Kennzeichen besitzen. Nach grundsätzlichen Bemerkungen zur Rolle von Literatur für diese semantischen Attribuierungen wendet sich der Aufsatz zunächst der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Pascal Fischer 30 Titelfigur in Bram Stokers Schauerroman Dracula von 1897 zu. Von da erfolgt ein Sprung zurück um rund hundert Jahre, und mit Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) wird eine andere Gothic Novel betrachtet, die die gebogene Nase zur Charakterisierung des Helden benutzt. Diese beiden Romane bilden grob die Pole, zwischen denen die Entwicklung unterschiedlicher Einschätzungen jener Nasenform an einigen Beispielen narrativer Literatur darzustellen ist. Schließlich werden physiognomische Studien herangezogen, die sich im 19. Jahrhundert mit der Nase beschäftigten. Die verschiedenen Bedeutungszuschreibungen zu ergründen, ist schon insofern geboten, als die in letzter Zeit intensivierten Untersuchungen zur Physiognomik im englischsprachigen Raum im 19. Jahrhundert entweder die Nase fast vollständig außer Acht lassen oder aber das Spezielle der damaligen Auseinandersetzung mit der gebogenen Form übergehen. Während Lucy Hartley in ihrem Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture von 2005 die mit der Nase verknüpften Konnotationen ignoriert und “nose” nicht einmal im umfangreichen Sachregister der Monographie nennt, geht Sharrona Pearl in ihrer 2010 erschienenen Monographie About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain nur recht allgemein und zum Teil stark vereinfachend auf den Stellenwert der Nase für die Physiognomik ein. Fiktionale Werke sind besonders geeignet, über die Entstehung von Wertungen und Klischees physiognomischer Merkmale Auskunft zu geben. Dabei darf Literatur jedoch keinesfalls, etwa im Sinne der Widerspiegelungstheorie Georg Lukács’, nur als Abbild außerliterarischer Realität genommen werden. Gerade Romane sind ein wichtiger Ort der Genese von Stereotypen, aber zugleich auch “Räume der Reflexion” (Glomb 2004: 46), in denen kulturelle Askriptionen verhandelt und bisweilen kritisch hinterfragt werden. Obwohl es einem Autor durchaus möglich ist, seine fiktionalen Figuren mit einer der Textintention zuträglichen Nase zu versehen, ist er unter anderem durch literarhistorische Vorgänger und literarische Typen eingeschränkt, mit denen die Figuren durch ihre Nase verbunden sind. Das Gewicht, das den Erzählwerken für die Beurteilung von Nasenarten zukommt, wird in den physiognomischen Schriften ganz offenkundig, denn diese greifen nicht selten auf literarische Gestalten zurück, um Belege für Zuordnungen von Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen zu erhalten. Unter den zahlreichen Deutungen der Titelfigur von Bram Stokers Roman Dracula hat zuletzt der Ansatz allgemeine Akzeptanz erfahren, der bei dem Grafen eine Reihe von Ähnlichkeiten mit antisemitischen Stereotypen des späten 19. Jahrhunderts entdeckt: der Parasitismus des Blutsaugers, seine Beziehung zum Geld, sein unstetes Umherschweifen, seine mangelnde Vaterlandsliebe und seine femininen Eigenschaften kongruieren mit zeitgenössischen Vorurteilen über ‘den Juden’. Als Hauptargument für die Nähe zum judenfeindlichen Klischee dient freilich zumeist Die gebogene Nase 31 die Physiognomie Draculas, die der intradiegetische Erzähler Jonathan Harker im Roman als “very marked” bezeichnet: His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. (Stoker 2002 [ 1 1897]: 42) Das Wort aquiline von lateinisch aquila wird im Englischen fast ausschließlich für Nasen verwendet, und da für jene, die wie der Schnabel eines Adlers gebogen sind. Die Relevanz der Nase für die Charakterisierung des fiktionalen Personals des Romans zeigt sich darin, dass auch zwei der drei weiblichen Vampire “aquiline noses, like the Count” (61) besitzen. Wird in der relativ distanzierten Beschreibung des vorliegenden Textabschnitts auf eine explizite Bewertung der Physiognomie Draculas verzichtet, erfährt man doch später, wie erschreckend dessen Anblick sei. 1 Judith Halberstam, für die die Schauerliteratur des fin de siècle insgesamt vom antisemitischen Diskurs durchzogen ist, hebt stark auf das Aussehen des Grafen ab: “Dracula’s physical aspect, his physiognomy, is a particularly clear cipher for the specificity of his ethnic monstrosity” (1995: 92, siehe auch 1993: 337). Um das Jüdische an Dracula zu belegen, führt sie weitere Textstellen an, die die gebogene Nase Draculas erwähnen. Ebenso betont Daniel P. Scoggin, Dracula entspreche aufgrund seiner Physiognomie dem Zerrbild des Juden im antisemitischen Diskurs (2002: 120). Das Lexikon Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution erklärt unter dem Stichwort “Dracula", der Schurke in Stokers Roman sei zwar nicht explizit als jüdisch identifiziert, aber “the novel’s physiognomic language is suggestive of contemporary notions of the Jewish physique” (Valman 2005: 188). Natürlich ist uns die gebogene Nase als ein Erkennungszeichen des Juden nicht zuletzt aus antisemitischen Karikaturen der Nazizeit bekannt, auch wenn sich die Forschung - abgesehen von Sander L. Gilman (1994, 1999) - noch kaum mit der Herausbildung dieses Stereotyps befasst hat: Zum Beispiel findet sich in der erwähnten Antisemitismus-Enzyklopädie für “Nase” kein Eintrag. Die Interpretation Draculas als zumindest tendenziell jüdisch ist oft gekoppelt mit der Lesart, dieser erscheine als degeneriert (Halberstam 1995: 92, 1993: 337). Tatsächlich sagt Professor Van Helsing im Roman über seinen Gegenspieler, er sei ein “criminal type", wie ihn Lombroso 1 So findet die gebogene Nase in einer besonders gruseligen Passage Erwähnung, die das Dämonische an Dracula betont: “As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes flamed red with devilish passion; the great nostrils of the white aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge; and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, clamped together like those of a wild beast” (283). Pascal Fischer 32 und Nordau charakterisiert hätten (336). Die beiden einflussreichen Sozialdarwinisten Cesare Lombroso und Max Nordau brachten Degeneration und Jüdischkeit in einen engen Zusammenhang. Besonders augenfällig sind die Übereinstimmungen Draculas mit Lombrosos Typus des geborenen Kriminellen, dem Inbegriff moralischer und physischer Degeneration (vgl. hierzu Harrowitz 1994: 54f.). In seiner Abhandlung L’Uomo Delinquente von 1876, auf Englisch von Lombrosos Tochter Gina Lombroso- Ferrero unter dem Titel Criminal Man herausgegeben, heißt es über die Nase des Mörders: “It is often aquiline like the beak of a bird of prey” (Lombroso-Ferrero 1911: 15). Anders als Lombroso verzichtet Stoker lediglich darauf, die an einen Raubvogel gemahnende Nasenform als Pseudobeleg für eine kriminelle Disposition seines Schurken zu nehmen. Auffallend ist zudem die Ähnlichkeit der Augenbrauen Draculas mit denen des Verbrechers, wie er bei Lombroso beschrieben wird: “The eyebrows are bushy and tend to meet across the nose” (Lombroso-Ferrero 1911: 18). Die Deutung der Nase Draculas als ‘jüdisch’ und als Anzeichen von Degeneration im sozialdarwinistischen Sinne ist bisher nicht in Zweifel gezogen worden. Tatsächlich ist diese Interpretation bis zu einem gewissen Grad einleuchtend, und es soll hier nicht der Versuch unternommen werden, sie zu falsifizieren. Allerdings verliert sie dann an Überzeugungskraft, wenn man einen Blick auf die Titelfigur in Matthew Lewis’ Roman The Monk Ambrosio wirft, bei dem nämlich die gleichen physiognomischen Merkmale wie bei Graf Dracula hervorgehoben sind. Der 1796 veröffentlichte Roman vertritt wie kaum ein anderer die Gothic Novel in ihrer Entstehungszeit, so wie Dracula das mächtige Revival des Genres in der spätviktorianischen Epoche repräsentiert. Der Schurke Ambrosio wird bei Lewis folgendermaßen eingeführt: He was a man of noble port and commanding presence. His stature was lofty, and his features uncommonly handsome. His nose was aquiline, his eyes large black and sparkling, and his dark brows almost joined together. (Lewis 1995 [ 1 1796]: 18) Lewis macht keinerlei Anspielungen, sein Antiheld, ein Kapuzinermönch, habe etwas Jüdisches oder Degeneriertes an sich. Offenbar hat die gebogene Nase hier eine andere semiotische Funktion, kennzeichnet sie ja das Gesicht eines zwar anrüchigen, aber erhabenen und stolzen Mannes von außergewöhnlich imposanter Gestalt. Die gleichen Züge, die bei Dracula Schauer erregen sollen, werden vom Erzähler in The Monk explizit als schön beurteilt. Die nahe liegende Erklärung für die Ähnlichkeit der Nasen Ambrosios und Draculas, dass der spanische Mönch genau wie der transsilvanische Graf dadurch lediglich fremdländisch und exotisch anmuten soll, kann nicht genügen, zumal sich ein weiterer Roman aus dem Bereich der englischen Schauerliteratur um 1800 findet, in dem der Schurke nunmehr Die gebogene Nase 33 Engländer ist und in etwa wie bei Matthew Lewis dargestellt wird. In Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote aus dem Jahr 1801 liest man über die zentrale Gestalt: Mr. Marauder was indebted to Nature for a fine and handsome person, and to Art for a judicious display of it. He was tall in stature, and of a commanding aspect, aquiline nose, a bold and full eye, large mouth, strong and well limbed, haughty in his usual gait, and very erect. (Lucas 2004 [ 1 1801]: 82) Schon aus diesen wenigen Zeilen geht hervor: Ambrosio und Marauder haben neben der Nasenform vieles gemeinsam. Sie sind von stattlicher Statur und besitzen eine gebieterische Ausstrahlung: Das Adjektiv “commanding” taucht in beiden Charakterisierungen auf. Die gebogene Nase soll hier ganz klar das verwegene, ehrgeizige Wesen unterstreichen - ebenso wie dies die funkelnden (“sparkling”) beziehungsweise kühnen (“bold”) Augen tun. Ambrosio und Marauder vertreten den literarischen Typus des Gothic Villain, der sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten des 18. Jahrhunderts herausbildete und später zum Byron’schen Helden weiterentwickelte. Solche Schurkenfiguren sind zugleich furchteinflößend und faszinierend. Sie erheben sich durch ihren unabhängigen Geist über die Gesellschaft. Ihre äußere Erscheinung und Intelligenz bringen ihnen höchste Bewunderung ein. Von einer ungeheuerlichen, geradezu diabolischen Energie angetrieben, verfolgen Antihelden wie Ambrosio und Marauder ihre Ziele genauso entschlossen und kämpferisch wie rücksichtslos. Obwohl Charles Lucas einer weltanschaulichen Strömung zuzurechnen ist, in der The Monk als radikales Machwerk verschrien war, ist es wahrscheinlich, dass sich der Autor bei der Schaffung seines zentralen Charakters an dem fünf Jahre zuvor veröffentlichten Skandalroman orientiert hat, wie Marilyn Butler bemerkt (1975: 114). Aus der Romanzentradition kommend, ist der Gothic Villain des Schauerromans fast durchgängig von adeligem Geschlecht, was seine Macht unterstreicht und ihm den Ruch des gefallenen Engels satanischer Größe verleiht (Thorslev 1962: 54). Wird der vornehme Stammbaum Marauders eigens betont, so bleibt die Herkunft Ambrosios, eines Findlings, letztlich ungeklärt. Allerdings deutet bereits die literarische Konvention auf eine aristokratische Abstammung hin, stellen sich doch Findelkinder in zahllosen Narrationen des 18. Jahrhunderts als Abkömmlinge Adeliger heraus. Tatsächlich munkelt man in Lewis’ Roman, Ambrosio sei womöglich von “noble origin” (16). Die Häufigkeit, mit der die gebogene Nase in den fiktionalen Werken des Untersuchungszeitraums bei Adeligen auftritt, zeigt: Sie konnte sogar als ein Erkennungszeichen dieses Standes eingesetzt werden. Demnach darf man Ambrosios “aquiline nose”, zumal im Zusammenhang mit seiner edlen Haltung (“noble port”), durchaus als Hinweis auf seine aristokratische Herkunft auffassen. Pascal Fischer 34 Um zu ermitteln, wie man die gebogene Nase Ende 18. / Anfang 19. Jahrhundert ästhetisch beurteilte und welche Persönlichkeitseigenschaften man mit ihr assoziierte, sind aus jener Zeit weitere Romane zu betrachten. Besonders aussagekräftig sind die aus der literarischen Strömung der Empfindsamkeit, hat man hier oft physiognomische Merkmale als authentischen Ausdruck von Charakter verstanden (Benedict 1995: 325, Wolf 1992: 114). Es verblüfft, wie viele positive Attribute dort der “aquiline nose” beigemessen werden. Die gebogene Nase gehörte damals ganz offensichtlich zu einem Schönheitsideal des Mannes. Schönheit wiederum wird in jener Literatur als Zeichen von Tugendhaftigkeit gesehen (Tytler 1995: 296). In dem anonymen Briefroman The Assignation. A Sentimental Novel (1774) ist Mr. Ofnay, der Sohn eines Grafen, so geschildert: To a person, the perfect model of manly elegance, nature, as if ambitious to excel herself, had joined the most faultless features. An aquiline nose, a good complexion, light blue eyes, the most expressive imaginable, and a mouth which, dressed in smiles, rendered him infinitely charming. (Bd. 1: 201) Die Kombination mit blauen Augen belegt: Die gebogene Nase ist keineswegs nur mit einem südländischen Typ verbunden. In dem 1774 erschienenen Roman besitzt dieser Adelige noch nichts Diabolisches, sondern verkörpert durch die Vereinigung von Gefühlskraft und Sittlichkeit ein Leitbild der Empfindsamkeit. Im selben Roman heißt es über Augustus Richmond, den ebenfalls eine “aquiline nose” ziert, der Neid müsse ihm lassen, dass er eine Gottheit ist (Bd. 2: 147f.). Als ein Gott wird auch Edward, ein Angehöriger der Gentry, in Blenheim Lodge von 1787 beschrieben: He is quite an Adonis, Bell; I’d give the universe to gain his heart; the sweetest dark eyes - Aquiline nose - beautiful teeth - Oh! he beggars description! and when he talks, ‘tis Heaven to hear. - I do verily believe I am half in love. (Bd. 2: 56) In der anonymen History of Miss Pamela Howard aus dem Jahr 1773 schwärmt Miss Coventry von einem Mr. Boventry, den sie beim Maskenball beobachtet hat. Wegen seiner beeindruckenden Erscheinung, seiner “elegant majestic person” (Bd. 1: 72), sei der Mann vom ganzen Saal bestaunt worden. Geradezu eine Offenbarung sei es für die junge Frau gewesen, als Boventry seine Maske abgenommen hat: Ah, my favourite Aquiline nose, and Eagle eyes, the very sort of Face I wished to belong to that striking person. I am now sure that the Fellow is not only handsome, but monstrous sensible; I never yet was mistaken in that kind of physiognomy; there the eyes are as windows to the head, and let one see how admirably it is furnished. (Bd. 1: 72) Neben der überschwänglichen Darstellung dieses Mannes sind in dieser Passage zwei Dinge bemerkenswert: Zum einen wird durch die unmittel- Die gebogene Nase 35 bare Nachbarschaft von “aquiline nose” und “eagle eyes” klar, dass “aquiline” nicht nur ein Synonym für “curved” ‘gebogen’ ist, sondern auch die ursprüngliche Semantik ‘adlerhaft’ noch anklingt, wobei es um Stattlichkeit und Würde und nicht wie bei Lombroso um das Räuberische des Greifvogels geht. Zum anderen wird durch diesen Textabschnitt des vor Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten (1775-78) 2 erschienenen Romans dokumentiert, wie selbstverständlich es schon vor dem eigentlichen Aufschwung der Pseudowissenschaft Physiognomik am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts gewesen war, äußere Charakteristika auf innere zu beziehen. 3 Die Physiognomik griff verbreitete und sich in der Literatur manifestierende Vorurteile lediglich auf und bestätigte sie. Miss Coventry in besagtem Roman glaubt jedenfalls, mit einem Blick Mr. Boventrys Disposition zu Verständnis und - ein paar Zeilen weiter - Klugheit erschließen zu können. Abgesehen von der beinahe perfekten Schönheit steht die gebogene Nase meist wie bei den Gothic Villains Ambrosio und Marauder für Durchsetzungsvermögen, Energie und mentale Stärke. Als Beispiel ist Robert Bissets Roman Douglas; or, the Highlander von 1800 anzuführen, in dem es von dem Titelhelden heißt, er sei “cast in the same mold as the Apollo of Belvedere” (2005 [ 1 1800]: 180). Seine Glieder entfalteten genauso viel Kraft wie Schönheit. Diese Eigenschaften kennzeichnen gleichermaßen sein Gesicht: His dark, hazel eyes were at once penetrating and thoughtful, sweet, brilliant. His nose was aquiline, his complexion fair, yet manly; his countenance exhibited a bright and capacious understanding, benevolent and noble dispositions, and a firm resolute mind. (2005 [ 1 1800]: 180f.) Durch Douglas’ gebogene Nase ergibt sich ein auffälliger Unterschied zu der antiken Marmorskulptur, deren Nase eine gerade, wenn nicht leicht konkave Form aufweist. In dieser Abweichung tritt die Besonderheit des maskulinen Schönheitsideals um 1800 deutlich hervor. Da man die Adlernase mit Attributen verknüpfte, die als typisch männlich galten, überrascht es nicht, dass diese Form bei weiblichen Romanfiguren nur vereinzelt vorkommt. Und wo es geschieht, wird sie auch fast immer als schön erachtet. Der erwähnte Charles Douglas bewundert beim ersten Anblick der 17-jährigen Isabella “a face and a countenance the most lovely and interesting he had ever beheld” (2005 [ 1 1800]: 175). Wir erfahren von ihren funkelnden blauen Augen und von ihrer Nase: 2 Eine englische Übersetzung von Lavaters Werk war gar erst 1789 verfügbar. Zu den unterschiedlichen Übersetzungen und zur Rezeption in England vgl. Graham 1979. 3 Werner Wolf bemerkt in einem Aufsatz zum empfindsamen Roman: “Reading physiognomy advances, in literature, to a decoding ‘science’ long before Franz Joseph Gall’s (1757-1828) and Johann Kaspar Lavater’s (1741-1801) famous theoretical studies in ‘phrenology’” (1992: 114). Pascal Fischer 36 “Her nose was a little aquiline” (ebd.). Das Gesicht drücke Anmut ebenso aus wie einen strahlenden, lebhaften Geist. Der Erzähler betont, über welch wichtige Verweisfunktion das Äußere verfügt: Isabellas Gesicht wird wörtlich “index of her mind” (ebd.) genannt. Mit negativer Zuschreibung erscheint die gebogene Nase in der Literatur um 1800 relativ selten. Allerdings gibt es Beispiele für die Assoziation mit Jüdischkeit und dann zugleich mit den damit einhergehenden Vorurteilen. In Mrs. Roberts’ Delmore, or, Modern Friendship, einem Roman aus dem Jahr 1806, ist über einen gewissen Discount zu lesen: His swarthy complexion, black eyes, aquiline nose, and dark hair, betrayed his Hebrew origin: and I soon discovered that the hopeful youth possessed the shrewdness, cunning, and caution of a hoary-headed extortioner. - I shall not disgust you by a tedious recapitulation of the various artifices, frauds, and subterfuges of these notable co-adjutors. (Bd. 2: 89f.) Es fällt auf, dass die “aquiline nose” hier nur zusammen mit dem dunklen Teint sowie den schwarzen Augen und Haaren die jüdische Herkunft der Figur verrät. Die Charakterzüge, die dem Besitzer der gebogenen Nase attribuiert werden, entsprechen dem Klischee des jüdischen Wucherers exakt: Discount setzt seine Intelligenz allein für den persönlichen Profit ein. Populäre Romane wie Delmore waren in entscheidendem Maße daran beteiligt, diesem Stereotyp - im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes - ein Gesicht zu geben, also das Vorurteil von der jüdischen Raffsucht mit einer visuellen Vorstellung zu verknüpfen. Verschiedene Karikaturen, etwa James Gillrays oder Thomas Rowlandsons, 4 bezeugen, dass die gebogene Nase um die Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert durchaus gelegentlich als physiognomisches Merkmal des Juden benutzt werden konnte. Diese Zuordnung war aber keinesfalls so verbreitet, wie man vermuten mag. Sie konkurrierte zum Beispiel mit der Darstellung von Juden als Schweinen, die auf das antijudaistische mittelalterliche Motiv der ‘Judensau’ zurückzuführen ist. In William Blakes Gedicht “The Everlasting Gospel” von 1818 findet sich folgende Beleidigung: “A Pig has got a look / That for a Jew may be mistook” (1966 [ 1 1818]: 757; hierzu Felsenstein 1995: 137, zu Blakes antisemitischen Äußerungen vgl. Shabetei 1995). Das Schmähbild des vom englischen König George III protegierten Hannoveraners Johann Heinrich Ramberg aus dem Jahr 1788 mit dem Titel Moses Chusing His Cook (siehe Abbildung) zeigt den zum Judentum konvertierten Lord George Gordon inmitten seiner neuen Glaubensbrüder im Gefängnis von Newgate. Während zwei oder drei der Juden Hakennasen haben, deuten die Nasen der Übrigen eher nach oben. Die Nase des rechts Stehenden (mit dunklem Bart und Hut) wirkt wie eine Spiegelung des Rüssels des Tieres auf der anderen Seite der Abbildung, das der nichtjüdische Koch 4 Vgl. z.B. James Gillrays satirische Karikatur Richard Brothers’, The Prophet of the Hebrews - the Prince of Peace - Conducting the Jews to the Promis’d Land, 1795, und Thomas Rowlandsons Humours of Houndsditch, 1813. Die gebogene Nase 37 hereinträgt und das von den Juden erzürnt zurückgewiesen wird. Wenn Sharrona Pearl bei der Besprechung von Rambergs Stich in About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain lediglich bemerkt, die Juden um Lord Gordon hätten “sharp noses” (2010: 134), übergeht sie diese physiognomischen Unterschiede und gelangt so insgesamt zu problematischen Schlüssen über die Stereotypisierung der jüdischen Physiognomie jener Zeit. 5 Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Moses Chusing His Cook (1788) Am Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts wurde die gebogene Nase immer stärker zum Erkennungszeichen des Juden. Dies heißt freilich nicht, dass dadurch das Schönheitsideal des energischen stattlichen Mannes mit der Adlernase vollkommen verdrängt worden wäre. Als aussagekräftiges Beispiel kann ein Roman Sir Walter Scotts dienen, eines Autors, der stark von der Physiognomik beeinflusst war (Tytler 2005). Obwohl Scotts Ivanhoe im Mittelalter spielt, ist in dem Werk aus dem Jahr 1820 eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem zeitgenössischen antisemitischen Klischee zu entdecken. Bei der Beschreibung Isaacs, des Vaters der reizenden Jüdin Rebekka, die 5 Zudem datiert Pearl das Bild fälschlicherweise auf 1803 und damit gut 15 Jahre nach der öffentlichen Diskussion über Gordons Konversion. Pascal Fischer 38 selbst eine “well-formed aquiline nose” (1996 [ 1 1820]: 94) hat, erwähnt der Erzähler neben klaren Gesichtszügen und durchdringenden Augen auch die gebogene Nase. Er ergänzt, es gehe dabei um Merkmale, die man an sich als schön empfindet. Bei Juden sehe man das aber anders, habe diese Rasse ja nicht zuletzt wegen der gegen sie gerichteten Ressentiments und wegen der Verfolgungen einen wenig liebenswürdigen Nationalcharakter entwickelt (64). Scotts Ivanhoe vermag das Potenzial von Literatur zu illustrieren, über vorhandene Stereotypen zu reflektieren. Werner Wolf verweist darauf, dass im 19. Jahrhundert selbst bei Autoren, die einem “physiognomischen Transparenzglauben” (Wolf 2002a: 314) anhingen, mitunter Ambivalenz gegenüber der “Lesbarkeit” von Gesichtern deutlich wird. Diese Skepsis sei im Zusammenhang mit der Funktion von Literatur als “contre-discours” zu sehen, wie von Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses beschrieben (Wolf 2002a: 317, Foucault 1966: 59). 6 Während Scotts Roman die ästhetischen Einschätzungen hinterfragt, trägt er allerdings zugleich dazu bei, an bestimmten, mit der gebogenen Nase verbundenen Vorurteilen festzuhalten. Aufgrund der betrachteten Romane ist zu konstatieren, dass man die gebogene Nase im 19. Jahrhundert meist entsprechend der Herkunft ihres Besitzers unterschiedlich bewertete. Brachte man diese Form beim Nicht- Juden, beim Christen, mit Mut und Tatendrang in Zusammenhang, stand sie beim Juden für die negativen Attribute, die man diesem zuordnete. Gerade anspruchsvollere Autoren durchbrachen dieses Beurteilungsmuster aber auf verschiedene Weise. Nahm die ‘jüdische Nase’ mit den Jahren auch eine immer wichtigere Funktion zur Bezeichnung jüdischer Charaktere ein, so war es einem Autor doch möglich, gewisse mit dieser Nase assoziierte Eigenschaften auf nichtjüdische Figuren zu übertragen. Als ein komplexeres Beispiel soll Edgar Allen Poes berühmte Kurzgeschichte “The Fall of the House of Usher” von 1839 genauer behandelt werden. Sie ist ebenfalls der Tradition der Gothic Fiction zuzurechnen. Der anonyme homodiegetische Erzähler beschreibt seinen alten Freund Roderick Usher, den er nach langen Jahren auf dessen Anwesen besucht: A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy. (1984 [ 1 1839]: 321) Signifikanterweise ist hier der allgemein übliche Ausdruck “aquiline” durch die Bemerkung ersetzt, Rodericks Nase folge im Ganzen einem “Hebrew model”. Das Wort Hebrew ist zwar weitgehend synonym zu Jewish, betont aber oft stärker den ethnischen Aspekt. “The Fall of the 6 Zu Foucaults Begriff des “contre-discours” vgl. Warning 1999: 316-327. Die gebogene Nase 39 House of Usher” dient immer wieder als Paradebeispiel (siehe z.B. Obuchowski 1975) für die Theorie der “totality” oder “unity of effect", die Poe in seinem Essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) dargelegt hat. Nach diesem Ansatz soll jedes Detail einer Geschichte zu einer einzigen emotionalen Wirkung auf den Leser beitragen. Welcher Effekt wird nun mit dem Hinweis auf das Jüdische an dieser Nase erzielt? Im Zentrum der Geschichte steht das Grauen angesichts des physischen, geistigen und ethischen Verfalls. Es war für den Autor demnach unbedingt zu vermeiden, für Rodericks Nase ein Adjektiv zu wählen, das die Figur nicht nur mit dem “König der Lüfte", sondern auch mit den imposanten, kraftvollen Gothic und Byronic Heroes der Literatur um 1800 in England verbunden hätte. Rodericks Mangel an Energie wird immer wieder herausgestellt, so in der vorliegenden Passage, in der ja von einem “want of moral energy” die Rede ist, der in der Physiognomie erkennbar werde. Dabei spricht aus der Kurzgeschichte das Bestreben, die aristokratische Herkunft Rodericks zu betonten. Denn mit dem “Untergang des Hauses Usher” ist in gleichem Maße das herrschaftliche Geschlecht wie das Familienanwesen gemeint. Die gebogene Nase vermag den Leser an den adeligen Hintergrund Rodericks zu erinnern. Bei Poe trifft man jedoch auf ein völlig anderes Adelsbild als in den erwähnten Romanen aus der Zeit um 1800: Es ist von der Auffassung geprägt, wonach dieser Stand überaus degeneriert ist. Schon im 18. Jahrhundert wurde der Ausdruck “degenerate nobility” weithin verwendet, um beim Adel religiöse Laxheit sowie Verweiblichung durch Luxusleben und sexuelle Libertinage anzuprangern, etwa in den Benimm-Ratgebern des Geistlichen Vicesimus Knox (z.B. 1793: 240f.). Zudem behauptete man bisweilen, diese Schicht sei durch Inzucht körperlich und geistig verkümmert. Tatsächlich spielt Poes Kurzgeschichte auf eine inzestuöse Beziehung Rodericks zu seiner Schwester an. Es gab nur noch einen Teil der Bevölkerung, der in ähnlichem Umfang mit Degeneration in Verbindung gebracht wurde wie der Adel, nämlich die Juden. Beispielsweise bemüht Thomas Paine in seiner Streitschrift The Rights of Man von 1791 die angeblich durch Verwandtenehe verursachte Degeneration der Juden als Beleg für die Degeneration der Adligen: Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species. By the universal economy of nature it is known, and by the instance of the Jews it is proved, that the human species has a tendency to degenerate, in any small number of persons, when separated from the general stock of society, and inter-marrying constantly with each other. It defeats even its pretended end, and becomes in time the opposite of what is noble in man. (1995 [ 1 1791]: 135) Indem Poes Kurzgeschichte die Nase Rodericks als jüdisch bezeichnet, wird die Aufmerksamkeit sowohl auf die gemeinsamen physiognomischen als auch charakterlichen Eigenschaften gelenkt, die man den beiden Pascal Fischer 40 Gruppen zuschrieb. So wie Paine die Diskurse um die vermeintliche Degeneration des Judentums und des Adels zusammenführt, geschieht dies bei Poe durch den Hinweis auf die nach dem “Hebrew model” geformte Nase des Aristokraten. Ohne auf Degenerationsvorstellungen im Zusammenhang mit dem Adel einzugehen, erwähnt Sander L. Gilman, wie durch die Nasenform von der Assoziation von Jüdischkeit und Degeneration Gebrauch gemacht wird: “Poe’s description of Roderick Usher, in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), the last offspring of a highly inbred family, was visualized as degenerate and, therefore, as Jewish” (1998: 160). Allerdings wäre es ein Irrtum, diese Verknüpfung als einen Autorenkommentar zu nehmen. Vielmehr ist sie auf der Ebene des Erzählers zu verorten: Er ist es, der den degeneriert erscheinenden Roderick mit Jüdischkeit assoziiert. Ein physiognomisches Interesse besaß freilich auch Edgar Allan Poe. So haben Michael Niehaus (1996: 411-416) und Erik Grayson (2005) nachgewiesen, wie stark Poe von der physiognomischen und phrenologischen Forschung seiner Zeit beeinflusst wurde. Neben Poe waren weitere Schriftsteller des 19. Jahrhunderts - Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy gehören zu den prominentesten Beispielen (Hollington 1990, Wolf 2002b: 398) - von der Möglichkeit fasziniert, vom Aussehen eines Menschen auf dessen innere Struktur und Wesensart zu schließen. Die Deutungsmuster, die zur Dechiffrierung von Physiognomien herangezogen werden, können dabei ganz unterschiedlicher Natur sein. Nach Werner Wolf lässt sich im realistischen Erzählen aufgrund der Heterogenität der Begründungssysteme und Typologien ein zunehmender Eklektizismus im physiognomischen Erklären beobachten, in dem nunmehr archaisches, anachronistisch wirkendes Analogie- und Ähnlichkeitsdenken Seite an Seite mit ‘klassisch’-rationaler Systematik und modernem entwicklungsgeschichtlichen und ‘wissenschaftlichen’, aber auch z.T. intuitivem Begründen auftreten. (Wolf 2002b: 400) Diese Einschätzung trifft ebenfalls auf die physiognomischen Studien zu, die sich im englischsprachigen Raum mit der Nase beschäftigten. Einige sollen jetzt daraufhin untersucht werden, welche Bedeutungen sie der gebogenen Form zuschreiben und in welchem Verhältnis sie zur Romanliteratur stehen. Es zeigt sich, dass die Abhandlungen die zwei in den narrativen Werken gestalteten Wahrnehmungsmuster aufgreifen, also diese Nase jeweils danach anders beurteilen, ob sie zum Gesicht eines Juden oder eines Nichtjuden gehört. Unter diesen theoretischen Schriften ist George Jabets Nasology: or, Hints Towards a Classification of Noses von 1848 von größtem Einfluss. Jabet, der anfangs unter dem Pseudonym Eden Warwick veröffentlichte, legte das Buch 1852 unter dem Titel Notes on Noses noch einmal auf. Wenn der Autor zwischen sechs verschiedenen Nasentypen differenziert, tut er dabei so, als sei seine Untergliederung ohnehin altbekannt und allgemein akzeptiert. Hier seine Klassifikation: Die gebogene Nase 41 Class I. THE ROMAN, or Aquiline Nose II. THE GREEK, or Straight Nose III. THE COGITATIVE, or Wide-nostrilled Nose IV. THE JEWISH, or Hawk Nose V. THE SNUB NOSE VI. THE CELESTIAL, or Turn-up Nose. (Warwick 1848: 14) Wie aus dieser Typologie hervorgeht, ist für Jabet das Hauptunterscheidungskriterium die Biegung der Nase, lediglich Typus III und V fallen heraus; sie sind vorrangig auf die Breite beziehungsweise Größe bezogen. Die griechische Nase ist gerade. Wir haben eine Nase mit einer konkaven Biegung, nämlich die Himmelfahrtsnase, Typus VI, aber zwei konvexe Nasen, die römische und die jüdische, Typus I und IV. 7 Die Charaktereigenschaften, die Jabet den Nasenarten zuordnet, folgen zunächst einer simplen Formel: Nach oben zeigende Nasen drücken Schwäche aus, nach unten deutende Stärke. Merkmale sowohl der Stupsals auch der Himmelfahrtsnase sind also: “natural weakness, mean, disagreeable dispositions, with petty insolence, and divers other characteristics of conscious weakness” (1848: 19). Die römische Nase oder Adlernase erhält dagegen eine Reihe von Bewertungen, die uns vor allem aus der Schauerliteratur vertraut sind: “great Decision, considerable Energy, Firmness, Absence of refinement, and Disregard for the bienséances of life” (15). Sie ist die Kämpfernase, die das Gesicht von Feldherren schmückt und sich von der verweichlichten Zivilisation abwendet (30). Die griechische Nase repräsentiert hingegen die Kultur: “It indicates Refinement of character, Love for the fine arts and belles-lettres” (16). Wie wichtig für Jabets Schema die Zuweisung von Energie und Kraft entsprechend der Wölbung ist, zeigt sich ebenso bei der griechischen Nase: Man müsse nämlich genau hinschauen, ob es nicht doch eine kleine Abweichung von der geraden Linie gebe: “If the deviation tend to convexity, it approaches the Roman Nose, and the character is improved by an accession of energy; on the other hand, when the deviation is towards concavity, it partakes of the “Celestial,” and the character is weakened” (15). Nach der Logik dieser Taxonomie müsste an sich die jüdische Nase, die nach Jabet noch stärker als die römische nach unten gebogen ist, am eindeutigsten mit Kraft verbunden sein und besondere Wertschätzung erfahren. Dem ist freilich nicht so: Dieser Form sind vielmehr Eigenschaften des klischeehaften Judenbildes zugeschrieben, wie es uns bereits in dem Roman Delmore, or, Modern Friendship begegnet war: “It indicates considerable Shrewdness in worldly matters; a deep Insight into character, and facility 7 Auch Sharrona Pearl geht auf diese Klassifikation ein. Die Tatsache, dass darin zwei konvexe Nasentypen vorkommen, bemerkt die Verfasserin freilich nicht (Pearl 2010: 50f.). Pascal Fischer 42 of turning that insight to profitable account” (Warwick 1948: 18). Das Wort “shrewdness” mit dem denotativen Kerngehalt ‘Scharfsinn’‚ ‘Klugheit’ hat meist die pejorativen Nebenbedeutungen ‘hinterlistig’, ‘gerissen’, ‘durchtrieben’. Sehr ähnlich dient das zweite, zunächst positiv erscheinende Attribut “Insight into character” nur dazu, die moralisch zweifelhaften, egoistischen Motive des Besitzers einer solchen Nase herauszustellen. Es wird Jabets Bemühen sichtbar, die oft mit der gebogenen Nase assoziierte “Intelligenz” im Falle der jüdischen Nase umzuinterpretieren. Man muss den Eindruck gewinnen, die Kategorie der jüdischen Nase ist deshalb eingeführt worden, um den Juden die sonst positiven Merkmale der gebogenen Nase abzuerkennen. Es überzeugt nicht, wenn Jabet vorgibt, es gehe hier um die Biegung, die die beiden Typen der römischen und jüdischen Nase unterscheidet, beziehungsweise darum, dass die römische Nase etwas hügelig ist. Es geht ausschließlich um Zuschreibungen nach dem ethnischen Hintergrund. Dies wird aus den zweiten Bezeichnungen für diese Nasenarten noch klarer: “aquiline nose” gegen “hawk nose”. Keineswegs ist der Schnabel eines Habichts stärker konvex als der eines Adlers. Im Gegenteil: tendenziell weist der Schnabel des Adlers eine stärkere Biegung auf. Bestimmend sind aber die diesen Vögeln traditionell zugeordneten Eigenschaften: Der Adler, das königliche Wappentier, wird als ehrfurchtgebietend und erhaben empfunden und verkörpert Kraft, Macht und Stolz. Schon in der Antike fungierte der Adler als Metapher für die Großen, die sich nicht mit Kleinigkeiten abgeben. “Eagles don’t catch flies,” sagt man im Englischen. Demgegenüber ist der Habicht ein nach dem Volksglauben niederer Raubvogel, der nichts Gutes verheißt. Das Negative, das man dem Habicht zuspricht, soll sich auf den Besitzer der Habichtnase, den Juden, übertragen. Die von Jabet vorgenommene terminologische Differenzierung wird übrigens in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts so nicht nachvollzogen. Der Ausdruck “hawk nose” findet sich ohnehin viel seltener als “aquiline nose”. Ein weiteres Argument dafür, dass es bei der Beurteilung von gebogenen Nasen im 19. Jahrhundert vor allem um Ethnizität und nicht um objektiv messbare Kriterien der Form ging, liefert der physiognomische Essay des englischen Schriftstellers James Hain Friswell “On the Faces Around Us” von 1864. Der Autor legt seinen stark anekdotischen Ausführungen beinahe die gleiche Typologie zugrunde wie Jabet, an dem er sich womöglich orientiert. Auch hier steht die römische Nase für “decision, firmness of character, great energy, and with these a considerable disregard for the softness, littleness, and paltry ways of society and life” (109). Dagegen heißt es über die jüdische Nase, die man bei den “hebräischen Brüdern” betrachten könne: “The species is good, shrewd, and useful. Perhaps selfishness and determination are more strongly marked in it than in any others” (114). Bemerkenswerterweise kommt Friswell jedoch im Laufe seines Aufsatzes mit der eigenen Terminologie durcheinander: Die gebogene Nase 43 Hebt er zuerst die “Roman or aquiline nose” von der “Jewish nose” ab (109), nennt er später die jüdische Nase ebenfalls “aquiline”. Obwohl in den Texten von Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice und Dickens’ Oliver Twist 8 nirgendwo von einer gebogenen Nase die Rede ist, dienen Friswell die fiktionalen jüdischen Charaktere Shylock und Fagin als Beleg für die mit der jüdischen Nase verbundenen Eigenschaften (116). Nachdem er den General Sir Charles James Napier erwähnt hat, mit dessen außergewöhnlich großer Adlernase eine ungeheure Energie einhergegangen sei, beeilt sich Friswell prompt klarzustellen, dass die Nase Napiers, den man in der Armee “Old Fagin” nannte, natürlich “far from Jewish” (117) gewesen sei. Die Unterscheidung von römischen und jüdischen Nasen bricht dann völlig in sich zusammen, als der Autor es für seltsam (“curious”) hält, dass Dickens’ Illustrator George Cruikshank, der eine Ähnlichkeit zu Napier gehabt habe, Fagins Nase nach dem Vorbild seiner eigenen gezeichnet hat (117). Schlaglichtartig wird sichtbar, dass nicht der Krümmungsgrad oder irgendein anderer äußerer Faktor für die Bedeutungszuschreibungen der gebogenen Nase maßgeblich ist, sondern allein die Herkunft ihres Besitzers. Aus dem Text geht nicht hervor, ob Friswell mit den Beispielen Napiers und Cruikshanks absichtlich auf Distanz zum Klischee der jüdischen Nase gehen wollte oder ob sich der Autor der Problematik seiner Stereotypisierungen gar nicht bewusst war. Die von Jabet formulierte und auch von Friswell benutzte Klassifikation der Nasen findet sich in weiteren physiognomischen Schriften der Zeit wieder. Samuel Roberts Wells, ein einflussreicher amerikanischer Phrenologe, der länger in London lebte, legt in seinem New Physiognomy, Or, Signs of Character as Manifested Through Temperament and External Forms von 1866 eine lediglich leicht modifizierte Typologie von nun fünf Nasenarten vor. Die Einteilung in die römische und die jüdische Nase belässt er. Erstere stehe für “Execultiveness” (1891 [ 1 1866]: 192), letztere für “Commercialism” (195). Wells zitiert sogar wörtlich Jabets Bewertung der jüdischen Nase als Zeichen von Gerissenheit und stimmt dessen Einschätzung mit den Worten “perfectly correct and well-expressed” (196) zu. Der Erwerbssinn (“acquisitiveness”) sei allerdings weniger in der Form des Kamms als in der Breite solcher Nasen enthalten. Während Wells die Grundlinien aufgreift, fügt er gelegentlich weitere Attribute hinzu. Zum Beispiel erfährt man über Männer mit einer gebogenen Nase des römischen Typs: “As speakers, they make use of strong expressions, emphasize many words, and generally hit the nail with a heavy blow” (102). War die gebogene Nase um 1800 noch kein eindeutiges Erkennungszeichen des Juden, so heißt es jetzt bei Wells, die jüdische Nase sei “almost universal among the Israelites” (195). Obwohl die Verknüpfung 8 In Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1839) wird lediglich auf die Größe und nicht auf die Krümmung der Nase Fagins verwiesen (Bd. 3: 105). Die vermeintlich jüdische Hakennase taucht dann allerdings in George Cruikshanks Illustrationen auf. Pascal Fischer 44 von Jüdischkeit mit der gebogenen Nase in der Tat entschieden enger geworden ist, konnte sich ebenfalls der andere, sehr positiv besetzte Typus der “aquiline nose” behaupten. Keineswegs wird die gebogene Nase, sei sie “römisch” oder “jüdisch”, in einer dieser physiognomischen Studien mit Degeneration in Verbindung gebracht. Nach Wells ist es die Stupsnase, die degeneriert ist. In einer merkwürdigen Vermischung von Schöpfungsgeschichte und Evolutionstheorie erklärt er: A Snub nose is to us a subject of most melancholy interest. We behold in it a proof of the degeneracy of the human race. We feel that such was not the shape of Adam’s nose - that the type has been departed from - that the depravity of man’s heart has extended itself to his features. (197) Das “gefühlte Wissen” um Adams Nase genügt als Beweis für die Degeneration der Stupsnase. Auch wenn einzelne Unterschiede zwischen den untersuchten Erzählwerken und den physiognomischen Schriften hervortreten, hat sich ergeben: Das Grundmuster, nach dem der gebogenen Nase Bedeutungen zugeschrieben werden, ist sehr ähnlich. Die konvexe Nase vermochte zwei separate kognitive Schemata zu evozieren, die eng mit der Ausbildung literarischer Typen verbunden sind (vgl. Wolf 2002a: 308). Die ungleiche Einschätzung dieser Nasenform je nach ethnischer Zugehörigkeit war schon in den Romanen der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts allgemein üblich und wurde dann ab der Jahrhundertmitte von den sogenannten nasologischen Studien lediglich systematisiert. Deren Praxis, zum Teil fiktionale Gestalten als Beleg für die eigenen Attribuierungen von Wesenszügen heranzuziehen, dokumentiert die Relevanz der Literatur für die Herausbildung der Stereotype. Umgekehrt waren etliche Schriftsteller von den Physiognomikern beeinflusst, so dass sich letztlich Literatur und Pseudowissenschaft gegenseitig in ihren Urteilen bestätigten. Dabei darf das Spezifische literarischer Werke nicht ignoriert werden. Es sind vor allem die anspruchsvolleren Autoren, die bisweilen Distanz zu den überkommenen ästhetischen Bewertungen und Klischees zeigen oder das Mittel der Narration dazu einsetzen, solche Auffassungen kritisch zu hinterfragen. Das Beispiel Edgar Allen Poes konnte die Möglichkeit von Literatur illustrieren, mehrere mit der gebogenen Nase verbundene Vorstellungen simultan aufzurufen. Interpretationen, die die gebogene Nase in Bram Stokers vielschichtigem Roman auf einen einzigen Sinngehalt reduzieren wollen, werden der semiotischen Offenheit dieses physiognomischen Merkmals nur unzureichend gerecht. Die Nase Draculas vermag auf Jüdischkeit ebenso zu verweisen wie auf das Bild des degenerierten Adels. Erinnert die Adlernase des Grafen an Lombrosos Verbrechertypus, verbindet sie den Schurken außerdem mit den imposanten, aber dämonischen Gothic und Byronic Heroes der ersten Phase der Schauerliteratur um 1800. Als Element zur Figurencharakterisierung ist die konvex gebogene Die gebogene Nase 45 Nase zugleich ein Mittel, verschiedenartige Diskurse zusammenzuführen. Auch dies macht sie zu einem aufschlussreichen Gegenstand literaturwissenschaftlicher Betrachtung. Bibliographie Anon. (1773). 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Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. 188f. Die gebogene Nase 47 Warning, Rainer (1999). Die Phantasie der Realisten. München: Wilhelm Fink. Warwick, Eden [i.e. George Jabet] (1848). Nasology: or, Hints Towards a Classification of Noses. London: Richard Bentley. Wells, Samuel Roberts (1891 [ 1 1866]). New Physiognomy, Or, Signs of Character as Manifested Through Temperament and External Forms. New York: Fowler & Wells. Wolf, Werner (1992). “The Language of Feeling between Transparency and Opacity. The Semiotics of the English Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Novel.” In: Wilhelm G. Busse (Hrsg.). Anglistentag 1991 Düsseldorf. Proceedings. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 108-129. Wolf, Werner (2002a). “Gesichter in der Erzählkunst: Zur Wahrnehmung von Physiognomien und Metawahrnehmung von Physiognomiebeschreibungen aus theoretischer und historischer Sicht am Beispiel englischsprachiger Texte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.” Sprachkunst 33/ 2. 301-325. Wolf, Werner (2002b). “‘Speaking faces’? - Zur epistemologischen Lesbarkeit von Physiognomie-Beschreibungen im englischen Erzählen des Modernismus.” Poetica 34. 389-426. Pascal Fischer Universität Würzburg / Universität Duisburg-Essen Ghost Busting The Role of Literary Cyberpunk in the Development of Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century Mojca Krevel Since the exhaustion of postmodernism in the first half of the 1980s, when its production could no longer provide an accurate interpretation of its immediate social reality, a number of literary attempts to deviate from the postmodernist dictum have appeared, claiming to be successors. From the perspective of the zeitgeist-based typologies, the rightful successor to postmodernism should already function according to the metaphysical premises of the postmodern epoch. In view of that, the article examines the phenomenon of literary cyberpunk, a movement formed in America at the beginning of the 1980s within the science fiction genre. The investigation of the position of cyberpunk in its original environment of science fiction, the relation between cyberpunk and its mainstream contemporary postmodernism, and the analysis of the specifics of the cyberpunk subject, literary worlds and style reveal the decisive role of cyberpunk in the development of the foundation upon which the Avant-Pop movement of the early 1990s successfully anchored literature within the new epoch. 1. À propos the death of postmodernism Even though postmodernism has, from the mid-1980s onwards, repeatedly been proclaimed dead, it still seems to be the common denominator of virtually all investigations into the developments in literature over the last twenty-five years. Considering the speed and the range of transformations in the domains of economy, society and culture in recent decades, it is extremely odd that the accompanying literary production should still be discussed in terms of a tradition that peaked roughly thirty-five years ago and which has been continuously recognized as outdated since less than a decade later. Does that mean that literature, put quite plainly, became mired in the never-ending feedback loops of postmodernist auto- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Mojca Krevel 50 referentiality, thereby mise-en-abimeing itself ad nauseam? No doubt some contemporary literature is solipsistic in its auto-referentiality. However, the share of literary works produced over the last thirty years providing fresh, exciting and artistically accomplished comments on contemporary reality has been steadily on the rise to produce what is now a significant majority. What might be the reason, then? In this respect, it is certainly noteworthy to mention the confusion in the usage of the terms “postmodernism” and “postmodernity,” which especially Anglophone scholars generally use synonymously, while others separate them as two distinct terms: the first referring to an artistic period, a late twentieth century phase in the development of art, and the second to the epoch succeeding the modern age. The gist of the problem is to a certain extent implicit in the explanation above; however, the most convincing reason for this frequent conflation of terms is, in my opinion, much more complex and further reaching. Before undertaking to provide answers to how postmodernism was dethroned, what happened next, and why its ghost still haunts the theoretical discourse on contemporary literature - all of which are the central concerns of this paper - I shall first briefly outline the basis of what should paint a clearer picture of the development and placement of often confusing literary phenomena of the last decades. In the case of postmodernism, it took scholars well over a decade to detect foundations differentiating it resolutely from those of all the literary periods preceding it. It is these different foundations that provide postmodernism with the status of an independent and theoretically-justified literary category. After a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts at text-based and empirical approaches, 1 discussion in the early 1980s increasingly focused on the more metaphysical aspects, foregrounding the social, economic and cultural changes accompanying the rise of the postmodernist tradition. 2 It seems that the most productive answer was offered by the approaches close to the controversial Geistes- 1 I am primarily referring to David Lodge’s, Douwe W. Fokkema’s and Ihab Hassan’s enumerations of formal and thematic characteristics of postmodernist writing, which, due to the decidedly intertextual nature of postmodernist production, can also be found in works pertaining to other traditions. Tomo Virk observes a similar problem with Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction as a quintessentially postmodernist form, which she, Virk claims, justifies with criteria combining certain formal (metafiction) and thematic (historicity) characteristics without clarifying the essential difference between postmodernist and previous usages of the form (62-63). 2 E.g. Brian McHale, Janko Kos, Tomo Virk and Douwe W. Fokkema, who, before concentrating on the empirical analysis of the specifically postmodernist semantic fields and lexemes, identified postmodernism as the last phase of a historical process which started in the Renaissance. A similar approach is also evident in Fredric Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism. Ghost Busting 51 geschichte, 3 which defines literary and historical periods according to the specific ‘spirit of the age’ by analysing the structures and relations of the four basic paradigms - i.e. subject, transcendence, truth and reality - specific to each artistic and historical period. In the case of postmodernism, the examination of the status of the four paradigms reveals that it represents the final phase of metaphysical nihilism and, with that, the definite disintegration of the metaphysical frame specific to the modern age. Its successors should therefore move away from Cartesian metaphysics entirely and abide by a new, postmodern structuring of the world. And indeed, they did. The problem was, as we shall see, that it was hard to notice and evaluate with the traditional and established tools of literary criticism. Relying, however, on the philosophical, sociological, economic and anthropological characteristics of the epoch succeeding the modern age as charted by the leading theoreticians of postmodernity, 4 the decisive diversions from the existing literary traditions first appear in the production of the 1990s’ Avant-Pop movement. Avant-Pop has not only successfully introduced literature to the computer era but also offered the fully-developed apparatus for significant literary interpretations of and contributions to that era. If postmodernism was essentially destructive, tearing apart the metaphysical foundations and beliefs of modernity, yet failing or even refusing to provide constructive alternatives, Avant-Pop relied upon the metaphysical tenets which were a priori productive. The interesting question is, of course, what happened between postmodernism, essentially still defined by the paradigms governing the modern age, and the already fully postmodern Avant-Pop. Literature has indeed bridged the epochal gap in less than a decade. The answer to this question, the justification of which is also the central purpose of this paper, is: by quietly succumbing to the lure of the frowned-upon outsider science fiction. In other words, what I intend to show is that in the plethora of literary attempts to transcend postmodernism in the 1980s, the sci-fi movement of cyberpunk offered the most productive groundwork for Avant-Pop to successfully carry literature into the postmodern epoch. 2. Pioneers in the desert of the real The beginnings of the epoch in question coincide with the formation of the postindustrial society after the Second World War. The drastic changes in the fields of trade, economy and finance brought about by the extremely rapid development of especially three industries - advertising, 3 The controversy surrounding the Geistesgeschichte is a consequence of the racist appropriation of the approach by Nazism (equating ‘Geist’ with ‘deutscher Geist’), and not a matter of its scholarly relevance. 4 E.g. Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Marshal McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari. Mojca Krevel 52 media and information technology - were soon followed by very noticeable shifts in the domains of society and culture. Theoreticians from various fields of humanistic studies responded promptly. Tracing the changes and establishing their incompatibility with the Cartesian categories, Marshal McLuhan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and others have provided a surprisingly compatible array of disparate observations on the governing mechanisms of the postmodern epoch. Using the postmodern Geistesgeschichte model, which will serve as a springboard for the detection of the first major deviations from the postmodernist tradition, I will rely on the terminology developed by Jean Baudrillard, which in my opinion 5 most aptly articulates and encapsulates the observations of his colleagues. 6 Reality, the postmodern version of which Baudrillard terms “hyperreality,” is a convenient starting point. Hyperreality refers to the reality of the third-order simulacra (cf. Baudrillard 1994: 121-127) conditioned by the shift in production relations which signalled the beginning of the postindustrial stage of capitalism after the Second World War. This is a reality created from copies, models without originals, in which consumption is no longer bound to the functional value of the products as they “assume their meaning in their differential relation to other signs” (Baudrillard 1981: 66) and ultimately function as signifiers. With that, the objects of consumption acquire social meaning and function as a basis of identity creation, which brings us to the category of postmodern subjectivity. The postmodern subject, which Baudrillard refers to as ‘fractal subject’, is therefore, like hyperreality, a network system of differential signs that can be arbitrarily manipulated according to one’s preferences - in a mediagenic society these generally correspond to media-transferred trends. Postmodern subjects are therefore completely fluid, unstable systems of information, and their existence is guaranteed by the constant influx of data from the media, which consequently assume the status of postmodern transcendence. The category of truth, which describes the relation between the subject and transcendence, in postmodern societies anticipates perpetual rhizomatous decentralization, which might as well be metaphorized by “I connect therefore I am.” My selection of the Avant-Pop movement as the most promising candidate for the first literary representative of writing governed by the Geistesgeschichte framework described above was based on what may seem to be a rather shallow reason: these 1990s authors were the first generation to have thoroughly internalized the hypertextual medium. 5 For a more detailed discussion see Krevel 2010: 40-47. 6 Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality coincides, for example, with Jameson’s concept of culturalization of all the aspects of social life within the postmodern situation, Lyotard’s model of the self as a node in an information network, Debord’s theory of society of spectacle, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of rhizome. Ghost Busting 53 Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the nature of media used for communication shapes societies more than the content of the communication does (McLuhan 2001: 8) provides my selection with a much more solid base - the change in medium typically accompanies the changing of epochs. For example, as Bolter observes in relation to the dawning of modernity, “[w]hen the printed word supplanted and marginalized the codex, the writing space took on the qualities of linearity, replicability and fixity” (Bolter 2001: 22). These qualities lie at the very core of the modern age’s structuring of the world and they establish the notion of the author of the printed text as an authority, a god-like creator of finite worlds, and the ultimate metaphor of the Cartesian subject. Considering the structural logic and the functioning of hypertext, 7 we could paraphrase Bolter’s statement as follows: When the hypertext supplanted and marginalized print, the writing space took on the qualities of “flexibility, instability and interactivity” (Bolter 2001: xiii). These clearly echo the defining qualities of Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality as a network of signs freely manipulated according to one’s desires. As such, the electronic medium carries a double function. On the one hand, it embodies the principles of the social, economic and cultural reality of our everyday existence and provides the perfect medium for commenting on it. On the other hand, its omnipresence and ubiquitous usage further accelerate the logic of its functioning into the social sphere, determining our society in the sense of McLuhan’s claim. I based my research of Avant-Pop production on the supposition that artistic works produced within the environment of hyperreality and expressed through the medium of hypertext should correspond to Baudrillard’s concept of the third order simulacra, models which both anticipate and accelerate the (hyper)real world of postmodernity. They should function like media, providing the material - the information - for the structuring of systems of our everyday hyperreality. The analyses of the literary characters, literary worlds and stylistic features of the most representative Avant-Pop works 8 reveal that the governing principle indeed predominantly corresponds to Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra of simulation, forming hyperreal systems foreign to the Cartesian dialectics and principles of organicity, hierarchization, and linearity (Krevel 2010: 89-137). 7 I am using the term “hypertext” for all the instances of electronic writing, as they all share the paradigms of flexibility, instability and interactivity (cf. Bolter 2001: xiii, xiv). 8 E.g. Mark America’s The Kafka Chronicles, Ron Sukenick’s Doggy Bag and Mosaic Man, Mark Leyner’s Et tu, Babe and Tooth Imprints on a Corndog, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, short stories in the Avant Pop anthology Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation. Mojca Krevel 54 The Avant-Pop subject is best described as an open, unstable system of information on the subject, meaning that it is prone to changing completely with the introduction of new data into the system of subjectivity. The validity of these data depends on the stability of the potential systems they might create between themselves and in connection to the systems already confirmed in hyperreality, 9 which present the fluid core of identity. If the clusters of new data entering the system create a more stable structure, the core is replaced or updated. The hypertextual logic of the subject’s creation furthermore dissolves - much as is the case on internet pages - the traditional distinction between the author, the reader, and the protagonists. 10 The existence of such an identity-in-flux is indelibly and crucially connected to the constant supply of data from the environment. In Avant- Pop the environment into which the characters are placed is the defining factor in identity creation. With the introduction of new information into the system of ‘environment’ or ‘story’, identities change. Avant-Pop landscapes are completely fluid systems within which places or locations are no longer the sum total of a finite number of characteristics, but established only with regard to the placing of these characteristics into the system of more or less stable environments. The precondition for their existence is the constant influx of new information, enabling the verification and stability of the environments introduced. The device providing them - in most Avant-Pop works the task is performed by television, print, radio, internet or their derivatives - thus becomes the guarantee of each immediate reality, while its logic assumes the status of truth in the sense of experiencing the world. The defining feature of Avant-Pop style is the absence of a system of familiar references. Its abundant neologisms have no symbolic correspondents, and they have yet to be actualized in the manner of the third order simulacra in the hyperrealities of individual receivers. In that respect, 9 These involve celebrities, trends, movies and TV-series, commercials, trademarks, etc. 10 For example, the main protagonist of all Mark Leyner’s fiction is ‘Mark Leyner’, so we could assume that the works are autobiographical. The style of narration is accordingly realistic; events provide an impression of a coherent structuring of the world. Yet the literary ‘Mark Leyner’ constantly moves within the mediagenic reality, arbitrarily choosing elements from it to build (or add to) his existing system of identity. Leyner’s ‘autobiographical’ identity is thus constructed along the way, the reader places individual information on ‘Leyner’ within systems of information, the stability of which depend on their connectivity. Leyner’s existence is thus completely fluid and depends on the reader’s capability of connecting information provided into both the already existing ‘literary systems’ of the story as well as the systems of reader’s actual, experienced reality. A similar structuring of the subject is also evident in Ronald Sukenick’s Doggy Bag and Mosaic Man, relying primarily on Jewish mythology and popular cults, in Kathy Acker’s novels, exploiting the systems of popular philosophy and pornography, Eurydice, relying upon feminism and poststructuralism, etc. Ghost Busting 55 they decisively define the direction of the possibilities for a story and its meaning. Avant-Pop metaphors are probably the best example of how a third order simulacrum attracts and incorporates raw data within its hyperreality. Fulfilling the traditional function of describing the unknown with the familiar, Avant-Pop metaphors rely exclusively upon the artefacts of the mediagenic society - those artefacts which have already become part of our everyday hyperreality. 11 These function much like hypertext links, since the receiver’s familiarity with them conditions the creation of the story. The governing principle of Avant-Pop’s activity and production, then, corresponds to Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra of simulation, forming hyperreal systems foreign to the Cartesian dialectics and principles of organicity, hierarchization and linearity. 3. The missing link and its whereabouts Such major transformations in literature do not and have never happened overnight. There were numerous attempts throughout the 1980s to move away from the unproductive and increasingly unattractive postmodernist modes, returning to the concrete everyday reality and addressing various contemporary social and economic issues instead. 12 Surprisingly enough, the tendency to focus on the more tangible aspects of (contemporary) existence again was not restricted to the domain of mainstream fiction and neither did it originate from that domain. In their attempt to revolutionise the obsolete modes of science fiction, the founding members of the cyberpunk movement - i.e. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner - turned away from both the psychologising of the New Wave soft sci-fi as well as from traditional hard sci-fi’s spaceships, Martians and galaxies far far away, to the “overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground” (Sterling 1985: iv). The latter would also be quite an accurate description of the 1980s experiential reality in which, after all, the computer became personal. In what follows I will explain why I consider cyberpunk to be the most productive ‘missing link’ between the unstable and unreliable realities of postmodernism, and the productive hyperrealities of Avant-Pop. I will 11 To illustrate: “He felt intact but worthless, like a chocolate rabbit selling for 75 percent off the month after Easter” (Coupland 2000: 53). 12 I am referring, for example, to the authors associated with neoor post-realism (e.g. Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan), revivals of the 1960s new-journalism (e.g. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Ted Conover’s Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens, books by William Finnegan, Leon Dash, Jane Kramer), the production of the socalled blank generation (e.g. Richard Hell, Kathy Acker, Bruce Benderson, Joel Rose), ‘brat-pack’ literature (e.g. Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz), etc. Mojca Krevel 56 show why literary cyberpunk seems to offer the most accurate rendering of the 1980s culmination of the postindustrial phase of capitalism, instrumental in the formation of a fully functioning postmodern society. Regardless of whether the idea to connect the nascent computer technology to the images and the aesthetics of pop culture was a stroke of luck, bare necessity, or a cunning marketing move, it enabled cyberpunk to treat contemporary reality with the very instruments governing that reality - something its mainstream contemporaries, for the most part, failed to do. The fact that this was done in the domain of science fiction and its demands considerably speeded up the disentangling of the unproductive postmodernist loops of autoreferentiality, which explains why literature was able to accommodate epochal changes in less than a decade. The Movement, as it was called until Gardner Dozois offered the catchier “cyberpunk” in his 1984 article “Sci-Fi in the Eighties” (Krevel 2001: 28), had never questioned its science fiction status. Still, in Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk manifesto, the aim of which was to establish the Movement as the next step in the development of science fiction, the fresh blood that would revitalise the genre, there is a statement which makes both the placement of cyberpunk within science fiction as well as the existence of the genre itself highly problematic: “The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world” (Sterling 1986: ix). The terminal impact of this statement becomes clear when we observe the relation between the development of science fiction and mainstream literary production. After its ‘declaration of independence’ from the mainstream production in 1926, 13 science fiction has rapidly achieved the status of a self-contained subculture, developing independently from the mainstream. From the existing theoretizations on the specifics of the genre in relation to the mainstream 14 one can deduce two major reasons for their separation. As science fiction is primarily about the research of alternative worlds, the questions it addresses are essentially ontological, while the mainstream with its observations about the experiential world is concerned with issues which are essentially epistemological. 15 At the 13 In his editorial to the first issue of the Amazing Stories journal, published April 5 1926, Hugo Gernsback defined the new literary genre of ‘scientification’ as fiction in which scientific facts combine with the foretelling of future in the manner of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and E.A. Poe. The definition on the one hand reflects the lineage with the tradition of fantasy writing, on the other hand, it also implies the complete incompatibility of such writing with the modernist tendencies governing the then mainstream fiction. 14 For a more detailed discussion see Krevel 2001: 16-23. 15 I am relying upon the terminology introduced by Brian McHale (1992: 247f.) as it will, over the following pages, facilitate my explanation of the relation between cyberpunk and postmodernism. Ghost Busting 57 same time, owing to its connection to the tradition of fantastic literature, science fiction relies for its effect on providing the element of the fantastic, which is achieved by forcing the reader to doubt the existing ontological order. Knowing that, it is not hard to see why science fiction as an independent genre might encounter a serious identity crisis when entering the social, cultural and economic reality of the 1980s. With postmodernism as its mainstream contemporary, the most important defining feature of science fiction - that of addressing ontological issues - was rendered irrelevant, as postmodernism was doing exactly the same thing. 16 Furthermore, despite the seeming incompatibility, the genre and the mainstream have kept each other in check since at least the 1960s. At that time, as Brian McHale shows in Constructing Postmodernism, a feedback loop of influences was established between the two, with mainstream writers borrowing themes, motifs and materials from science fiction, while science fiction authors drew from mainstream poetics (McHale 1992: 227- 236). What is interesting is that the two initially absorbed the models with a certain delay, that is, each drew on the previous phase of the other’s development. Throughout the years, however, the delay began to decrease until, with cyberpunk, it disappeared. McHale describes the situation as follows: “Cyberpunk SF can thus be seen, in this systemic perspective, as SF which derives certain of its elements from postmodernist mainstream fiction which itself has, in its turn, already been ‘sciencefictionized’ to some greater or lesser degree” (McHale 1992: 229). With cyberpunk, in other words, science fiction and mainstream fiction found themselves within the same aesthetic frame, dealing with similar themes and motifs and using similar writing strategies. With that, keeping them separate thereafter seems to be more a matter of cosmetics than an actual, theoretically-justified necessity. On the other hand, the rise of the information society and culture defined by technology contributed to the waning of the other defining feature: the element of the fantastic. A techno-culture defined reader can no longer doubt the unity of the ontological order as that order has been ruined for quite some time. In a world where the real is constructed according to one’s preferences and desires (by changing TV channels, using a walkman, playing video or computer games, not to mention the possibilities offered by the internet), concepts like ‘impossible’, ‘unreal’ or’ ‘fantastic’ lose their traditional meanings - especially when science is 16 According to Brian McHale, modernism and preceding literary traditions rely upon the epistemological dominant and address epistemological issues, while the dominant of postmodernism is ontological (McHale 1999: 6-11). Similarly, Janko Kos and Tomo Virk define postmodernism as the concluding stage in the development of modern age literature, as postmodernism disqualifies the last remaining tenet of modernity - the concept of a reliable single reality, guaranteeing the subject’s existence (Kos 1995: 47-54). Mojca Krevel 58 involved. For a contemporary individual, that which is grounded in science and probability can in principle no longer be fantastic. From the perspective of science fiction, cyberpunk therefore merges the genre with the mainstream by bringing technology to the core of literary creation. However, to fully understand its role in the development of literature after postmodernism, we must also clarify the relation between cyberpunk and its mainstream contemporary. Let us ground this clarification in the most obvious difference between the two: cyberpunk novels read, on the whole, like detective fiction, while postmodernist novels are as a rule rather difficult to read in terms of traditional, linear narrative. As simplistic as this observation may be, it is operative in explaining the relation between the two. The environment that produced the literature of postmodernism predicted the postmodern situation on a theoretical and philosophical level. It is therefore understandable that in postmodernist works the problems of the indefinability of a subject, reality, or a higher, transcendental truth are reflected merely on the level of form, showing through metafictional practices, mixing of genres, quotations, and so on. In cyberpunk, however, these elements move into the story, or in the words of Brian McHale, cyberpunk “translates or transcodes postmodernist motifs from the level of form (the verbal continuum, narrative strategies) to the level of content” (McHale 1992: 246). As I will show in the following section, cyberpunk heroes have no individual identity since the traditional concept of ‘identity’ is crucially linked to selecting among traditional binary oppositions of the type I/ Other, natural/ artificial, spirit/ body, alive/ dead, man/ machine, male/ female, and so on. In the age defined by technology such binaries disappear and identification in the traditional sense is rendered impossible. Literary personae in cyberpunk novels remain on the level of types, which is the closest they can get to the idea of subjectivity. As such they are a reflection of individuals in the information age. Furthermore, in postmodernist literature the formation of multiple realities was achieved through the juxtaposing of different literary discourses and thus remained implicit. In cyberpunk, the existence of multiple realities is no longer a subject of speculation but a proven fact and it can therefore enter the story. Individuals conditioned by the information society and techno-culture no longer ask themselves questions of an epistemological nature but rather ontological ones: Which of the worlds am I in? How do I differentiate between different worlds? In which of the worlds is my decision correct? These are the questions cyberpunk heroes ask themselves as they travel through the virtual landscapes of the Net, as they are wired on a ‘simstim’ unit, as they move through the islands of wealth, poverty, and war. What, then, is the relation between cyberpunk literature and mainstream postmodernist fiction? Taking into account what has been said, Ghost Busting 59 we can agree with Brian McHale’s theory that cyberpunk materializes postmodernist stylistic practices. Since the latter quintessentially define postmodernism, the claim that cyberpunk literature enhances and upgrades postmodernism in the sense that it fully realizes its possibilities seems the most convincing. But does it, unlike postmodernism, offer any productive alternatives? 4. Cyberpunk @ postmodernity Cyberpunk writing was, of course, not yet affected by the actual hypertext medium, as most of the texts - even in William Gibson’s exemplary Neuromancer - were written on a typewriter at the time when the internet was still a more or less clandestine national security project. The categories of author, reader, and literary reality are therefore still completely traditional. However, its main thematic concern was a technology the functioning of which corresponded to the modus operandi of the society in which the movement emerged. As such, cyberpunk offered an accurate reflection of the zeitgeist, which was closer to the modes traditional mainstream fiction had been employing in the rendering of reality than to the specifics of traditional science fiction. Also, in a society governed by hyperreality, the Movement’s popularity and thematic ‘coolness’ provided it with the reality-forming potential of other, already postmodernized, media. The usage of traditional science fiction techniques, especially extrapolation and speculation, on the materials crucially connected to the principles governing the 1980s society contributed to the formation of the foundation which served as a springboard for the emergence of the fully postmodern literary phenomena in the following decade. In order to illustrate this, I will analyze three areas of cyberpunk, areas which in my opinion also represent crucial points in the epochal changes - the structures of the subject, literary worlds, and style. These will be examined in the light of their correspondence to the concept of Baudrillard’s third order simulacra as the organizing principle of postmodern reality creation and, if possible, compared to their Avant-Pop counterparts. 4.1 Cyberpunk subject Cyberpunk emerged at the time of the disintegration of the modern subject and his or her identity, mirrored in an over-all crisis of representation, which is in the centre of both the works of postmodernist authors as well as theoreticians of postmodernity. Joseph Tabbi remarks that the two-dimensionality of literary personae in postmodernist works and cyberpunk is not so much a consequence of cultural narcissism but rather the only possible reaction to the crisis of representation: Mojca Krevel 60 The prospect that identity might become wholly informational enables Gibson, like Mailer, Pynchon, and their theorist contemporaries Fredric Jameson and Donna Harraway, to de-realize any notion of an individual and separate subject and thus to make identity itself an abstract representation of the vast and impersonal corporate networks that constitute so much of the contemporary life-world. (Tabbi 1995: 213) The main problem of postmodernist creation of character and identity lies precisely in the paradigmatic postmodernist equality of discourses, which can never conform to a meaningful hierarchic system. In the works of postmodernist writers, the incompatibility of discourses is reflected in the usage of pastiches, simulacra, intertextuality, and in other metafictional maneuvers. In cyberpunk, however, postmodernist techniques materialize on the level of the story; they are no longer a metaphor for the contemporary world. Quite the opposite, the world becomes a metaphor of the technique, a copy of the simulacrum. Tabbi makes a similar observation: Indeed, it often seems as if cyberpunk’s characters cannot help but represent to themselves the surrounding structure of mediations, simulacra, and machinic repetitions that have produced, for example, Baudrillard’s simulation culture, Lyotard’s postmodern sublime, or the dream space of Jameson’s political unconscious. (Tabbi 1995: 215) Cyberpunk characters are therefore representations, and as such best described by the traditional concept of a type. However, cyberpunk ‘types’ - e.g. the console cowboy, the assassin, the merchant, artificial intelligence - are not the classical cross-section of features typical of a certain group of people, they are no longer metaphors but material for metaphorization, just like MTV, Vogue, movies or TV series. 17 As such, they correspond to Baudrillard’s third order simulacra: they are artificial constructs of various segments of reality that have yet to find their place in hyperreality. And they found it indeed in the form of a late 1980s and early 1990s cyberpunk subculture, the image, credo, and activities of which were based upon those of the heroes in cyberpunk novels. Such a concept of character creation corresponds to the logic of character creation in Avant-Pop. There is, however, an important difference between the two. In cyberpunk, the author does not enter the simulacric process but remains outside the literary reality throughout the meaningproviding entity. The reason for this is simple: cyberpunk authors were still essentially a product of traditional approaches to and understandings of literature, which was, after all, reflected in their stubborn insistence on being considered exclusively in terms of science fiction. Their characters were therefore still created as traditional science fiction second order simulacra, as extrapolated versions of existing people and technologies. 17 For a more detailed explanation see Krevel 2001: 86-104. Ghost Busting 61 However, the technology they based their extrapolating upon functioned according to the principles which not only translated extrapolation into the generation of information but also contributed to its immediate realization. What is more, the same principles also governed the functioning of the environment within which the reception took place, viz. the reality of third order simulacra. Such ‘double’ existence reveals in practice the borderline status of cyberpunk. 4.2 Cyberpunk literary worlds If we follow McHale’s suggestion that traditional science fiction explores primarily ontology in fiction while postmodernism is largely concerned with the ontology of fiction (McHale 1992: 247), postmodernist science fiction, that is, cyberpunk, should use space for both the exploration of ontology in fiction and at the same time of the ontology of fiction, worlds-as-they-could-be in a world-as-it-could-be. In practice that would mean that space in cyberpunk should be a means for the creation of a multiplicity of worlds which are no longer fictional but complementary to our(s). In the formation of its worlds, cyberpunk relies upon traditional sci-fi locations (e.g. space colonies, space stations in the orbit, megalopoli), however, with an explicit tendency to provide ‘worldness’ to the alternative worlds. Although millions of miles away, these worlds are like our world, except for some minor technical details. The cyberpunk versions of, for example, space colonies are almost parodic in comparison with their established counterparts, as they are mostly derelict slums, ghettos, or luxury resorts for the rich. 18 Similarly, Gibson’s Sprawl, a massive urban area covering the entire East Coast from Boston to Atlanta, may not (as yet) be our immediate environment; however, as it is constructed from the elements of the existing reality, it functions in the same way as our media-generated notions of existing places we may never have actually visited (those that are frequently featured in the media, for example Beverly Hills, Miami, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc). Sprawl is therefore not perceived as a sci-fi extrapolation of the existing reality but as a simultaneity that is typical of the functioning of hyperreality. If physical spaces can to some extent still be related to those in classical science fiction and even postmodernist production, the introduction of the concept of cyberspace separates cyberpunk from both the canon of traditional science fiction as well as from postmodernist metanarrative experiments. Cyberspace is the ultimate example of ‘reality before real- 18 Freeside, where the residence of the Tessier-Ashpool clan in Gibson’s Neuromancer is located, is a luxury Vegas-like resort for the wealthy, while Rucker’s habitat on the Moon in Wetware is based on ghettos like Harlem and the slum areas surrounding Asian megalopoli. Mojca Krevel 62 ity’. Like Sprawl, it is a product of Gibson’s imagination, an integration of existing entities of reality (video games) into a concept which did not yet exist per se. It was not until a decade later that the internet, functioning very similarly to Gibson’s cyberspace, became a household utility. The world of cyberpunk is therefore no longer a postmodernist simulation of the one we live in; quite the opposite, the world we live in is a simulation of the cyberpunk world. The structure of cyberpunk spaces, especially the notion of cyberspace, is therefore very similar to the concept of creation of Avant-Pop media landscapes from our media conditioned ideas of places. The main difference between the two is the already discussed double status of cyberpunk. Its places start functioning as third order simulacra within the social and economic reality of their reception, while in Avant-Pop, the mediageniety is the defining factor from the get-go. 4.3 Cyberpunk style The most important cyberpunk innovations in comparison to preceding and parallel literary (genre and mainstream) production are to be found in its characteristic style. Cyberpunk literature comes closest to the aesthetics of contemporary media: reading a cyberpunk novel could be compared to the MTV bombardment with images, while the rhythm of narration is so fast that it is often rather difficult to follow the story. Revolutionary as such ‘MTV-style’ narration may seem, its function is predominantly cosmetic. The most radical innovations are, in fact, to be found in the formation of neologisms and metaphors. Gibson’s technological neologisms, for example, seem strangely familiar at first: we understand individual parts, but not their combinations. Their matter-of-fact usage in the text echoes the way in which technological innovations and concepts enter our everyday reality. Consequently, when we come across a cyberpunk technology-based neologism, we do what we usually do with new technological words - we ascribe an image to it which we form according to our existing knowledge and experience. With that, we typically accelerate our everyday models, and the simulacric wheel comes full circle: we do exactly what Gibson was doing, borrowing the components for his neologisms from computer handbooks. Thus, the main characteristic of words that provide cyberpunk style with its specifics is that they do not have symbolic counterparts. But unlike the poststructuralist never-ending chains of signifiers, pointing to the instability of reality created through words, cyberpunk neologisms function as third order simulacra, they create their hyperreal ‘signifieds’ such as ‘cyberspace’, for example. To understand the specifics of cyberpunk metaphorics, we must first clarify the difference between a literary and a scientific metaphor. According to Ruth Curl, the main difference between them is that in litera- Ghost Busting 63 ture, a metaphor triggers an explosion of meanings which we can never fully comprehend in their entirety. Science, on the other hand, selects the right meaning from a finite group of meanings ascribable to a certain word, thus undermining the full semantic potential of the metaphor. The literary metaphor is therefore a means for the exploration of ontology, while the main aim 19 of using metaphor is predominantly epistemological, viz. to clarify (unfamiliar) technological and scientific facts by means of (familiar) natural processes (Curl 1992: 233). What happens, when science and technology are more familiar to us than nature and when they define and support our existence in and comprehension of the world more than nature? The natural is described by the technological, of course. And this is precisely the case with cyberpunk metaphors, and perhaps the most important novelty that the movement contributed to the late twentieth century development of literature. From a plethora of metaphors which contribute to the specifics of the cyberpunk style, the most effective are those which describe unfamiliar natural phenomena with more familiar technological concepts. In Neuromancer, the colour of the sky is described as that of a “television, tuned to a blank channel” (Gibson 1995: 9), while Molly explains her aggression by being “wired” (Gibson 1995: 37) that way. In cyberpunk, the characteristics of literary and scientific metaphors merge, which is best illustrated by the central cyberpunk metaphor: the computer. This often-used sci-fi motif thus appears in a double function in cyberpunk. On the one hand, it retains the characteristics of the traditional sci-fi Frankenstein’s monster metaphor, which is essentially scientific; on the other hand, it also becomes a metaphor for the creator of Frankenstein’s monster. Consequently, the computer becomes a genuinely ontological metaphor, a generator of an infinite number of meanings, ranging from connotations referring to transcendence and mythologies (as is the case especially in the Neuromancer sequel Count Zero) to allusions to motherhood and creation in general. Cyberpunk neologisms and metaphors seem to be elements which already fully agree with the modus operandi of postmodernity both in the manner of their conception as well as their reception. Their structuring and functioning are generally comparable to those of Avant-Pop. However, the main difference between the cyberpunk technological neo- 19 The usage of metaphors in science is purely functional: a hypothetical metaphorical connection is established between the concept that is the subject of scientific research and a familiar natural or social concept. The connection is than tested and analysed against data and either the ‘correct’ meaning is selected, or, if the ‘correct’ meaning cannot be found, the metaphor is discarded (the kinetic theory of gases was, for example, established upon the comparison of gases to large swarms of infinitely small particles). A scientific metaphor is therefore primarily “a tool for expanding the boundaries of the quantitative” (Curl 1992: 233), and not a means to explore the qualitative like its literary counterpart. Mojca Krevel 64 logisms without symbolic correspondents, which provides their simulacric status, and the style in Avant-Pop works is that in cyberpunk all systems eventually conform to a single, closed system of a linear story with a distinct beginning and end. The absence of such a system of ‘familiar references’, enabling the unknown to lean upon the familiar and thus contributing to the creation of a clear, linear story is what seems to be the defining feature of Avant-Pop style. If cyberpunk neologisms predominantly serve as stylistic devices spicing up the manifestation of an undisputed cover story, Avant-Pop neologisms define the direction of the possibilities for a story and its meaning. 20 Similarly, Avant-Pop develops the potential of cyberpunk technological metaphors, in which notions from the fields of information and general technology are used to describe natural phenomena. Their simulacric status is provided by the fact that technological concepts in themselves function as copies without the original and that their meaning is generally ascribed to them through verification in reality. In the mediagoverned society that fully came into effect with the spread of the internet to the social reality of individuals at the end of the 1980s, each event, or for that matter each individual, is essentially technological, that is, enabled by technology. The borderline between nature and technology is not just blurred; only technology in fact guarantees nature’s existence as our conceptions of nature and of the natural, like everything else, are media-generated. And only within such completely technologized, mediagenic reality, could Avant-Pop practice broaden cyberpunk’s strictly technological metaphors across the entire spectrum of media phenomena, forming the basis for the creation and understanding of the more complex segments of everyday hyperreality. 5. In conclusion It would be inaccurate to claim that cyberpunk was the only factor in Avant-Pop’s successful breakthrough to the terrain of postmodernity. 21 The Avant-Pop manifesto, after all, offers a comprehensive range of literary influences, dating back to the historical avant-garde movements and even to symbolism. The common denominator of the very diverse array of sources upon which Avant-Pop founded its production and philosophy 20 The functioning of Avant-Pop neologisms is best illustrated and even thematized by Coupland’s system of footnotes in Generation X, which provide more or less random explanations of trendy terms and neologisms (Krevel 2010: 127-128). 21 At this point I would like to emphasise that the Avant-Pop movement existed and has remained at the very margin of contemporary American literary production. A major breakthrough to the mainstream scene would, after all, disqualify their fundamental avant-garde stance. Nevertheless, from the perspective of literary history the production of its authors seems to be the first to thoroughly reflect the postmodern condition in (and of) literature. Ghost Busting 65 is their tendency to offer productive alternatives to literary traditions after they had lost their ability to adequately reflect the social and cultural concerns of their time. Cyberpunk, however, was the last in line, and the attempts of its authors to revolutionize science fiction by abandoning the obsolete modes it had rested upon coincided with the increasing inability of the mainstream postmodernist production to offer relevant comments on the developing information and media society. Postmodernist disqualification of reality as a source of certainty for the subject’s existence in the Cartesian world reflected the actual disappearance of the metaphysical bases upon which modern age societies functioned. The world was moving into a new epoch and postmodernists, with their obsolete literary tools of the Great Tradition, could do little but endlessly reflect upon how they can reflect no more. Cyberpunk, on the other hand, had the advantage of its genre origins not to care particularly about its metaphysical grounding. Its sole intention was to make science fiction exciting, cool and attractive to pop-cultural audiences. By linking their production to a (then) still largely primitive computer technology and the possibilities it implied, they managed, on the one hand, to embody, on the level of the story, what was only implicit in postmodernist decisively formal attempts to render the disappearance of the Cartesian notion of reality. On the other hand, by submitting their narrative to the central theme of technology, the functioning of which metaphorizes the functioning of the new world order, cyberpunk authors offered literary interpretations of experiences to which readers of the 1980s could relate. The analyses of the structures of cyberpunk protagonists and literary worlds showed that they correspond to the structuring of Baudrillard’s postmodern subjects and hyperreality. Even though conceived as second order simulacra, with the author clearly separated from the literary reality, they were received in society as third order simulacra and they further functioned as such, accelerating into the fully postmodernized subjects and landscapes of Avant-Pop. The examination of cyberpunk technology-based neologisms and metaphors, which are the trademarks of its style, determined their full status of third order simulacra both on the levels of production and reception. Cyberpunk may therefore be considered the ultimate realization of the possibilities offered by postmodernism, and at the same time also the movement which brought literature into the immediate vicinity of its postmodern incarnations. Furthermore, the innovations it introduces already signal what became painfully obvious with the rise of Avant-Pop: the inability of the established apparatus of literary criticism to provide an accurate theoretical response to contemporary literary phenomena. And until the theory finds its own approximation of cyberpunk to take it into the new epoch, the ghost of postmodernism will haunt its discourse, forcing it to theorise itself rather than its subject, as it has done for at least the last twenty-five years. Mojca Krevel 66 References Acker, Kathy (1988). The Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press. Amerika, Mark (1992). “The Avant-Pop Manifesto: Thread Baring Itself inTen Quick Posts.” http: / / www.altx.com/ manifestos/ avant.pop.manifesto.html (17 Aug 2011). Amerika, Mark (1993/ 1995). The Kafka Chronicles. Normal: Black Ice Books. Baudrillard, Jean (1972/ 1981). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Transl. Charles Levin. St. Louis, MO: Telos. Baudrillard, Jean (1981/ 1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Transl. Sheila F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bolter, Jay D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Conover, Ted (1987). Coyotes: A Journey through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens. New York: Vintage Books. Coupland, Douglas (1992/ 2001). Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture. London: Abacus. Coupland, Douglas (2000/ 2004). Miss Wyoming. London: Harper Perennial. Curl, Ruth (1992). “The Metaphors of Cyberpunk: Ontology, Epistemology, and Science Fiction.” In: George Slusser/ Tom Shippey (eds.). Fiction 2000. Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens & London: University of Georgia Press. Debord, Guy (1967/ 1999). Družba spektakla. Komentarji k družbi spektakla. Panegirik. Transl. Meta Štular and Tanja Lesničar Pučko. Ljubljana: ŠOU Študentska založba. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (1987/ 2005). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fokkema, Douwe W. (1984). Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gibson, William (1984/ 1995). Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins. Gibson, William (1986/ 1987). Count Zero. New York: Ace Books. Hassan, Ihab (1985). “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture & Society 3. 119-31. Jameson, Fredric (1998/ 2000). The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. New York: Verso. Kos, Janko (1995). Postmodernizem. Ljubljana: DZS. Krevel, Mojca (2001). Kiberpank v literaturi. Ljubljana: DZS. E-book. http: / / icarus.dzs.si/ e-knjige/ index.html (17 Aug 2011). Krevel, Mojca (2011). Izvidniki v puščavi resničnosti. Avant-pop med kiberpankom in postmoderno. Ljubljana: Sophia. Leyner, Mark (1990/ 1993). My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. New York: Vintage Books. Leyner, Mark (1992/ 1993). Et Tu, Babe. New York: Vintage Books. Leyner, Mark (1995/ 1996). Tooth Imprints on a Corndog. New York: Vintage Books. Lodge, David (1977). The Modes of Modern Writing. London [etc.]: Arnold. 229-45. Lyotard, Jean-François (1979/ 1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Transl. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCaffery, Larry (ed.) (1993/ 1995). Avant-Pop: Fiction for a daydream Nation. Normal: Black Ice Books. Ghost Busting 67 McHale, Brian (1987/ 1999). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge. McHale, Brian (1992). Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall (1967/ 2001). The Medium is the Message. An Inventory of Effects. Corte Madera: Gingko Press. Rucker, Rudy (1988). Wetware. New York: Avon Books. Sterling, Bruce (1986). “Preface to Mirrorshades.” In: Bruce Sterling (ed.). Mirrorshades. The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Arbor House. vii-xiv. Sukenick, Ronald (1994). Doggy Bag. Boulder, CO: Black Ice Books. Sukenick, Ronald (1999). Mosaic Man. Normal, IL: FC2. Virk, Tomo (2000). Strah pred naivnostjo. Poetika postmodernistične proze. Ljubljana: Literarno-umetniško društvo Literatura. Tabbi, Joseph (1995). Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk. London: Cornell University Press. Wolfe, Tom (1987). The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Mojca Krevel Faculty of Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia The Language of Alternative Lifestyles A Critical Analysis of the Discourses of Emos and LOHAS Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko This article examines how two alternative lifestyles - LOHAS (= Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) and Emos (= youth lifestyle stressing negative emotionality and social withdrawal) - try to construct their Otherness, i.e. their deviance from a postulated mainstream, in their discourses. Starting from a Critical Discourse Analytical perspective, we analyse two small corpora representing the respective discourses, trying to demonstrate in the process how modern means of computer-assisted and quantitatively oriented corpus analysis can fruitfully be applied to the investigation of cultural issues. Sample analyses of word lists, keywords and the collocations of select linguistic structures reveal that Emos define their status as outsiders less via reference to a mainstream culture but rather by solipsistically focusing on their inner and emotional selves. LOHAS, on the other hand, seems to be pushing a reformist agenda, concentrating on our - human and non-human nature - collective well-being. This agenda, however, seems to be defined as achievable through economic measures, which creates the impression that LOHAS has partly become part of the capitalist mainstream culture rather than being a real alternative. 1. Introduction Social identities are produced by the continuous process of interpretation rather than being objectively given. Self-identification therefore primarily happens in discourse and thus in and through the incessant play with signifiers and signifieds. Structuralism assumes that elements in a sign system are mainly defined in relation to other elements, which means their identity rests on what they are not as much as on what they are. Transferred to the field of society and culture, this means that our identities - if we think of them as AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 70 values in a system - could also derive from distancing ourselves from a certain group, i.e. from actively not being part of it. Constructing an alternative identity (in the sense of ‘different from others’, not ‘different from our own ‘standard’ identities’) thus is a process of undermining, reversing, or perverting the signifiers of mainstream culture. As mainstream culture, however, is not a given but rather a construct, people adopting such alternative identities may unintentionally contribute to a solidification of this construct. Or in other words, by presenting themselves as different and as transgressing the borders of conventions, they reconfirm the existence of these very conventions and strengthen their relevance. In this article, we want to examine how two alternative groups - Emos and LOHAS supporters - engage in this active Otherness and differentness. We will be paying more attention to their language than to their use of other signifiers (e.g. food, clothes). Our objective is to demonstrate how such an analysis of discourse can be done and how we can shed some light on processes of identity construction rather than to present the results of a comprehensive and coherent study. 2. What are alternative lifestyles? Before dealing with analyses proper, we want to examine the concept of alternative lifestyle more closely. We will additionally provide some background information on the two groups we will be concerned with. 2.1. Lifestyle The title features the word lifestyles rather than groups, culture, or identity. So the first question to ask is: What is the difference? Lifestyle has become something of a buzzword in current social theory, partly because some proclaim lifestyles to be a phenomenon of modern society cutting across and partly replacing more traditional categories such as class, gender or ethnicity (cf. Chaney 1996). A lifestyle can be defined as any open set of freely-chosen practices and items by which I express and make perceptible who I am or who I want to be in terms of ‣ Beliefs (epistemological systems) ‣ Attitudes (systems of ethical values) ‣ Tastes (system of aesthetic values) They thus define my social identity, by which I position myself in a society (cf. Marko 2010: 148f.). The distinctive features of lifestyles are the following (adopted and adapted from Chaney 1996): The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 71 I. The symbolic value of everyday life This is the idea that in today’s Western society, things are not just what they are but they also are signs of something else. These things potentially include everything, i.e. what you wear, what you like, what you eat, what you do, etc. Another interesting aspect relevant in modernity is that there is a shift - obviously promoted by advertising and the mass media - from functional to cultural meanings. Products of everyday life used to indicate - and thus to mean in a broad sense - their function: a door meant ‘you can enter/ leave here’, stairs meant ‘you can walk up/ down here’, a pepper mill meant ‘you can grind pepper with this’, etc. Advertising, of course, primarily referred to the functional qualities of a product, in the sense of ‘this is a good pepper mill because it grinds pepper so much better than anything else’. Today, we buy a pepper mill because of its nice design (meaning: we have a good taste), because of the higher price (meaning: we can afford it or, more likely, we spend money on these kind of things because these details are important to us), because of the brand and its connotations (one of which might, interestingly, be that it covers highquality products), etc. Signifiers in late modernity and particularly regarding the phenomenon of lifestyles are primarily visual. In the era of the anonymous city, the spectacle, i.e. things to see, have become even more central than before. It is not by chance that public conceptions of a person are referred to as their image. The importance of visuality also explains the salience of the body - its shaping and trimming through food, exercise and clothing - in lifestyles. II. The predominance of choice In today’s Western societies, people are constantly confronted with choices which are no longer determined by institutions, but which - to a certain extent - have to be taken individually. And with choices we create meanings, which in turn contribute to constructing our social identities. Consumption is central in these choices, more so than production. Lifestyles are consequently primarily defined by signifiers from the area of a hedonistic form of consumption. Even though lifestyles appear to be individual choices, they rely on social categories and social meanings to work. III. The centrality of social/ personal identity The main meaning/ signified of cultural signifiers in modernity concern the question of who I am, i.e. my social identity. In the structuralist/ poststructuralist tradition, it is assumed that there is no ontological found- Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 72 ation to identity, i.e. there is no real me out/ in there, but it is an interpretation of the signifiers that I use. So who I am is equivalent to who I signify/ represent to be. My identity is no longer - at least not to the same extent - determined by my social class and my working position, my geographical origin, my gender or my ethnicity. Any of these may become dominant, but only to the extent that I choose to. But more commonly, identities are fragmented, with different aspects playing a significant role in different contexts or with aspects mixing, partly in heterogeneous combinations. In lifestyles, identities are first and foremost defined ethically and aesthetically. This means who I am is primarily defined by the things that I consider good and bad and by the things that I consider beautiful and ugly and by my acting accordingly. 2.2 Lifestyle communities People who share a lifestyle may form a coherent interactive community, which means they maintain some kind of contact with others that is motivated by and based on this lifestyle. In this case, we speak of a lifestyle community. The interactive contact, however, is not a necessary prerequisite to a common lifestyle. This implies that lifestyle identities can be more privatized than primarily class-based identities, even though any kind of lifestyle needs the public that can read the signifiers pointing to a certain identity. 2.3 Alternative If lifestyles depend on individual choices, we may wonder whether there could be such a thing as an alternative lifestyle - or a mainstream lifestyle, for that matter - shared by a large group of people. But the question is not about ‘reality’, but about interpretations and perceptions (even though we could probably argue that there are certain statistical trends in people’s choices which allow them to subsume them under a common denominator). Alternative then means ‘in contrast to a perceived and postulated mainstream lifestyle and its concomitant conventionality’. This contrast is pursued actively, so that we can say that alternative lifestyles actively seek to position themselves as the Other, with the implication that this is also the Better. We can distinguish three types of alternative lifestyles: ‣ Escapist: People adopting escapist lifestyles distance themselves from mainstream culture, seek as little contact as possible with the latter and show no interest in changing it either. Example: selfsupporting communities. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 73 ‣ Confrontational: People adopting confrontational lifestyles actively and possibly even aggressively confront mainstream culture, either because they think that conflict provides some legitimation for their own lifestyles or because they seek a revolutionary upheaval of mainstream culture. Example: punks. ‣ Reformist: People adopting reformist lifestyles seek to reform mainstream culture gradually by education. Their own lifestyles serve as models to be emulated by others. Example: some forms of vegetarianism. The ideal 1 objective shared by all types is to disclose the problematic nature of mainstream lifestyles. The question, however, is whether they - perhaps to a different extent - actually sustain and legitimate these very lifestyles, perhaps also because alternative lifestyles of any kind are socially dependent on mainstream lifestyles (punks would lose their special outlaw status if everybody adopted their ideals, vegetarians would not be super-ethical if no one ate meat, etc.). The other interesting question is to what extent mainstream culture manages to appropriate alternative lifestyles by adopting their signifiers (jeans with cuts and holes, organic food supermarkets, etc.) (cf. Fiske 1994). 3. Two examples: Emos and LOHAS We have decided to focus on two lifestyles, namely Emos and LOHAS (= Lifestyle Of Health And Sustainability). Even though they clearly classify as alternative, they represent two different poles of the spectrum. They therefore seem to suggest themselves for a comparison. 3.1 Emo Emo - a clipping of emotional - is the label of an alternative youth culture characterised by introversion and withdrawal from an outside (adult) world perceived as unsympathetic, misunderstanding and imposing and the concomitant emphasis on negative and depressive moods, (self-) humiliation, self-pity and suicidal ideas. Externally, Emos show a preference for dark colours in clothes, hairstyle and make-up and for androgynous styles. 2 Being an Emo seems to be a phenomenon strictly limited to teenagers. 1 Ideal because it is far from clear whether practicing Otherness remains on the level of the signifiers or whether this corresponds to some deeper levels of meaning. 2 The term was initially used for a genre of music blending hardcore punk with emotionality. Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 74 Emos keep in touch with each other, mostly through computer-mediated communication. We might even argue that Emos construct and enact their identities primarily in and through this medium, with localized Emo identities, i.e. identities based on the interaction with one’s immediate social environment, not playing an important role. Emos are difficult to subsume under the three categories posited above. But they probably fit best into the escapist category because they do not seem to be looking for changes in mainstream culture. They, however, maintain some kind of contact with the latter as a source of humiliation, from which they derive some justification for their identities (cf. Kelley/ Leslie 2007). 3.2 LOHAS LOHAS is an acronym standing for “Lifestyle Of Health And Sustainability”. It refers to a lifestyle that combines a focus on a positive promotion of (personal) health and well-being with environmentalist attitudes. Signifiers of a LOHAS lifestyle range from the practicing of Yoga or Qi Gong and visits to spas and other wellness locations via an openness towards alternative and complementary medical procedures (acupuncture, Ayurveda, etc.) to buying organically grown and fairly traded food and using environmentally friendly forms of housing and transportation. Those practicing LOHAS belong to a well-educated and well-to-do segment of the population. It is not clear to what extent people would explicitly define themselves as LOHAS (the term itself tends to be used to characterize a group from a marketing point of view). And those subscribing to LOHAS clearly do not - in toto - form lifestyle communities. LOHAS can be categorized as reformist alternative because most supporters believe that theirs is a way of life to be followed. This, of course, does not preclude the possibility that some enjoy considering themselves elite. But rigid elitism does not agree with LOHAS principles (cf. Kirig/ Wenzel 2009 and LOHAS online). 3.3 Why should we study Emos and LOHAS? Alternative lifestyles can be regarded as a critique of mainstream culture. Studying them provides an opportunity to bring to light what those explicitly and intentionally positioning themselves outside the centre of a society think about the latter and about problematic aspects of mainstream culture and conventionality. Such research also allows us to consider the nature of the alternative paths that such - in a neutral sense - deviant lifestyles offer, their consistency or - possibly - their inconsistencies, contradictions and their dependencies on the very mainstream at which they target their critique. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 75 LOHAS and Emo appear to represent very different forms of alternative lifestyles. Studying them may show two distinct approaches to Otherness and distancing from mainstream, both with their peculiar problems. This makes a comparison all the more interesting. 3.4 How should we study Emos and LOHAS? Since the linguistic turn in the social sciences, there has been agreement that language does not only play a crucial but an even constitutive role in social, political, cultural and historical phenomena. As these phenomena are based on shared conceptions and attitudes and as the process of sharing happens in and through interaction, examining language use and communication appears to be a viable and valuable path to understanding.We will therefore focus on the language that is used by supporters of the two alternative lifestyles under scrutiny. 4. Methodology and data 4.1 Approach We are taking a Critical Discourse Analysis (or CDA) approach. CDA aims to elucidate/ understand sociocultural and sociopolitical phenomena (usually in contested areas) by examining the role that language plays in these. It assumes that how language is used regularly (in particular discourses) contributes to the creation and maintenance of certain systems of beliefs and attitudes (= ideologies). This of course also applies to ideologies underlying alternative lifestyles. Subscribing to a functional paradigm, CDA assigns great importance to even small linguistic elements, which might have large-scale effects on meanings and interpretations. Critical Discourse Analysis thus examines the nitty-gritty details of authentic language use, describing patterns of forms that can be related to the interpretation of patterns of meaning which in turn may correspond to patterns of conceptualizations whose socio-cultural significance (usually in terms of ideology) we evaluate (for more thorough introductions to CDA, cf. Marko 2008, Fairclough 1989, 1992). 4.2 Method Critical Discourse Analysis is an approach rather than a method, since the three procedures -description, interpretation, evaluation - just mentioned could be carried out by various means. This said, it normally centres on a Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 76 semantically-oriented form of textual analysis. But even within this, methodology can be differentiated. There is no one-to-one relationship between the levels just mentioned and sociocultural significance can therefore not be read off from linguistic forms. But consistencies in form and meaning across a large number of different texts may add weight to our conclusion that particular meanings play a role in people’s conception of a certain domain and may thereby gain socio-political significance. We are not interested in the extraordinary and the unique, but in the ordinary and in typical patterns. This suggests that a purely qualitative study of individual pieces of discourse might not suffice  but we need larger samples of text. This is why we choose corpus analysis, i.e. the computer-assisted examination of large electronically-stored collections of text, as our method in CDA. It allows us to retrieve patterns, interpret them in their verbal contexts, and quantify them (for an introduction to the use of corpora in all forms of discourse analysis, cf. Baker 2006). 4.3 Data We will be using two relatively small corpora representing the discourses used by LOHAS supporters and Emos. In both cases, finding suitable material proved more problematic than initially assumed. The Emo corpus was compiled by Kerstin Florian for a paper in a seminar entitled “The language of alternative lifestyles”. She included a heterogeneous set of genres written and made publicly available by young people identifying as Emos, such as blogs, fashion and lifestyle articles, poems and song lyrics. Corpus linguists call such collections “quick and dirty” (cf. Tribble 1997). But it can be argued that the corpus in its inconsistent composition represents the chaotic textual universe in which young people shape and enact their Emo identities. 3 The corpus comprises 141,614 word tokens. The LOHAS corpus was compiled by ourselves for this paper. We suggested above that LOHAS has not yet gained widespread acceptance as a label. So people clearly falling into this group might not explicitly identify as LOHAS. This, however, makes it difficult to decide what to include and what not. We therefore chose to limit ourselves to a website explicitly associating with LOHAS (LOHAS online at http: / / www.lohas.com) and to copy all articles posted or included on this site (24 overall). It has to be mentioned that the material does not always clearly distinguish between LOHAS support or LOHAS marketing and promotional interests. But probably this is a typical feature of LOHAS discourse. 3 Kettemann 2011 presents results from the same Emo corpus in a similar fashion as we do here but from a pedagogical perspective, discussing how corpus data can help in the teaching of Cultural Studies. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 77 The corpus comprises 27,507 word tokens. Both corpora are relatively small in size. But there is a strand in corpus linguistics that assumes that small corpora, if focusing on very specific discourses or genres, can be relevant sources of information (cf. Tribble 1997). We have to admit, though, that for a more comprehensive study corpus sizes would have to be increased and the sizes should be adjusted. For the analysis, Wordsmith Tools 5.0 by Mike Scott (2008f.) was used. 5. Exploring the discourses of Emos and LOHAS We will proceed along a quasi narrative path. This means we will demonstrate how we normally start exploring the data to arrive at the most significant and interesting issues. We will partly do this comparing the two discourses in question, partly examining a particular question only with respect to one of them. 5.1 Wordlists Corpus-based discourse analysis tends to focus on words and word patterns as the constituents of meanings across individual texts. This is why starting with a look at words promises first insights into the conceptual grid which discourses construct. Concordancing programmes of the quality of WordSmith have a function that can list all the words - defined here as orthographic words, i.e. as combinations of letters - found in a corpus with their frequencies. A raw frequency list for the two corpora looks like this. Emo LOHAS I 4,312 the 1,363 the 3,206 and 983 to 2,834 of 793 and 2,649 to 773 you 2,553 in 529 2007 2,220 a 528 my 2,197 is 420 a 2,036 that 326 by 1,720 for 293 of 1,462 are 264 me 1,432 as 206 it 1,424 s 186 pm 1,360 with 180 is 1,343 LOHAS 159 12 1,286 on 145 Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 78 in 1,152 more 141 that 1,143 by 140 Emo 1,102 it 133 am 961 organic 113 but 922 their 113 so 842 from 112 for 824 green 110 your 813 has 106 1 761 products 100 with 730 or 94 Table 1: Wordlists of the Emo corpus and the LOHAS corpus. These lists already show interesting differences. The fact that the first person pronoun I tops the list, with second person you also in the top 5 in the Emo corpus stresses the rather conversational tone of most of the texts and also the personal nature of the content. On the LOHAS side, we already see some terms that seem significant with respect to the content, e.g. LOHAS, organic, green, products. Overall, however, the problem with such lists is that they contain lots of grammatical words such as articles, pronouns or prepositions, which contribute to meanings, but usually only in combinations with lexical words. We have therefore produced lists filtering out these grammatical elements (and technical elements referring to dates and times of posts in blogs included in the Emo corpus). Refined in this way, the lists look as follows. Emo LOHAS Emo 1,102 LOHAS 159 like 721 organic 113 just 657 green 110 hair 530 products 100 love 472 consumers 85 need 355 energy 81 know 338 business 79 life 326 companies 67 think 319 says 67 help 294 growth 65 post 287 environmental 62 joined 275 consumer 61 posts 275 new 58 heart 268 yoga 57 people 263 market 55 posted 254 percent 55 want 247 world 54 see 242 health 52 The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 79 really 239 sustainable 50 top 235 years 50 current 234 spa 49 feel 234 company 48 subject 230 clean 46 pain 222 technology 43 black 220 use 42 say 220 medicine 41 look 218 people 41 music 212 food 39 location 211 industry 39 make 209 association 38 Table 2: Content wordlists of the Emo corpus and the LOHAS corpus. The most frequent words of these edited lists indicate that Emos live between the existential sphere of emotions and thinking and their fashion, while LOHAS adds a strong economic slant to their focus on health and ecology. To examine these aspects in more depth, we have taken the first 250 lexemes from these lists (the full lists, this is, not the extracts shown here) and categorized them according to their semantic domains. For this purpose, we have combined grammatical realizations of the same word, e.g. singular and plural or present and past tense, and partly also morphologically related words, e.g. sustainable and sustainability, under single headings (technically speaking, we have lemmatized the corpus, cf. Mukherjee 2009: 67). As there is no pre-given and fixed set of semantic domains, we put together a list based on previous attempts at semantic categorization (cf. Archer/ Wilson/ Rayson 2002), on our expectations concerning the themes deal with in the texts, and on informal explorations of the data. A subjective and arbitrary element can, however, not be fully avoided. We used the following domains: ‣ Existence & change: processes of being and becoming; e.g. exist, become. ‣ Persons/ humans: e.g. man, Jane, priest. ‣ Location: e.g. inside (as an adverb), place. ‣ Time: concepts concerned with or related to points in time, duration, age, frequency, etc.; e.g. old, today, century. ‣ Possession: concepts concerned with or related to having, getting or losing; e.g. own, obtain, lose. ‣ Phase: concepts concerned with or related to starting, finishing or continuing; e.g. stop, begin, keep on. Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 80 ‣ Modality: concepts concerned with or related to likelihood; e.g. likely, perhaps. ‣ Evaluation: attributes expressing a judgement.  Positive: e.g. great, good, top.  Negative: miserable, weak, stupid.  Comparative: similar, different. ‣ Quantity: concepts concerned with or related to amounts, size and numbers; e.g. big, amount, growth. ‣ Colour: e.g. black, pink. ‣ Body: concepts concerned with or related to the body and its parts; e.g. head, face, hair, body. ‣ Health: concepts concerned with or related to the preservation of health and the treatment of ailments and diseases; e.g. spa, massage, cure. ‣ Social phenomena:  Social groups: e.g. punks, group, Emos.  Social institutions: (or related to them); e.g. organization, run (an organization).  Social relations: e.g. mother, parents, bisexual. ‣ Communication: acts, products and media of communication; e.g. say, talk, book. ‣ Mental phenomena:  Cognition: thinking; e.g. know, remember.  Perception: sensual perception; e.g. see, hear, look at.  Emotion: affection, volition and evaluation; e.g. fear, enjoy, need. ‣ Science: concepts concerned with or related to research, its administration and presentation; e.g. research, study, example. ‣ Geography/ politics: concepts concerned with or related to nations or countries; e.g. America, local, home. ‣ Chemical substances: e.g. antioxidant, carbon. ‣ Ecology: concepts concerned with or related to nature and its protection and to natural phenomena; e.g. renewable, solar, wind, nature. ‣ Economy: concepts concerned with or related to the economy, business and industry; e.g. bank, business, economic, trade. ‣ Music: concepts concerned with or related to music and the music business; e.g. music, rock, bands ‣ Style: concepts concerned with or related to clothes, make-up and hairstyle; e.g. pants, wear, dye. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 81 ‣ Computer: concepts concerned with or related to computer technology and the world wide web; e.g. internet, gallery. ‣ Physical contact: concepts concerned with or related to physical contact with people or objects; e.g. touch, cut, kiss. We then calculated the sizes of the different categories with respect to both lexical variation (i.e. how many different words are included in a category) and token frequencies (i.e. how often do all the words in a category occur). Both can be argued to contribute to the salience of a particular domain. If there are a lot of synonymous, near-synonymous or at least semantically closely related words - a phenomenon referred to as overwording (cf. Fairclough 1989: 115, Goatly 2000: 64) - then this creates the impression that a discourse is preoccupied with this domain. Similarly, if words occur very frequently, then this also foregrounds the specific domain. The following table thus contains the relative sizes of the most important categories with respect to both lexical variation and token frequencies. The percentages represent the relative sizes of the classes relative to the overall number of words. A percentage of 25% thus means that a fourth of all words found in among the top 250 content words belong to the respective class. Mind that for the calculation of percentages, unclassifiable words were also considered. The totals therefore do not add up to the sum of the individual categories. Emo LOHAS Existence & change 2 1.0% 736 3.1% 5 1.9% 102 1.5% People 8 4.1% 945 4.0% 9 3.4% 191 2.9% Location 9 4.6% 866 3.6% — — — — Time 14 7.1% 1330 5.6% 11 4.2% 294 4.5% Possession 3 1.5% 291 1.2% 2 0.8% 29 0.4% Phase 3 1.5% 274 1.2% — — — — Modality 3 1.5% 367 1.5% — — — — Evaluation 21 10.7% 1,914 8.0% 28 10.1% 577 8.9% Quantity 2 1.0% 199 0.8% 22 8.3% 481 7.4% Colour 5 2.5% 488 2.0% — — — — Body 7 3.6% 1,108 4.7% 1 0.4% 11 0.2% Health — — — — 8 3.0% 300 4.6% Social 17 8.6% 3,132 13.1% 26 9.8% 692 10.7% Group 3 1.5% 1,314 5.5% 6 2.2% 302 4.7% Institution 1 0.5% 82 0.3% 11 4.2% 226 3.5% Relation 7 3.6% 763 3.2% 2 0.8% 25 0.4% Communication 12 6.1% 1,330 5.6% 4 1.5% 125 1.9% Music 3 1.5% 306 1.3% — — — — Style 11 3.6% 797 3.3% 1 0.4% 11 0.2% Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 82 Mental 4 40 20.3% 6,244 26.2% 18 6.8% 259 4.0% Cognition 6 3.0% 1,166 4.9% 8 3.0% 94 1.4% Emotion 28 14.2% 4,350 18.3% 5 1.9% 93 1.4% Perception 3 1.5% 556 2.3% 3 1.1% 48 0.7% Science — — — — 6 2.2% 108 1.6% Geography/ politics 1 0.5% 92 0.4% 13 4.9% 257 4.0% Chemical — — — — 2 0.8% 47 0.7% Ecology — — — — 17 6.4% 680 10.5% Economy 3 1.5% 176 0.7% 50 18.9% 1,466 22.6% Computer 3 1.5% 303 1.3% — — — — Physical contact 4 2.0% 342 1.4% — — — — TOTALS 5 197 23,823 265 6,483 Table 3: Relative sizes of semantic domains with respect to lexical variation and token frequencies in the Emo corpus and the LOHAS corpus. The results reveal a lot about the nature of the two discourses represented in the corpora. On the one hand, we see domains that stress the personal, individual and subjective sphere of people on top in the Emo corpus, especially emotions, but also communication, the body, style and social relations. On the other hand, the LOHAS corpus has dimensions of general, collective and global relevance on top, with a strong lead by economy, but also ecology, geography/ politics (including references to the world, to countries, etc.) and quantity. This dichotomy between individual and global seems to corroborate the assumption that Emos and LOHAS supporters are alternative in a very different sense. Focusing on their own destiny, Emos seem to favour personal withdrawal as a form of being alternative. It might be objected that this personalization is less a result of the lifestyle standing behind the texts than a consequence of the inclusion of lots of personalized genres such as blogs. This is of course true. But we also have to consider that Emo discourse is strongly tied to such personalized genres, which means it does not happen in other forms, so that we cannot disentangle the two aspects. LOHAS, on the other hand, promotes a notion of alternative that focuses on the environment and on our wellbeing as general phenomena. Given the prominence of the economy as a semantic domain, this seems to be the main path to achieve such a reformist agenda. The selection of the texts, which partly verge on promotional discourse, plays a role in this. But there is no denying that the strong emphasis on the economic 4 The superordinate category also includes words that could not be clearly assigned to any of the subordinate classes, the numbers therefore do not represent the sum of the numbers of the individual classes. This also applies to the social class. 5 Even though the top 250 words from the wordlist were considered, the totals in the type column are not 250. The reason for this is that in the Emo corpus, there were a lot of lemmata, i.e. e.g. Emo, Emos and Emo’s count as one type. In the LOHAS corpus, on the other hand, which is much smaller in size, a large number of different words share the 250 th position, so we had to include all of these. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 83 side also points in the direction of a capitalist conception of the world. And even though capitalism is definitely in the mix of the mainstream culture that alternative lifestyles seek to undermine, LOHAS’ Otherness may be superficial after all, focusing on the economic side of the consumption of the lifestyle signifiers. We do not deny that LOHAS efforts may have effects, but the question remains whether the conceptual basis does not rely too much on the mainstream to really make a long-term difference. The only category that ranks highly in both corpora is evaluation. Considering that alternative lifestyles - perhaps even more so than mainstream lifestyles - are concerned with ethical attitudes associated with particular signifiers, the salience of evaluative terms should not come as a surprise. Is there anything in the evaluative lexemes themselves that would point to a difference between the two routes of Emos and LOHAS? First of all, it has to be mentioned that evaluation may play an even larger role in the LOHAS discourse. The data shown in the table just relate categories to each other. But it does not show, for instance, that the LOHAS corpus actually features more different evaluative terms than the Emo corpus despite being smaller. When we look at the set of terms in the LOHAS corpus, we see that practically all of them denote positive evaluation. authentic; clean; efficiency; fair; fitness; free; good/ well; great; green; important; integrative; key; opportunity; primary; quality; significant; successful; top There are also positive evaluations in the Emo corpus. cool; deep; good; hot; matter; ok; pretty; right; top; true But, as was to be expected, there are also many negative ones (though they do not occur more often, perhaps slightly surprisingly). bad; hard; hell; loser; problem; shit; stupid; wrong We probably expect alternative lifestyle discourses to compare the mainstream to one’s own lifestyle on aesthetic and especially on ethic grounds. This implies that there should be both positive and negative evaluative elements in the text. This is indeed the case with the Emo discourse, but not with the LOHAS discourse. Could this indicate that LOHAS wants to praise itself, but not necessarily in comparison to the mainstream? This could, of course, be interpreted as meaning that LOHAS, as a matter of fact, already contains aspect of a mainstream lifestyle. It has to be mentioned in this context, though, that the promotional slant of some of the articles included in the corpus has contributed to this foregrounding of the positive. Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 84 5.2 Keywords WordSmith also allows the production of comparisons between corpora, showing which words occur significantly more often in one corpus than in another. These words are defined as keywords. In the following table, you see comparisons between the Emo and the LOHAS corpora. The left column contains the words that most clearly distinguish the discourse of Emos from that of LOHAS, the right column contains the words that most clearly distinguish the discourse of LOHAS from that of Emos. 6 Emo vs. LOHAS LOHAS vs. Emo I LOHAS my the you of me organic Emo products am/ I’m green so consumers hair and love energy never business like companies by in just growth don’t environmental her consumer joined yoga back market she percent it sustainable think spa post health location company subject technology pain their really as music industry know medicine hate association 6 Most of the function words appearing in the lists point to differences related to style and genre rather than to the thematic perspectives proposed, e.g. personal and possessive pronouns, especially first and second person pronouns, indicate a more personal style in one of the corpora, while the definite article indicate a less personal style employing noun phrases rather than references to the speaker or the addressee. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 85 broken says get clean mood research heart sustainability Table 4: Keyword comparison between the Emo and LOHAS corpora (left) and the LOHAS and Emo corpora (right). We have also compared the two corpora to a large general corpus of English. For this purpose, we have chosen to use the British National Corpus (= BNC), a 100-million-word corpus of British English, compiled in the first half of the 1990s and consisting of written (90%) and spoken (10%) material produced, roughly speaking, in the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Aston/ Burnard 1998). This is supposed to allow more general insights into which lexical items are key to the two discourses under scrutiny. Emo vs. BNC LOHAS vs. BNC Emo LOHAS I/ me/ my organic am/ Im consumers hair yoga you/ your green posted products posts spa love sustainable/ sustainability joined ecotourism post Fairmont location energy lol percent GBP 7 environmental/ ly hate antioxidant by growth pain medicine heart mega-banks mood Weil hearted companies broken clean like marketplace just NMI 8 Table 5: Keyword comparisons between the Emo corpus and the BNC and the LOHAS corpus and the BNC. All in all, the keyword comparisons support the interpretations from above. We again see words pointing to emotional individualization in the 7 giving prices of fashion items 8 = National Marketing Institute Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 86 Emo corpus and political and economic collectivization in the LOHAS corpus. 5.3 Concordances and collocations Lists of words allow insights into which aspects of meaning are salient in a discourse. But being limited to isolated items of text, they can only tell part of the story and must be complemented with analyses that also take into account the combinations that words enter into. By producing concordances, which display a word (or a string of words) as it occurs in the text, i.e. in its immediate verbal context, we can examine such combinations. With the help of WordSmith’s Collocate function, we can additionally produce lists of the most common words occurring within a defined distance to the search word, thus getting immediate access to frequent collocations. 5.3.1 Collocations in the Emo corpus: Verbs following first person I As has been discussed above, the conception of the world on which the lifestyles of Emos is based shows a strong emphasis on the individual person. It therefore is interesting to see how this individual is constructed in the Emo discourse. One way of looking into this question is to examine the verbs collocating with the first person singular pronoun I as their subject. This will reveal in which events Emo individuals - we assume that the first person pronoun is the major linguistic element referring to Emos in the texts - participate. And what Emos say they do will be pivotal in their construction of their own identities. We limit the search to the first word directly following the first person singular pronoun. This means missing out on verbs of more complex verb groups (including negations, modals, semi modals, etc.), but the data would be very difficult to process otherwise. And we still think that the majority of verbs directly follow the pronominal subject. The resulting list of collocates is then categorized semantically. The categories we are using are the following. ‣ Existence & change: processes of being and becoming; e.g. exist, become. ‣ Possession: processes of having, getting or losing; e.g. own, obtain, lose. ‣ Movement & static position: processes of changing - e.g. walk, come - or keeping one’s position - e.g. lie, sit. ‣ Phases: processes of starting, finishing or continuing; e.g. stop, begin, keep on. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 87 ‣ Physiology: active and reactive processes of the body; e.g. eat, sleep. ‣ Social processes: e.g. date, meet. ‣ Communication: processes of communication and interaction; say, promise, convince. ‣ Cognition: processes of thinking; e.g. know, remember. ‣ Perception: processes of sensual perception; e.g. see, hear, look at. ‣ Emotion: processes of affection, volition and evaluation; e.g. fear, enjoy, need. ‣ Style: processes concerned with dressing, make-up and hairstyle; e.g. wear, dye. ‣ Physical contact: processes of physical contact with people or objects; e.g. touch, cut, kiss. There are also verbs that could not easily be assigned to any of the categories. The table below contains all the verbs found (with the exception of the unclassified ones) in their respective categories. The numbers between brackets give absolute frequencies (higher than one). Existence & change: die (18); live (11); get (‘become’) (9); become (4); exist (3); change (2); go Emo (2); grow (2); disappear; turn (‘become’), pass away Possession: have (139); get (‘receive’) (42); give (20); take (12); lose (11); keep (4); belong; buy; gain; steal Movement & static position: go (18); walk (10); fall (9); come (7); move (4); run (3); crawl (2); get (somewhere) (2); skate (2); approach; bow; creep; glide; hop on; march; slide lie (‘horizontal bodily position’) (17); sit (10); lean (4); stand (3); kneel Phases: start (18); stop (9); end (3); keep (on) doing (3); launch (3); begin (2); give up (2); stay (2); finish; go on; keep up; resign Physiology: cry (42); bleed (6); wake (up) (5); fall asleep (4); sleep (4); laugh (3); awake (2); eat (2); collapse; drain; draw a breath; drink; drown; faint; starve; swallow; take a breath; take medication; weep Social processes: meet (8); help (2); break up; celebrate; date; go out; join Communication: say (48); write (37); tell (22); ask (16); scream (9); swear (6); bet (5); call (5); agree (4); pray (4); promise (4); beg (2); blame (2); explain (2); lie (‘not to tell the truth’) (2); plead (2); recommend (2); talk (2); admit; answer; apologize; convince; defend; disagree; mutter; preach; read; refuse; scribble; stutter; text; voice Cognition: think (127); know (122); guess (30); remember (19); mean (13); wonder (10); realise (9); believe (6); get (‘understand’) (6); dream (5); pick (4); plan (4); decide (3); doubt (3); learn (3); look back (metaphorically) (3); suppose (3); choose (2); expect (2); figure (2); reminisce (2); understand (2); con- Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 88 fuse; consider; forget; recognize Emotion: want (109); feel (105); love (102); need (92); hate (71); like (54); wish (44); hope (29); care (14); miss (10); bottle up (5); dig (5); fall in love (4); fear (4); break (down) (3); fall for (3); hurt (3); adore (2); long for (2); bother; cherish; comfort; crave; dare; deal (‘cope’); dislike; dread; heart; look forward; pity; prefer; revel; suffer; take (‘bear’); take it to the heart; trust Perception: see (75); look (‘gaze’) (19); hear (17); watch (5); stare (4); listen (3); taste (3); gaze (2); glare; notice; peer Style: wear (26); look (‘appear visually’) (9); dress (8); dye (4); pierce (2); put on (2); braid; clip; color; put hair in a ponytail; sport Physical contact: cut (27); hold (14); tear (7); push (4); smash (4); stab (4); grab (3); press (3); rip (3); turn (3); beat (2); break sth. (2); give a kiss (2); hit (2); kick (2); kiss (2); pull sth. out (2); clench; clutch; embrace; grasp; grip; hug; press sb. close; pull; scratch; slash; slice; snap; snatch; squeeze; strike; touch; unwind; wipe; wrap Table 6: Major semantic classes of verbs following first person singular I in the Emo corpus. The percentages in the table below represent the sizes of the categories relative to each other and have been calculated in the same way as in 5.1 (Tables 3 and 4) above. All verbs have been included for the calculations, even if they could not be assigned to any of the classes mentioned. Types Tokens Existence & change 11 3.4% 54 2.3% Possession 10 3.1% 232 9.9% Movement & static position 21 6.5% 99 4.2% Phases 12 3.7% 46 2.0% Physiology 19 5.9% 79 3.4% Social processes 7 2.2% 15 0.6% Communicative processes 32 9.9% 188 8.0% Cognition 26 8.0% 384 16.4% Perception 12 3.7% 159 6.8% Emotion 34 10.5% 676 28.9% Style 11 3.4% 56 2.4% Physical contact 36 11.1% 105 4.5% TOTALS 324 2,339 Table 7: Absolute frequencies and relative sizes of the semantic categories of the verbs following first person I in the Emo corpus. The data in this table supports the conclusion from above about the prevalent importance of emotions for Emos - nomen sometimes still est omen. This category could probably be even further ahead if we consider that some processes categorized as related to the body, i.e. as physiologi- The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 89 cal, such as, for instance, cry or laugh (the category needs to be stretched to accommodate them, we admit), could be included as well. Certain processes, even though showing high frequencies, do not seem to be peculiar to the Emo discourse, e.g. cognitive processes (after all, this includes any instance of I think) or possessive processes (including any occurrence of I have as a lexical verb). The fact that communicative events feature relatively prominently, especially with respect to lexical variation, points to the dilemma of the Emo identity - lonely but reaching out for communicative contact. One category that is ranked surprisingly high in the type column is physical contact. Obviously, there is a great variety of terms that describe how Emos touch - however forcefully - themselves, other people or things. A look at the verbs shows overwording of those words that denote a strong, even violent, act by the first person. cut; tear; push; smash; stab; grab; press; rip; beat; break; hit; kick; clench; clutch; grasp; grip; scratch; slash; slice; snap; snatch; squeeze; strike Verbs such as embrace, kiss or hug are also included in the list, but are comparatively rare. This suggests that there is some moment of violence in what Emos do (according to their own descriptions). This could of course point to a more confrontational dimension of their Otherness. A closer look at the data, e.g. in a concordance, showing all the verbs mentioned in their immediate verbal context, however, reveals that many of the verbs occur in the description of auto-aggression and aggression against objects, but rarely directed against other people. instead I thought I would just cut myself till I felt better... it like REAL DEPRESSED and well I cut myself with a knife...I cam dep ent cut since then. Now i just scar myself. But lately I have star Post subject: well I don't cut myself but I don't judge ppl. I straight, just think shit? ! ? i tore my fucking heart open just for t manage to control myself. I cut myself open again, tears fallin wall, I swear I’m not insane beat myself up ‘till I fall, I hard ed, I feel like such a prat I smash my head against the wall, I s deep I feel like such a fool I slash at my flesh That I broke, tha I hate. I cried all day, now I cut my wrist. To end the pain the p 4 months straight... i mostly slashed my palms cuz i figured the Concordance 1: Violent verbs in auto-aggression of first person. These aspects thus add to the impression that Emos try to define their difference to the mainstream in solipsistic terms, focusing on themselves rather than being concerned with changing their mainstream environment. Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 90 5.3.2 Collocations in the LOHAS corpus: consumer and product One of the most frequent content words in the LOHAS corpus is the noun consumer. Being interested in the collocations of the word, we have produced a list based on Mutual Information (= MI). This is a statistical measure defining the degree of association between two elements. It is not simply based on the frequency at which two words occur together (after all, nouns tend to occur with the definite article more often than with any other word and still we do not speak of a strong connection there), but it also includes the frequencies at which two words occur without each other. The more frequent the co-occurrences and the fewer the solitary occurrences, the higher the Mutual Information (cf. Oakes 1998: 63-65, Mukherjee 2009: 89f.). Here are the words that show a high MI score and can therefore be argued to be tightly associated with consumer in the LOHAS corpus. 9 consumer attitude consumer awareness consumer data consumer demand consumer education consumer expectation consumer issue consumer market consumer movement consumer product consumer report consumer research consumer sales consumer segment/ segmentation consumer target consumer trend Table 8: Combinations starting with consumer with a high Mutual Information. All of the collocates are nouns, which means that all combinations are as a matter of fact compounds. What could be the effect of this? Compounds may mitigate the personalization of consumers. Even though consumer on its own denotes a person, being part of a compound the noun is reduced to a modifier in words denoting non-personal concepts. This effect is enhanced by the fact that all of the compounds are expressions from marketing research, where personal psychology is transformed into ab- 9 It has to be mentioned, however, that the Mutual Information score is not sensitive to the frequencies of collocating words. This means that two words may have a high MI score even though one of them occurs just once in the corpus (cf. Mukherjee 2009: 104). The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 91 stract concepts, e.g. awareness, attitude, expectation, and behaviour is represented only as part of scientific practices, e.g. research, report, trend, etc. This adds to the strong emphasis on economic aspects and would thus be in line with the interpretations offered in the discussion of the most common semantic domains of content words. Let us look at the collocates of a second lexeme that appears frequently in the LOHAS corpus, viz. product, or rather the plural form products, which occurs significantly more often. This time, however, we will look for collocates preceding the search word. farm products (personal) care products building products green products organic products its products new products consumer products our products Table 9: Combinations ending in products with a high Mutual Information. The results underline the inconsistency of the LOHAS worldview already discussed above. On the one hand, most of the expressions denote goods produced according to ethically sound - ecologically speaking - principles (in this context, it must be mentioned that even words such as consumer products and building products are used exclusively with modifiers such as green or ecologically friendly). On the other hand, however, consumer product, new product and also the possessive pronouns its and our, which relate products to the companies making and selling them, emphasize the marketing dimension, marrying an ecological perspective with a capitalist slant. Conclusion This article set out to demonstrate that examining large samples of texts by Emos and proponents of LOHAS (= Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) with a Critical Discourse Analytical approach and corpus linguistic methods could shed light onto the ways these two groups, which can both be defined as subscribing to alternative lifestyles, construct their Otherness, i.e. their deviance from a postulated mainstream, in their discourses. Although we confined ourselves to the analyses of word lists, keywords and verbs following first person singular I (in the Emo corpus) and compounds with consumer and product (in the LOHAS corpus), which Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko 92 means, as indicated, that the study can only be considered a preliminary pilot project, even this tentative look at results shows two very different approaches to alternative lifestyles. Emos seem to exclusively focus on themselves and their - mostly negative - emotions. They, however, are less concerned with a withdrawal rather than with a rejection of mainstream culture. LOHAS supporters, on the other hand, are reformist in orientation, seeking to improve the well-being of humans in balance with the well-being of non-human nature. They, however, seem to seek to achieve this goal partly through economic means. Thus agreeing with capitalist principles of mainstream culture could be argued to undermine the status of LOHAS as genuinely alternative rather than as an ‘ecologized’ version of conventional problem-solving strategies. References Archer, Dawn/ Andrew Wilson/ Paul Rayson (2002). “Introduction to the USAS Category System.” http: / / ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/ usas/ usas%20guide.pdf (23 Jan 2012). Aston, Guy/ Lou Burnard (1998). The BNC Handbook. Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Baker, Paul (2006). Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. Baker, Paul/ Andrew Hardie/ Tony McEnery (2006). 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LOHAS online (n.d.). http: / / www.lohas.com (17 Dec 2011). Marko, Georg (2008). Penetrating Language. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Pornography. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Marko, Georg (2010). “Heart disease and cancer, diet and exercise, vitamins and minerals. The Construction of Lifestyle Risks in Popular Health Discourse.” In: CADAAD Journal (Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines) 4: 2 (Special Edition. Risk as Discourse. Ed. By Jens O. Zinn). 147-170. [online] http: / / www.cadaad.net/ 2010_volume_4_issue_2/ 65-53 (17 Dec 2011). Mukherjee, Joybrato (2009). Anglistische Korpuslinguistik. Eine Einführung. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. The Language of Alternative Lifestyles 93 Oakes, Michael P. (1998). Statistics for Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Tribble, Chris (1997). “Improvising corpora for ELT: quick-and-dirty ways of developing corpora for language teaching.” In: Barbara Lewandowska- Tomaszczyk/ Patrick James Melia (eds.). PACL 97: Practical Applications in Language Corpora. Łodz: Łodz University Press, 106-117. Software Scott, Mike (2008f.). WordSmith Tools 5.0. Bernhard Kettemann & Georg Marko Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz In the Hands of Morpheus A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep Eva Triebl In recent years, sleep has become an increasingly popular topic in medicine, sociology and the media, and there has been an immense proliferation of selfhelp books and seminars providing expert advice on the proper ‘management’ of sleep. The construction of sleep as a resource to be maximally exploited by means of a positively valued lifestyle on the one hand and as a potential health threat on the other is problematic: it suggests that the last non-productive third of our lives is being turned into a regulated, output-oriented activity and that health is the result of proper sleep (cf. Baxter/ Kroll-Smith 2005: 52, cit. in Williams 2005: 120). Drawing on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper critically examines the reconceptualization of sleep as a tool in achieving better health and productivity by quantitatively examining a corpus of 103 texts from the Internet and extracts from 6 selfhelp books. 1. Introduction Given that we spend no less than a third of our lives asleep, it is fair to argue that sleep is a central part of human existence. The meanings of sleep have, however, changed dramatically during the past few years. While it was long considered a passive physiological state, it is now represented either as a potential health problem to be solved or as a resource to be maximally exploited by making the right lifestyle choices - not only for the sake of people’s personal wellbeing, but also for the sake of their functioning in society. This differentiation and extension of the conception of sleep is reflected in an increasing academic interest. While sleep has always been a subject of medical and psychological investigation, the last four decades have seen an immense progress in sleep research (cf. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies [= IOM] 2006: 9). At the same time, socio- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Eva Triebl 96 logists have ‘woken up’ to the importance of sleep, which, they argue, can be seen as a “socially scheduled, socially organized and socially institutionalized pursuit or practice” (Williams 2005: 3). Looking at the reconceptualization of sleep from a linguistic viewpoint is an important addition to the existing sociological work on the topic, because in today’s ‘knowledge society’, information is increasingly being disseminated in the form of “‘extra-local’, ‘textualised’ forms of knowledge” provided on innumerable websites or in self-help books rather than through direct contact with, for instance, medical institutions (Williams 2005: 154). This paper will shed light on the social and semiotic construction of sleep by applying the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (= CDA) (as proposed by Fairclough 1989, 2003). In the following, I will discuss the aspects of sleep that seem most relevant from a CDA perspective because of their potentially problematic socio-cultural implications and explain why analysing them requires a focus on discourse. As a next step, I will present my research question and hypothesis and describe the corpus-based approach to CDA I am taking. The main part of the paper is a computer-assisted analysis of a corpus consisting of advice-giving texts on sleep from the Internet and from self-help books. 2. The discourse of sleep In this section, I will describe three fields of discourse that seem particularly interesting from a CDA perspective, namely the discourse of sleep as a public health issue, the discovery of sleep as hitherto unexploited resource and business opportunity, and the reconceptualization of sleep as a lifestyle feature. 2.1 Sleep as public health problem Sleep has recently been brought to public attention through claims about its health benefits on the one hand and the dangers of sleep deprivation on the other. Considering that the quantity of sleep has decreased, 1 health authorities like the IOM (2006: 137) keep warning against the risks of sleep deprivation, arguing that people who sleep too little are “less productive, have an increased health care utilization, and an increased likelihood of accidents.” This, it is argued, has above all a considerable economic impact - for example, sleep-related accidents are reported to cost about $56 billion each year (cf. Mitler et al. 2000, cit. in Williams 2005: 1 Bonnet and Arand (n.d., online), for example, report that “between 1959 and 1992 the average amount of sleep reported by middle age individuals decreased by about one hour per night (from 8-9 hours per night to 7-8 hours per night).” A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 97 105). As Kroll-Smith and Gunter (2004: 3) explain, sleep is increasingly conceptualised as a measurable public risk that has to be adequately managed by both the individual and society. Indeed, there has been a proliferation of all kinds of texts on the risks of sleepiness. As an example, Kroll-Smith and Gunter (2004: 3) state that the Washington Post has published 46 articles on sleepiness and other sleep disorders between 1990 and 2000. On the occasion of the World Sleep Day 2011, the World Association of Sleep Medicine (n.d.) stated that “sleepiness and sleeplessness constitute a global epidemic that threatens health and quality of life.” The IOM (2006: 148) even represents sleep deprivation as moral failure, claiming that “the impact of driver sleepiness is similar in magnitude to that of alcohol consumption.” While sleepiness is increasingly problematized, one of the buzzwords of the recent media coverage of sleep is the so-called power-nap, which is currently being promoted as a means for achieving better performance and productivity. From a sociological viewpoint, both dimensions of the representation of sleep - viz. sleepiness as a problem to be solved and sleep as a productivity-booster - seem to relate to economic and political changes that have taken place over the last few decades, especially the shift from Fordism to flexible capitalism (cf. Williams 2005: 113ff. and Boden et al. 2008: 542ff.), which is marked by the expansion of the service sector, longer and more intensive working hours, the requirement to be multi-skilled and capable of multi-tasking and, what is particularly important, flexibility as a key concept and flexible shift-work as a distinctive feature of modern labour market deregulation (cf. Boden et al. 2008: 542). The importance of flexibility in late modern Western society accounts for the shift from monophasic to polyphasic sleeping patterns: while sleeping ‘in one block’ is well possible in economies of the Fordist type, where the emphasis is not so much on flexibility but on stability and on physical rather than knowledge-based labour, post-Fordist, knowledge-based economies require flexible, ‘just-in-time’ sleep (cf. Williams 2005: 111-113). The idea of ‘efficient’ sleeping as a means to increase productivity is, indeed, gaining momentum in the corporate world, which manifests itself for instance in workshops such as Tom de Luca’s “Power Napping® for Less Stress”, which are being offered to employees of corporations like Ford or American Express (Brown 2004: 173). The main site where the association between sleep and performance is preached is popular selfhelp books such as James B. Maas’ Power Sleep (2008) and all kinds of websites promoting the benefits of sleep. As Williams (2005: 118) states, “‘putting sleep to work’ in order to get the ‘most’ if not the ‘best’ out of one’s employees” can be seen as “the latest form of exploitation.” According to Baxter and Kroll-Smith (2005: 52, cit. in Williams 2005: 120), the (economic) exploitation of such a private, genuinely unproductive aspect Eva Triebl 98 of life shows that Western society has “an increasingly ravenous work culture that encroaches on modern boundaries between work and home.” 2.2 Sleep as a consumption and lifestyle choice Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the recent concern about sleep voiced by physicians and promoted in popular media is the market potential it bears. Those who benefit most from the popularity of sleep are the pharmaceutical industry and health professionals: due to the ever-increasing number of diagnoses of sleep disorders, the overall sales of insomnia drugs has increased from $1.1 billion to $2.8 billion between 2001 and 2005 (Nelson 2007, cit. in Moloney 2008: 7) with Sanofi-Aventis’ Ambien ® selling even better than Viagra ® in 2009 (cf. the ranking of the 200 top pharmaceutical sales of 2009 on http: / / www.drugs.com). At the same time, more and more health professionals are deciding to make “a ground-flooring investment in a sleep clinic” (Norbutt 2004, cit. in Williams 2005: 150). Besides prescription hypnotics, sleep is a profitable business for providers of mattresses and alternative therapies such as acupressure, ayurveda, Bach Flower remedies, biofeedback, hydrotherapy, reflexology and shiatsu (examples taken from a website for holistic therapies (www.holistic-online.com). The UK company Boots has also seized the market opportunity and now has their own range of sleep products, e.g. Boots Sleep Pillow Mist (Geranium), Boots Sleep Well Traditional Herbal Remedy, Boots Nasal Strips against snoring, and Boots Sleep Warm Neck and Shoulder Wrap (examples taken from the company’s website www.boots.com). The age-old notion of ‘beauty sleep’ is another aspect of sleep that is being commodified: based on recent scientific claims about its regenerative effects, sleep is now often represented as a time where the body, of its own volition, works to become healthier and more beautiful. On http: / / www.sleepdex.org, a website providing “resources for better sleep”, for example, we learn that stages 3 and 4 of sleep 2 are “what people call ‘beauty sleep’ as secretion of growth hormone helps repair and rebuild body tissues like muscle and bone.” This claim comes in handy for the cosmetics industry, which now sells all kinds of beauty and slimming products specially developed for use at night, such as Clarins’ Multi Active Night Youth Recovery or SlimQuick Night, an “advanced nighttime fat burner” (“Slim Quick Diet Pills”) 2 The IOM (2006: 33-45) distinguishes between two types of sleep, namely nonrapid eye-movement (NREM) and rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep. NREM sleep can be further classified into four stages according to the different characteristics of brain wave patterns, eye movement and muscle tone, stage 1 being the lightest and stage 4 being the deepest sleep phase. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 99 The new popularity of the sleep as “ultimate ‘performance enhancer’, if not the ‘cheapest form of stress relief’” (Williams/ Boden 2004: 3.22) has also opened up promising business opportunities for consultants providing talks and seminars on the topic. For example, health promotion consultant Thea O’Connor advertises a seminar called “Why become a Nap-Friendly Workplace? ” on her homepage (cf. “Thea O’Connor - health promotion consultant, writer, speaker”). In this seminar, she wants to inform CEOs and other decision-makers about “ways to increase alertness and productivity amongst workers.” In addition, sleep benefits ‘experts’ such as Sarah Mednick, whose book Take a Nap! Change Your Life (Mednick/ Ehrmann 2006), promising to “make you smarter, healthier, [and] more productive” has become a bestseller. The commodification of sleep - whether in the field of beauty, health or in the corporate world - seems to rest to a considerable degree on the assumption that sleep can be turned into productive time. Whether or not one makes use of the opportunity to be healthier, more beautiful and more productive is represented as lifestyle decision. In today’s healthist society , lifestyle and behavioral causes are more and more often advanced as explanations for health and body maintenance, which are becoming a social imperative (cf. Nettleton 2006: 33). Health, as Williams and Boden (2004: 3.1.) argue, “is now something not simply to be worked at but consumed through a range of lifestyle choices, goods and services.” The importance of consumption for what is seen as a ‘healthy lifestyle’ means that health is not only a moral issue, but also a marker of status and identity (cf. Bourdieu 1984, cit. in Williams and Boden 2004: 3.1.). As the discourse of the risks of sleepiness shows, sleep is not only constructed as important for the individual, but also associated with risk and thus morally loaded. 2.3 Socially problematic aspects of the discourse of sleep Since this paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis of the discursive construction of sleep, the reconceptualization of sleep will be analysed critically in terms of their possibly problematic socio-cultural implications (cf. Fairclough 2003). But what could be ideologically problematic about the societal tendencies described above? Firstly, if sleep is redescribed (Kroll-Smith 2003) as part of a healthy lifestyle and public health problem, this means that the individual is constructed as responsible for health or ill-health and morally judged for his or her lifestyle decisions. This focus on self-control and self-responsibility is problematic because it serves to present people suffering from ‘lifestyle diseases’ as guilty and to mask other factors that may have contributed to the health problem, such as socio-cultural factors or, simply, chance. Secondly, the construction of sleep as tool for enhancing professional performance implies that one of the most private and inherently unpro- Eva Triebl 100 ductive spheres of life is functionalized to meet the demands of a capitalist society. It also serves to conceal the fact that the contemporary “business world demands long work hours that would necessarily preclude eight to ten hours of sleep” (Brown 2004: 175). 3. Approach, method, data and research question 3.1 Critically analysing sleep In how far can CDA provide interesting new insights on the issue of sleep, considering that so much has been written on this ‘dormant’ topic already? Even though the importance of discourse in today’s social life has led to a “turn to language in recent social theory” (Fairclough 2000: 164), social theorists have mainly focused on the theoretical potential of language rather than analysing how it actually works as an element of social practices (cf. Fairclough 2003: 204). CDA, which studies precisely the question of how discourse figures in social practices, can fill this gap and thus enhance social theory. 3 This is why CDA perfectly lends itself as a theoretical framework for analysing the reconceptualization of sleep more comprehensively. CDA is an approach first proposed in Norman Fairclough’s Language and Power (1989) which - based on the social constructionist view that language constructs, rather than merely reflects, reality - sees language as an irreducible element of social life that plays a key role in the creation, maintenance and change of social power relations. It combines two research procedures, namely an analysis of how language use figures in social processes - the discourse analytical part - and a social critique that seeks to reveal the ideological implications of language use. CDA usually starts with describing the formal elements and patterns that appear on the level of the concrete text. It then focuses on the meaning of these elements, trying to detect the regularities of particular discursive representations of the world. The final step is an analysis of the role of discourse in social practices and, thus, its socio-cultural significance. This means that we have to contextualise the meanings created in a particular discourse and critically evaluate their ideological implications. 3 It should, however, be mentioned that according to Fairclough (2000: 164), the relationship between CDA and social theory should not be seen as CDA simply being added to social theory or vice versa, but as a transdisciplinary process where one theory uses the logic of the other. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 101 3.2 Methodology and data This paper takes a quantitative approach to CDA, which means that it examines a limited number of linguistic features in a corpus, using specifically designed software. A modern corpus, as used in this analysis, can be defined as collection of authentic samples of language in electronic form which has been designed with the aim of being analysed linguistically (cf. Hunston 2002: 2). There are several arguments why a quantitative, corpus-based approach best meets the requirements of CDA’s hermeneutic research practice: firstly, linguistic information has a greater influence on our semantic knowledge if it occurs often and with great variation. It is therefore important to find out about the frequency and degree of variation of a particular construction (cf. Marko 2008: 96). Secondly, as McEnery and Wilson (1997: 62) put it, using corpora allows us to distinguish phenomena that are “genuine reflections of the behaviour of language” in a particular discourse from those that are “merely chance occurrences.” Hunston (2002: 109) also acknowledges the importance of corpus-based, quantitative analyses for the study of ideology and culture, noting that “patterns of association - how lexical items tend to co-occur - are built up over large amounts of texts and are often unavailable to intuition or conscious awareness” [my emphasis]. 4 The corpus compiled for this paper is a specialized corpus 5 made up of 109 advice-giving texts on sleep, comprising 122,998 word tokens. 103 of these texts were retrieved from the Internet (82,721 words); the other 6 texts (40,277 words) are extracts from self-help books on sleep (with titles like Sleep Well Every Night, Harrold 2008). The reason why I chose to include texts from the Internet and self-help books is, as Marko (2010: 150) explains, that “healthist discourse appears primarily in the genres of the self-help book and internet forums providing expert (and lay) advice on medical matters.” The corpus has been annotated, which means linguistically relevant information has been added to the raw corpus in order to facilitate the analysis. I used the software Wmatrix (Rayson 2009), which features the annotation tools USAS (UCREL Semantic Analysis System), which automatically assigns lexemes to a set of predefined semantic categories, and CLAWS (Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System), which is used for automatic part-of-speech (POS) tagging (i.e. grammatical tagging). For the analysis, I used the concordancing software WordSmith Tools 5.0 by Mike Scott (2008f.). 4 It is worth mentioning that corpus analysis also has its drawbacks - discussed, for example, in McEnery and Wilson (1997) and Hunston (2002). 5 A specialized corpus (as opposed to a general one) features texts of a particular type, on a particular topic or from a particular time frame (cf. Hunston 2002: 14- 15). Eva Triebl 102 3.3 Research question and hypothesis Sleep is an extremely rich topic and can be researched at various levels and from different angles. In this paper, I have chosen to present my research on one particular question, namely “How is sleep discursively constructed as a tool in achieving better health and productivity and what conceptions of the world does this imply? ” I hypothetically assume that this construction works by representing sleep as manageable, purpose-oriented activity, thus associating it with heightened efficiency and productivity. 4. Analysis To find answers to this question, I first carried out a general semantic profiling of the corpus, doing a conceptual analysis of the 200 most frequently occurring nouns. In addition, I examined the compounds of sleep and sleeping. Finally, I took a closer look at imperatives to find out how a ‘good sleeper’ is conceptualized in the examined texts. 4.1 General semantic profiling As Fairclough (1989: 115) explains, the overwording of a particular semantic field can be seen as an indicator of a preoccupation with some aspect of reality and, thus, as a sign of ideological struggles. In order to get a general idea of which conceptual domains are particularly salient in my corpus, I first did an analysis of the 200 most frequently occurring nouns. I have chosen to focus on nouns as they are the central word class in the texts analysed and can thus be argued to contribute to conceptualizations of the world most substantially. Thanks to the POS-tagging, it was possible to automatically limit the search to nouns. After lemmatizing 6 the nouns, I assigned them to the semantic categories presented in the table below (for reasons of space, only the most salient categories - with more than 1,000 word tokens - are presented here). Time (3,257 tokens; 17 types) night (731), time (593), hour (410), day (394), morning (151), minute (143), clock (98), week (94), evening (75), day (55), year (50), afternoon (49), daytime (45), weekend (43), middle of the night, (39), bedtime (231), period (56) Rationality (2,700 tokens; 43 types) Quantification & classification (834 tokens; 16 types): amount (107), quality (104), level (82), stage (52), step (52), a number 6 Lemmata include the different forms which realize the same lexeme, subsumed under one entry (cf. Baker/ Hardie/ McEnery 2006: 104). A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 103 of/ number (1, 2… 50), point (43), times (few, several…) (41), state (39), type (35), percent (34), lot (33), cup (32), lack (74), loss (29), glass (27) Organizing (767 tokens; 12 types): routine (106), habit (91), schedule (63), program (57), rhythm (57), practice (48), control (31), diary (29), behavior/ behaviour (28), (sleep, immune..) system (84), pattern (96), cycle (77) Methodology (379 tokens; 5 types): way (178), technique (128), solution (40), cue (33) Causality (360 tokens; 5 types): effect (170), cause (52), result (47), factor (46), reason (45) Scientific practice (308 tokens; 5 types): study (119), fact (56), research (51), expert (46), researcher (36) Lifestyle (1,629 tokens; 22 types) General (50 tokens; 1 type): lifestyle (50) Diet (1,006 tokens; 14 types): caffeine (187), food (137), alcohol (131), coffee (79), drink (79), tea (63), diet (54), water (53), meal (41), nicotine (41), stimulant (41), milk (39), chocolate (34), snack (27) Wellness (573 tokens; 7 types): relaxation (107), massage (37), yoga (33), exercise (190), meditation (74), bath (73), rest (59) Furniture & household items (1,415 tokens; 9 types) bed (712), bedroom (154), room (124), tv/ television (124), pillow (83), mattress (82), alarm (clock) (34), window (34), sheet (28) Pathology (1,401 tokens; 23 types) Diseases (878 tokens; 12 types): insomnia (198), stress (154), disorder (131), (sleep) deprivation (61), disease (59), pain (47), depression (43), condition (42), apnea/ apnoea (39), symptom (37), insomniac (35), obesity (32) Treatment (523 tokens; 11 types): medication (78), medicine (59), doctor (53), treatment (48), drug (40), prescription (40), aid (83), remedy (34), pill (33), herb (28), therapy (27) Body (1,326 tokens; 15 types) body (603), hormone (83), muscle (75), heart (73), weight (64), eye (63), back (55), melatonin (55), breathing (54), stomach (39), blood (pressure) (38), breath (36), cell (30), head (30), hand (28) Sleep & sleep-related states (2,757 tokens; 8 types) sleep (2,379), nap (116), sleeping (77), dream (55), wakefulness (38), waking (33), drowsiness (30), alertness (29) Mind (1,119 tokens; 12 types) Emotion (365 tokens; 7 types): mood (62), feeling (57), worry (39), trouble (71), anxiety (60), tension (32), need (44) Cognition (557 tokens; 5 types): mind (240), brain (158), thought (62), memory (58), idea (39) Table 1: General semantic profiling. Eva Triebl 104 As can be seen in Table 1, the most salient semantic category of nouns is “Time”, with words such as day, minute or weekend. The overlexicalization of time in the discourse of sleep is interesting because it suggests that the overarching issue in the examined discourse is the question of when and how long we sleep. One of the main reasons for the discursive emphasis of time could be that the concept of the night as a time for sleep is nowadays being more and more challenged: since it is nowadays possible to ‘turn the night into day’, there is an increasing pressure to make efficient use of every minute of the day (cf. Brown 2004: 177). The second major conceptual domain is what I labeled “Rationality”, which can be further divided into 5 subcategories. The largest subcategory is “Quantification/ classification” (834 tokens) and includes nouns used to quantify (e.g. amount, level, a lot of) or classify the world in terms of quality, different states and types. The second subcategory is “Organizing.” The nouns assigned to it all have to do with planning things and bringing them into a routine. Practice, for example, refers to a particular routinised behaviour; and behaviour is something which requires selfdiscipline and/ or self-control if we want to change it. Likewise, the reference to people’s sleep in terms of a cycle implies that their sleeping (and, thus, waking) lives are subjected to recurrent patterns and thus to routine. And nouns such as routine, habit and schedule are all quite straightforwardly concerned with planning and organizing. The third subcategory I identified is “Methodology” (379). It features nouns that refer to ways and methods of finding solutions to problems, e.g. way, technique, solution and cue. The fourth subcategory includes nouns used to describe relations of cause and effect (360 tokens) and finally, the subcategory “Science” encompasses nouns that can describe scientific practice (308 tokens). What these five subcategories have in common is that they create a very rational view of the world: the prominence of words used to quantify and classify and the high number of words for scientific practice can be seen as contributing to scientification (Marko 2010: 153). The salience of the subcategories “Cause and effect” and “Methodology” also serves to conceptualize the discourse of sleep in very pragmatic (in the philosophical sense) terms, the underlying logic being that problems have objectively assessable causes and can be subjected to scientific research with the aim of finding a solution. The large-scale conceptualization of life in terms of routines and schedules also supports a rational worldview because it implies that every activity has (or should have) a clearly allotted time frame, which thus discursively imposes a tight structure on life. The salience of the semantic category “Furniture & household items” points to the need to create an appropriate sleeping environment foregrounded in the examined texts. Good sleep, it seems, heavily depends on the right choice of furniture, the bed of course being the most important item (712 tokens). A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 105 Another major semantic field is “Lifestyle.” This category includes general references to the noun lifestyle but also features the subcategories “Diet”, also encompassing nouns referring to ‘lifestyle drugs’ such as alcohol and nicotine, and “Wellness”, including nouns such as relaxation, exercise, yoga and massage. The salience of these semantic categories suggests that sleep is constructed as closely relating to what we (should or should not) purchase and consume, not only in terms of furniture and other sleep-related equipment, but also in terms of diet and wellness practices. Two other major semantic categories identified are “Pathology”, which features words for diseases, e.g. insomnia, pain, obesity, disease, and therapies, e.g. medication, pill, doctor and drug, and “Body”, which only has 15 different types (body being the most frequent word). The high frequencies of references to the body, diseases and their treatment point to a preoccupation with a medical perspective on the world (cf. Marko 2010: 153). Finally, there are many nouns subsumable under the category “Mind”, which includes lexemes for emotional states such as mood, anxiety and worry and lexemes for cognition such as brain, memory and idea. The discursive emphasis on emotional states and cognitive processes implies a preoccupation with individuals and their inner lives. It is especially the addressees’ minds that the texts focus on, an assumption supported by the fact that the second person pronouns you and your (with 3,081 and 1,928 tokens respectively) occur significantly more often than in a general corpus of (British) English (the BE06 corpus, cf. Baker 2009) - 2.43% in the sleep corpus versus 0.43% in the BE06 - as was to be expected of interactive texts. Considering the foregrounding of the addressee’s emotional and cognitive processes and thus of his or her individuality, we may conclude that this adds an element of personal responsibility to the construction of sleep in the texts. As far as socio-cultural significance is concerned, the analysis reveals that time seems to be an issue of ideological struggle in the discourse of sleep. In today’s 24/ 7 society, which Melbin (1989, cit. in Williams 2005: 105) has called “incessant”, with flexibility and adaptability as key values, it is becoming more and more difficult to make time for sleep. The salience of the semantic category “Rationality” and especially of the subcategory “Organizing” suggests that routine is one of the prime means of managing one’s sleep. Focusing on the planned, routinized and scheduled aspects of life means backgrounding the spontaneous, pleasurerelated dimensions of human existence, which adds a somehow ascetic, anti-hedonist (cf. Marko 2010: 153) flavor to the conception of sleep. The discourse of sleep is marked by an emphasis on the physical and, importantly too, the pathological: sleep is mainly represented in terms of its (potentially negative) consequences on health, an important characteristic of healthist discourses which Marko (2010: 153) calls negativization. Eva Triebl 106 Constructing sleep as potential risk is problematic because it means associating it with the moral imperative to actively reduce that risk. 4.2 Analysis of the compounds of sleep While the previous analysis was supposed to shed light on the general conceptual structure of the discourse of sleep, I will now examine the concepts discursively associated with sleep in particular. One way of analysing conceptual associations is to look at compound nouns. Compound nouns are formed by formally and semantically joining two lexemes of which the second one must be a noun (at least in endocentric compounds). Because they create compact conceptual units from two separate elements, compounds are a powerful means of making connections between particular concepts seem natural. In order to identify the most frequently occurring nominal compounds with sleep, I used WordSmith to produce a concordance of sleep/ sleeping, focusing on the lines with nouns directly following the search word. As a next step, I assigned the compounds I found to the different semantic categories contained in the table below. Pathology (433 tokens; 34 types) Disorders (305 tokens; 22 types): problem (120), disorder (102), apnea/ apnoea (36), disruption (8), disturbance (6), issue (5), restriction (5), loss (4), trouble (3), attacks (2), difficulty (2), inertia (2), walking (2), disruptor, hangover, insufficiency, interference, intervention, killer, paralysis, robber, sufferer Treatment (128 tokens; 12 types): aid (71), pill (17), medication (13), supplement (11), medicine (8), remedy (2), diagnosis, inducer, healthcenter, prescription medication, promoter, therapist Rationality (384 tokens; 51 types) Scheduling (180 tokens; 13 types): pattern (41), cycle (31), habit (25), schedule (24), time (17), routine (9), scheduling (9), hours (6), window (6), period (5), rhythm (5), clock, plan Science (88 tokens; 19 types): expert (22), system (13), foundation (11), researcher (6), specialist (6), mode (5) research (5), council (3), study (3), (lab)oratory (2), stage (2), zone (2), associations, centre, counselor, professional, society, survey, mechanism, process Managing (52 tokens; 11 types): diary (22), hygiene (16), log (4), requirement (3), demand, practice, preparation, records, ritual, rule, work Methodolgy (49 tokens; 4 types): efficiency (27), benefit (12), strategy (8), technique (2) Quantification (15 tokens; 4 types): debt (12), bank account, quotient, threshold Setting & circumstances (36 tokens; 4 types) environment (27), partner (7), scenario, setting A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 107 Information (21 tokens; 8 types) tip (12), advice (3), awareness, basics, education, fact, guide, topic Table 2: Compounds with the words sleep, sleeping or sleeper as their modifier. On the whole, the list contains 97 different compounds of sleep and sleeping which occurred a total of 874 times in the corpus (not counting expressions that could not be assigned to the above classes). As you can see in Table 2, more than half of them can be assigned to the semantic category “Pathology”, which, like in the general semantic profiling above, includes disorders (e.g. sleep disorder, sleep apnoea, sleep loss) and therapeutic measures (e.g. sleep aid, sleeping pill, sleep medicine). The focus on health problems already seen in the general semantic profiling can thus be observed even more clearly when looking at the immediate textual surroundings of sleep. The second major semantic category is “Rationality.” Its largest subcategory is “Scheduling”, including compounds concerned with the time management of sleep, such as sleeping according to a regular sleep cycle or sleep pattern, lexemes which occur in concordances like the ones below: Keep a regular wake/ sleep cycle. How to reset your sleep cycle. The biggest problem for people who do not keep to a regular sleep pattern is waking up feeling fatigued. A compound whose meaning might be unclear without its context is sleep window. It refers to a period of time allotted for sleep and occurs in concordances like the following: Carolyn has been following a 6-hour sleep window and is now managing to sleep an average of 5½ hours per night. The second subcategory is “Science.” It includes compounds that construct sleep as an object of scientific investigation with people (sleep researchers, experts and specialists), scientific practices (sleep research, studies and surveys) and institutions (sleep societies, associations and centers) devoted to its study. By referring to a sleep system, a sleep mode and a sleep mechanism, writers construct sleep as something abstract and/ or technical rather than as biological - after all, talking about a natural physiological process in terms of a sleep mode evokes associations with the different modes of operation of technical devices such as mobile phones or computers, e.g. standby, recharging, sleeping, etc. The third subcategory is “Managing”, featuring compounds referring to the management of sleep through self-observation by means of diaries, logs and records, through becoming aware of and trying to meet one’s sleep requirements, and through keeping a good sleep hygiene, a compound which occurs in concordances such as the following: Eva Triebl 108 Improving sleep hygiene, including adapting the bedroom and eliminating any noise, will set the scene and will help if you have sleeping difficulties. However, for most people it is a case of making the most of all of the good sleep-hygiene practices to make sure that you are better prepared for sleep. There are also compounds I assigned to the subcategory “Methodology” because they are all concerned with the means towards achieving a goal, e.g. a strategy supposed to reach a maximum efficiency. The fourth and last subcategory I set up is “Quantification”, including compounds whose heads denote a particular amount of sleep or the lack thereof, like for example sleep debt - which is, by the way, an interesting metaphor from the field of economy that constructs sleep as capital to be managed. Socio-culturally speaking, the salience of these semantic domains points to two interrelated tendencies that characterize the discourse of sleep: first of all, there is a tendency towards reconceptualizing sleep in terms of its potentially negative consequences on health. Secondly, there is a preoccupation with a scientific approach to and the rational management of sleep. The underlying logic is that proper sleep management - the most important element of which is, judging from my results, careful scheduling and planning - reduces potential health risks. 4.3 Managing sleep The results from the analyses above suggest that the idea of efficiency is important in the discourse of sleep. If sleep is conceptualized as means towards particular ends, this raises the question of how efficiency is conceptualized in the examined texts and if lifestyle decisions and management skills are important aspects of being an ‘efficient sleeper’. This question can be answered by looking more closely at the advice given in the texts I am analysing. Linguistically, advice-giving is mainly realized by imperatives, expressing a strong obligation to act, but in your own best interest (weaker forms of deontic modality with modal verbs combined with a second person subject, e.g. you should… or you must, are not as common in my data, possibly because it introduces an element of moral obligation, undermining the benefits for the addressee). I methodologically proceeded by searching for verbs in the base form, as identified by the POS-tags (the base form covers the finite present tense - excluding the third person singular - and the imperative), occurring right after a punctuation mark indicating a sentence boundary, viz. a full-stop, colon, exclamation mark, question mark, or quotation mark, as imperatives mainly occur at the beginning of a sentence. As a next step, I semantically categorized the imperatives I found. The meanings of some of these verbs heavily depend on the complement or adjunct in the verb phrase - compare, e.g., keep active and keep the bedroom dark and quiet. In the case of such ambiguity, I considered the whole A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 109 phrase for the semantic categorization, which means for instance that the two examples of keep are assigned to different categories. The semantic categories of imperatives are shown in table 3 below. General (145 tokens; 22 types) General (10 tokens; 3 types): (not) 7 do sth. (7), (not) engage in (2), carry out Instrumental (35 tokens; 1 type): (not) use sth. (35) Conative (59 tokens; 1 type): try (59) 8 Creative (25 tokens; 6 types): create (12), develop (8), make sth. (2), create, renew, draw Possession (7 tokens; 3 types): get sth. (5), give, keep sth. Causative (3 tokens; 3 types): make body sth., not get sb. used to sth., get sb. to do sth. Concern (3 tokens; 2 types): work on (2), deal with Attribute (3 tokens; 3 types): be regular, not be a bat, be creative Mental processes & emotions (172 tokens; 61 types) Cognition (110 tokens; 33 types): remember (17), consider (14), imagine (9), (not) think (10), focus on (7), allow (5), see (=consider) (5), keep in mind (3), know (3), learn (3), let sb. do sth. (3), concentrate (2), believe (2), clear (head/ mind) (2), know (2), note (2), recall (2), teach yourself (2), keep mentally stimulated (2), figure (out) (2), bundle (worries), centre (mind), conjure up, be in the here and now, bear in mind, not underestimate, mind, notice, realize, sharpen mentally, take information, keep concentrating, envision Perception (16 tokens; 8 types): listen to (7), take look (2), see (2), have a look at, look at, look to, stare, take glance Emotions (46 tokens; 20 types): relax (11), not worry (7), (not) feel (8), be patient (3), wind down (2), bear, enjoy, not stress, not catastrophize, not agonize, not be afraid, not be surprised, have fun, make commitment, revere sleep, worry about sth., not obsess, not become tense, relieve yourself, loosen tension Management (173 tokens; 49 types) Control (143 tokens; 23 types): avoid (78), make sure (23), ensure (9), follow (=observe) (6), be sure (4), choose (3), put yourself first (2), leave sth. (2), set sth. aside (2), break rules, shun, beat sth., determine, fix up, hold back from, prohibit, put stress to sleep, 9 7 not indicates that the imperative only occurs in negated form, (not) indicates that it also occurs in negative form. 8 The verbs contained in the complements of try have been listed separately because the imperative function extends to them. 9 In the metaphorical sense Eva Triebl 110 put work aside, take control of sth., throw worries into trash can, block out, implement, turn sth. around 10 Planning (24 tokens; 22 types): schedule (2), plan (2), have a bed routine, have a bed time, run like a German train, build up routine, build up steps, 11 expect, get on a schedule, get in the habit, get into a routine, keep a regular schedule, keep a regular wake-sleep cycle, keep regular hours, keep routine, keep schedule in tune, make bedtime routine, make list, make sleep a priority, put yourself on (schedule), break up (into minutes), not arrange Goal-achievement (6 tokens; 4 types): solve (problem) (2), take action (2), take measure, find way to Quantitative, qualitative & phasal change (121 tokens; 48 types) Quantitative change (57 tokens; 27 types): reduce (11), limit (8), remove (4), cut out (4), lower (3), stay away from (stimulants, drugs, caffeine) (3), cut back (2), get rid of (2), vary, try to remove, stay away from (food), banish, curb, cut, decrease, eliminate, empty, evict, increase, minimize, regulate, restrict, shortcut, skip, keep it down Phasal change (55 tokens; 16 types): stop (11), start (9), begin (7), continue (5), stay (+adjective) (5), establish (4), maintain (4), stay with sth. (2), stick to (2), keep, finish, get on with, leave it there, 12 refrain from, remain, stay on track Qualitative change (8 tokens; 5 types): (not) change (3), adjust (2), improve (2), substitute, transform Wellness & Exercise (80 tokens; 31 types) (not) exercise (31), take hot bath/ warm bath (8), stretch (8), bend (knees) (2), have (warm) bath (2), keep active (2), take exercise (2), take yoga class (2), have the right sunlight exposure, play sports, jump, dance, do stretching, do yoga, get exercise, have exercise, hit gym, keep stomach pulled, keep muscles contracted, lengthen (arms), plant (feet) into floor, raise arms, release (arms, head), relieve (back pressure), take the stairs, not do strenuous exercise, take breathing lessons, unroll, squeeze, tense Physiological processes (70 tokens; 29 types) General (16 tokens; 8 types): breathe (5), take breath (4), bring up (energy) (2), make breath (2), not sweat, lose weight, inhale, keep breathing Diet (38 tokens; 13 types): (not) eat (17), (not) drink (8), have a light snack (2), take food (2), not feast, have a glass of milk, have a hot drink, have dinner, have a water bottle, have meals, sip, take vitamin supplement, taste Sleep-related (16 tokens; 8 types): (not) take nap (5), (not) nap (4), sleep (2), be tired, get sleep, wake up, wake, stay up Spatial movement & posture (69 tokens; 19 types) General (37 tokens; 13 types): close (eyes) (7), go somewhere (7), move (5), lie (4), sit (4), return (3), not stay inside, make fist, get outside, stay in the dark, unroll, walk, lay 10 In a figurative sense 11 Steps in a step-by-step programme 12 Meaning stop for the time being A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 111 Sleep-related (32 tokens; 6 types): (not) go to bed (21), get up (7), not stew in bed, not lie in bed, not toss and turn, retire Manipulation & movement of objects (65 tokens; 39 types) Arrangement of setting (54 tokens; 30 types): keep bedroom sth. (8), make bedroom/ bed sth. (5), put sth. somewhere (5), place sth. somewhere (3), turn off (3), set time/ alarm/ (3), not have (too many) covers (2), turn away sth. (2), clean up, decorate, dim, not spray, hang sth. somewhere, have a good sleeping environment, have a rummage, keep lights dim, keep temperature in your room, keep sth. out of the bedroom, open curtains, play CD, spray (sheets) with, sprinkle sheets with, switch off, not turn on (light), light a candle (2), keep sth. outside the bedroom, open a window, place a humidifier, close curtains, add pillows General (11 tokens; 9 types): hide sth. (2), switch sth. (2), equip sth., install, pack sth., turn sth., fold sth., pull up sth., shut sth. down Documentation & communication (38 tokens; 16 types) read (13), say (4), write down (4), read/ do reading (4), consult (2), say, ask, tell, express, make scream, sum up, keep notes, make note, let sb. know, get answer, answer Time (18 tokens; 9 types) take time (5), take moment (5), give yourself time (2), keep it short, keep longer sleeping hours, give (time), spend (a moment), take while, wait Social (15 tokens; 8 types) Economic (9 tokens; 3 types): buy (4), not consume (2), invest (3) General (6 tokens; 5 types): have sexual activity (2), visit, make love, show sb. sth., give sb. (confidence) Medical (14 tokens; 10 types) see doctor (3), take (medication) (2), talk to doctor (2), take help, cure, not self-medicate, get referral, take sleep aids, undergo therapy, treat yourself Table 3: Imperatives. As can be seen in the table, the most prominent semantic category is “Mental processes & emotions.” This is interesting for two reasons: first of all, it shows that what the reader is most frequently advised on is his or her own thinking and feeling, which again foregrounds the individual. Secondly, the category “Management” figures very prominently, which implies that a large proportion of the advice provided in the examined texts concerns the reader’s organizational skills. The third major semantic category is “Quantitative, qualitative & phasal change.” Its quantitative prominence suggests that being a good sleeper means making numerous, especially quantitative changes. In other words, a lot of advice implies that the reader’s current situation - i.e. his or her behavioral routines - is bad, requiring change, and that reducing quantities is an important aspect of this change. The conceptualization of life in terms of quantities is significant because it implies a rational but perhaps one-dimensional worldview. Eva Triebl 112 Interesting, too, is the salience of the semantic field “Wellness & exercise” and the numerous other verbs referring to physical activity in general (e.g. in the category “Spatial movement & posture”). They suggest that good sleep requires being proactive in one’s waking life, which, in turn, implies that sleep problems are associated with inactivity and passivity. Many imperative verb phrases denote physiological processes (in a broad sense, including intentional acts), with “Diet” as its most prominent subcategory. The latter includes references to eating and drinking, e.g. have a snack, have dinner and drink. Eating and drinking in combination with the aforementioned quantitative changes are constructed as another important factor in the management of sleep. The next semantic category worth commenting on is “Manipulation & movement of objects.” Most tokens assigned to that category belong to the subcategory “Arrangement of setting”, which includes phrases like make your bedroom cool and dark, keep the lights dim and light a candle. The fact that advice is often concerned with the arrangement of the sleeping environment, which often requires buying the proper equipment (e.g. humidifier, curtains), implies a certain preoccupation with certain forms of consumption as a means to improve sleep. The semantic category “Documentation & communication”, which includes words like make notes, write down, read and answer is, though less prominent, also interesting because it suggests that the examined texts promote reflexive observation of and communication about sleep (and other) habits. Put differently, being aware of one’s health and talking about it seems to be encouraged in the discourse of sleep. Summing up, the results of the analysis of imperatives show that the advice on sleep provided in the texts analysed either concerns the reader’s management skills or aspects of his or her lifestyle, namely wellness and exercise, diet and the proper arrangement of the sleeping environment. Sleep, it seems, is just another aspect of life which, like exercise, diet and consumption choices, has to be actively planned and managed. Management, the analysis has shown, does not only mean being in control and planning one’s life in minute detail, but also being aware of, and ready to actively change, particular behavioral patterns, especially as far as quantities of particular things or practices - food, exercise, etc. - are concerned. This, in turn, suggests that a positively evaluated lifestyle constructed as necessary for good sleep has a lot to do with selfawareness and self-control. 5. Conclusion The present paper was based on the initial assumption that sleep is discursively associated with heightened efficiency and productivity. The analysis of the 200 most frequent nouns revealed that the semantic cate- A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep 113 gory ‘Time’ is very prominent and, thus, seems to be a site of ideological struggle in the discourse of sleep. As for the handling of time promoted in the examined texts, the salience of words from the semantic field of rationality was striking in both the analysis of the most frequent nouns and the analysis of compounds with sleep. In addition, the analysis of imperatives showed that the advice provided in the examined texts mainly refers to the management of sleep - bringing sleep into control and scheduling it appropriately is constructed as key for good sleep. What these results imply is that time is treated as resource to be exploited as economically as possible in the examined texts: good sleep management, it seems, corresponds to good time management , the purpose of which is not to allow more time for sleep, but to allot an ideal amount of time - not too little and not too much - for sleep. The semantic category ‘Quantitative, qualitative & phasal change’ turned out to be prominent when analyzing imperatives, i.e. the advice provided in the texts. This suggests that being a good sleeper means making numerous, especially quantitative changes and, thus, that the implied reader’s current situation should be altered - mainly by reducing particular quantities and making qualitative improvements. In other words, the analysis showed that the proposed solution for sleep problems provided in the examined texts is to maximize the efficiency of sleep by scheduling it appropriately on the one hand and by optimizing its benefits on the other. Good sleep, the results of this corpus analysis suggest, is mainly about making the right decisions: both the analysis of nouns and the analysis of imperatives showed that there is a preoccupation with the addressee’s mind and, thus, that personal decisions and responsibility are discursively foregrounded. Apart from time-management, the responsibilities of a good sleeper mainly involve consumption or so-called lifestyle choices, as the analyses of nouns and imperatives showed. Risk looms large in the examined discourse: most compounds of sleep and a considerably high number of nouns could be assigned to the semantic field of pathology, which implies that the individual’s failure to efficiently exploit sleep leads to ill-health and, in turn, that ill-health is linked to inappropriate sleep management. References Baker, Paul (2009). “The BE06 Corpus of British English and recent language change.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14/ 3. 312-337. 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Text 77: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ articles/ 127784.html Text 78: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ articles/ power-nap-success-sleep-brainwaveentrainment.html Text 79: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ articles/ americans-just-not-getting-enoughsleep-study-shows.html Text 80: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ articles/ causes-of-sleeping-too-much.html Text 81: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ editorials/ 12-18-2004-63118.asp Text 82: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ editorials/ 8-25-2004-58390.asp Eva Triebl 118 Text 83: http: / / www.buzzle.com/ editorials/ 8-24-2004-58321.asp Text 84: http: / / www.cuddleewe.com/ Sleep-Advice.aspx Text 85: http: / / www.readersdigest.com.au/ healthsmart/ sleep-to-besexy/ article79738.html Text 86: http: / / longevity.about.com/ od/ lifelongenergy/ tp/ healthy_sleep.htm Text 87: http: / / www.better-sleep-better-life.com/ benefits-of-sleep.html Text 88: http: / / www.fi.edu/ learn/ brain/ sleep.html Text 89: http: / / www.cookinglight.com/ healthy-living/ health/ 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Top-Ways-to-Get-Better- Sleep&id=4224168 Text 97: http: / / www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ lifestyle/ health/ the-ten-bestways-to-get-more-sleep-13931656.html Text 98: http: / / health.usnews.com/ health-news/ familyhealth/ sleep/ articles/ 2009/ 03/ 03/ 10-ways-to-get-better-sleep-andmaybe-cure-your-insomnia.html? PageNr=2 Text 99: http: / / www.sleepdisordersguide.com/ blog/ good-night-sleep/ 11ways-to-get-a-good-night-sleep/ Text 100: http: / / www.foxnews.com/ story/ 0,2933,483864,00.html Text 101: http: / / doctorstevenpark.com/ quickwaystosleepbetter Text 102: http: / / www.rd.com/ living-healthy/ achieve-a-deep-uninterruptedsleep/ article15950.html Text 103: http: / / www.braintraining101.com/ 10-simple-ways-to-get-a-peacefulnights-sleep/ . AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 Rezensionen Michelle Gadpaille, “As She Should Be”: Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing. (Anglistische Forschungen 393). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Maria Löschnigg While the Canadian literary canon creates the impression that nineteenthcentury women’s writing from the area was firmly dominated by settler narratives such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush or her sister Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada, Michelle Gadpaille’s excellent study on Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing makes one aware that the overall picture is a much more diversified one. Indeed, as she says, the “narrative of early settler life became the first (for a while, the only) women’s writing from this era to be rediscovered, excerpted and republished” (118). However, this has led to an “unfair canonization” (ibid.) which has detracted attention from a range of other remarkable genres and texts. One of the merits of Gadpaille’s book therefore lies in the unearthing of a hitherto neglected segment of Canadian literary history, and another in her systematic and illuminating exploration of the complex relationship between conduct books and early Canadian fiction by women. Gadpaille takes her title from a novel by Mary Herbert (Woman As She Should Be; or, Agnes Wiltshire, 1861) which, according to the author, “set the tone for eight decades of fiction by women in Canada” (7). Her focus on the literary production of nineteenth-century Canadian women brings to mind another seminal publication on the lives and literary output of gentlewomen in early Canada, which is surprisingly missing from the bibliography. Yet, while Marian Fowler’s The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada (1982) focuses on the gentlewoman’s survival in the Canadian wilderness, i.e. of the ‘feminine’ in a ‘masculine’ world, what Gadpaille seeks in texts by women writers, as she makes clear in her introduction, “is not national consciousness or local landscape, but an individual relation between the writer and the domestic space called home and centered on female characters, and AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 120 between the genteel narrator and her would-be-genteel reader, as conflicted as that relationship may be” (11). This approach opens up new perspectives on early Canadian writing, directing one’s attention to a sphere which was predominantly feminine and domestic and which existed alongside and outside of what was considered ‘serious’ literature. “Literary history”, as Gadpaille underlines in an explanation of the relevance of her study, “has embraced the books of practical instruction for wilderness living, but overlooked the directions for mere social survival” (8). The first chapter of “As She Should Be” deals with the conduct book, a genre which, as the author demonstrates, determined in various ways (and to various degrees) fiction written by Canadian women from the early nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century. The remarkable popularity of the conduct book in the early United States and Canada must be seen against the backdrop of the urgent need for social rules which were a fitting substitute for old (British) norms of gentility relying mainly on birth. ‘Ladyhood’ in nineteenth-century North America became increasingly determined by behaviour “and tend[ed] to situate such behaviour in a Christian context” (21), while inherited titles became increasingly irrelevant. After first providing a comparative account of conduct books in Canada and the United States, Gadpaille then sets out to analyse in detail three major Canadian and US examples respectively in order to “extract a workable pattern of conduct” (21), which forms the basic framework for her discussion of Canadian conduct fiction in chapters 3 to 6. The relationship between conduct books and fictional literature (especially the genre romance) was problematic beforehand, as Gadpaille emphasises, because of “the conduct-book’s traditional disapproval of fiction” (29). The paradoxical nature of ‘conduct fiction’ which results from this averseness is further explored in the second chapter. Here, Gadpaille discusses in detail the general opinion expressed in conduct books that reading novels was likely to have a disastrous effect on women, and especially on young girls. To deflect the impact of such verdicts, “women writers [therefore] strove to make the romantic plot [of their fictions] compatible with social and moral ideas about the education and development of young women” (38). For many nineteenth-century women writers in Canada, writing thus became a matter of balance - a skilful juggling of seemingly incompatible discourses. It is this precarious and ambivalent space which Gadpaille explores in her insightful analyses of selected stories and novels published between the 1830s and the first decade of the twentieth century. At the centre of the third chapter stands “Grace Morley: A Sketch from Life” (1839), a story by Eliza Lanesford Cushing, which constitutes, as Gadpaille convincingly argues, “the clearest example of the match between conduct rules and fictional form” (39). The two novels analysed in the fourth chapter, Rosanna Leprohon’s Antoinette de Mirecourt; or Secret Marrying, Secret Sorrowing (1864) and Mary Leslie’s The Cromaboo Mail Carrier (1878), though decades apart from “Grace Morley”, are still strongly informed by the prevailing conduct book patterns of the time - even if they differ decisively in “generic and geographical respects” (50). Surprisingly, however, this is not the case in “Alice Sydenham’s First Ball”, a story by Leprohon which appeared Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 121 fifteen years before her novel in 1849. Gadpaille’s analysis of this story in chapter 5 makes visible the subtext which lies beneath the surface of the story’s didactic discourse, showing that the author employs more advanced techniques in this earlier work than in the later novel to straddle the boundaries between conduct book and fiction. Chapter 6 deals with examples from the late 1880s to the beginning of the twentieth century. In her discussion of May Leonard’s Zöe, or Some Day (1888), Sara Jeanette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today (1894) and Amelia Fytche’s Kerchiefs to Hunt Souls (1895), Gadpaille traces shifts in the representation of rules of behaviour, and demonstrates that “the New Woman novel […] is a dead end for conduct literature” (96). The result, as she claims, was a gradual disentanglement of conduct book and fiction, which is manifested especially in her last (and chronologically latest) example, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). Through the character of Anne Shirley, Montgomery pointed to new models of behaviour for young women, portraying, as Gadpaille rightly emphasises, the first ‘real’ adolescent in Canadian literature. Inspired and methodically stringent at the same time, Gadpaille’s book is rounded off by a critical examination of the processes of canon formation in Canada, which pins down the factors responsible for the exclusion of conduct books and conduct fiction from the literary canon until the very end of the twentieth century. Cogently, the author delineates the long-standing marginality of most nineteenth-century women’s literature in Canada. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as she points out, the factors for this neglect were, on the one hand, the general bias against ‘romance fiction’ as opposed to the more highly valued genres of drama and poetry, and on the other hand the general spirit of patriotism which characterized the early years of the Dominion. The Canada First movement, it seems, left no space for discourses which turned to the private and domestic spheres. Also, in the modernist and cosmopolitan climate of the 1920s, didacticism and romance were not valued very highly in literature. Not even in the 1960s, when Canadian Literature boomed for the first time and a re-consideration of the canon took place, did the great moment for nineteenth-century woman ‘as she should be’ come. Rather, “[t]he thematic paradigm for ‘CanLit’ became the garrison in the wilderness, with its accompanying theme of survival, and dictated for two decades what would be accepted as authentically Canadian literature” (117). It is only recently, in fact, that critics have paid more attention to Canada’s forgotten or marginalized literary genres. It is in the context of this new awareness and appreciation of literary forms which existed on the periphery of Canada’s male-dominated ‘high’ culture that Michelle Gadpaille’s monograph must be seen. Her perceptive and astute critical readings of early Canadian fiction by women against the background of the conduct-book pattern reconstruct a missing link of Canada’s literary and cultural history. There is not much one might want to criticize about this extremely well-researched book, except for a number of typographical errors, inconsistencies in the use of punctuation and one case of a footnote slipped into the main text (57). In sum, “As She Should Be”: Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing provides a neglected chapter in Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 122 the history of Canadian literature which has long waited to be given the attention it deserves. The author’s lucid discussion of her material and readerfriendly style (plus useful index) will undoubtedly make the study a valuable source of information and inspiration for further research in the field. Maria Löschnigg Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Christa Jansohn, Eta Harich-Schneider: Die Sonette William Shakespeares und die Lyrik der ‘Rekusanten’. Erlebnisse und Übersetzungen einer reisenden Musikerin: 1941-1982. (Studien zur englischen Literatur 25). Berlin: L IT , 2011. Wolfgang Riehle Ihre neue wissenschaftliche Monografie widmet Christa Jansohn der international einst hoch angesehenen, heute jedoch in Vergessenheit geratenen Künstlerin, wissenschaftlichen Autorin und Übersetzerin Eta Harich-Schneider, die von 1933 (seit 1935 als Professorin) bis 1940 an der Hochschule für Musik in Berlin wirkte. Sie leitete beispielsweise Klassen für Cembalo und Kammermusik des Barock und hielt insbesondere Vorlesungen über Stilkunde, in denen es ihr um die “enge Verbindung zwischen Literatur und Musik” ging (S. 20). Durch die NS-Zeit fühlte sie sich aber auch zu politischem Widerstand gegen das Nazi-Regime herausgefordert, indem sie sich besonders für ihre jüdischen Schüler/ innen und ihre jüdische Lehrerin Wanda Landowska einsetzte. Es blieb nicht aus, dass sie als ‘judenhörig’ und ‘politisch-katholisch’ eingestuft und zur Feindin der Partei erklärt wurde. Diese Einstufung in Verbindung mit verbreitetem Neid wegen ihrer künstlerischen Erfolge veranlasste die Berliner Musikhochschule schließlich zu ihrer Kündigung. Als großer Kennerin japanischer Musik erhielt sie danach ein Angebot zu einer japanischen Konzertreise (mit eigenem Cembalo). Durch die weiteren Zeitläufte sollte sich diese Reise zu einem Japanaufenthalt bis 1949 ausdehnen, und erst nach einigen in den USA verbrachten Jahren erhielt sie eine Stelle an der Musikhochschule in Wien, die sie bis zu ihrer Pensionierung innehatte. In Wien ist sie 1986 mit 92 Jahren gestorben. Harich-Schneider war nicht nur eine mit zahlreichen Ehrungen ausgezeichnete Cembalistin, sondern auch eine vorzügliche Kennerin japanischer Musik. Ihr 1973 bei Oxford University Press erschienenes Buch A History of Japanese Music gilt noch heute als Standardwerk. Mit dieser Kompetenz hat Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 123 sich die Künstlerin erfolgreich um eine Förderung des europäischen Verständnisses japanischer Musik bemüht. Überhaupt war es ihr ein wesentliches Anliegen, für kulturelle Vermittlung zu wirken. Stark ausgeprägt war bei ihr auch das Interesse an den Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Kunst und Literatur. So führte sie ihr Weg zum Cembalo, wie sie selbst sagt, über die Literatur. Und gerade in diesem Zusammenhang sind ihre literarischen Übersetzungen zu sehen, die somit auch einen eigenen Forschungsgegenstand der Anglistik bilden. Harich-Schneider gehört zu den zahlreichen Menschen, für die Shakespeares Sonette eine lebensbegleitende Bedeutung haben. Daraus ergab sich für Jansohn die lohnende Aufgabe, Harich-Schneiders Übersetzungen in ihrer Biografie zu verorten. In äußerst gründlichen Recherchen, die bereits in der Einleitung des Buches begonnen werden und dann eine große Dokumentation ergeben, untersucht Jansohn die verschiedensten zur Verfügung stehenden Quellen, wie Harich-Schneiders ausgedehnten Briefwechsel (besonders mit der eigenen Tochter und mit Verlagen), ihre Tagebücher und Memoiren, vor allem aber den Nachlass in der Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Mit diesem Aufwand gelingt es der Vf., “ein genaueres Bild der gesellschaftlichen, privaten wie auch der politischen, kirchlichen und kulturellen Atmosphäre”, in der diese Übersetzungsarbeit geleistet wurde, zu vermitteln (S. 13f.). Die Sonett-Übertragungen dieser Künstlerin, die nur ein einziges Mal - und zwar in China - veröffentlicht worden waren, hat nun Jansohn historisch-kritisch und gut zugänglich ediert. Man merkt Harich-Schneiders Übertragungen der Shakespeare-Sonette die persönlich-existentielle Ergriffenheit an, mit der sie diese geschaffen hat, und dass sie deshalb versuchte, ihre Wirkung auch in der deutschen Übersetzung zu vermitteln. Sie wollte die zahlreichen bereits existierenden Nachdichtungen der Shakespeare-Sonette, von denen bis dahin nur fünf aus weiblicher Feder stammten, übertreffen und Jansohn zeigt, wie es sich Harich-Schneider zur Aufgabe setzte, durch ihre weibliche, künstlerische Sensibilität und ihr Einfühlungsvermögen noch größere Nähe zum Original zu erreichen. Unschwer lässt sich erkennen, wie speziell die hohe Musikalität dieser Cembalistin auch der Praxis ihrer Übersetzungsarbeit zugute kommt. Die Tatsache, dass bei ihr literarische Ambition und künstlerische Praxis zusammenfallen, darf somit als ein außerordentlicher Glücksfall gewertet werden, auch wenn diese Übertragungen nicht immer perfekt und über jede Kritik erhaben sind. Harich-Schneider hat sich indes nicht nur Shakespeares Sonetten zugewendet, sie hat auch lyrische Texte englischer Dichter, die nach der Reformation nicht dazu bereit waren, ihren katholischen Glauben aufzugeben, übersetzt und mit ausführlichen Kommentaren versehen. Das 1945 abgeschlossene Manuskript zu diesem Buch über die ‘recusant poets’ mit dem Titel: “Die den Eid verweigerten. Katholische Dichter Englands aus der Zeit der Reformation (Recusant Poets): Eine Studie des Umfangs menschlicher Widerstandskraft” konnte leider nie veröffentlicht werden. Jansohn hat das Werk nun im letzten Teil ihres Buches mit allen Textstadien und Versionen kritisch ediert. Sie fügt die englischen Original-Texte aus der Sammlung “Recusant Poets” von Louise Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 124 Imogen Guiney hinzu, auf die sich Harich-Schneider gestützt hatte, wodurch der Leser die Möglichkeit hat, auch diesmal ihre Übersetzungskunst selbst zu überprüfen. Diese Texte waren im Übrigen noch nie ins Deutsche übersetzt worden. Was aber hatte die Künstlerin dazu bewogen, diese Lyrik einer deutschsprachigen Leserschaft nahezubringen? Ein wesentlicher Grund lag sicher darin, dass sie eine gewisse Verwandtschaft mit jenen Menschen erkannte, die sich in der Shakespearezeit dem Verbot des Beharrens auf eigener Glaubensüberzeugung widersetzten; denn einen Widerstandsgeist besaß auch sie, mit dem sie den politischen Strömungen der eigenen NS- Zeit begegnete. 1 Mit ihrer überaus reich dokumentierten Untersuchung zeichnet Jansohn aber nicht nur das Bild einer großen Künstlerin, sondern zugleich auch einer interessanten, schillernden Persönlichkeit, die etwa kurzzeitig mit dem Sowjet-Spion Richard Sorge und später, sehr überraschend, mit einem Leutnant der Waffen-SS liiert war, und die schließlich in ihrem biografischen Werk auch nicht vor Unwahrheiten und bewussten Fiktionalisierungen zurückschreckte, wenn es um ihre Selbststilisierung ging. Die in diesem Buch vorgelegte, ausführliche Dokumentation kann somit auch zu Recht beanspruchen, “ein Stück gelebter Zeitgeschichte” zu sein. Wolfgang Riehle Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz 1 Es ist freilich schade, dass die von Harich-Schneider benutzte Anthologie von Louise Imogen Guiney nur Gedichte von Männern enthält, gibt es doch auch eine beträchtliche weibliche Rekusantenliteratur, wie das neuere Buch von Dorothy L. Latz zeigt: Glow-worm light. Writings of 17th century English recusant women from original manuscripts (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1989). Lange in Vergessenheit geratener Rekusantenliteratur hat sich die Wissenschaft überhaupt erst neuerdings zugewandt, vgl. dazu etwa auch die diesbezügliche Studie von Dorothy L. Latz: Neglected English Literature. Recusant Writings of the 16th-17th Centuries (1997). Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 125 Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Imagology Revisited. (Studia Imagologica. Amsterdam Studies on Cultural Identity 17). Amsterdam & New York: 2010). Günther Blaicher The present volume documents Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s life-long interest in the perception and representation of ethnic groups and nations. Both his Habilitationsschrift on Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur und Literaturkritik (1977) and his monograph on Das Deutschlandbild in der amerikanischen Literatur (1998) have become indispensable sources of information on these subjects. In Imagology Revisited he has assembled twenty-three of his essays on a wide range of imagological issues published over a period of some forty years. Thus this volume offers another opportunity to appreciate Zacharasiewicz’s achievement in this multi-faceted field. In his introduction written in the form of a personal memoir Zacharasiewicz sketches his expanding interest in imagological phenomena. Beginning with his doctoral thesis on the representation of exotic countries in 17 th and 18 th century English poetry, which he submitted to the University of Graz in 1967, he moved on to the study of specific stereotypes and models of thought in the description of ethnic and national diversity in Europe. In his seminal monograph on the theory of climate as the principal source for the stereotypical description of nations he registered the remarkable uniformity of European opinion on this matter and pointed out the rise of comparative and panoramic ways of looking at the field. Continuing his career at the University of Vienna, Zacharasiewicz explored the imagological themes manifested in North American literatures in respect of the acculturation of immigrants and the construction of distinct regional and national identities, with special emphasis on American attitudes and perceptions of Germany, Austria, England, Scotland and Italy. At the same time he widened his field of research to media other than literature and to branches of learning like physiognomy and social psychology. After this introductory memoir the volume offers a review of research on national stereotypes in Anglophone literature encompassing imagological studies from the beginning of the 20 th century down to its publication in 1991/ 2. In this way Zacharasiewicz provides the reader with an overview of basic aspects of imagological research, which serves as an excellent starting point for understanding the subjects elaborated on in the main body of this collection of articles. Writing in the heyday of reception aesthetics he opens up new vistas for future studies by pointing out the importance of readeroriented criticism for a better understanding of the role of stereotypes in the interaction between an author and his or her readership. The twenty-two chapters which follow are grouped thematically in seven sections of two to five chapters each: Imagology and the Theory of Climate (3), Images of Europe and Its Nations (5), Imagology of Germany in American Culture (5), Images of Vienna and Austria in Anglophone Cultures (3), Images Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 126 of the English and Scots Abroad (2), Images of Jews in North American Culture (2), and Images of Italians in Anglophone Cultures (2). In these chapters, Zacharasiewicz emphasizes, among other themes, the limited value of the tripartite zonal model within the theory of climate for American writers, according to which the middle regions are privileged at the expense of northern and southern zones, the result not rarely being a combination of theory of climate and notions of race (chapter 4). He follows the intricate reciprocal relationship between American self-perceptions and attitudes to Europe and European heterostereotypes of America through almost two centuries (chapter 6) and probes the function of the transfer of stereotypical notions of European nations to North America or the use of European models in an attempt at identity-construction in America (chapters 9, 10, 19). The volume is concluded by an extensive bibliography of some sixty pages and an index of persons, nations and ethnic groups. In view of the wealth of factual information and of the meticulous presentation of arguments it is impossible to give a satisfactory résumé of this volume. Instead I would like to make an attempt at describing the author’s method and the shifts it has undergone in the course of four decades. Zacharasiewicz’s work is informed by an aetiological interest, which makes him go beyond the mere description of imagological phenomena and their function in literary texts and in the political sphere. Trying to understand how these phenomena came into being he lays open their roots in literary und cultural history. In a substantial article originally published in German in 1975 on “Johannes Kepler, James Howell, and Thomas Lansius: The Competition between European Nations as a Literary Theme in the 17 th Century” his method is affiliated to the tradition of source research. Focussing on James Howell’s A German Diet (1653), a debate on the strengths and weaknesses of the European nations, he puts forward the thesis that this is a translation or an adaptation of an earlier work and proposes Thomas Lansius’ Consultatio de principatu inter provincias Europae (1613) as the immediate source. Comparing the images of the various nations in the two texts Zacharasiewicz hopes to uncover “some of the roots of the intellectual climate which fostered the literary dissemination of national characters” (131). In the process he also discovers the roots of the popular literary convention of juxtaposing the nations of Europe in Cornelius Agrippa’s Of the Vanitie and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences (English translation 1569). In a chapter on “Transatlantic Differences: (Mis)Perceptions in Diachronic Perspective”, published almost thirty years later in 2004, his starting point is the controversial debate initiated by US politicians on the premises of US policies and on ‘Old Europe’ during the Iraq crisis. Here again Zacharasiewicz is guided by his aetiological interest claiming that “these developments make it necessary to dig deeper, to the very roots of these different modes of perception of vital questions in a globalized world” (171). This chapter, covering a period of two hundred years, is in fact a lucid presentation of six phases of the US American self-conception with regard to its relation to Europe (chapter 6). Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 127 Zacharasiewicz’s aetiological interest also includes the roots of stereotyping practices in individual authors. The essay “Sketches of a Traveller: Observations on a Dominant Theme in Washington Irving’s Work”, published in 1977, presents a survey of Washington Irving’s use of national stereotypes before 1825 and an analysis of their functions. It arrives at the conclusion, “that the roots of Irving’s literary practice can be found in the thinkers of the early 18 th century and in Renaissance writers and critics” (206). Ten years later Zacharasiewicz gives up this historyofideas approach, when, in “Remarks on the Tradition and Function of Heterostereotypes in North American Fiction between 1900 and 1940” (chapter 8), he compares Thomas Wolfe’s and John Dos Passos’ use of stereotypes and locates the differences in the social origin and world views of these writers, that is, in factors of their biographies and psycho-history. Willa Cather and William Faulkner are other cases in point. In “Stereotypes and Sense of Identity of Jewish Southerners” (1991), Zacharasiewicz elaborates on this when he attributes Wolfe’s antisemitism to “flaws in his own personality, his way of coping with disconcerting experiences, and his inclination to verbal aggression and xenophobia” (429). A look at the chronology of Zacharasiewicz’s essays thus reveals a widening of perspective. This allows a flexible use of approaches from social psychology, cultural history and perception psychology, which take his studies well beyond the pale of literary imagology in a narrow sense of the word. His digging for roots is essentially a process of enlightenment. This motivation of his works also surfaces in his repeated appreciations of the work of Hugo Münsterberg, a German experimental psychologist who came to teach at Harvard in 1892 and who, in his American Traits: From the Point of View of a German (1901), analysed German and American heterostereotypes of each other tracing “the mutual misunderstandings and prejudices to their roots” (183). In a similar vein Zacharasiewicz describes Sir Thomas Browne (1605- 82) as a tolerant and enlightened thinker whose censure of the use of stereotypes and of the practice of unwarranted and unpremeditated generalisations gives him a respected place in the struggle against “vulgar errors” and prejudices (470ff.). In his digging for roots Zacharasiewicz displays an admirable range of reading and erudition, and this is also true with regard to a second feature of his work: its survey character. More than half of these essays fall into this category. Since he is not only interested in origins, but also in developments, his articles tend to assume the form of imagological and interdisciplinary surveys. This mode of presentation allows him to trace the influence and the reception of individual writers and the dissemination of individual stereotypes as well as the transfer of traditional stereotypes and patterns of thought to different contexts. Here again an early essay such as “Remarks on the Tradition and Function of Heterostereotypes in North American Fiction between 1900 and 1940” (1987) remains largely within the sphere of literature, whereas the more recent survey on “German Ethnicity in the American South and the Permeability of Ethnic Borders” of 2008, which traces the fortunes of the German ethnic group in the Southern states in the 19 th century and in the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 128 first decades of the 20th century reflects “the cultural turn” of literary studies and reaches out into the wider field of immigration studies. The essays collected in Imagology Revisited confirm Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s standing as one of the leading imagologists in the field of Anglo- American literature and culture. His work is based on the conviction that literary scholars can offer a contribution to an improved understanding between nations and ethnic groups. Not the least of the many merits of his scholarly activities is to have made imagology an esteemed part of English and American studies. Günther Blaicher Katholische Universität Eichstätt Sonja Fielitz (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Loves, Layers, Languages. (Anglistische Forschungen 411). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Daniella Jancsó The quartercentenary of the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the year 2009 was celebrated in the daily press and in the theatre, where Peter Brook’s staging of the sonnets was a major event. In the academic world, the jubilee was marked by, among other things, the publication of A Quartercentenary Anthology, a commendable treasury of translations in 72 languages with a critical commentary, edited by Manfred Pfister and Jürgen Gutsch. The anniversary also occasioned a number of academic conferences. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Loves, Layers, Languages, edited by Sonja Fielitz, is a collection of the papers given by distinguished scholars at an international conference hosted by the University of Marburg. The title of the volume bears upon “three major fields of criticism”, as Fielitz explains in her introduction: “‘Loves’ refers to a section dedicated to the texts themselves, that is, matters of gender and sex, including the fictional identity of the Dark Lady and the ‘sweet youth.’ ‘Layers’ is related not only to the general idea of ‘layers of meaning’ but rather to various degrees of friction and synthesis, that is, between form and content, discourses and expression, word and image”, while “[t]he third section, ‘Languages’, covers [...] the (linguistic) afterlife of the sonnets” (p. viii). This triad, for all its alliterative allure, cannot quite conceal the fact that the book lacks a unifying idea, and the result is a thematically heterogeneous collection. It is also regrettable that the description does not exactly match the actual scheme of the book, which is divided into three Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 129 parts entitled “Prelude”, “(Fe)male Matters”, and “Afterlife: Great Britain and Beyond”. Thus, there is no section corresponding to “Layers”. Although this very broadly defined theme can be discerned in the contributions in different forms, these connections remain largely implicit, with their import often unspecified. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s casually autobiographical “Touched by Shakespeare’s World” is categorised as the “Prelude” to the essays that follow. Recalling his first encounter with Shakespeare’s poetry during his schooldays, Gumbrecht seeks explanations for his lasting fascination by exploring the sonnets’ aesthetic value. He notes that Shakespeare’s texts “show a potential to reach an extravagant concentration and immediacy in the realization of their own world”, and adds that “this Stimmung, and Shakespeare’s world, is preserved in the sonnets in various layers, which can [...] be separated and ordered as individual phenomena” (p. 2). Gumbrecht characterises the Stimmung in Shakespeare’s sonnets as a “many-voiced, suspenseful, and moving unity of tones” (p. 6), although he also warns against conceiving of the aesthetic effect in terms of unity: “[t]he formerly conjured correspondence between contents and sound is nonexistent”, for readers “seem only to be able to concentrate either on the contours of the contents or on those of the sound” (ibid.). His tentative conclusion is that the “specific magic of [Sonnet 18] is so hard to name [...] because it is connected to the intensity of the suspenseful and likewise oscillating harmony of rhythm and contents” (p. 7). In “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Sex”, the opening essay of the section “(Fe)male Matters”, Stanley Wells concisely claims that “Shakespeare’s concern with sex in his sonnets is both exceptionally explicit [...] and profoundly serious” (p. 10). By carefully phrasing his argument that the sonnets “reveal what [Shakespeare] could imagine as personal experience, even if not his own” (p. 13), Wells elegantly avoids crude biographical criticism. At the same time, he achieves a renewed focus on the existential depth of these poems, reading them as documents of human predicament rather than as ingenious literary exercises. These sensitive readings demonstrate that the sonnets, autobiographical or not, “afford profound, and sometimes deeply troubling, insights into human sexuality” (20). In “The Effect of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, also included in “(Fe)male Matters“, Paul Edmondson approaches the sonnets from three reasonable, if unfortunately unrelated, perspectives. First, he is interested in the “incredibly intricate relationship between sound, sense, and metre” (p. 24). Contrary to Gumbrecht, Edmondson emphasises the power of their unity, and comes to the conclusion in his analysis of Sonnet 8 that “[p]art of the cumulative impact is the awareness that the progressive sound and sense of the sonnet is as interconnected as the musical notes it describes”, creating an “irrevocable, harmonious effect” (p. 25). Secondly, Edmondson stresses the importance of relating Shakespeare’s plays to his sonnets. And indeed, this is still a relatively neglected field of study, despite David Schalkwyk’s groundbreaking Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (2002). In the final part, Edmondson does, however, adduce good reasons to regard “A Lover’s Com- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 130 plaint”, the closing poem of the 1609 quarto edition, as Shakespeare’s own “creative and antithetical response” (p. 29) to his sonnets. Paul Franssen’s “How dark is the dark lady? ” and Thomas Kullmann’s “Shakespeare and the Love of Boys” round off the section “(Fe)male Matters”. Franssen addresses the question of “how to avoid compounding the ostensible misogyny of the Sonnets with racism” (p. 31), an issue most pertinent to the appropriation in popular culture of the Dark Lady as a woman of African descent. He clearly points out that in contemporary figurations of the Dark Lady, “political correctness often wins out over historical plausibility” (p. 41) and concludes that “[t]o whitewash the Black Lady, in the name of political correctness, Shakespeare, the archetypal DWEM, is all too often accused of a multitude of sins, ranging from misogyny and racism to bad breath - and usually without a great deal of evidence” (ibid.). Kullmann, in contrast, focuses on the historical discursive and cultural contexts of the sonnets, and argues that Shakespeare drew on classical literary discourses to “give shape and meaning to the experience described in the sonnets: pederasty, or the love of boys, as practiced in Greek and Roman antiquity” (p. 43). Kullmann's historically informed analysis leads him to the assumption that Shakespeare “saw himself as a Platonic lover of boys, as one who admired the boy’s beauty for its transcendental perfection, engendering a love which is nobler and more perfect than a love of women which is based on sexual practice” (p. 50f.). The section “Afterlife: Great Britain and Beyond” opens with an essay that is somewhat at odds with this heading: Roy T. Eriksen’s “Shaping the Sonnet Italian Style: Petrarch, Tasso, Daniel and Shakespeare” reviews the development of the sonnet up to Shakespeare’s time and addresses the question of how “Shakespeare’s practice of the sonnet form relate[s] to that of his Italian predecessors” (p. 55). Eriksen, like Edmondson, conceives of the sonnet as a spatial and a musical experience. Furthermore, he proposes a structural approach he calls “topomorphology”, which “considers the rhetorical shape and integration of topoi, or themes, within the body of a poem” (p. 56), and his reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 indicates how this approach can yield valuable insights. Boris Dunch, Uwe Meyer, and Wolfgang Weiß discuss the translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Latin, Esperanto, and various German dialects and sociolects, respectively. Their essays not only enrich the territory opened up by A Quartercentenary Anthology, but also raise important questions about the quality of translations and the cultural status of dialects. The contributions by Erich Poppe, Wolfram R. Keller, and Christian Pauls consider the legacy of the sonnet form - but not specifically the legacy of Shakespeare’s sonnets - in Welsh, Scottish, and contemporary British poetry. Although they are all well worth reading, their inclusion in a volume entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets would require some form of explanation. Erich Poppe’s highly informative “Welsh Contexts for the Sonnet: The years 1833/ 1834, c. 1600, and 1909 (and after)” calls attention to the interesting fact that the sonnet form made its first appearance in Welsh literature as late as 1833. The subtlety of Poppe’s argument is evident in his observation that “the foreign form of the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 131 sonnet did not cause colonial anxieties, but was rather considered to have a liberating effect” (p. 79), as it allowed Welsh poets more flexibility than their strict metres, which they increasingly perceived as being too limiting. Wolfram R. Keller’s “‘Unconquered into chaos’: Edwin Muir, the Sonnet, and the (Scottish) Renaissance” is an excellent exposition of the poetological relevance of the sonnet form for Muir’s later work. Keller impressively demonstrates that by means of the sonnet, “Muir literally recasts Scotland’s twentieth-century literary renaissance as the historical Renaissance that did not take place, rooting Scottish traditions firmly in the middle-ground between Continental and English poetic models” (p. 111). Finally, Christian Pauls’ “A ‘Fourteen-Liner most Apposite’? - Taking a Cross-eyed Look at the Sonnet in Peter Reading’s Diplopic” presents a remarkable contemporary appropriation of the form: Diplopic consists of twin texts in which the subject of the first poem is reworked in the second one as a sonnet (of sorts). Pauls elaborates primarily on the thematic transformations within the pairs, but perhaps a more in-depth formal analysis would have sharpened the essay’s argument. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Loves, Layers, Languages, despite its lack of a unifying approach, does offer some interesting perspectives on Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular, and the sonnet form in general. Whereas the “Introduction” relates the volume to the revived critical interest in the aesthetic value of Shakespeare’s sonnets (p. i), this issue is addressed directly in merely three (of the thirteen) contributions. The volume does raise, though only implicitly, questions about aesthetic experience, whose exploration might have contributed to the overall coherence of the collection. Gumbrecht’s essay ends, surprisingly, with the following evasive conclusion: “Maybe there is no elaborate description or explanation for [the sonnet’s] beauty beyond the reference to the poem, and to whatever one expects from it. Each moment of aesthetic experience is an event that cannot be guaranteed success, which is only ever proven by means of the empirical judgement of those experiencing it” (p. 7). And Edmondson concludes by noting “the elusive effect of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (p. 29), and it is also telling that he reverts to the trope of personification to stress his point: “They [the sonnets] have a habit of breaking free from any interpretative system that tries to contextualise or control them [...]” (ibid.). If elusiveness is the last word on the aesthetic experience in general, or on the effect of Shakespeare’s ‘unruly’ sonnets in particular, then criticism with an aesthetic focus also risks drifting off into the elusory itself. One would certainly welcome more substantial insights from such a long overdue readmission of aesthetics into literary studies. Daniella Jancsó Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 132 Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology. Approaches and Analyses. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. Birgit Neumann During the last decade or so narratology has undergone a major paradigm shift: a range of new approaches has emerged and classical narratology (presuming there ever was something like a unified classical enterprise), with its interest in general characteristics of narratives, has gradually evolved into a plurality of new critical approaches. What once looked like a more or less unified structuralist enterprise has thus branched out into different directions, yielding an array of innovative, mainly context-sensitive approaches. These innovative approaches are frequently subsumed under the label ‘postclassical’ - a term that was first introduced in David Herman’s influential study Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (1999). While the term is by now firmly established in narrative scholarship, the question of what exactly it designates is still an open issue. The recent explosion of narrative research reflects the field’s conceptual and methodological richness, but also its fragmentation. The volume at hand, edited by Freiburg-based scholars Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, takes up the challenge of coming to grips with narratology’s recent postclassical ramifications. Proceeding from the premise that postclassical narratology has reached a new phase of “consolidation despite continuing diversification” (5), an international group of narratologists sets out to explore new perspectives on narratives, addressing potential overlaps and interrelations between different postclassical approaches. In their introduction, Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik provide an overview of some of the most relevant directions pursued by postclassical approaches to narrative, focusing on the differences between the classical structuralist paradigm and the new postclassical research programme. Drawing on Ansgar Nünning’s survey “Narratology or Narratologies” (2003), they maintain that postclassical narratologies “move toward a grand contextual, historical, pragmatic and reader-oriented effort” (6). Whereas structuralism was primarily concerned with a general theory of narrative, postclassical approaches focus on contextual factors and individual reading strategies that potentially make every act of interpretation different. Much more interesting than this well-known juxtaposition of classical and postclassical narratology are the four major lines of new ‘postclassical’ developments, which Alber and Fludernik identify: first, postclassical narratology “extends the classical paradigm intradisciplinarily” (3) by tackling its conceptual blind spots. Second, postclassical narratology proposes a number of methodological extensions, producing, for example, deconstructive narratology or narratological speech act theory. Third, postclassical narratology integrates new thematic concerns and concepts, giving rise to innovative versions of narratology such as feminist, queer or postcolonial approaches. And fourth, postclassical narratology Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 133 extends narratological analysis to various media, the performative arts and non-literary narrative. The editors are right to point out that post-classical narratology is still a highly diversified field of research. While some scholars continue to work within the classical paradigm, attempting to rejuvenate it by adding new analytical concepts, others more or less radically break with the structuralist tradition by questioning and ultimately discarding standard concepts and typologies. The differences between, say, deconstructive narratology and those approaches that mainly complement classical narratology by refining its categories are indeed huge. Regrettably, the editors do not attempt to define the relations and tensions that exist between these different, and to some extent incompatible, branches of postclassical narratology in a more systematic manner. Rather, these differences are mainly used at an abstract level to organize and subdivide the volume. Accordingly, the first part of the volume contains contributions which propose various extensions and reconfigurations of classical narratology whereas the second part, entitled “Transdisciplinarities”, consists of a number of essays which propose innovative combinations of narratological categories with medial, gender-related, psycho-analytical and non-fictional contexts. Most of the essays make relevant contributions to the still burgeoning field of narratology, with varying degrees of innovation. In the shorter first part, Werner Wolf and Alan Palmer propose to complement classical narratology by focussing on hitherto neglected phenomena, namely mise en cadre and intermental units respectively. Wolf conceives of mise en cadre as a complement to mise en abyme and hence as a form of textual self-referentiality. Drawing on the theory of intermediality and frame theory, his essay illustrates the potentials of classical narratology, i.e. the study of what he terms “‘textual’ generalities” (78). In another fine essay, Alan Palmer introduces the concept of intermental thought and outlines its importance with regard to fictional narrative, arguing that “a large amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development and breakdown of […] intermental systems” (83), i.e. socially distributed cognition. Richard Walsh questions basic axioms of classical narratology, criticizing the concept of narrative voice from the perspective of a rhetorical model of fictive representation. By drawing on a rhetorical approach to voice, Walsh suggests inverting the hierarchical relationship between structure and act, thus understanding narrative representation as a performative act itself, “the performance of a real-world communicative gesture” (35). The first section is rounded off by Monika Fludernik’s essay, which provides a sophisticated discussion of the relationship between Stanzel’s concept of mediacy (as the defining feature of narrative), processes of narrative mediation (or transmission) and focalization. In this important contribution, Fludernik illustrates that the concepts of mediacy and mediation rely on different definitions of narrativity and at least partially incompatible notions of discourse. Scrutinizing the connections between mediacy, mediation and focalization in classical narratology, she also revisits the fundamental story/ discourse dichotomy and discusses the potentials of no-narrator and no-mediation theories. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 134 David Herman opens the second part of the volume by examining potential overlaps between different postclassical approaches. Analyzing William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree”, Herman is particularly concerned with “the structure and dynamics of story-telling practices”, the various semiotic systems in which narrative practices are realized and “the mind-relevant dimensions of the practices themselves” (139). Refining Fludernik’s concept of experientiality, narrative, according to Herman, is essentially about qualia, namely the sense of ‘what it is like’ for someone or something to have specific experiences. Narrative, for Herman, is particularly suited to explore the world from the perspective of an experiencing mind, i.e. of capturing the “what-it’slike dimension of conscious awareness itself” (157). In the next essay, Jan Alber scrutinizes the interfaces between transmedial narratology, rhetorical approaches to narrative and unnatural narratology, reconsidering cinematic narration from the vantage point of ‘hypothetical intentionalism’. The replacement of the filmic narrator and the implied filmmaker with the concept of the ‘hypothetical filmmaker’, Alber argues, offers a means of integrating the viewer’s speculations about possible motivations for the making of the film into narratological analysis. One of the aims of this redefinition is to do “justice to the folk-psychological reasoning viewers typically use to make sense of films” (181). Although I find Alber’s interpretation of David Lynch’s film Lost Highway intriguing, it remains debatable whether narratology (even if ‘postclassical’) should primarily aim at accounting for “folk-psychological reasoning” - in particular, if this means doing away with distinctions between internal and external levels of narrative communication. In the following articles, Susan Lanser, Amit Marcus, Jarmila Mildorf, Martin Löschnigg and Henrik Skov Nielsen reconsider the model of classical narratology by linking it to new conceptual paradigms and extending it to cover new genres and media. Pursuing a diachronic and formalist purpose, Susan Lanser explores how the cultural topos of female same-sex desire can be tied to historically variable narrative forms and, consequently, argues for “both a more consciously historicized narratology and a more consciously narratological history of sexuality” (188). Amit Marcus combines narratology with psychoanalysis by drawing on René Girard’s concept of triangular desire and correlating the mediation of desire to the story/ discourse distinction. In another stimulating essay, Jarmila Mildorf, taking up David Herman’s (1999) suggestion to develop a ‘socio-narratology’, links sociolinguistic narrative analysis with narratological terms and by so doing provides insights into the specificities of oral narratives. Focusing on concepts such as identity, social positioning, in-group and out-group relations, the essay identifies points of convergence between narratology and social science brands of narrative research and shows that postclassical narratology does indeed open up many perspectives for interdisciplinary research. Martin Löschnigg merges cognitive narratology and theories of autobiography, and examines representations of experientiality (sensu Fludernik) in autobiography. The volume ends with a contribution by Henrik Skov Nielsen and a discussion of hybrid texts that cut across the fiction/ non-fiction distinction. By establishing a link between un- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 135 natural narratives and - what he terms - “natural authors”, he makes the case for revising the classical paradigms of narratology. There is no doubt that the volume makes a highly readable, timely and pertinent contribution to the field of narratology. Most of the suggestions of revising, extending or discarding the paradigms of classical narratology are convincing and certainly warrant more critical attention. But, of course, the volume also begs a number of questions, most importantly concerning the term ‘postclassical’ itself. What is the heuristic value of the term, if applied to both a frame-abiding and a frame-shattering engagement with the structuralist paradigm? Even though the editors do not envisage “one overarching model”, their project is based upon the premise that “considerable consolidation despite continuing diversity is called for at this moment” (5). However, there are substantial conceptual, methodological and ideological differences between approaches that scrutinize narrative elements against the foil of power structures and gender differences (see e.g. Lanser) and approaches that are mainly interested in textual generalities. These disparities strike me as being too huge to be subsumed under the umbrella-term ‘postclassical’. In this respect, Werner Wolf’s suggestion to term approaches that mainly complement classical narratology by postclassical elements (leaving classical premises intact) “neo-classical” (59) seems indeed enticing. So, yes, this is an excellent contribution to narrative scholarship - but perhaps not under the single heading of ‘postclassical narratology’. Birgit Neumann Anglistik/ Cultural Studies Universität Passau Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Gender and Creation. Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority and Authorship. (Regensburger Beiträge zur Gender-Forschung 4). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Sabine Schülting In her seminal article on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Barbara Johnson reads both the novel and Shelley’s introduction to the third edition of 1831 as “the description of a primal scene of creation” (Johnson 1996: 248) that closely links biological parenting and literary authorship. In Johnson’s account, Shelley is concerned with the monsters, the “hideous progeny” (Shelley 1996: 173), produced by men who desire to give birth and by women who desire to write (Johnson 1996: 248). The ways in which biological procreation, intel- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 136 lectual creativity and (literary) authorship have been, and still are, informed by cultural discourses of sexual difference is also at the centre of this collection of essays. Since the beginning of the second wave of feminism, the contested field of female authorship and women’s writing has been of crucial interest to feminist literary studies. Continuing this line of research, the present volume seeks to broaden the perspective by discussing “metatextual - and gendered - depictions of processes of creativity in literature and culture” (p. 14). Combining authorship questions with a focus on phenomena that cut across the boundaries between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ creation, it explores the tensions between literature, myth and scientific discourses. The volume brings together thirteen essays which originated in a lecture series at the University of Regensburg in 2009/ 10. The main focus is on English literature, from the Middle Ages to postcolonialism and postmodernity, complemented by some excursus on French, American and German writers. Although the structure of the volume suggests a historical argument, the choice of texts discussed in the contributions seems to have been primarily motivated by personal research interests and would have profited from a clearer editorial agenda. The collection offers a broad and differentiated perspective on canonical and non-canonical, male and female, medieval and early modern writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Robert Burton, Aemilia Lanier, Anne Braedstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch. However, there is a strong imbalance between this first part, comprising the contributions by Annette Kern-Stähler, Danielle Clarke, Christoph Heyl, Anne-Julia Zwierlein, and Rainer Emig, and the volume’s treatment of later epochs. The selection of British literature of the second half of the twentieth-century, for example, is considerably smaller, being confined to only two articles, one by Brigitte Glaser on the postcolonial poetry of “women of colour” (p. 224) writing in English, and one by Francesca Nadja Palitzsch, on Jeannette Winterson. Although Winterson’s novels are undoubtedly pertinent to the overall topic of the volume, they still only represent one voice in the polyphonic field of contemporary fiction. What is perhaps more lamentable, many of the (interesting) connections between individual articles remain largely implicit: the creative potential offered by the revision of myth and mythological figures (Clarke, Achim Geisenhanslüke); the link between melancholy, gender and authorship (Zwierlein, Emig); Romantic notions of authorship (Helga Schwalm, Ingo Berensmeyer); the relation between concepts of divine and human creation (Zwierlein, Katharina Rennhak); as well as the various strategies, employed by women writers, to defend female authorship (Kern-Stähler, Zwierlein, Rennhak, Virginia Richter, Palitzsch, Glaser). An index would have been useful in this regard. The editor’s “Introduction” certainly seeks to establish a dialogue between the chapters by suggesting central topics and a variety of research questions such as “Concepts of ‘Creation’ and ‘Creativity’”, “Concepts of ‘Authority’ and ‘Authorship’”, “Female Authorship and Creativity”, “The ‘Genderization of Narrative’”, and “Gendered Myths of Creation and Creativity” (pp. 11-23). However, the respective passages are relatively short, and they do not sufficiently relate the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 137 volume to the wide range of extant research on similar questions. Despite the ambitious claim in the blurb that the collection is “conceived as a cross-over between gender studies, science and literature studies, the history of medicine and biology and cultural studies”, the theoretical and methodological implications of this assertion are not fully explored. In addition, how the chapters on English literature relate to the American, French, and German examples is not explained, and some of the articles still reveal their origin as a contribution to a series of lectures. But what is indispensable for a paper addressed primarily to students, namely to give general introductions to e.g. humoral pathology (Emig), Adamic language (Heyl), literary history (Junkerjürgen, Glaser), or “the development from feminism to gender studies and queer theory” (Berensmeyer, p. 160), may strike some readers as odd in a volume that is primarily addressed to scholars working in the field. Having said this, I hasten to add that a number of contributions offer compelling readings of both canonical and lesser known material. This is particularly the case in those articles that take up the central research question of the volume and explore the ways in which poetological writing is imbued with, and becomes meaningful through, cultural discourses of gender, including myths, metaphors of the sexual act and of giving birth, as well as scientific knowledge of the human body. I can only briefly mention three examples here that I found especially inspiring. Danielle Clarke regards the repeated allusion to Philomela and/ or the retelling and revision of the Ovidian myth in early modern poetry as the expression of a specifically “Renaissance dilemma”, “namely that the adaptation of classical rhetoric and poetics to the vernacular raises a series of complex questions around access to this mode of circulating cultural capital” (p. 61). Clarke shows that the identification with Philomela proved particularly productive for the early modern (male) poet. The myth provided a figure that allowed him to address issues such as the poet’s authority and his position in public, the connection between poetry and affect, as well as questions of poetic competition and stylistic decorum. Focusing on, among other texts, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, Paradise Lost, and The Blazing World, Anne-Julia Zwierlein discusses the merging of early modern poetics with the discourse on melancholia “as part of a sexualized aetiology of creativity” (p. 85). The move from (male) lovesickness to “melancholic creativity” (p. 90), closely associated with masculinity, implies an appropriation of the female power of giving birth. In early modern texts this masculine narcissism is “simultaneously glorified and vilified” (p. 90). What is perhaps most surprising, it also offered a point of reference for female writers. Articles like these move beyond the opposition of male versus female authorship that represents a too simplistic approach to more complex negotiations, as Helga Schwalm convincingly argues in her chapter on “The Lake Poets/ Authors”. She subjects conventional assumptions on Romantic literature to scrutiny, in particular the postulate of an inextricable link between male authorship, the construction of Romantic subjectivity and the literary genres of poetry and autobiography. Focusing on autobiographical texts by Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 138 William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey, Schwalm develops a nuanced approach to the “‘geopolitical’ mode of selfwriting” (p. 132) of the three poets, which complicates traditional accounts of Romanticism. In the three poets’ engagement with the Lake District she discerns a wide variety of “autobiographical practices at work” (p. 146), dynamically moving between the two poles of self-centring and dissemination of the self (cf. p. 145). Refraining from the feminist celebration of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals as a subversive challenge to the masculinist assertion of autonomous subjectivity and authorship, Schwalm manages, in her subtle readings, to transcend the binary oppositions between male and female and the (allegedly) corresponding tendencies towards an assertion of subjectivity in contrast to its decentring. I wonder whether Schwalm’s article also implies that “the monstrousness of selfhood” is not only “embedded within the question of female autobiography” (Johnson 1996: 251, my emphasis), as Barbara Johnson claimed in her article on Frankenstein. Many of the contributions brought together in Gender and Creation show that since the Middle Ages and in texts by both male and female writers, attempts at conceptualizing creativity and authorship have repeatedly called forth disconcerting narratives of melancholy and insanity, the uncanny mythological figures of Philomela, the Medusa and the Sirens, and violent images of penetration, rape, childbirth and castration. Gender is a powerful category that informs these discourses, both stabilizing and destabilizing the self-assertion of the author that - again and again - comes dangerously close to the monstrous. “Myths of creativity”, the volume convincingly shows, represent a fascinating field of research that has only just begun to be charted. References Johnson, Barbara (1996). “My Monster / My Self.” In: Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. A Norton Critical Edition. New York/ London: W.W. Norton. 241-251. Shelley, Mary (1996). “Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831).” In: Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. A Norton Critical Edition. New York/ London: W.W. Norton. 169-173. Sabine Schülting Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin