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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) • Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Christian Mair In Memoriam Geoffrey N. Leech……………….…………………………..109 Walter W. Hölbling ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’: U.S. Soldiers in Recent American Wars...........................………….……115 Cvetka Sokolov The Writing Process under Exam Conditions……………………………..129 Ibrahim Yerebakan Explicit Language, Radical Tone: Harold Pinter’s Obscene Words Speak Louder than Action……………..155 Nick Scott The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim……...........175 Rezensionen: Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff Werner Wolf (Ed., in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon & Jeff Thoss). The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media. Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation………………………......................185 André Otto Jochen Petzold. Sprechsituationen lyrischer Dichtung: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungstypologie………….……………………………………………......187 108 Christa Jansohn Holger Klein (Ed.).William Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 1. König Heinrich IV. Teil 1 Englisch/ Deutsch Holger Klein (Ed.).William Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 2. König Heinrich IV. Teil 2 Englisch/ Deutsch……………………..…………….195 Merle Tönnies Jürgen Kamm & Bernd Lenz (Eds.). Representing Terrorism. Jürgen Kamm, Jürgen Kramer & Bernd Lenz (Eds.). Deconstructing Terrorism. 9/ 11, 7/ 7 and Contemporary Culture. ……………………..….203 In memoriam Geoffrey N. Leech (16 January 1936 - 19 August 2014) Christian Mair Geoff Leech has been one of the founder figures of English linguistics. His wide-ranging interests, his willingness to debate his ideas with linguists of different methodological persuasions to his own, his generous mentorship of younger scholars and, not least, his ability to present linguistics to an interested lay public will ensure him a lasting reputation. Geoff Leech was born in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where he attended the small but reputable local grammar school. After his national service, he started his bachelor studies at University College London in 1956. It was the time in British academia when various language-related strands of research began to coalesce into the fully fledged academic discipline of linguistics as we know it today. As Geoff Leech himself put it many years later: “I regard it as the most fortunate accident of my career that when I went to study at University College I chanced upon a magic circle of leading scholars in the study of language” (2002: 155). Inspiration for Geoff Leech came from the UCL phoneticians (Daniel Jones, A. C. Gimson and J. D. O’Connor), from John Rupert Firth, Britain’s first designated professor of linguistics, from M. A. K. Halliday, Director of UCL’s short-lived Communication Research Centre (CRC), where a research studentship sponsored by a commercial television broadcaster laid the foundations for Geoff Leech’s master’s thesis on the topic of English in advertising (cf. Leech 1966), and above all, of course, from Randolph Quirk, who introduced Geoff Leech to the then yet-to-be-digitised Survey of English Usage (SEU) corpus and encouraged him to follow developments in American structuralism. In 1964/ 65 Geoff spent a year as a visiting scholar in the Linguistics Department at MIT. With Noam Chomsky away on a sabbatical in London at the time, there was little opportunity to exchange ideas with the leading mind of the generative school, but interaction with scholars such as AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Christian Mair 110 Barbara Hall (later Barbara Hall Partee) helped Geoff develop his PhD thesis on English semantics and semantic theory, which he defended in 1968. In a period of a mere ten years at UCL Geoff Leech took up several lines of inquiry which resulted in the publication of books that have continued to serve as important points of reference to the present day (as is evidenced by the numerous re-prints and re-editions). A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (Leech 1969) explores the potential of the linguistic toolkit for the study and interpretation of literary texts. Style in Fiction (Leech and Short 1981) extends the approach to cover prose fiction. Leech 1974, 1980 and 1983 have remained key texts in the study of semantics and pragmatics. His 1971 Meaning and the English Verb is one of the best and most accessible treatments of the complexities of tense, aspect and modality in present-day English - impressive testimony to his individual credentials as a member of the famous “gang of four” grammarians who produced two milestone reference grammars of contemporary English (and several spin-offs) in the 1970s and 1980s (Quirk et al. 1972, 1985; Leech and Svartvik 1975). The years as a student, an assistant lecturer and as a lecturer at UCL ended in 1969, when Geoff Leech was appointed Reader and, subsequently, in 1974, Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at the University of Lancaster, the institution which became his permanent academic home and which he continued to serve as a Research Professor from 1996 to his death. In Lancaster, computer-aided corpus linguistics became the clear focus of his research activities, and it was due to his creativity and energy that this young university developed into an internationally leading centre for a budding new research field. Geoff Leech was a member of that legendary group of visionaries who met in Stig Johansson’s kitchen in February 1977 to found what was to become ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern English (now “Modern and Medieval” English). By compiling the British English LOB Corpus (and, much later, the 1930s BLOB, or “Before LOB,” and the - sadly unfinished - Lancaster-1901 corpus) to match the American English Brown one, he created the foundations for the extended Brown family of small corpora which has made possible the integrated study of ongoing diachronic change and regional variation in World Englishes (Leech et al. 2009). In the autobiographical memoir already quoted, Geoff Leech describes the heady atmosphere of his early years at Lancaster with his characteristic note of gentle irony: In memoriam Geoffrey N. Leech 111 As early as 1970, before linguistics became a separate department, the small group of young linguists at Lancaster got together round a table, and considered how Lancaster could make its mark in the world as new centre for research. I suggested we should develop a computer corpus of British English, one which would match in every possible respect the Brown University Corpus of American English. (2002: 161) Similar visions may have been entertained at the time in plenty of other places, but at Lancaster, Geoff Leech and others laid the institutional foundations for one of the leading centres for research on the linguistics of English in the world. Activities in UCREL, the University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, branched out far beyond the compilation of small corpora. Together with colleagues in English, linguistics and computer science Geoff Leech developed the CLAWS (= “Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System”) part-ofspeech tagging software, which at the time CLAWS 1 appeared represented a quantum leap in correctness of automatic identification of part-ofspeech classes and has since become the most widely used “workhorse” program for POS-tagging in English corpus linguistics. Having brilliantly succeeded in part-of-speech tagging, UCREL teams subsequently explored automatic parsing and treebanks. Needless to say, together with three major publishers (OUP, Longman, Chambers) and the University of Oxford, Geoff Leech, UCREL and Lancaster were part of the British National Corpus (BNC) consortium, which - together with John Sinclair’s COBUILD project and his Bank of English - ushered in the era of large corpora in the 1990s. The nature of the work carried out in UCREL meant that most of Geoff Leech’s publications at the time were in the form of technical reports and articles in journals or edited collections of papers. Readers looking for the fruit of the labours of these years in terms of the descriptive linguistics of English will be richly rewarded, however, by consulting the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999), another monument to corpus-inspired and corpus-based scholarship in English grammar to which Geoff Leech made a crucial contribution. These astounding successes in team-based and applied research came at some personal cost to Geoff Leech, because the work and energy spent on these corpus-related research and development activities meant that he had little time left to pursue his interests in literary linguistics, semantics and pragmatics - fields which he returned to in a very active retirement in publications such as Leech 2008 or Pragmatics of Politeness (Leech 2014), which he managed to see through to publication in the very weeks before his untimely death. Among the many honours recognising Geoff Leech’s academic achievement are his membership in the British Academy and two honor- Christian Mair 112 ary doctorates awarded by the University of Lund and Charles University in Prague. Students and young scholars from all over the world benefitted from his teaching during several visiting appointments and guest professorships - from China only just emerging from the throes of the Cultural Revolution in 1977 to the more placid waters of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the 2000s. No appraisal of Geoff’s achievement would be complete without mentioning his human qualities. For me, his modesty, generosity and general sense of tact have always made him a role model for younger scholars. I shall remember his almost boundless selflessness when working in teams, his patient and unobtrusive mentorship of younger scholars, his calm and graciousness as deadlines became pressing - all qualities which are not to be taken for granted in an “academic star” of his calibre. He concluded his memoir with the following wish: I have become ‘typecast’ as a computational grammarian. But I still hope that, in my remaining years at Lancaster, I will have the opportunity to return to stylistics and pragmatics - two other areas of research I have found to be both challenging and fulfilling. (2002: 168) I sincerely wish there had been more years remaining. Scholars studying the English language all over the world will continue to build on Geoffrey Leech’s work and ideas and will honour his memory in this way for a long time to come. References Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan (1999). The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman. Leech, Geoffrey N. (1966). English in Advertising. London: Longman. Leech, Geoffrey N. (1969). A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman. Leech, Geoffrey N. (1971). Meaning and the English Verb. London: Longman. [3 rd ed. 2004] Leech, Geoffrey N. (1974). Semantics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. [2 nd ed. 1981] Leech, Geoffrey N., & Jan Svartvik (1975). A Communicative Grammar of English. London: Longman. [3 rd ed. 2002] Leech, Geoffrey N. (1980). Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Leech, Geoffrey N. & Michael H. Short (1981). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London: Longman. [2 nd ed. 2007] Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman. Leech, Geoffrey N. (2002). “Geoffrey Leech.” In Edward K. Brown & Vivien Law (Eds.). 2002. Linguistics in Britain: Personal Histories. Publications of the Philological Society, 36. Oxford and Boston: Blackwells. 155-169. In memoriam Geoffrey N. Leech 113 Leech, Geoffrey N. (2008). Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Harlow: Longman Pearson. Leech, Geoffrey N., Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair & Nicholas Smith. (2009). Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP. Leech, Geoffrey N. (2014). The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: OUP. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik (1972). A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Christian Mair English Department University of Freiburg Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de JETZT BES TELLEN! JETZT BES TELLEN! VERSATZ 190 MM/ 30 MM Winfried Fluck, Donald Pease (Hrsg.) Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 30 2014, X, 502 Seiten €[D] 148,00 / SFR 192,40 ISBN 978-3-8233-4185-7 American studies, envisioned in the 1930s and institutionalized after World War II, was from its very beginning tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. As recent debates have shown, this American exceptionalism does not merely claim uniqueness and difference for “America”, but asserts a political and moral superiority resulting from specific American visions and virtues. In response, American studies have begun to widen their analytical scope from national to transnational perspectives. Should Transnational studies be the new American studies, then? Recent debates have complicated this happy scenario of transition and insisted on a continuing need to also analyze social and cultural developments within the U.S. itself. How can this be done, however, without falling back into an exceptionalist framework? What can be the contours, themes, and methods of an American studies that is tied, neither to the idea of American exceptionalism, nor to an exclusively transnational perspective? This volume of REAL provides a contribution to the theory and method of a post-exceptionalist form of American studies. ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ U.S. Soldiers in Recent American Wars Walter W. Hölbling My argument here is that the abysmal disappointment and trauma of Vietnam dramatically widened an already existing split between official discourses about wars & military possibilities on the one hand and the way young Americans were thinking about it, on the other. The official discourses for the subsequent U.S. military engagements likewise employ a rhetoric of new beginnings and the spreading of democracy. Looking at the writings and blogs of U.S. soldiers, the majority of them - except those about the Gulf War of 1991 - do not seem to share these sentiments and rather feel they are repeating the experience of their mothers and fathers in Vietnam: Once more they are thousands of miles from home, in a country whose language and culture remain alien to them; once more they find it difficult to distinguish between friends and foes, and once more they discover that the people whom they were sent to protect more often than not consider them invaders rather than liberators. In short, for many of the U.S. soldiers, the wars they are fighting do not feel like new beginnings but rather like more of the same old. President Obama seems to share these sentiments to a certain degree and appears determined to use military force only as one of many means of U.S. foreign policy. Maybe this signifies the end of the old American tradition of “rejuvenation/ regeneration through violence” and opens up an opportunity for joint action of a less militant New America and for a New Europe that has - after centuries of deadly fighting - decided that war is not the first but the last means for settling differences among nations. 1. Introduction “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” These famous words from President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Walter W. Hölbling 116 addressed especially to young Americans, signified a “new beginning” in the relationship between U.S. citizens and their government, corresponding to the new beginning on the scene of global Cold War politics sounded earlier in the same speech: “So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” John F. Kennedy himself became the charismatic emblem of a youthful presidency, taking over the office from the ageing Dwight D. Eisenhower, suggesting a new dynamics. Thousands of young Americans, inspired by these words, volunteered for military service in the then escalating Vietnam Conflict; after their tour of duty, many of them returned disillusioned, embittered, and traumatized; Vietnam veterans keep writing a still growing flood of fiction, poetry, and personal narratives in order to come to terms with their experience. The abysmal disappointment and trauma of Vietnam dramatically widened an already existing split (ever since the Korean War) between official U.S. discourses about wars and military possibilities on the one hand and, on the other, the way young Americans - who always have to do the actual fighting in any war - were thinking about this. There have been quite a number of US military interventions since the end of the Vietnam Conflict in 1975: Gulf War 1991 (Kuwait/ Iraq), Somalia 1993, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, and most recently Syria (I leave out minor military deployments like Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Lebanon, or Lybia). The official discourses for these military engagements employ a variety of motivational rhetoricisms - there is talk of new beginnings, the spreading of democracy, of protecting the safety of U.S. citizens (and of the global community) against the supposed threat through weapons of mass destructions by (some) of the ‘rogue states’ and the ‘axis of evil.’ Reading through the writings and blogs of U.S. soldiers, not many - except those about the Gulf War of 1991 - seem to share these sentiments. 2. The American Vietnam Experience Until the Vietnam War, the dominant model for American war writing in the 20th century war is World War II - you fight a just war against a formidable enemy; after serious sacrifices you are victorious, and all the surviving soldiers go back home and lead a happy, peaceful life. Apart from the fact that this cliché did not even apply to World War II (as authors like Norman Mailer, J. H. Burns, J. Hersey, K. Vonnegut, J. Heller and others illustrate), the Vietnam War soon makes it clear that this model has not even a remote affinity to the Vietnam conflict, though many authors use it anyway, like J. Del Vecchio in The 13 th Valley. The war in Vietnam practices a strategy of containment in which no ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 117 traditional ‘victory’ or ‘progress’ are visible and the same hills, villages, towns, access routes, and bridges are fought over again and again; the one-year rotation scheme of soldiers as well as the long duration of the war leaves most of the participants with only a rather fragmented perspective and no sense of closure; swift transportation by jet from and to the world of war creates the impression of war as an event in a limited geographical space, and the high-tech speed of transition between “Nam” and “The World” give many soldiers a sensation of being caught in a surreal sequence of events; and the media coverage is as diverse as it is abundant. As an American reviewer of fiction about Vietnam puts it in 1978: “The novelist’s disadvantage is that this was a war with no center, no decisive battles; it was all circumference and it is therefore difficult to filter the thing through unified plot and point of view.” (The Nation, 25, 1978, p. 344) Accordingly, in the vision of authors like Tim O’Brien, Susan Fromberg-Schaeffer, William Eastlake, or Robert Mason, war turns into a complex metaphor for - as well as a critique of - a world in which individual as well as collective aggressive behavior seems to have become a generally accepted model of social and political interaction. By now, at the beginning of the 21 st century, in the age of ‘real time’ newsbreaks, we have become quite accustomed to the fact that war is no longer an exceptional state limited by its temporal duration, but that there is always some war going on somewhere on the globe, and the media tell us about it. In short, since World War II, war has become a spatial event that affects us even if we happen to live in a peaceful space. Not surprisingly, American fiction and personal narratives of Vietnam exist in dazzling variety and multitude, to which one still has to add other genres like poetry, drama, cartoons, graphic novels, diaries, film, and television. What all of them share is the attempt to understand - or at least come to terms with - a war that went terribly wrong by all traditional American standards. Even the “gung-ho” tales in print and on screen (e.g. Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, the Rambo sequels, etc.) testify to this endeavour, clinging, as they desperately do, to familiar patterns of military success and individual heroism that have become obsolete in the face of a new reality. The familiar beliefs of fighting a just war with a strong sense of mission in a unique historical situation are radically shaken by the Vietnam experience, which gives rise to a serious questioning of basic American values on the personal as well as the collective level. No novel presents the enormous gap between expectations and actual experience of the young American GIs in Vietnam better than Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978). Paul Berlin, 19 year old collegedropout and the 3 rd person limited narrator, sums up the crucial dilemma in the chapter “The Things They Did Not Know”: Walter W. Hölbling 118 Not knowing the language, they did not know the people. [...] They did not recognize hostility unless it was patent, unless it came in a form other than language. (309) [ … ] They did not know even the simplest things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. [...] They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind, or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotions squandered in ignorance. They did not know good from evil. (320-21) While Paul Berlin and his fellow soldiers represent the kind of American ignorance about Vietnam that Denise Levertov castigates in her poem “What Were They Like? ” and awared-winning journalist Frances FitzGerald criticizes in her pertinent study Fire in the Lake, the title character Cacciato, who is only 17 but lied about his age in order to join the army, symbolizes archetypal American innocence. His literary ancestors include Huck Finn, Henry Fleming of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Hemingway’s Nick Adams and Lt. Henry of A Farewell to Arms, as well as Yossarian and Orr in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, or Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. O’Brien situates his character firmly in the tradition of American war novels. One of the most touching scenes is set in a mountain landscape devastated by saturation bombing; the bomb craters are filled with water in the monsoon season, so the soldiers sarcastically dub the area “The World’s Greatest Lake Country”. During a rest, Cacciato goes fishing: He tied a paperclip to a length of string, baited it up with bits of ham, then attached a bobber fashioned out of an empty aerosol can labeled Secret. Cacciato moved down to the lip of the crater, then flipped out the line. The bobber made a light splashing sound. (283) The obvious allusion here is to Hemingway’s famous short story “Big Two-Hearted River”, where Nick Adams, back from World War I, attempts to regain his bearings in the world by the familiar ritual of trout fishing. For both youths, the ritual of fishing is meant to (re-)constitute a sense of personal identity, but its form and its significance are notably different. Hemingway’s Nick, symbolically placed between the burnt land around Seyney behind him and the swamp before him, is able to determine his position in the world - i.e., the river and his campsite - by doing the right things, or rather by ‘doing things right’, and thus establishes a working relationship with his natural environment. ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 119 Compared to this, the very material Cacciato uses for fishing - some string, paperclip, a piece of canned ham, an empty aerosol can - signifies more than just a low grotesque version of Yankee ingenuity. In the world of the 17-year old Cacciato, no piece of untouched nature is left between the burnt land and the swamp: Hemingway’s (symbolic) landscapes have been fused in the lifeless wasteland of “World’s Greatest Lake Country”. Interaction with such an environment to constitute one’s identity must take different forms, and Cacciato’s fishing becomes an ambiguous symbolic gesture: An expression of boyish helplessness and withdrawal into oneself, it also signals individual self-assertion by clinging to a familiar ritual whose situational inadequacy makes it a striking image for the youth’s despair. Soon after, Cacciato decides to leave this war and go West (in the tradition of Orr in Catch-22, who paddles from the Adriatic to Sweden) - to Paris, where the nation that took over the French colonial heritage in Vietnam gained its own independence from England in 1783. Appropriately, at the end of the novel, Cacciato, symbol of American innocence, is MIA. Different from the enigmatic Cacciato, Paul Berlin imagines his own desertion but in the end is unable to follow through with it: I fear the loss of my own reputation. [...] I fear being an outcast. I fear being thought of as a coward. I fear that even more than cowardice itself. (377) [ ... ] Even in imagination, we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for even in imagination, obligations cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has ist limits. (378) This statement is relativized a little later when he claims that “with courage, it could have been done” - another suggestive reference to the moral uncertainty, if not helplessness, of young American GIs in Vietnam - and in most future military engagements of the USA. The concluding words of Robert C. Mason’s Vietnam novel Chickenhawk (1984) - “No one is more shocked than I” - might as well express the experience of many American soldiers in the most recent U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once more they are thousands of miles from home, in a country whose language, customs, and cultural codes remain alien to most of them; once more they find it difficult to distinguish between friends and enemies (and, therefore, tend to shoot first and ask questions later), and once more they discover that the people whom they were sent to protect more often than not consider them invaders/ oppressors rather than liberators. Even for an observer not directly affected by this war, it is heartbreaking to read the personal narratives and blogs of yet another generation of young Americans Walter W. Hölbling 120 suffering through the process of disillusionment, despair, trauma, and anger when they discover that the “just war” their government started rests on rather weak premises, to put it politely. In spite of the different political and historical contexts of the Iraq engagement, the experience of American soldiers is reminiscent of that of their parents’ generation in Vietnam; so is the media coverage, whose daily reports of soldiers and civilians wounded or killed in Iraq or Afghanistan resemble the notorious “body counts” of the Vietnam years. Domestically, looking at the flawed arguments for the Iraq war and the profits certain U.S. businesses have gained from it, events and practices also show eerie similarities to those of the Vietnam years. In 1971, Senator J. William Fulbright warned of the detrimental effects of long wars on a democratic society: When a war is of long duration, when its objectives are unascertainable, when the people are bitterly divided and their leaders lacking in both vision and candor, then the process of democratic erosion is greatly accelerated. [...] Beset by critics and doubt, the nation’s leaders resort increasingly to secrecy and deception. (Congressional Record, Senate, Mar. 12, 1971, 6395.) 3. Iraq and Afghanistan So far, no important American novel about the Iraq war has come to my attention, but the number of blogs is infinite, they are also getting published in book form (e.g., Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, 2005), together with a growing number of personal narratives of male & female soldiers, and even of a deserter (e.g., John Crawford, The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq 2005; Jason Christopher Hartley, Just Another Soldier, 2005; Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More than You, Young and Female in the U. S. Army, 2005; Joshua Key as told to Lawrence Hill, The Deserter’s Tale, 2007), as well as oral histories (e. g. Trish Wood, ed., What Was Asked of Us. An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It, 2006). David Bellavia, with John R. Bruning. House to House. A Soldier’s Memoir (2008); Donovan Campbell, Joker One. A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood (2009); Craig M. Mullaney. The Unforgiving Minute. A Soldier’s Education (2009). A good faction about the Fallujah campaign is Bing West, No True Glory. A Frontline account of the Battle for Fallujah. 2005; a bit on the glorifying The-Marines-side but very readable are Evan Wright, Generation Kill (2004) and Sean Parrell, Outlaw Platoon (2012). Most of these texts praise the courage and endurance of GIs and Marines and the lower ranks, but often criticize incompetence and arrogance among the higher command. Most of them speak well of the ‘buddy system’, many of them also foreground the ‘fighting spirit’ of the ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 121 tough U.S. soldier variety, yet they are very much aware that this is just one of many aspects of their war experience. Sometimes, the very title of the book signifies its overall message - like No True Glory, The Unforgiving Minute, The Deserter’s Tale. Joshua Key, who entered the army as a trigger-happy patriot from small-town Oklahoma, after 6,5 months of service in Iraq does not return from a home leave but, after hiding for over a year within the US, flees with his wife and children to Canada; he sums up his war experience this way: I am ashamed of what I did in Iraq, and of all the ways that innocent civilians suffered or died at our hands. The fact that I was only following orders does not lessen my discomfort or ease my nightmares. [After I came across the four decapitated bodies by the side of the road in Ramadi, and saw soldiers in my own army kicking the heads for their own amusement, I began to dream of the incident and the rolling heads.] (214) [...] I will never apologize for deserting the American Army. I deserted an injustice and leaving was the right thing to do. I owe one apology and one apology only, and that is to the people of Iraq. (231) Few authors are as outspoken as Joshua Key, but the experience of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq war as expressed in many texts so far very much resembles that of their fathers’ generation in Vietnam and indicates that their experience in Afghanistan and/ or Iraq is very likely to produce another traumatized and disillusioned generation of young Americans. The American movie production about Vietnam and the more recent wars, unless they are of the “Gung-Ho” variety, mostly send similar messages that foreground the loss of innocence and the fundamental disillusion of the youth that followed the call of President John F. Kennedy and volunteered for Vietnam or, a generation later, were members of the National Guard and suddenly found themselves sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Films like The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and others testify to these aspects of the Vietnam experience. To make things worse, when the veterans came back they had the feeling that they - rather than the politicians - were blamed for a war they did not start and could not win. The U.S. Census Bureau (2004) reports there are 8.2 million “Vietnam Era Veterans”; of these, 2.59 million are reported to have served “in country”; about 850,000 of them are believed to suffer from PTSD. A film by Cedric Godin, titled P.T.S.D., was completed in 2012. From the many films about Vietnam veterans, I just want to mention two - as example for PTSD Rambo. First Blood. Part I (1982), and as example for severe physical injuries Ron Kovich’s Born on the 4 th of July (1989). The first Rambo movie actually focuses on the genuine plight of many PTSD-afflicted Vietnam veterans who felt underappreciated and ostracized by their fellow Americans; John Rambo’s resistance against harassing civil authorities found wide Walter W. Hölbling 122 audience approval, even though his fighting skills already border on the superhuman. The three sequels (1985, 1988, 2008), however, show Rambo mostly as an invincible super warrior for a good cause who rescues US prisoners from the Viet Cong (against the will of US politicians), helps the Afghans against the Russians (also against the will of superiors), and a group of Burmese rebels against their cruel army (again on his own). With some benevolent interpretation, one could see Rambo (and his military commander Col. Trautman) as Thoreauvian individualists fighting against a morally questionable majority of politicians, civil authorities, as well as army bureaucrats, but the action thriller dominance definitely overshadows this aspect. 4. Movies vs. Documentaries Quite differently, Ron Kovich, author of the book on which the movie Born on the 4 th of July is based, was left wheelchair-bound from his war injuries and has been a staunch activist against war since 1972. In his foreword to the 2005 edition of his book, he wrote about the message he wants to bring across: I wanted people to understand. I wanted to share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to be in a war - to be shot and wounded, to be fighting for my life on the intensive care ward - not the myth we had grown up believing. I wanted people to know about the hospitals and the enema room, about why I had become opposed to the war, why I had grown more and more committed to peace and nonviolence. I had been beaten by the police and arrested twelve times for protesting the war and I had spent many nights in jail in my wheelchair. I had been called a Communist and a traitor, simply for trying to tell the truth about what had happened in that war, but I refused to be intimidated. In the film, Tom Cruise plays Kovich, and on the last day of filming Kovich gave Cruise his Bronze Star, as reward for his “courageous portrayal of the true horrors of war.” In the 23 years since Born on the 4 th of July came into the movie theaters, U.S. soldiers have seen sustained military action mostly in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the 2.16 million U.S. troops deployed in combat zones between 2001 and 2010, the total estimated two-year costs of treatment for combat-related PTSD are between $1.54 billion and $2.69 billion. (“The Psychological Cost of War: Military Combat and Mental Health.” Georgia State University, March 2011). From several movies & documentaries that deal with the problems of the latest generation of U.S. war veterans - e.g. Home of the Brave (2006), Grace is ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 123 Gone (2007), In the Valley of Elah (2007) etc. I have chosen Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Heather Courtney’s documentary Where Soldiers Come From (2011). The Hurt Locker won 6 Oscars and is based on the experience of a three-man high-tech team that defuses Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq. The film opens with a quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent and journalist Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug”. All the words fade except for the last four. After the defuser of the team is killed in an explosion, his replacement turns out be not only a warproven technical expert but also a “cowboy”, i.e. he loves to take extreme risks, endangering also the rest of his team in several daring actions. After his tour of duty is over, he comes back to his girlfriend and son, but soon signs up for another 365 day rotation. The final shot shows him in his bomb-suit walking towards yet another IED, suggesting that he has become, as suggested by the initial quote, an addict to the drug of war. As quite a contrast, nothing could be further from the minds of Heather Courtney’s small-town youth in her documentary Where Soldiers Come From (2011). Growing up in Courtney’s Michigan home town on the Upper Peninsula at the shores of Lake Superior, the film tells the story of Dominic and several of his friends who decide to join the National Guard and are then assigned to a bomb-clearing unit in Afghanistan, living through very similar experiences as the characters in The Hurt Locker. After their tour of duty, they try to re-integrate into civil life and find it rather difficult, having to acknowledge the effects of the new silent signature wound of the Afghan and also the Iraq war, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). At the end of the movie, only Dominic, with the help of an art teacher, is able to rediscover his artistic self and expresses his troubles in the form of a narrative mural on the back wall of the college. His friends appear to be suspended in limbo, not (yet? ) able to cope with the change the war experience and TBI have wreaked in their lives. As Heather Courtney states on the movie’s official website: Eventually, my film becomes a story about the war at home, how it affects families, loved ones and communities here, and how the war continues at home when these young men return from a year in combat. But at its heart it is still a film about growing up. […] Many Americans, whatever their politics or feelings about war, are very far removed from the Iraq/ Afghanistan wars because they don't know anyone personally who has gone there as a soldier. I hope that my film will help viewers get to know these young men and their families, feel compassion for them, and see a bit of themselves in the people on the screen. Walter W. Hölbling 124 What I find worth noting in the last two films is that the development of the hero figures resembles very much those in the movies about Vietnam: both The Hurt Locker and Where Soldiers Come From focus on teamwork, comradeand leadership, the ‘heroes’ suffer more or less spectacularly, but there is no discernible positive effect, no reward, for all that suffering - neither for them as individuals nor for the American society they are supposedly fighting for. Rather, the boys from Michigan return from Afghanistan as prematurely disillusioned adults, and the bomb expert in The Hurt Locker is so unfulfilled by domestic family life that he leaves again for another tour of duty. 5. Conclusion In its international edition of August 29, 2011, Time’s cover story by wellknown columnist Joel Klein ran like this: “The NEW Greatest Generation. How young U.S. war veterans are redefining leadership at home”. It testified to the individual leadership qualities of these recent war veterans and also maintains that the latest generation of veterans is different from the previous ones (Vietnam, Korea, and World War II) because they receive more and better attention to their injuries, physical and psychic, than any of the earlier veterans in the USA. Somewhat in contradiction to Joel Klein’s optimism about the new greatest generation, the American ‘soldiers’ minds and bodies presented in these novels, personal narratives, and films seem to suggest that U. S. politics might be in dire need to find ways towards a society that offers its youth more visions for their future than just the option of fighting in yet another war. In spite of President Obama’s “surge” of troops in Afghanistan soon after he took office, the current US president appears to consider military force only one of many means of U.S. foreign policy. The liquidation of long-sought Osama bin Laden in 2011 also removed one (of several) reasons given to maintain Western military presence in the area, and the largest NATO meeting ever in Chicago in May 2012 was called primarily to find the best exit strategy from Afghanistan without leaving the field to the Taliban. The results of this meeting received mixed responses, and it remains to be seen whether they work in practice. Recently intensified religious(? ) fighting between Sunnis and Schiites in Syria and Iraq pose renewed challenges and question the feasibility of a complete U.S. withdrawal. It is too early to assess whether the current policy signals the end of the old American tradition of “regeneration through violence” (Slotkin) and open up an opportunity for joint action of a less militant New America and a New Europe (former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld did get it quite wrong in 2003…) that has - after centuries of deadly fighting - decided that war is not the first but the last resort for settling differences among nations. In any case, even though Karl Rove in ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 125 his Courage and Consequence (2010) claims that this is not at all what happened with the Iraq war, I believe young American soldiers were “lied into” that war and would highly appreciate not to have that experience again. References I. Primary Texts - print Bellavia, David, with John R. Bruning (2008). House to House. A Soldier’s Memoir. Briley, John (1969). The Traitors. Campbell, Donovan (2009). Joker One. A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood. Crawford, John (2005). The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell. Del Vecchio, John (1982). The 13 th Valley. Eastlake, William (1969). The Bamboo Bed. Fromberg Schaeffer, Susan (1989). Buffalo Afternoon. Greene Graham (1955). The Quiet American. Hartley, Jason Christopher (2005). Just Another Soldier. Heinemann, Larry (1977). Close Quarters. Heinemann, Larry (1986). Paco’s Story. Key, Joshua, as told to Lawrence Hill (2007). The Deserter’s Tale. Mason, Bobbie Anne (1985). In Country. Mason, Robert (1983). Chickenhawk. Moore, Robin (1965). The Green Berets. Mullaney, Craig M. (2009). The Unforgiving Minute. A Soldier’s Education. O’Brien, Tim (1978). Going After Cacciato. O’Brien, Tim (1990). The Things They Carried. Parnell, Sean & John Bruning (2012). Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan. Vonnegut, Kurt (1969). Slaughterhouse-Five. West, Bing (2005). No True Glory. A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. Williams, Kaya (2005). Love My Rifle More than You, Young and Female in the U. S. Army. Wood, Trish (2006). What Was Asked of Us. An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It. Wright, Evan (2004). Generation Kill. Wright, Stephen (1983). Meditations in Green. II. Primary Texts - films and TV productions A Mighty Heart (2007, dir. Michael Winterbottom) Avatar (2009, dir. James Cameron) Buying the War (2007; part of PBS Billy Moyer’s Journal, docu) Charlie Wilson’s War (2007, dir. Mike Nichols) Generation Kill (2008, TV-mini series, docu) Grace is Gone (2007, dir.James C. Strouse) Green Zone (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass) In the Valley of Elah (2007, dir. Paul Haggis) Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006, docu) Walter W. Hölbling 126 Lions for Lambs (2007, dir. Robert Redford) My Country, My Country (2006, dir. Laura Poitras, docu) No End in Sight (2007, dir. Charles Ferguson, docu) Off to War (2006, TV-series docu, dir. Brent & Craig Renaud) Poster Girl (2010; dir. Sara Nesson, docu) Redacted (2007, dir. Brian de Palma) Soldiers Pay (2004, dir. Tricia Reagan, David O. Russel, docu) Standard Operating Procedure (2008, dir. Errol Morris, docu) Stop-Loss (2008, dir. Kimberly Peirce) The Ground Truth (2006, dir. Patricia Foulkrod, docu) The Hurt Locker (2008; dir. Kathryn Bigelow The Kingdom (2007, dir. Peter Berg) The Messenger (2009, dir. Oren Moverman) The Oath (2010, dir Laura Poitras, docu) The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004, 3-part TV-mini series, dir. Gilles Kepel, Melville Goodman, Stephenn Holmes, docu) Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (2004, docu) Where Soldiers Come From (2011, dir Heather Courtney, docu) Why We Fight (2005, dir. Eugene Jatrecki, docu) WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception (2005, dir. Danny Schechter, docu) III. Critical Literature Aho, James (1981). Religious Mythology and the Art of War. London: Aldwych Press. Dawes, James (2002). The Language of War. Literature and Culture in the U. S. from the Civil War Through World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Congressional Record, Senate, Mar. 12, 1971, 6395. FitzGerald, Frances (1972). Fire in the Lake. The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Little Brown & Co. Fulbright, William J. (1966). The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage. Heilman, Robert B. (1973). The Iceman, the Arsonist and the Troubled Agent. Tragedy and Melodrama on the Stage. Seattle: U Washington P. Hoffman, Frederick J. (1983). American Melodrama. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publ. Hoffman, Frederick J. (1964). The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP. Hofstadter, Richard (1966). The Paranoid Style in American Politics. London: Cape. Hölbling, Walter (1987). Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman. Tübingen: Narr. Hölbling, Walter (1993). “Texts and Contexts: Lyndon B. Johnson's Gulf-of-Tonkin Report and his Remarks at Syracuse University.” In: Paul Goetsch & Gerd Hurm (Eds.). Die Rhetorik amerikanischer Präsidenten seit F. D. Roosevelt. Tübingen: Narr. 165-175. Hölbling, Walter (2007). “The Vietnam War: (Post-)Colonial Fictional Discourses and (Hi-) Stories.” In: Jon Roper (Ed.). The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 89-120. Hölbling, Walter (2007). “Americans and their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics.” In: Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, Ingrid Thaler (Eds.). Transnational American Studies. Tübingen: Narr. 211-223. ‘What My Country Can Do to Me’ 127 Jason, Philip & Mark A. Graves (Eds.) (2000). Encyclopedia of American War Literature. New York: Greenwood Press. Just, Ward (1970). Military Men. New York: Knopf. Kennedy, David (1980). Over Here. Oxford UP. Lipschutz, Ronnie D. (2001). Cold War Fantasies. Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. New York. etc.: Rowman & Littelfield. Louvre, Alfred & J. Walsh (Eds.) (1988). Tell Me Lies About Vietnam. Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press. Lundestad, Geir (1998). “American European Cooperation and Conflict: Past, Present, Future”. In: No End to Alliance. The U. S. and Western Europe. Past, Present, Future. London: Macmillan. 245-262. McLoughlin, Kate (2009). The Cambridge Companion to War Writing. Cambridge: CUP. REMF Bibliography, which is part of the Sixties Project sponsored by Viet Nam Generation Inc. and the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville: http: / / lists.village.virginia.edu/ sixties/ HTML_docs/ Resources/ Bibliographies/ RE MF_bib_entry.html Roper, Jon (Ed.) (2007). The United States and the Legacy of the Vietnam War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rove, Karl (2009). Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. New York: Threshold Editions. Slotkin, Richard (1973). Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Wesleyan UP. Slotkin, Richard (1992). The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Middleton/ CT: Wesleyan UP. Slotkin, Richard (1992). Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth- Century America. New York: Atheneum. The Nation, 25 (1978), 344. [Anonymous review] Van der Beets, Richard (Ed.) (1973/ 1994). Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives 1642-1836. University of Tennessee Press. IV. Selected Webliography http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ War_in_Afghanistan http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Iraq_War http: / / iraqblogcount.blogspot.com http: / / iraqthemodel.blogspot.com http: / / usliberals.about.com/ od/ homelandsecurit1/ a/ IraqNumbers.htm http: / / pjmedia.com/ ? s=iraq+war&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 http: / / www.whitehouse.gov http: / / whitehouse.georgewbush.org/ index.asp: Source of satirical spoofs about the G. W. Bush White House http: / / www.alternet.org/ waroniraq/ http: / / www.democrats.org/ http: / / www.rnc.org/ http: / / www.newdream.org Walter W. Hölbling Institute of American Studies Karl-Franzens-University Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Theory and practice of corpus-based semantics Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 25 2014, 200 Seiten, €[D] 49,00/ SFr 63,10 ISBN 978-3-8233-6754-3 The book is a clear yet challenging overview of both the theoretical and the practical aspects of doing semantic research through the use of language corpora. Via a very hands-on approach it presents the relevant semantic and corpus linguistic issues in an accessible way and aims at providing a very practical experience of doing advanced corpus-based research. The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions Cvetka Sokolov Characteristics of the writing process acknowledged by adherents of both genre and process approaches to teaching writing seem to offer abundant evidence in favour of portfolio assessment. However, due to some disadvantages, most notably the danger of plagiarism and the alternative assessment’s timeconsuming nature, there are teachers who either avoid it altogether or at least insist on combining it with the traditional timed writing under exam conditions. This article focuses on some ways in which in-class assessment of writing can be conducted by taking the nature of the writing process into account as much as possible. Enabling candidates to use various resources, including technology, allotting time generously, not insisting rigidly on a particular length of exam essays, and assigning topics thoughtfully contribute considerably to achieving this aim. In addition, various stages of the writing process can be incorporated into in-class assessment if the exam period is expanded. Writing teachers should explore possible strategies, developing the optimal combination of approaches to assessing writing in their particular teaching context. 1. Introduction Characteristics of the writing process, recognized by adherents of both genre and process approaches to teaching writing and confirmed by research findings, call traditional in-class assessment into serious doubt. Therefore, alternative ways of assessing writing, specifically ways which take the writing process into account to the highest possible extent, need to be identified (cf., e.g., Camp 1996: 145). Such attempts resulted in the implementation of portfolio assessment a long time ago, representing an immense step forward in the development of teaching and assessing writing. Although the actual effectiveness of the process approach to teaching writing “has long been questioned (e.g. Feez 2002; Hasan 1996) as it fails to explicate what is to be learnt and minimizes the social authority of powerful text forms” (Hyland 2007: 150), this does not mean that the AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen u Cvetka Sokolov 130 proponents of genre-based pedagogies (cf., e.g. Hyland 2007; Johns 2008, 2011) deny the need of writing teachers to take the steps of the writing process into account (cf., e.g. Bawarshi in Johns et al. 2006: 245; Johns 2008: 243, 248; Johns 2009: 215; Johns 2011: 63, 64, 65; Yayli: 2011: 126; 128). The common strategies which help novice writers to tackle the writing process such as the encouragement to write several drafts and make use of peer review are common in genre instruction, too (cf., e.g., Hyland 2003a: 26; Hyland 2007: 158; Murie and Fitzpatrick 2009: 160; Yayli: 123). Similarly, the awareness of the significance of portfolio assessment continues to be sustained (cf., e.g., Hyland 2003a: 26; Hyland 2007: 162; Johns 2009: 212; Yayli 2011: 122, 124, 127, 128). However, the portfolio-based approach to assessing writing is not without weaknesses and cannot be used in all contexts; therefore, securing favourable exam conditions under which students can move through the stages of their writing process as comfortably as possible still remains one of the main tasks and challenges faced by contemporary writing teachers. As there is no such thing as the perfect approach to assessing writing, it is the responsibility of the writing teacher to become acquainted with possible approaches and to consider them carefully before opting for the combination of those that work best in their particular educational context. 2. The Writing Process 2.1. Stages of the Writing Process The writing process consists of several stages leading to the final product: choosing the topic, gathering ideas (e.g. by brainstorming or free writing), making an outline, writing one’s first (second, third …) draft(s), revising, proofreading and editing. Of course, the actual writing is much more complex than this (artificial if useful) classification of the stages suggests, and does not take place in such an orderly sequence - writers tend to cope with various stages simultaneously throughout the process of writing; they are quite likely to skip a step, returning to it later (or not at all); they may go back to the beginning (sometimes even to replace the topic with an entirely new one), and so on. In addition, every writer develops his or her own idiosyncratic ways of tackling the writing process, which usually vary at least to some extent from writing task to writing task: “Writers need their own timetables, their own ways of collecting and processing information, and their own versions of the writing process” (Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 75; cf. Murphy and Grant 1996: 287). An individual writer’s writing process is not static, though. It changes and develops as the writer matures and becomes more versatile. FL and L2 students’ writing processes depend also on their language proficiency. The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions 131 “[T]he recursive nature of L2 composing is mediated by proficiency: increased command of the L2 brings with it the possibility of sharing attentional resources among various composing processes” (Manchón et al. 2009: 115). Most writers find it rather difficult to step out of their own shoes, so to speak, when revising their own pieces of writing. Since establishing distance from one’s writing is essential before assessing its strengths and weaknesses, it is important for writers to have enough time to be ready to perceive their own texts as readers rather than their creators. The rapid development of technology and the increase of computerbased writing has had an enormous impact on the ways writers handle the writing process. New technologies have made the nonlinear nature of writing much easier to cope with by making drafting, editing, proofreading and formatting less laborious and time consuming. The ease with which texts can be manipulated by writers cutting and pasting, deleting and copying, checking spelling and grammar, and changing text layout makes it possible for them to create neater, more thoroughly developed and carefully revised texts, but, as some research has shown, has also resulted in an exaggerated focus on surface features, longer texts of poorer quality and a dramatic increase in plagiarism (cf. Hyland 2003b: 146- 147). On the positive side, the use of computer-based writing and the growing integration of new technologies into writing courses have made writing processes easier to observe and understand (cf., e.g. Hyland 2003b: 145, 146). 2.2. The Writing Process in the Light of Process and Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing The process approach to teaching writing emphasizes the personal and cognitive aspects of creating texts. Its adherents point out that the writing process is as important as the final product; therefore, writers should be discouraged from being too concerned about the latter too early during the process of text production (cf., e.g., Elbow 1981: 7). Writing teachers adopting this approach do give feedback on students’ writing but their interference with their “writing as self-discovery” is to be “non-directive and facilitating, providing writers with the space to make their own meanings through an encouraging, positive and cooperative environment” (Hyland 2002: 23). The cognitive view of composing texts draws attention to the exploratory nature of the writing process, which is recognized as recursive and interactive rather than linear (Hyland 2002: 25; cf. Lunsford and Connors 1995: 3; Raimes 1983: 2). The process approach to teaching writing has been praised for moving the focus of writing instruction from correcting grammatical errors to recognizing and acknowledging other important aspects of writing (cf., e.g., Hyland & Hyland 2006: 3) but also criticized for not considering u Cvetka Sokolov 132 “real-world contexts where writing matters”, and for lacking solid theoretical foundations. (Hyland 2002: 23-30; see also Hyland 2003a: 20; Hyland 2007: 149; Johns 2008: 250; Yasuda 2011: 123) Looking for a presumably more effective alternative has led to genre-based pedagogies, which work on “increasing learners’ awareness of the conventions of writing to help them produce texts that seem well-formed and appropriate to readers” (Hyland 2002: 17; cf. Clark & Ivanič 1997: 67-70). In addition, genre adherents point out the need to teach to L2 and FL students the very conventions of the target language writing in order to empower them socially - without being equipped to recognize and be able to use a wide range of genres they can gain no access to power structures (cf., e.g., Clark & Ivanič 1997: 110-1; Flowerdew & Li 2009: 171-173; Hyland 2003a: 20, 24; Ortega 2009: 243, 242-243; Pearson Casanave 2009: 258; Reiff & Bawarshi in Johns et al. 2006: 240, 243; Tardy 2011: 2). To sum up, the key elements of the genre approach to teaching writing are “real life contexts”, “conventions of writing”, “the sense of audience” and “access to power structures”. But do the items on the list really justify the clear demarcation line between the two approaches advocated by many a distinguished theoretician? According to Ken Hyland’s (2003a) view expressed in his article “Genre-based pedagogies: A social response to process”, they do. According to Hyland’s book Teaching and Researching Writing (2002: 87-95), they do not. In the former, the author states that “process represents writing as a decontextualized skill by foregrounding the writer as an isolated individual struggling to express personal meanings” (Hyland 3003a: 18; cf. Johns 2008: 244). In the latter, however, he presents a successful writing course based on the process approach to teaching writing established in New Zealand in 1987 by Janet Holst, who designed (along with three hours of workshops per week) one-hour lectures that emphasise the importance of clarifying purpose and meeting audience expectations, [and] also focus on the heuristics of the writing process, the features of each particular assignment genre, an awareness of the context of writing, and the interpersonal aspects typically associated with it. (Hyland 2002: 92) Obviously, the process approach to writing is not as decontextualized as genre proponents suggest. Even such “romantic” and “naive” (Hyland 2002: 24) process defenders as Peter Elbow and Donald M. Murray cannot be reproached for promoting personal writing in a vacuum. Elbow says in his Writing with Power (1981: 128-9) that “there is no such thing as good-writing-in-general. You must make it good for this purpose with this audience”, and Murray in his Read to Write (1986: xv) that “good writing is always in context”. 133 What is more, although mastering genres does “[enable us to make choices and facilitate] expression” (Hyland 2007: 152), genre-pedagogies are themselves prone to a different kind of decontextualized teaching of writing, namely to formulaic and prescriptive teaching of genre conventions separated from real-life contexts. Such an approach does not encourage students to express and develop their views on topics which they perceive to be significant, and is thus bound to smother their motivation, creativity and critical thinking skills. Hyland (2007: 152) argues, however, that “there is nothing inherently prescriptive in a genre approach”, and points out “that genres do have a constraining power which limits the originality of the individual way we write”. While originality is definitely promoted in process approaches to writing, it is not unrestricted either; on the contrary, it is limited by the ‘rules’ of good writing concerning the development of ideas, the text structure, and the like. And while it is true that any approach to teaching can become overly prescriptive and static if carried out by an incompetent teacher, teaching “formulas” of constructing genres is more likely to get repetitive and tedious. This has been confirmed by some researchers who “have documented the undesirable outcome of formulaic knowledge [in investigations of ESL contexts where L2 writing instruction was explicit]” (Ortega 2009: 247). As for conventions of writing, Hyland (2003a: 19) suggests that “disempowered teachers” using the process approach to teaching writing are reduced to “the role of well-meaning bystanders” who never teach “the structure of target texts types” to their students explicitly. Instead, they are expected to discover appropriate forms in the process of writing itself, gleaning this knowledge from unanalysed samples of expert writing, from the growing experience of repetition, and from suggestions in the margins of their drafts. (Hyland 2003a: 19). Genre-based pedagogies, on the other hand, are praised extensively for promoting the writing teacher’s central role and the use of model texts, which is the logical consequence of the approach’s intertextual nature (cf., e.g., Hyland 2003a: 23; Hyland in Johns et al. 2006: 237; Hyland 2007: 150, 154; Johns 2008: 249; Yasuda 2011: 113-6, 121; Yayli 2011: 122-3). “[W]hen audience expectations, purposes and/ or textual features in a particular genre bear resemblance to those of another, a transfer may emerge, that is cross-genre awareness” (Yayli 2011: 128; cf. Johns 2008: 245; Johns 2009: 209). The description of the process-based course Writ 101, however, stands in contradiction with the claim (quoted above) that students attending process-oriented writing courses are expected to “[glean the] knowledge [of appropriate forms] from unanalysed samples of expert writing”. The course book used in Writ 101 contains sample texts that do get analysed and evaluated by students “considering their content, purpose, possible The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 134 audiences, degree of formality, sentence lengths, vocabulary choices, and so on” (Hyland 2002: 90-1; emphasis added). So does Murray’s Read to Write (1986) writing process reader. Similarly, it is not true that process-based writing ignores the intended reader, whereas genre-based pedagogies make the writer aware of his or her audience’s expectations to “get things done” (Hyland in Johns et al. 2006: 237; cf. also Hyland 2007: 149; Johns 2008: 244), generally putting a lot of emphasis on the issue of the writer-reader relationship (cf., e.g. Yasuda 2011: 124, 125; Yayli 2011: 121). Not only do processoriented authors such as Elbow (1981: 177-235) and Murry (1986: 30-1) point out the importance of the audience explicitly, too, but also Hyland (2002: 93) himself recognizes the significant role that the audience plays in the process-based Writ 101, which is reflected also in the fact that assessment rubrics used to assess the writing skills of students who have taken the course include the category ‘reader awareness’. In fact, some genre adherents tend to promote reader awareness to an exaggerated extent. Ann M. Johns (2008: 239) establishes that “genres are purposeful, or, at the very least, responsive”. In academic settings, she observes, students mainly compose responsive texts: “their instructors assign the tasks and the students respond to them. The students’ purposes, in the main, are to please instructors [who are also their readers] and/ or pass the examinations.” Brian Paltridge (in Johns et al. 2006: 236) refers to the students’ skill of working out and conforming to the expectation to write according to their new teacher’s ideas “about how an essay should be written, what issues it should address, the extent to which students should show what they know, and how they show “a sensitivity to the values of those who are judging the effectiveness of the genre in a particular context”, which is a euphemistic way of praising social conformity. The following comment made by an L2 student on his passing a writing exam should not come as a surprise, then: “I don’t really know what they’re looking for. I just know how to pass it. That’s all I researched [laughs] before the exam” (Mott-Smith 2009: 123). In other words, students are encouraged to help sustain the existing power relations instead of employing their critical thinking skills to evaluate and challenge them. Should it not be the other way round? Do we really want student writers to be “nervous”, “tentative”, “hesitant”, “noncommittal”, “beating round the bush”, their “tone of voice always curing up into a mini-question mark at the end of every sentence”, “never daring to asset any of [their] real convictions” (Elbow 1981: 226-7)? Do we really want them to keep asking themselves “what [their instructors’] expectations and interests [are]” (Johns 2008: 244)? Which of the two approaches to teaching writing (if we insist on the sharp division line between the two) is socially more progressive, then? Which is the one which is more likely to “put [students] in boxes [so that] they all come out the same”, possibly in the shape of “bricks in the wall”? 135 However, genre proponents disagree. In their view, it is exactly the socio-political aspect of genre-based pedagogies that makes up for the drawbacks of “an ideology of individualism” promoted by the process approach to teaching writing (Hyland 2003a: 20). By keeping ways of understanding the social nature of texts invisible and individual, process based invention strategies exclude even further those students whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds leave them on the margins of the dominant culture and its genres. (Bawarshi in Johns et al. 2006: 244) Understanding and mastering genres is important. Apart from empowering writers to resist marginalization, it is a prerequisite for questioning “the dominant culture and its genres” (cf. Hyland 2007: 149; Johns 2011: 65; Swales 2011: 83). But the process approach to writing does not make this less possible than genre-based writing does - we have established that students learning writing in a process-based course do learn about genres, too (cf., e.g., Hyland 2002: 91; Murray 1986: 9), so they also get equipped to meet social expectations concerning genre choices, which provides them with social power, and, at the same time, enables them to evaluate and negotiate genre conventions critically (cf., e.g. Hyland 2003a: 20). A valid concern, however, is the fact that “while such crucial culturally specific norms of thought and expression in process classrooms may be unreflectively transparent for mainstream American undergraduates [and undergraduates from other Western cultures], they may not always be recognized or accepted by students from cultures less entrenched in the ideology of individualism” (Hyland 2003a: 20; cf. also Hyland 2007: 149). But this may also be claimed about culturally imposed genre conventions which do secure access to power structures but at the same time sustain their dominant socio-political role (cf. Clark & Ivanič 1997: 118- 123; Hyland 2003a: 24-25; Hyland 2007: 151; Yasuda 2011: 125). It is true that “[l]earning about genre does not preclude critical analysis but, in fact, provides a necessary basis for critical engagement with cultural and textual practices” (Hyland 2007: 152; cf. Clark & Ivanič 1997: 119; Yasuda 2011: 125), though. But then again this is also true of critical evaluation of the process approach to writing as we have shown. Other reproaches have been levelled at process adherents such as their alleged harming students by “suggesting, even implicitly, that ‘product’ is not important” (Delpit 1988 in Hyland 2003: 19). In reality, process writing proponents do not suggest that, not “even implicitly”. Would they encourage their students to write so many drafts if they did not want the final product to be as good as it can get? What they suggest is that “when people think too much during the early stages about what they want to end up with, that preoccupation with the final product keeps them from The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 136 attaining it” (Elbow 1981: 7). Obviously, the final goal is a final product of fine quality, which is why teachers giving genre-based courses do not necessarily avoid recommending their students to see to other aspects of their writing “before grammatical accuracy and editing concerns are attended to” (Murie & Fitzpatrick 2009: 166). The above discussion on the two approaches to teaching writing has brought us to the conclusion that they do not differ as much as most theoreticians will have us believe. The main difference seems to lie in the aspects of composing texts to which the proponents of one or the other attribute more significance. Hyland’s thorough analysis of Writ 101 confirms this view, expressed in the following: There is nothing here that excludes the familiar tools of the process teacher’s trade. Genre simply requires that they be used in the transparent, language-rich, and supportive contexts which will most effectively help students to mean. (Hyland 2003a: 27) If we accept this view, the quite popular dual approach integrating genre and process approaches, which “are more usefully seen as supplementing and rounding each other out” (Hyland 2003b: 23; cf. also Nordin & Mohammad 2006; Yan 2005) is actually already there in both of the two approaches. 2.3. The Writing Process and Writing Assessment The writing process is so complex and time-consuming that it makes it difficult for teachers to decide upon the most appropriate method of evaluating students’ writing abilities. Some experts on (teaching) writing think that traditional forms of assessing writing under exam conditions should be given up altogether: “Gone should be the days when students are asked to complete their writing in forty-eight minutes […]. Gone should be the days when one draft - the first and final - is handed in for an unchangeable grade” (Lunsford & Glenn 1990: 404). Their radical view is supported by research results clearly indicating that students generally produce better pieces of writing when given home assignments rather than when writing under exam conditions (Kroll 1990: 142-150, Sokolov 1999: 185). “Many educators have replaced testing - or at least supplemented it - with assessment practices that provide students with not only greater freedom to select work on which they will be assessed but more extended periods of time in which to execute it.” (Hill & Parry 1994: 263; cf. McNamara 2000: 4) Alternative assessment has a positive effect on teaching and learning (the so-called washback), focuses on evaluation of the process and thus progress rather than the end product (formative assessment vs. summative assessment), and is more authentic (Brown 2004: 253). 137 3. Portfolios Portfolios are collections of all the pieces of writing a student produces during a term or academic year. A portfolio usually consists of different kinds of writing such as narrative, expository and argumentative essays as well as pieces of creative writing (also written out of class). University students’ portfolios will mostly contain various types of academic essay writing. “An academic essay is a genre. It is a socially approved way in which students show what they know, what they can do, and what they have learned in a course of study” (Paltridge in Johns et al. 2006: 235). Johns (2009: 207) also defines the academic essay as a genre per se: “The academic essay used to assess secondary or undergraduate students is a genre that becomes a catch-all name for a variety of texts requiring rhetorical stances and different approaches to argumentation and sources.” This does not imply, however, that other text types are excluded from a portfolio. Students are likely to be asked to create other genres, too, e.g. book and film reviews, reports, summaries, research papers, CVs, letters to the editor, or emails, which are particularly interesting because they lend themselves to very informal but also quite formal writing. Many different functional goals, including expressing gratitude, making a request, and applying for a job, can be achieved through written dialogue (mode) in response to a particular audience (tenor) for a particular social action being pursued (field). Thus, emails can be a medium through which many different genres can be generated and realized by the appropriate linguistic/ rhetorical decisions of writers who are guided by an awareness of context. (Yasuda 2011: 113) Aside from final versions of various text types, portfolios can also include earlier drafts, outlines, mind maps, free writing pieces, notes, and students’ reflective self-observations. In a portfolio, a student can also collect writing-course handouts, newspaper articles, statistical data, various quotes, pictures and other similar resources which he or she finds potentially useful for his or her future writing. William Grabe (and Robert B. Kaplan 1996: 419) observe(s), “In a sense, such a portfolio becomes a knowledge resource for future writing activities as well as a record of past and ongoing writing tasks.” 3.1. Advantages of Portfolios One of the main advantages of portfolio evaluation is that most of the writing takes place at home under student-friendly conditions devoid of exam-related pressure, in short - “in more natural and less stressful contexts” (Hyland 2003: 234; cf. Hamp-Lyons 1996: 236; Hamp-Lyons 2006: 142; Weir 2005: 66). The collection of essays furnished by the teacher’s The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 138 marginal and terminal comments, and peer suggestions for improvement encourages students to reflect upon their writing process and the progress they have already made, which increases motivation considerably. The benefit of portfolios can be enhanced further if student-teacher meetings on the contents and the quality of the texts assembled in the portfolio are conducted as part of the writing course programme. In this way the student is given reliable external support, developing additional skills: the ability to “[make] use of all the available resources - including social interactions” (Cushing Weigle 2002: 178; cf. Daiker et al. 1996: 258, Shaw & Weir 2007: 42), and to distinguish between good and weaker pieces of their writing in order to be able to really select their best work (cf. Hamp-Lyons 2006: 143). The comprehensive feedback and the prolonged period of the writing process encourage the awareness of the need for revision and give students the opportunity to improve their written texts more thoroughly, thus achieving better results. Whereas students get only one chance with multiple choice examinations or timed impromptu essays, portfolios allow as many chances as a student wants - and in this way they convey the positive message that continuing effort can lead to improvement. (Daker et al. 1996: 259) Portfolio assessment promotes students’ responsibility for their writing by leaving it up to them which suggestions for improvement to accept and how best to do so, and which to reject (cf. Roemer et al. 1991: 467). It is positive in other ways, too. By being allowed to brush up the essays of their own choice for the final grade, students retain control over their writing process. “When students are allowed to choose their best work based on explicit criteria, they will be intrinsically motivated to revise and improve their writing and take pride in their work” (Cushing Weigle 2002: 213; cf. Grabe & Kaplan 1996: 336, Roemer et. al. 1991: 456). To make good choices students need to consider their work carefully, developing reliable self-evaluation skills and “a sense of ownership of their writing” (Cushing Weigle 2002: 205; cf. Daiker et al. 1996: 258). The positive effect of portfolios can be increased if students are not only allowed but also encouraged to put into their portfolios the texts they have written for their own pleasure, and even more so if such (wellwritten) pieces of writing influence their final grade favourably. It is heartening that introducing portfolios actually surpasses the objective of grading students by becoming an integral part of teaching writing and thus creating a close connection between instruction and assessment (cf. Cushing Weigle 2002: 205, Eržen 2011: 75; Grabe & Kaplan 1996: 418, 420, Hyland 2002: 139, Neff Lippman 2003: 214). The teacher’s written response reminds developing writers of the basic theoretical foundations of good writing, gradually making them an inseparable part 139 of students’ writing skills. It is equally important that portfolios make it possible for the writing teacher to reward progress and encourage focus on development of ideas and structure of students’ compositions rather than be on the alert for (language) mistakes. In the portfolio assessment context, ESL writers can be convinced that concentrating on ideas, content, support, text structure, and so on is worthwhile because they don't have to fear that such concentration will be at the cost of attention to technically correct language - which most of them have been conditioned to believe that teachers value most. (Hamp- Lyons 1996: 236) 3.2. Disadvantages of Portfolios Possibly, the main disadvantage of portfolio assessment is the increased danger of plagiarism. Students working on their writing assignments at home are not supervised in any way. Thus, less conscientious and weaker students could be tempted into submitting essays, or portions of essays, written by someone else (cf. Hyland 2002: 142; Weir 2005: 114). If writing teachers rely exclusively on home assignments for their students’ final grades, they will not be able to compare them with essays written in class (which might have proved to be suspiciously weaker); therefore, it is possible that they will not even think of plagiarism. Even when they combine portfolio evaluation with in-class assessment such cheating is hard or even impossible to prove - a student cannot and should not be accused of plagiarism just because he or she has written a composition of considerably poorer quality in class; after all, there are many other factors that may have influenced his or her performance. That said, stealing intellectual property from the internet is usually fairly easy to detect - an essay pieced together from various (unacknowledged) sources in a suspiciously incoherent way, and spiced with an awkward sentence or two produced by the student himor herself has plagiarism written all over its pages. As long as the culprit has used somebody else’s essay (or its parts) without re-formulating the original (parts of the) text, the necessary evidence is easily accessible. However, most students ‘borrowing’ other people’s work are clever enough to change the original text(s) to such an extent that the suspicious teacher can spend hours looking for the actual source without success. Deliberate plagiarism can be fought against most successfully by making students aware of its true nature and consequences but will probably never be eradicated completely. Therefore, the only reliable way of making sure that all students are the actual authors of the work they submit is to make them take essay exams as Weigle (2002: 216) points out: “A timed writing test is the best way to ensure that the writing has been The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 140 done independently and thus represents the ability of the writer him or herself” (cf. Hill & Parry 1994: 269). Furthermore, multi-drafting, largely based on the teacher’s and peers’ feedback and seen as one of the principle benefits of portfolios to students, brings up the question of the actual authorship of the final product: can the final version signed by a particular student truly be attributed to his or her writing skills exclusively? Can it still be considered as independent work when so many other people have contributed their knowledge and their ideas in the process of its creation? Even if the teacher supervises the way feedback is given to developing writers (let alone when students take the very teacher’s advice and seek outside help), it is very difficult if not utterly impossible to draw a line between an ‘acceptable’ amount and type of feedback and ‘excessive’ outside assistance. Therefore, as Cushing Weigle observes, “[a] portfolio may become more of a collaborative work than an individual one” (ibid.; cf. Grabe & Kaplan 1996: 417, Hill & Parry 1994: 268, Hyland 2002: 142, Neff Lippman 2003: 201). Finally, portfolios are extremely time-consuming for both students and teachers. Teachers have to become acquainted with the theoretical aspects of the introduction of portfolios beforehand, plan the contents of portfolios in collaboration with their colleagues, prepare handouts and tasks (such as self-observation forms, peer-review guidelines, and the like), understand, accept and get used to a new way of assessing students’ writing, and play an active part in establishing assessment criteria and standardizing assessment. In addition, some teaching sessions must be devoted to the introduction of portfolios so that the students understand what makes them useful and how to arrange them (cf. Hyland 2003: 237). At first, the students are likely be excited about the new approach (who likes exams, after all? ) only to realise later on that they are required to do much more writing now. Of course, this is good for them, but on the other hand, the writing course is not the only one they have to take. Nor are their numerous essays the only ones their teacher has to mark. Add to this individual consultations between the teacher and individual students which can only partly be conducted in class - mostly the teacher and the student meet out of class during the teacher’s office hours, which often have to be prolonged considerably due to the complexity of the feedback process as well as due to the large number of students. For all this, though, most of the teachers who have worked with portfolios believe that it pays off, pointing out that “the time and effort involved in implementing portfolios is well worth the benefits received” (Cushing Weigle 2002: 210; cf. Hill & Parry 1994: 271, Neff Lippman 203: 214). Despite the advantages, portfolios may not always be beneficial to those less motivated students who rely on having an entire academic year 141 or semester to start putting effort into their work. Such students tend to turn in careless first drafts that seem to be nothing more than incoherent free writing pieces. Why do their best when they can wait for the teacher’s feedback, and then write something better much faster and more easily? Who cares if the teacher will spend twice the usual amount of time to give feedback on such careless writing! Another problem can arise if a student is unable to find a previous draft when the final assessment is due. If the lost pieces of writing contained feedback in the margins and at the end of the essay, such a student will be disadvantaged when revising his or her work. While this may seem like poetic justice, it harms the entire portfolio process. The teacher cannot chart the student’s progress and discuss it if he or she cannot compare the revision with the original. Finally, information about how skillfully students have used feedback on their work is also important, influencing the teacher’s decision on the final grade. 4. Assessing Writing Under Exam Conditions 4.1. The Disadvantages of Assessing Writing under Exam Conditions The main disadvantage of writing tests is that they require students to produce a single essay in a strictly limited time with little (or no) choice of topic and no opportunity for revision. Timed writing under pressure and on a topic that is not known to the writer beforehand does not resemble the usual conditions under which people undertake writing in ‘real life’ - when not being tested on their writing skills. It is a safe bet that ‘unnatural’ testing situations make the final grade rather unreliable since, among other things, a single essay is often far from a true reflection of the particular student’s general writing skills (cf. Cushing Weigle 2002: 197, Elbow 1996: 120, Grabe & Kaplan 1996: 407, Hill & Parry 1994: 263, Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 174, Weir 1990: 61; Weir 2005: 66). Can a language learner - or a native speaker, for that matter - adequately perform writing tasks within the confines of a brief timed period of composition? Is that hastily written product an appropriate reflection of what the same test-taker might produce after several drafts of the same work? Does this format favor fast writers at the expense of slower but possibly equally good or better writers? (Brown 2004: 233) In addition, students mostly get tested on one particular genre (most likely “an essay of some sort” - Cushing Weigle 2002: 98) under exam conditions although their actual writing ability could be evaluated in a more reliable way if other genres were included (cf., e.g. Cushing Weigle 2002: 153-4; Weir 2005: 116). The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 142 An important consideration is also the fact that modern approaches to teaching writing do not restrict writing skills to language and cognitive abilities of the writer but expect them to be capable of using all kinds of knowledge resources to create a satisfactory piece of writing - including their readers’ feedback (Cushing Weigle 2002: 178). Traditional timed essay tests make this impossible. Finally, not many institutions administering written examinations offer the possibility for candidates to choose between handwritten and word-processed writing under exam conditions. Computer-based writing has changed the way we write, “distributing the cognitive load (...) across the whole word-processing experience, [which, as research has shown] appears to be helpful for L2 writers”; what is more, it is likely “[to lead] to an improved sense of audience (...) [and] measureable increases in students’ motivation to write” (Shaw & Weir 2007: 200-1). Another important advantage of writers using computers was revealed by a study in which “[i]t was found that student writers paid more attention to higher order thinking activities while reviewing their written work using computers” (Li 2006 in Ismail et al. 2012: 272). Obviously, handwritten exams do not necessarily provide the true picture of a test taker’s writing ability. Some studies have actually confirmed that writing quality increases if papers are word-processed whereas others have shown no difference in the quality of the final products regardless of whether they had been computer or pen-and-paper composed (Shaw & Weir 2007: 199). 4.2. The Advantages of Assessing Writing under Exam Conditions The indisputable and most important advantage of assessing writing under exam conditions is, as already pointed out in 3.2., that the writing teacher is (virtually) absolutely sure that students have written their essays independently and without any outside assistance. Not only is this important in terms of preventing plagiarism, it also makes it possible for the teacher to establish reliably what individual students can actually achieve by themselves. For many classroom teachers the individual view of writing ability is important as well, even in classrooms where students are encouraged to receive feedback on their writing from classmates, the instructor, and / or tutors before turning it in for a final grade. Since the teacher cannot always control or monitor the kind and extent of help that students are receiving on out-of-class writing, many teachers feel it is important to give in-class timed writing tests so that they can evaluate what the students are able to accomplish on their own. (Cushing Weigle 2002: 178) In addition, some teachers report on students who do surprisingly well (that is, better than when asked to write home assignments) under exam 143 pressure - they can pull themselves together faster and better, they rarely digress, and produce essays that are generally better structured than the rambling piece of writing they might have created at home. To conclude, the claim that writing exams are ‘unnatural’ does not entirely hold water: exams are a part of every student’s life. Essay exams are not restricted to writing courses only but are an integral part of many other classes as well, e.g., literature and even grammar classes (cf. Carr 2000: 207, Cushing Weigle 2002: 203). It is true that essay exams of those kinds are usually based on studied material, but good writing skills will certainly make it easier for students to demonstrate their knowledge in any field more effectively. Developing strategies to tackle the writing process as part of classroom instruction can also be seen as “the preparation that learners need both to function in creative real-world writing tasks and to successfully demonstrate their competence on a timed impromptu test” (Brown 2004: 248). 4.3. Writing tests - taking the writing process into account 4.3.1. The Use of Dictionaries and other resources Using dictionaries and other resources is an integral part of the writing process. When students write at home, they have all sorts of resources at their disposal: various handbooks, the internet, the phone (to confer with a colleague if necessary), and so on. Despite this, not every student does well - teachers still get to grade essays that cover the entire quality range, that is, from excellent over average to poor essays. When students have finished their studies and enter the work world, they will mostly use all the resources available when they have to write something both professionally and privately. This should (and mostly is) taken into account when students take writing tests. After all, good writers differ from poor ones also by their ability to use resources critically, selectively and effectively (cf. Cushing Weigle 2002: 106). One drawback of letting students use dictionaries during the writing test is that looking words up is time-consuming, taking precious writing time from the candidates. Most students will soon realise this potential problem and take the necessary measures: many use dictionaries selectively and often at the very end of the exam session when all the pressing matters have been seen to - if they have not run out of time by then. If students are offered the option to word-process their response, this is not only likely to improve their performance (cf., e.g., Shaw & Weir 2007: 199) but will also provide them with easier and faster access to sources and web sites that they are officially allowed to use. Due to an increased danger of cheating computer-based examinations are usually taken on universityor exam-centre-owned computers, which should operate at the same speed. Students who use computers of their own have The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 144 to “download security software that blocks certain applications from laptops, making them suitable for exam use” (Ratcliffe 2012). Privately owned computers obviously need to be checked and approved before they can be used in exams. (For examples of guidelines for the use of computers in examinations see for instance Imperial College London and University of Washington’s guidelines.) Finally, teachers grading computer-written texts should be aware of the risks of rater bias resulting from the following factors listed by Shaw & Weir (2007: 200): ‣ computer-generated products may engender higher rater expectations; ‣ handwritten text may provoke an enhanced reader-writer relationship; ‣ the construction of handwritten responses may convey to the reader a greater sense of effort on the part of the writer; ‣ (...) while allowances can be made for handwritten responses, the same may not be true for those that are word processed. (Shaw and Weir 2007: 200) 4.3.2. Time Allotment When asked about it - and sometimes even when not asked about it! - the majority of students complain that they are never given enough time when taking writing tests (Sokolov 2005; cf. Jennings et al. 1999: 448). Many would like to have more time only to think about the topic (let alone to write something coherent, witty and generally sensible about it). According to F. Weaver’s findings, quoted in Liz Hamp-Lyons, the complaints are to be taken seriously: In interpreting a task and creating a response to it, each writer must create a “fit” between his or her world and the world of the essay test topic. There has been very little work done in this area, but Weaver's (1973) work suggests that each writer needs to take the other-initiated test task and transform it into ‘self-initiated’ topic - that is, make it his or her own. In order to match writer response to test expectations, the writer must follow the steps of attending to, understanding, and valuing the task. If this breaks down, the writer will replace the task with a different or a related one, but will not respond to the topic intended. (Hamp-Lyons 1990: 77) In fact, it is downright astonishing that anybody can expect students to write a proper essay in forty-five minutes, which is the time usually allotted to students in Slovenia when they take essay tests. Forty-five minutes may well be enough for developing writers to pull themselves through the free-writing stage (step two in the writing process! ) but they have a 145 long way to go before they reach the last stage - the final product reflecting the best they can do. Experts on writing, including Romy Clark and Roz Ivanič, warn teachers against such practices: [Writers] cannot be expected to hand in a 'perfect' piece of work at the end of one short classroom session, or one homework period. This expectation only encourages learner writers to see themselves as 'failures' because they cannot do what is expected, rather than come to an understanding that it is the writing process itself that is complex, difficult and takes time. (Clark & Ivanič 1997: 234) Admittedly, research in the area of time allotment does not confirm “the common-sense notion that more time is better”, which can often be attributed to culture-specific differences between students (Cushing Weigle 2002: 1012). Students who are expected to write essays in an extremely short period of time get used to it (and to producing first drafts only) and, if given extra time, do not know what to do with it - even if their draft could do with much improvement. On the other hand, other research results have shown that “scores on the writing measure [are] positively affected by allowing more time in which to write” (Powers & Fowler 1997: 451). All things considered, the complexity of the writing process, “[involving] the discovery of meaning, of what it is that the writer wants to say” (White 1988: 40), definitely speaks in favour of more generous time allotment, even more so in the case of foreign language writers (cf. Hill & Parry 1994: 263). “In FL writing contexts, it might be the case that available knowledge about, for example, text structure (developed from L1 writing experience) cannot be used, due to the fact that the writer has to allocate cognitive resources to other subprocesses, particularly when writing under time pressure.” (Schoonen 2009: 79, after Manchón & Roca de Laris 2007) 4.3.3. The Length of the Essay Taking the drastic time restrictions into account, candidates sitting for writing exams cannot be expected to write very long essays. Most experts suggest that the length (that is, the number of words, sentences, paragraphs or pages) should be determined beforehand so that the students will know what is expected of them (cf. Cushing Weigle 2002: 103). Another view often quoted in favour of this kind of exercise is the necessity of making sure that students can produce a well-developed and yet concise argument in, say, no more than 300 words. It's quite common to be given a word count when you're given an essay title. One reason for this is to make sure you write a decent amount of information; another reason is to stop you waffling on forever and a day: The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 146 the word count helps to focus your thoughts and make your writing more concise and clear. (Woodford 2008) Admittedly, it seems difficult to refute the reasons for assigning word counts given above (to say nothing about the fact that longer essays take longer to mark! ). Nevertheless, the characteristics of the writing process speak strongly against this kind of practice. Students submerging themselves in the process cannot know beforehand how much space they will need to get their message across. They can plan the number of pages they want (or are required) to write but may well end up writing more (or less). Writing teachers’ experience shows clearly that prescribing the number of words students can (and have to) use in their essays diminishes the quality of their writing - on the one hand, they either force paragraphs into their essays that do not fit the rest of the texts or deliberately use lengthy phrases and sentences (“Many of us have learned to pad our writing with all sorts of empty phrases to reach length requirements for academic writing.”, Kilborn 2000), on the other, they give up original ideas and strong arguments because they have ‘run out of words’ When the tests which we assign encourage students to become more concerned about the number of words their essay will consist of than about its persuasive power and good structure, it is high time to change the strategy (cf. Hilbert 1992: 76-7; Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 75). It seems reasonable to bear in mind that “the appropriate length is whatever length is necessary to accomplish whatever that individual [text] sets out to do.” (Lukeman 2010: 157) Some research has shown that penalizing students because they have written longer essays than prescribed is usually unfair since such compositions are predominantly of higher quality than shorter ones (Čokl & Cankar 2008: 65). Of course, pieces of writing of a particular length have their place in any writing course since it is sometimes necessary to produce such texts, too. Also, most students benefit from occasional length restrictions because they help them to eliminate wordiness and instances of digression from their writing. But generally speaking, insisting on a particular number of words rigidly tends to diminish the quality of writing. 4.3.4. Choosing the topic/ title All writing teacher should do their best to assign topics which the candidates are likely to find interesting and significant as well as topics about which they can be expected to be knowledgeable (cf. Clark 2003: 83, Cushing Weigle 2002: 91, Franklin Parks et al. 1991: 173, Grabe & Kaplan 1996: 252, Hyland 2003: 14, Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 139). Failing to pick the right topic will result in students’ writing that lacks per- 147 suasive power and enthusiasm (cf. Hamp-Lyons 1990: 73, Schoonen et al. 2009: 78). To offer a suitable range of varied topics appealing to young writers, teachers have to know and understand their students’ perception of the world. In addition, they have to make sure that the titles are not too demanding in terms of language (containing a pun difficult to figure out or a cryptic reference, for example) and content (requiring a discussion that surpasses the general knowledge and experience that can be expected from a particular group of students such as a topic revolving around a complex social or political issue) (cf. Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 77). In other words, appropriate titles will be simple but not simplistic - lexically, syntactically and semantically. Finding suitable exam topics is much more difficult than one would initially expect. Research carried out in 2003/ 04 (Sokolov 2005) showed that a lot of students in fact liked what their teacher thought were unsuitable titles - titles that were either difficult to understand (“The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn”, to quote an example), or remote from young adults’ experience (for instance “The older we get the more difficult it is to make friends”). On the other hand, a number of students rejected ‘easy’ and ‘boring’ titles (such as “We should always tell the truth and nothing but the truth”). Interestingly enough, the students involved in the research displayed their general lack of understanding of the more popular (and less suitable) titles - when asked to paraphrase them in their own words, the paraphrases often diverged considerably from the meaning expressed in the original titles. It is obvious that what students like is not always good for them. “Some studies have shown that writers do not always make the best choice” (Jennings et al. 1999: 432). It is certainly beneficial for writing teachers to be acquainted with their students' tastes and preferences as much as possible, but at the end of the day they will have to make a professional choice based on their knowledge and experience (Sokolov 2005: 236). Finding a fresh topic is quite an achievement in this respect - students are reluctant to write on certain (‘easy’) topics simply because they have grown tired of them after years of similar essay topics assigned by their teachers of English at various levels of their education. Another factor that makes thinking of student-friendly topics/ titles difficult is the fact that tastes differ (cf. Jennings et al. 1999: 433), which makes finding out what students actually want ever more difficult (if not virtually impossible). It is therefore essential to provide students with a range of varied topics. The more the better? No, not really. It turns out that students generally prefer to be given no more than three titles (Sokolov 2005: 240), since more choice makes it more difficult for them to make a decision, and requires more time investment. Also Cushing Weigle (2002: 103) suggests that the time students spend on choosing a title could be better spent on writing itself. On the other hand, students The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 148 fear the danger of not finding any of the topics suitable enough if they are offered just one or two titles. The anxiety could affect an individual’s performance in a negative way; in addition, “increased choice is beneficial in that it empowers the test-taker and may help to shift the balance of power from the tester to the test-taker” (Jennings et al. 1999: 451). Letting test-takers influence the choice of topics boosts their power, too. One possible way to of doing this is the writing teacher collecting students’ wishes and suggestions before the exam date. However, when given the opportunity to participate actively in the creation of exam writing tasks, students prove to be at a loss - they lack original ideas (even more than their fatigued teachers) and make lists of worn-out titles of the kind they reject when their teachers assign them. The situation is even worse when students are encouraged to write an essay on anything they want - it turns out time and again that most students like specific titles much more than general topics which they have to narrow down first. Some authors attribute the fact that many if not most students do not know what to do “without an assigned topic” to their instructors teaching them “that coming up with a topic is not part of the student writer’s responsibility” (Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 139). Vicki Spandel and Richard J. Stiggins (ibid.) suggest that the appropriate response to this sorry state of affairs could be encouraging students “to explore several of [many potential] topics in various ways - through reading, writing, and talking with others”. Despite teachers’ best effort to find generally acceptable titles when they assign topics themselves, there will always be students who approve of none of the given options. Elbow’s (1981: 229) recommendation to such students goes: “Work out alternative assignments with your teacher so that it will be easier and more natural to give your writing to others.” Being open to such adjustments is certainly worth considering - even under exam conditions (cf. Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 139). Some teachers inform their students of exam topics beforehand, thus enabling them to shorten or even drop some stages of the writing process. The approach is worth consideration, although there are drawbacks that accompany the benefits. For example, it is likely to encourage (some) students to write essays at home (possibly with outside assistance) before the exam session and to learn them by heart just to reproduce them from their memory when taking the exam; obviously, such occurrences undermine the main objective of the writing test - obtaining reliable information about what students can manage on their own. 4.3.5. Making process writing an integral part of writing tests Cushing Weigle (2002: 186-8) describes a number of ways in which it is possible to incorporate process writing into writing exams. To begin with, the teacher can make a common pre-writing session a part of the exam 149 session - students produce ideas related to the topic(s) assigned, while the teacher puts them on the blackboard for everybody to use at their discretion. Such an approach eases exam tension, helps students to get started and saves them precious time. Some teachers will even divide the exam into two sessions - one for students to work on their first draft, and another for them to create the final product (cf. Carr 2000: 207), sometimes even based on their peer’s feedback. The time between the two exam periods enables students to get the necessary distance from their first draft, giving them a chance to improve it more effectively - in addition to “[recognizing] the truth that writers perform better on some days than on others” (Daiker et al. 1996: 257; cf. Spandel & Stiggins 1990: 170). The implication here is that because changing physical and psychological factors affect performance, even multiple writing samples, if they are collected at the same time, cannot adequately measure writing ability. (ibid.) Apart from organisational difficulties and limitations (such as time and space), there are other disadvantages to promoting process writing under exam conditions. Firstly, it blurs the demarcation line between out-ofclass writing and timed writing tests, thus making the main objective of the latter difficult to achieve (cf. 4.3.4.). Secondly, peer feedback under exam conditions puts students into an unequal position since weak students cannot provide their fellow students with such useful assistance as more advanced students can. Thirdly, pre-exam brain storming can influence the students’ performance negatively by restricting them to the list of ideas on the blackboard rather than encouraging them to think of original ones themselves and to make their own voice an indispensable part of the text they produce. 5. Conclusion Finding a fair, objective and reliable way of evaluating students’ writing is as complex a process as the writing process itself. Research into various aspects of assessing writing has resulted in important conclusions which writing teachers should be familiar with, making sure to follow new developments in the field, too. The most important considerations to bear in mind are the following: ‣ Portfolio assessment (if extremely time consuming for both students and teachers) remains a reliable and valid approach to assessing writing skills. The danger of cheating makes in-class writing tests a necessary supplementary form of assessment in most educational contexts, though. The Writing Process nder Exam Conditions u Cvetka Sokolov 150 ‣ The process/ genre debate has affected none of the basic findings about the nature of the writing process, which should be taken into account when designing in-class writing tests. ‣ Writing exams should be conducted in a way which facilitates the candidates’ writing process to the highest possible extent: relevant resources need to be available to them; they should preferably be given the choice between handwritten and computer-based exams; they should be allotted enough time to compose their final drafts, which will be marked; the length of the final products should be flexible; test takers should be given a range of varied topics to choose from and the possibility to negotiate them; and, ideally, the exam should be extended over a longer period of time, allowing examiners to incorporate stages of the writing process into it. Of course, not all the recommendations are feasible in every educational context. 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Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10. 121-129. Cvetka Sokolov Faculty of Arts University of Ljubljana Explicit Language, Radical Tone: Harold Pinter’s Obscene Words Speak Louder than Action Ibrahim Yerebakan This analysis provides a close reading that demonstrates that Pinter’s late work deserves a distinct approach and a new critical attention in terms of the obscene and provocative use of language. My analysis also looks into the new dramatic and poetic vocabulary in Pinter’s literary oeuvre and particularly those four-letter Anglo-Saxon words which the author himself asserts are ‘still very strong, they hit you in the stomach’. The study reveals that the obscenity in these late works is connected to the radicalisation of the writer, which became more and more intense towards the end of his career. The study concludes with an argument that obscene language has various functions: it is sometimes used as a means of oppression, sometimes as a weapon of resistance against authoritarian figures, sometimes as a protest, sometimes as a mere mockery and lampoon of the political elite. References will be made to his poems, “American Football”, “Democracy” and his dramatic works, Mountain Language, The New World Order and Celebration, where frequent and outright use of obscene expressions dominates much of the atmosphere. This is the first comprehensive study to correlate Pinter’s use of obscene language with his late dramatic and poetic works known to literary circles as the playwright of silence and pauses, and characterized by some drama critics as an author that “wallows in symbols and revels in obscurity” (Darlington 1958: 8), Harold Pinter changed significantly in the final decades of the twentieth century from the obscure to the explicit use of the language. Pinter turned to a “political activist” (Batty 2005: 79), a “militant pacifist” (Williams 2008: n.p.) towards the end of his life. With increasing frequency, he began to use a series of short, sharp and disturbing images and provocative and obscene words in his plays and poems as an expression of protest and anger at human rights violations on a global scale. It is evident that Pinter felt the pains of the world more intensely than ever be- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Ibrahim Yerebakan 156 fore and ultimately put his political frustrations into his late works in a rather violent and explicit tone, which may not be to the taste of every reader. For instance, in one of his poems, titled “Modern Love” (2005), Pinter uses the word fuck more than ten times, thus sacrificing much humour and more aesthetics which abounds in his early work and reducing poetry or the ‘queen of the arts’, to a “barely articulate howl of disapproval” (Newey 2003: n.p.). A Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2005, celebrated and performed all over the world with notable frequency, Harold Pinter is a master technician in the use of language. With his disturbingly radical and shocking tone and blatantly grotesque images, Pinter continues to puzzle literary circles even after his death, turning him into one of the most controversial twentieth century dramatists. In Penelope Prentice’s words, “Harold Pinter continued to be both revered and derided by critics” (1994: lxx). On the one hand, Pinter’s art is compared to Ibsen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, even Shakespeare (Eyre 2008: n.p.), and he is considered to be the most influential playwright of the twentieth century whose “plays are more lasting and rewarding than Beckett’s precisely because he roots their power struggles in a superbly drawn social reality” (Hare 2005: n.p.). On the other hand, Pinter is “viciously attacked for the directness of his most recent plays and for his willingness to use his celebrity as one of the world’s great playwrights to voice his political views” (Luckhurst 2006: 369). As Billington (1996: 389) observes of the writer, “you cannot possibly sum up Harold Pinter in a nutshell: he is too complex, too elusive, too contradictory” Pinter’s artistic career reveals a radical departure and decisive shift from the elusive, silent writer of the 1960s and 1970s to the passionate polemicist of the 1980s and 1990s. In an article written on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Pinter was referred to as “an angry old man”, “the old bull” (Billington 2000: n.p.) However, Pinter’s fascination with cruelty, barbarity and hidden and exposed forms of violence was never absent in his early works, either. Although it is certainly true that recent decades have seen terrible bloodshed and injustice, it would be hard to surpass the decades of Pinter’s early life in the 1930s and 40s in terms of mass slaughter, mass deportations, and concentration camps by brutal dictatorships. As a Jew, growing up in the embattled East End of London, where Fascism and anti-Semitism were growing as well, seeing the photographs and the newsreels of the mass deportations and detention camps in the aftermath of the World War II, Pinter could hardly have remained impassive. It is interesting to note how the disturbing images he employed in one of his first published poems, “New Year in the Midlands” (1950), bear remarkable comparisons with those of his late poem, “American Football” (1993): “Watch/ How luminous hands/ Unpin the town’s genitals”. This angry tone also emerges in one of his letters to the director of the first production of The Birthday Party in 1958, where he comment- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 157 ed on the leading characters: “Goldberg and McCann? Dying, rotting, scabrous, the decayed spiders, the flower of our society. They know their way around. Our mentors. Our ancestry. Them. Fuck ‘em.” (2009: 22-3). No doubt, Pinter became more outspoken and more provocative in his portrayal of human rights abuses and political states of affairs in his late work - not to mention his interviews, personal and public statements he made on various occasions. His last poems, in particular, embody a fresh departure, which also suggests that the playwright’s final literary output became explicitly obscene in the face of equally obscene political acts of violence around the world, compared to his early metaphorical and ambiguous explorations of power games. In the final years of his career, Pinter almost abandoned writing plays and sacrificed his stagecraft for political and social causes. Due to his profound interest and involvement in human rights issues, Pinter was, on one occasion, designated as a human rights activist, “polemicist and humanist” (Macaulay 2008: n.p.). Certainly, this politicisation of the dramatist and his use of violent tone in the late work are connected with the enormous increase in human rights abuses, the systematic use of oppression and the suppression of civil liberties in the final decades of the twentieth century. Ultimately, Pinter expressed his concern about political issues more angrily and disturbingly than ever before, transforming the language of literature and creating a new vocabulary, which was more explicit, more direct and highly provocative. When the Western powers engaged in military operations in the Middle East in the early 1990s, Pinter spoke out on public platforms denouncing ‘neo-imperialism’, ‘war’, ‘murder’, ‘torture’ and ‘plunder’ carried out under the pretext of global responsibility. Especially in the aftermath of the Gulf war, Pinter confronted what he called one of the most serious global political issues, ‘American domination’. In a Degree Speech to the University of Florence, Italy in 2001, Pinter stated the following: Arrogant, indifferent, contemptuous of International Law, both dismissive and manipulative of the United Nations - this is now the most dangerous power the world has ever known - the authentic ‘rogue state’ - but a ‘rogue state’ of colossal military and economic might. And Europe - especially the United Kingdom - is both compliant and complicit... I believe this brutal and malignant world machine must be recognized for what it is and resisted” (Pinter Degree Speech to the University of Florence, 2001). Dismissing globalisation and free market expansion and attacking American imperial politics with derogatory words such as ‘crap’ and ‘bollocks’, Pinter became eventually “an odd sort of dissenter: less a Vaclav Havel or a Gunter Grass than a Victor Meldrew - a professional Mr Angry whose thermostat is supposedly calibrated between a steady simmer and a rolling boil of fury” (Riddell 1999: n.p.). Ibrahim Yerebakan 158 Pinter became a stronger and more vociferous anti-Western, anti- American and anti-British protester and dissenter in the wake of the second US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which he described in his Nobel Acceptance Speech as “a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. He repeatedly claimed that the invasion was a clear manifestation of ‘American hegemony’, ‘British complicity’ and the hypocrisy of the Western democracies. In his Nobel Speech, Pinter also further stressed that while Western democracies were claiming to bring peace, stability and freedom to the region, they were in fact endorsing an extreme form of barbarism: We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. Along with vigorously criticising Anglo-American policies in the Third World in harsh terms, Pinter also castigated political leaders of the West in even harsher words. He called a former British Prime Minister “deluded idiot”, “mass murderer”, while downgrading a former president of the United States as “illegally elected”, “fake”, and comparing his administration to “Nazi Germany”, and blaming “other millions of totally deluded American people” for not resisting American imperialism (Chrisafis & Tilden 2003: n.p.). Pinter’s personal statements reveal that he felt the pains not only of Iraqi people, but also of those desperate individuals suffering in various deplorable hotspots of the world. They include Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo, the Darfur region in Africa, former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Palestine, and Turkey, where he believed human rights violations systematically occurred, human dignity was lost and most blatant forms of barbarism were actually committed in the name of democracy, liberation and freedom. In his pursuit of revealing the truths in arts, in real life and in politics, Pinter, as Merritt noted in her analysis, “opposes war; exposes deceits catapulting thugs towards world hegemony and decries their violence” (Merritt in Gillen & Gale 2008: 141). It may well be that Pinter’s late literary output took a more obscene and violent turn as a result of his radical response to and deep concern about these harrowing atrocities and harsh realities of our violent world. With his political anger and global concerns dissolving into something dark yet grotesquely comic, Pinter seems to combine his verbal protest and political outrage with obscenity, thus unmasking atrocious, yet at the same time actual acts of violence in brutal and obscene terms and putting his frustration at the human rights violations into more violent words in his late works. Pinter’s political anger, for instance, found an obscene and brutal expression in “American Football: A Reflection upon the Gulf War”, an of- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 159 fensive, scatological poem, categorized by one critic as “one of Pinter’s best known poetic works” (Derbyshire, in Raby 2001: 233). Evoking views of the author on the involvement of the Western military powers in the Middle East, the poem is a harsh criticism and linguistic satire “through language that is deliberately violent, obscene, sexual and celebratory, the military triumphalism that followed the Gulf War” (Billington 1996: 329). Much of the profanity in the poem originates from the author’s outrage at the euphemisms through which the Gulf War was displayed on the Western media. The ‘embedded’ reporting and journalism during the military operations distorted people’s views of the Gulf war and belittled the deaths and killings of soldiers as well as civilians during the war. Technical and bureaucratic language, infused with neologisms such as ‘collateral damage’, ‘precision bombing’ and ‘surgical operations’, replaced realistic and factual reporting of what really happened in the Iraqi desert. In a way, this provocative language of the poem was a radical response to the oddities and discrepancies between what was really happening on the battle ground and how this reality was reported by the media, concealing the carnage from the Western public. Touching on these double standards of the Western democracies, Billington commented that this uncompromising poem was the product of Pinter’s “own obsession with the huge gap between language and fact” (Billington 1996: 329). In fact, these violent and shocking images and the explicitness of the language in the poem such as ‘We blew them into fucking shit’, ‘We blew their balls into shards of fucking dust’, define much of the poem’s territory; a world of brutality, insecurity and barbarity, a horrid landscape of twentieth century atrocity. Generating appallingly grotesque, dark comedy, these imageries also evoke powerful metaphors of human degradation, the symbols of catastrophe, confronting the reader with the real situation in the Gulf War, thus breaking down the distance imposed by geography and the indifference of the Western society to the devastating consequences of the war. Using such language of profanity can convey its terror both powerfully and provocatively. In Pinter’s mind, no other meaning of expressions or tools could be more effective and more haunting to display his immediate outrage at the Gulf War and to communicate the ultimate realities of war than using the language of scatology. Major British and American newspapers, including The Observer, The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Review of the Books, declined to publish “American Football” on the grounds of obscenity. Pinter was indeed censored by the mainstream press in the West. Frustrated and annoyed by this censorship, Pinter made his point, reiterating that the poem was obscene, but was referring to obscene facts; “This poem uses obscene words to describe obscene acts and obscene attitudes” (Pinter 2009: 224). Pinter also maintained that the offence resulting from the scatological language in print was nothing compared to the reality of the situation Ibrahim Yerebakan 160 and the sight of the broken and dismantled bodies of the retreating Iraqi soldiers, ‘suffocating in their own shit! ’, the actual reality of burning an untold number of soldiers and civilians alive. With these unsettling imageries, Pinter may have intended to captivate the imagination of his readers, strongly reminding them that a distinction has to be made between the obscene words in a poem, which are only words, and the actual scenes in the battlefield, which are extremely cruel and vicious. In a personal statement, Pinter also reiterated his conviction that burying a great number of civilian casualties with bulldozers was more terrifying and that committing these crimes was a more awful and more unforgivable act than disclosing in a poem in ugly words and ugly images what the Western tanks actually did in the desert (Pinter 2009: 223). By using the offensive words and polemical materials in “American Football”, Pinter reconnects the readers with the battle carnage as something real, but at the same time something painful, brutal, and very ugly. Thus, Pinter makes the readers feel complicit in the horror by bringing them into the centre of the action, enabling them to see and to recognise man’s inhumanity to man. These swear-words and ugly metaphors in the poem ironically provide a sharp contrast to the glamorised and jingoistic reporting of the allied ‘victory’ by the Western media which pretend that these brutalities did not exist or did not happen at all. With these contrasting situations, Pinter, in fact, breaks down all the geographical boundaries and the distance between Europe, the USA and the Middle East, exposing the indifferent attitudes of the West to actual events, hinting that such horrible events could happen anywhere in the world, in the East, in the West, as he once expressed in one of his interviews: they’re exactly the same as you and I. Just because, for example, they’re 3.000 miles away, a lot of people say, Oh well, ‘why don’t we look at England? ’ Well, we are looking at England. By which I mean, ‘Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’. (Ford 1989: 4) By using ‘we’ in the poem as the subject of all sentences except one, Pinter sharpens the sensibilities of the Western readers into the realization that there is no longer an automatic division between ‘them’, the dictators, morally bankrupt cruel tyrants in the Middle East, and ‘we’, the supposedly superior Western leaders, whom he identifies as ‘elected dictatorships’, the ‘war criminals’, the ‘murderers’. The frequent and deliberate use of the subject “we” also reinforces the notion that “we”, the most civilized Western societies, are no better than cruel dictatorships around the world. As Pinter stressed in an interview, “So when you say “Saddam Hussein - what a murderer”, so are we” (Paxman 2002: n.p.). Suddenly changing the subject of the sentences from ‘we’ to ‘I’ in the final line of the poem, Pinter seems to disconnect himself from its setting. With the first person voice, the author further dissociates himself from this obscene Explicit Language, Radical Tone 161 territory, which is not the environment he wants to inhabit. Despite the fact that “American Football” was published at the end of the first Gulf War, it could just easily be interpreted to signify the events unfolding in the aftermath of the second invasion of Iraq, which had similar catastrophic consequences. “Democracy” (2003) is another uncompromising anti-war poem, showing the moral hypocrisy and duplicity of the Western powers, a profound, explicit response to horrors of the second invasion of Iraq. This poem is an unequivocal combination of politics and obscenity, where ‘obscene acts of violence’ committed against the civilian population during the second invasion are exposed in most horrific, profane terms. With its strong language and angry tone, the poem in many respects is a quick reminder of the images portrayed in “American Football”, where swearwords are constantly used to describe the indescribable for which there are no more decent terms. Thus, beneath the surface of the strong and embarrassing language in this rather short poem, one gets the sense of the view of a country as a war and rape victim. The crude and direct use of the brutal images in the poem such as ‘fuck’ and ‘pricks’ connects the reader with the stronger and the darker images of a country as being raped on the one hand, and the superior, invincible, malignant powers as rapists on the other. Confronted with such brutal expressions as: ‘They’ll fuck everything in sight’ as a prediction, the readers are clearly hurt, disturbed and unsettled. This might also suggest that war, torture and rape will continue unabated around the world, in the Third World, whether under the oppression of a dictator or of Western powers. In fact, arbitrary cases of rape, sodomy, homicide, torture, inhuman treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad were confirmed and pornographically displayed in the media in the aftermath of the second invasion of Iraq. More to the point, such strong expressions in the poem as ‘The big pricks are out’, ‘Watch your back’ imply that there will be more sustained bombing and more misery, more degradation, more rape and more catastrophe. Such vocabulary of aversion and anger in the poem could be taken as the voice of the author, the voice of his passionate protest and indignation and a profound response to the horrors of the twentieth century. We all know such horrid images not only from the war in Iraq but also from World War I, World War II, the Bosnian War and, most recently, the Syrian Civil War. Pinter, better than most, knew of the power of these images used in the poem, some of which may be too graphic, too depressing and too disturbing for us to see, but the facts they represent did happen. Whereas in “American Football” fuck is used as an adjective or a noun, in “Democracy” this particular swear-word is used as a verb for the whole action of the poem. The word fuck here is used in order to expose an ugly action, to show the magnitude of human catastrophe, and to describe the immoral and obscene actions in the Middle East. This time, however, Pinter keeps further distance to the West by using they as the subject of Ibrahim Yerebakan 162 the poem rather than we, thus cutting himself off, mentally at least, from the very world of which he is part. The obscenity reflects the author’s responsibility as a citizen of the world to look beyond the jingoistic attitudes and rhetoric of the West and to examine the reality of the situation, the reality of the tortured, raped, brutalized, decapitated, disfigured bodies of soldiers as well as civilians who were actually blown up by cluster bombs into ‘shards of fucking dust’. In spite of this mood of pessimism and the obscenity of death and killing, one can also get an impression from the poems that war is hell and intolerable, but apparently must be accepted by people with common sense. Western military might seems irresistible, but must be resisted. Moving from poetry to Pinter’s late dramatic pieces, one can observe the similar diatribe, similar disturbing language, dreadful images and the frequent use of four-letter words. There is much obscenity and profanity in Mountain Language, where “language is the oppressors’ weapon of choice. The fascist captors speak in lies, scatology and double talk” (Rich 1989: n.p.): SERGEANT’S VOICE: Who is that fucking woman? What is that fucking woman doing here? Who let that fucking woman through that fucking door? (37) Using the ‘f’ words in the play does several things at the same time: through the menacing and offensive tone, these words evoke the immediate notion that language in this context is the most savage instrument and the torture equipment of these authoritarian figures. As Carey Perloff most perceptively observes, this is a manifestation of how language “can be manipulated and distorted to inflict violence on another person, […] how people can destroy each other through language” (Perloff, in Burkman & Gibbbs 1993: 15). Mountain Language is set inside the prison of an unspecified country, but certainly a totalitarian country, where linguistic oppression, linguistic fanaticism and torture are systematically practised upon the questioning, oppositional voices. With linguistic oppression at the core of the discussion of the play, Mountain Language can be characterised as one of Pinter’s most serious, explicit and blatant expressions of violence through the use of the obscene imageries, a short play “as relentless in its dissection of fanaticism and despair as Miller’s The Crucible” (Cohen 2008: n.p.). What is striking about the obscenity in this political play is that unlike any of Pinter’s other literary works, the ‘f’ word is used not only by men (which might be expected), but also by a woman, and actually as a verb. With Young Woman, apparently an intellectual, a political dissident and a staunch opponent of the military regime, Pinter explores a peculiar facet of linguistic suppression in the play. The strongest political messages of the play are conveyed to the audience through this Young Woman sarcas- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 163 tically in an obscene and explicit language. Singled out and branded by the state authorities as “fucking intellectual” (25), Young Woman is subjected to sexual harassment and verbal intimidation by the military officers, apparently the protectors and guarantors of the state. Further physical abuse of the military regime comes to surface when one of the officers places his hand on the bottom of Young Woman, and threatens her freedom and personality, thus reducing her to “a slab of meat” (Prentice 1994: 287) and a sex object through repeated obscene references to her sexuality: “Intellectual arses wobble the best” (25). It appears that her education, her intelligence, and her knowledge do not count for much in this military regime; oppositional voices are seen simply as “shithouses” (21), “a pile of shit” (31) by these elements of the state power. With these swear-words Pinter explores the fact that such ugly expressions and obscene language have become the language of the authorities. However, the irony is that although the representatives of this brutal regime are capable of applying heavy-handed physical power and physical violence to those “enemies of the State” (21), they use words, obscene language, bad language; they use their tongue, which proves to be more effective than using truncheon or any other means to crush the opponents of the state. Strangely enough, the ugliness of the language serves the purpose of these authoritarian figures better than resorting to physical violence in the process of silencing their opponents. Despite the fact that Young Woman is experiencing unendurable circumstances in Mountain Language, she dares to stand up to the authoritarian power structures. She protests the arbitrary change of the prison regulations and vigorously reacts to the news that she can only see her imprisoned husband and can get information about him from a bloke “who comes into the office every Tuesday week, except when it rains. He’s right on the top of his chosen subject. Give him a tinkle one of these days and he’ll see you all right. His name is Dokes. Joseph Dokes” (41). Angered and dismayed by these superficial remarks, Young Woman makes her strongest protest “by apparently adopting the mind-set of those in power” (Batty 2001, 109). Staring directly at her torturer’s eyes and hissing the sarcastic questions at him in the most pointed of ways, Young Woman uses equally the most horrific offensive four-letter words as a verb: YOUNG WOMAN Can I fuck him? If I fuck him, will everything be all right? ” (41) In her courageous act of articulating ‘f’ words and her resistance to and protest against authoritarian postures, Young Woman “seems to have reversed, if only for a moment, the valence of her subjection: now, she can act; she can create the possibility of her own happiness, which quite clearly includes the release of her husband” (Watt 2009: 51). In her tem- Ibrahim Yerebakan 164 porary defiance of authority by using the words of her torturers, Young Woman, nonetheless, cuts through the texture of the humiliation and verbal and physical abuse of the authoritarian power structures. In her articulation of anger with ‘f’ words, Young Woman dares to place herself as the subject rather than the object of the action. Of course, Young Woman is not really going to do what she articulates. However, in her utterance of four-letter words, she simply means that this is the only language that is comprehensible to those repressive state apparatuses; this is the only way of standing up to authoritarian power, which imposes linguistic oppression on its own citizens. In an interview, Pinter provides a sharp insight into the character of Young Woman when he traces the causes of her articulation of ‘f’ words: I think the Sergeant, who has a stick which he doesn’t have to use, uses the words instead in a way. He’s using it as an adjective and she uses it as a verb. My understanding of what she’s doing is that she’s saying “This is the only practical world to inhabit, is that what you are saying? That if I do this, if I fuck this man you say can help me, then everything will be all right, will it? ...It’s a very cruel, brutal world that she’s entered into and I think she’s having a very tough time, but she despises it so thoroughly that she’s able to use that language with no trouble at all (Ford 1989: 4). In her toughness and angry defiance of the representatives of the fascist regime in equally offensive and tough words, Young Woman becomes an immediate focus of the audience’s attention. Among Pinter’s women characters, Young Woman is singled out as the most courageous and admirable figure. We invest our faith in her because of her courageous act of defiance. Pinter, who normally rarely comments on his characters, stated the following: “She’s a dignified and intelligent woman... I admire her very much” (Ford 1989: 4). Making her strongest protest verbally, Young Woman demonstrates also that her body, her husband, her relatives, her loved ones can be crushed by the oppressive regime, incapacitated by innuendos, by verbal and physical insults, but her thoughts, her intellectual side, her spirit can never be crushed and can never be invaded even by such systematic brutalisation, constant harassments and intimidations, verbal and physical assaults. In this overtly political play, Pinter leaves the impression that, unlike in any other works, explicit language is used not only by the victimizers as a means of brutalization and intimidation, but also by the victim as a very effective means of defiance and resistance against the irresistible. However, the irony is that this act of defiance produces very few positive results on behalf of the oppressed. Like Pinter’s other political works, The New World Order contains many elements of obscenity and brutality, where obscene words are used to apply verbal torture on a nameless, silenced and blindfolded victim by omnipotent torturers, Des and Lionel. These sharp-suited figures of au- Explicit Language, Radical Tone 165 thority talk threateningly about what they are going to do with their victim, engaging in a discussion as to whether the victim is a “cunt” or a “prick”: LIONEL The level of ignorance that surrounds us. I mean, this prick here - DES You called him a cunt last time. LIONEL What? DES You called him a cunt last time. Now you call him a prick. How many times do I have to tell you? You’ve got to learn to define your terms and stick to them. You can’t call him a cunt in one breath and a prick in the next. (420- 421) As in Mountain Language, where prison officers reduce their victims to a scatological level by using most disparaging and offensive expressions, in The New World Order the torturers downgrade their victim to a bestial and sexual level with such ugly terms as “Motherfucker” or “Fuckpig”(420). They further engage in yet another reductive classification of the nameless victim as “a lecturer in fucking peasant theology” (419), thus ridiculing the belief systems of peasants. Once again, it emerges that obscene language is used here to a devastating effect, a very crude tool to oppress, to demolish the voice of the voiceless. Verbal assault of an intellectual by the authoritarian forces through cruel language is a grim reminder that “there is little room for dissent in the promised new world order” (Billington 1996: 328). It also reminds us of the fact that torture is not always carried out through physical violence but through the use of obscene language and cruel images. With The New World Order, Pinter engages his audience once again with a nameless intellectual who we understand has been crushed and traumatized into silence by an invincible but recognizable power structure. However, unlike Young Woman of Mountain Language, who is able to withstand the regime’s power, this blindfolded man is unable to resist even in words, let alone in action. The only action this man can take is to remain silent; he is denied both name and speech. Unable to resist the pressure, this man has to face up to these verbal as well as physical torrents of abuse. Yet, the strange irony is that even this relentless verbal intimidation and brutal attack by these sharp-suited interrogators in a language of revulsion, verbal abuse and verbal torture becomes meaningless in the face of no opposition at all or lack of any reciprocal communication even on the very superficial level between the victimised and the victimisers. Ibrahim Yerebakan 166 It appears that strong expressions and obscene images in both Mountain Language and The New World Order pack the double punch; they represent more than simple signs. Derogating and deprecating the oppressed, these obscene words also subtly denigrate the oppressors, reduce the limit of their vocabulary to clichés, and diminish their status to a sarcastic, ludicrous level. Through these ugly expressions, Pinter tries to reveal how torturers talk and use language and how they control language. The obscene language reflects the torturers’ minds, the torturers’ crudity of thinking and the banality of their vocabulary. These torturers say all sorts of horrendous things; make horrendous verbal insults through derogatory words, however almost all of them get away with these insults. The sexually brutal and bawdy language of Pinter’s torture plays “assimilates itself into comic dinner table talk in Celebration” (Prentice 2004: 65), where women characters call one another ‘fuckpigs’ and men call each other ‘cunts’. With Celebration, Pinter’s final full-length stage play, we move from the mysterious torture chamber of The New World Order and the totalitarian dungeon of Mountain Language into the most glamorous restaurant in London. As one of the characters in the play reveals, this is “the best and the most expensive fucking restaurant in the whole of Europe” where “up to the very highest fucking standards are maintained with the utmost rigour” (24). Instead of the torturers and the uniformed interrogators of the earlier plays, we have most extravagantly and most elegantly dressed diners, apparently members of the ruling elite maintaining their bizarre existence in complete isolation from the rest of the world. What is rather peculiar about these glittering aristocrats is that they describe themselves through violent language, attitudes and swearwords. Apparently they are drunkenly enjoying a ‘fabulous’ dinner with their spouses while celebrating “a fucking wedding anniversary” (25), to use their own terms. More to the point, they subtly describe themselves as strategy consultants keeping the peace worldwide without carrying guns, but in reality they are secretly and clandestinely directing the business of money-laundering, drugs trafficking and arms trade around the world. The external appearance of these aristocrats is, in fact, a deception which conceals the reality behind the camouflage of the luxury of an exquisite restaurant setting. With this play Pinter once again returns to exposing “nouveau riche, whose vulgar ways are not obscured by their copious wealth” (Grimes 2005: 128). As the play progresses, the superficial conversations of these elites about the delights of exotic foods, ‘gold plates’, ‘hot towels’, drinks and copulation turn the Pinteresque linguistic satire into a much darker comedy. The incompatibility between the debased language of the characters and the setting of the play, ‘the best restaurant’, “takes comedy to darker corners than it has gone before” (Prentice 2004: 67). The married couples, who are also brothers and sisters, are shouting at each other, using vulgar terms such as ‘whore’, ‘prick’, etc. and yelling at each other in the Explicit Language, Radical Tone 167 rudest manner: “Get out the bloody way! You silly old cunt” (70). Recognising the woman at the next table, Lambert, who introduces himself as a strategy consultant, but whose job involves violence and force, utters the following: “You see that girl at that table? I know her. I fucked her when she was eighteen” (50). Recalling her childhood, Prue, using the language of scatology, tells the story of how her sister “could make a better sauce than the one on that plate if she pissed into it” (21). These characters do not even remember their dinner orders. ‘What did I order? Lambert asks. ‘Osso Buco’, his wife answers, which is immediately associated with ‘arsehole’ by Matt. In its most unpleasant expressions and imageries and most evocatively sensual and ugliest tone, Celebration “also has a touch of the Greek, reminding one a bit of Aristophanes at his most politically and sexually outrageous” (Burkman, in Gillen & Gale 2002: 189). The contemptible language of this play also candidly reflects how violent and brutal twenty first century society has become. Ironically, there is no physical act of violence in the play; violence is very much through offensive, ugly, hideous words and expressions rather than through action. The great paradox about the use of swears-words in Celebration is that it is women characters that articulate most of these obscene expressions rather unambiguously and aggressively, let alone central male characters. The conversation, connecting these characters with each other only superficially, symbolizes their extreme viciousness and crudity. With this particular play, Pinter’s use of vulgar expressions and “scatological language explodes into the surrounding dialogue as a kind of mental violence portending the physical violence that is located just beyond the scenic limits of the physical action” (Gordon, in Gillen & Gale 2000: 69): JULIE All mothers-in-law are like that. They love their sons. They love their boys. They don’t want their sons to be fucked by other girls. Isn’t that right? PRUE Absolutely. All mothers want their sons to be fucked by themselves. JULIE By their mothers. PRUE All mothers LAMBERT All mothers want to be fucked by their mothers. MATT Or by themselves. PRUE No, you’ve got it the wrong way round. Ibrahim Yerebakan 168 LAMBERT How’s that? MATT All mothers want to be fucked by their sons. LAMBERT Now wait a minute MATT My point is LAMBERT No my point is - how old do you have to be? JULIE To be what? LAMBERT To be fucked by your mother MATT Any age, mate. Any age. (16-17) There is no other dramatic text where Pinter uses more explicit and vulgar language and where he deploys obscene words one after another with such a disturbing and alarming frequency. Commenting on the horror, vulgarity and viciousness of the tone and the language with which these ‘gilded aristocrats’ communicate with each other, Ronald Knowles proposes that “the subtitle of the play might well be Spending and Fucking” (Knowles, in Gillen & Gale 2000: 185). When viewed together, the abundance of swear-words throughout Celebration demonstrates the mental poverty and the spiritual emptiness that pervade the lives and the drunken behaviours of this unhappy and wealthy elite. Their dialogues are bitterly comic but also disturbingly offensive. Their appallingly vulgar manners and behaviours contradict glamorous clothes, gold-plated dinner tables and luxurious restaurant setting, which can be taken as “symptom and signifier of the reductive materialism of contemporary culture” (Gordon, in Gillen & Gale 2000: 66). It is obvious that with his frequent use of bad words in the play, Pinter lampoons bitterly and satirises unequivocally the degradation and dehumanisation of these foul-mouthed souls, privileged upper class elite in their own immoral, corrupt manners, in their own degraded language, in their depraved behaviours, and bad communication with each other. In other words, the bad language in this play looks like a slap in the face for those gleaming aristocrats, who seem to be completely disconnected with the rest of society and who are totally indifferent to the realities of life. In one form or another, Pinter confronted and protested twentieth century violence around the world with violent words, and responded to Explicit Language, Radical Tone 169 the appalling state of affairs, the horrific crimes around the world with equally appalling provocative and obscene language. Pinter deliberately used every single weapon including black humour, deadly irony alongside obscenity to launch the most offensive assaults on the obscenities of the abuse of power and the terrible landscape of the twentieth century. As Billington remarks, “it was as if Pinter himself had been physically recharged by the moral duty to express his innermost feelings” (Billington 2005: n.p.). Pinter is formulating his protest in words, in obscene imageries and obscene language, which he finds more powerful than any other medium. In many instances, words can be much stronger and much harder for people to digest than the action itself. Especially in theatre, the message conveyed to the audience directly through the use of bad language and violent images seems even stronger because they are articulated explicitly and unequivocally by the live characters in full view of the audience. Pinter’s language can be profane, obscene but it works ironically and grotesquely at a more significant and higher level. Obscene language in these texts has power to challenge authority and to condemn the abuse of power. Sometimes these obscene images can become the voice of protest against authority, and sometimes they become an instrument of self-defence as with Mountain Language, and sometimes a means of expressing the author’s anger at the obscenities of the terrors of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly these images have a major impact on the audience, pushing them to question their belief-systems and responsibilities to each other. Confronted with these brutal images, the audience is left with two options; they either look away or pay attention to them. Despite the fact that the explicit use of profane images can work better in the theatre in an attempt to sharpen and to awaken the senses of the audience to the terrors of the real world, Pinter turned to poetry towards the end of his career to express his passionate opposition to an increasingly frightening ‘new world order’. In this case, poetry might have sounded to him a preferred genre, a more convenient and better form of articulating his anger, his protest, and his political outrage. Evidently, Pinter put his angry feelings into his late poetry, using hyperbolic expressions more intuitively, more powerfully and more profoundly on a cognitive level than what the audience might get from other genres. Pinter may have seen that profane and obscene language in poetry and in drama had more evocative power in itself than any other means of expression, and these obscene images can sometimes be a cheap trick, sometimes offensive, sometimes bitterly humorous, sometimes compelling, yet much stronger, more touching and harder to face up to than the action itself. As Aleks Sierz notes, since “humans are language animals, words often seem to cause more offence than the action to which they refer. Taboo words such as ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ work because we give them a magic power, Ibrahim Yerebakan 170 which makes them more than simple signs that describe real-life event or thing” (Sierz 2000: 7). It is true that Pinter’s invective against human rights abuses, against war, the US and the UK foreign policy in the Third World, his harsh satire on the authoritarian power structures and the ruling elite may not be pleasurable. Pinter’s art is that violent expressions and swear-words are stripped of all sexual and erotic connotations. The references to the word ‘fuck’ and other sexual images as such function “as intensifying epithets in the weaponry of language and finally means almost nothing at all” (Prentice 1994: 289). These brutally crude images bring into our consciousness the dark, destructive forces in us all, awakening us to the grimmest and most destructive realities of our world. These words might be obscene, but with these brutally crude and obscene images, Pinter articulates his anger at the obscenities of power, obscenities of domination, obscenities of the destruction of a great many innocent people worldwide, obscenities of the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisoners’ abuse. Pinter’s use of brutally crude language looks like “the hammering of a woodpecker’s beak against the trunk of a tree”, and “that language - hovering between idiocy and poetry, horror and comedy - was a profound response to the terrors of the 20 th century” (O’Toole 2008: n.p.). His is a language, deliberately aggressive, provocative and impossible to ignore or avoid. In spite of these violent images and the profanity of the language, Pinter’s art, his histrionic genius and his artistic creativity should not be demoted or downgraded simply to such an obscene level. Even the crude expressions are not devoid of humour, however unpleasant they taste. No matter how offensive these expressions may appear, they are bitterly humorous, one of the distinguishing qualities and artistic uniqueness of the author. Prentice suggests: Pinter’s bawdy language dramatizes and embraces human complexity through ambiguities that spill into the comically incongruous; ultimately, it explores the dangers that exist in unexamined assumptions and resultant actions. Revealed in that rarely acknowledged interface between opposite in the self, comedy lights that space where the erotic meets the destructive, desire butts up against revulsion, normalcy with nightmare, reality with the invented and the imagined (Prentice 2004: 66). Even in the language of notoriety Pinter is a writer with a complete mastery of vocabulary of disgust, “a public intellectual with unrivalled rhetorical gifts” (McCrum 2005: n.p.). As a theatre man Michael Colgan observed of him, “People see Harold as being curmudgeonly or rude, but you can’t be those things and write beautifully” (cit. in Addley 2008: n.p.). 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The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter. Cambridge: CUP. 230-245. Eyre, Richard (2008). “A fair cricketer, a good actor and a playwright of rare power and originality”. Th e Observer, 28 Dec . 2008 . [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ culture/ 2008/ dec/ 28/ harold-pinter-theatre (accessed 19 Jan. 2009). Ford, Anna (1989). “Radical Departures: An Interview with Harold Pinter”. The Listener, 27 Oct. 1989. Gordon, Robert (2000). “Celebration in Performance: the Drama of Environment”. In: Francis Gillen & Steven H. Gale (Eds.). The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 1999and 2000. Tampa: University of Tampa Press. 66-72. Grimes, Charles (2005). Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo. Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Hare, David (2005). “For once the committee has got it exactly right”. The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2005.[online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2005/ oct/ 14/ nobelprize.awardsandprize s (accessed 17 Oct. 2005). Ibrahim Yerebakan 172 Knowles, Ronald (2000). “London Report: Harold Pinter 1998: 2000”. In: Francis Gillen & Steven H. Gale (Eds.). The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 1999and 2000. Tampa: University of Tampa Press. Luckhurst, Mary (2006). “Torture in the Plays of Harold Pinter”. In: Mary Luckhurst (Ed.). A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama. Oxford: Blackwell. 358-370. Macaulay, Alastair (2008). “British Dramatist leaves a gap far greater than all of his famous pauses”. The Financial Times, 27 Dec. 2008. [online] http: / / www.ft.com/ cms/ s/ 0/ 8bd48154-d3b7-11dd-989e- 000077b07658.html#axzz3QsNq4y9q (accessed 24 Jan. 2013). McCrum, Robert. “Pause and Effect”. The Observer, 16 October 2005. [online]http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2005/ oct/ 16/ nobelprize.awards andprizes1 (accessed 10 Apr. 2005). Merritt, Susan Hollis (2008). “(Anti-)Global Pinter”. In: Francis Gillen & Steven H. Gale (Eds.). The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 2005-2008. Tampa: University of Tampa Press. 140-167. Newey, Adam (2003). “A Howl of Disapproval”. The New Statesman, 14 July 2003. O’Toole, Fintan (2008). “A writer whose dream of political theatre found a home here”. The Irish Times, 27 December 2008. Paxman, Jeremy (2002). “An Interview with Harold Pinter”. The BBC Two: Newsnight, 25 Oct. 2002. Perloff, Carey (1993). “Pinter in Rehearsal: From The Birthday Party to Mountain Language”. In: Katherine H. Burkman & John Kundert-Gibbs Pinter at Sixty. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.1-17. Philips, Robert (1982). “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with Philip Larkin”. The Paris Review. No. 84. 42-72. Pinter, Harold (1988). Mountain Language. London: Faber and Faber. Pinter, Harold (1996). The New World Order. In Harold Pinter Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber. Pinter, Harold (2000). Celebration and The Room. London: Faber and Faber. Pinter, Harold (2009). Various Voices: Sixty years of Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948- 2008. London: Faber and Faber. Pinter, Harold (2001). “Degree Speech to the University of Florence”, 10 Sept. 2001. [online] http: / / www.haroldpinter.org/ home/ florence.html (accessed 20 Oct. 2002). Pinter, Harold (2005). “Art, Truth and Politics”. The Nobel Acceptance Speech. Delivered at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm, Sweden. 7 Dec. 2005. Prentice, Penelope (1994). The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic. New York: Garland Publishing. Prentice, Penelope (2004). “Comedy and Crime: Pinter’s Primal Power”. In: Leslie Kane (Ed.). The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet. London: Routledge. 61-71. Rich, Frank (1989). “A Pinter Double Bill of Evil and Bleakness”. The New York Times, 9 Nov. 1989. [online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 1989/ 11/ 09/ theater/ review-theater-a-pinterdouble-bill-of-evil-and-bleakness.html (accessed 21 Feb. 2014). Riddell, Mary (1999). “An Interview with Harold Pinter”. [online] The New Statesman, 8 Nov. 1999. (accessed 19 Aug. 2008). Sierz, Aleks (2000). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber. Explicit Language, Radical Tone 173 Watt, Stephen (2009). “Things, Voices, Events: Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language as Testamental Text”. In: Modern Drama. Vol. 52, No. 1. 37-56. Williams, Ian (2010). “Pinter Bitter”. The Guardian, 26 Dec. 2008. [online]http: / / www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ cifamerica/ 2008/ dec/ 2 6/ pinter-theatre (accessed 20 Dec. 2010). Ibrahim Yerebakan Department of English Language and Literature Recep Tayyip Erdogan University Turkey Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! JETZT BES TELLEN! Hans Jürgen Heringer Interkulturelle Kommunikation Grundlagen und Konzepte UTB 2550 M 4., überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage 2014 256 Seiten, € 19,99 / SFr 28,00 UTB-ISBN 978-3-8252-4161-2 Probleme interkultureller Kommunikation sind im Zeitalter der Globalisierung und in der multikulturellen Gesellschaft akut. Interkulturelle Kompetenz gehört zu den Grundfertigkeiten und Schlüsselqualifikationen in der Wirtschaft, in internationalen Beziehungen, im schulischen Alltag. Heringers Standardwerk vermittelt die linguistischen Grundlagen der Interkulturellen Kommunikation und vertieft das Basiswissen: die sprachlich Dimension von Kultur, nonverbale Kommunikation und Konversation. Es bietet eine detaillierte Darstellung der Aspekte, die für erfolgreiches interkulturelles Kommunizieren wesentlich sind, und führt kritisch ein in Bedeutung und Funktionsweisen von Kulturstandards, Stereotypen und Critical Incidents. Die 4. Auflage geht verstärkt auf die Grundlagen von Sprache und Kultur sowie interkulturelle Unterschiede im Inland ein. Die Anleitung zu einem eigenen kleinen Projekt und ein aktualisiertes und erweitertes Verzeichnis der grundlegenden Literatur runden den Band ab. The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim Nick Scott This essay analyses the representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. It argues that despite the praise the novel has received for its realism, it in fact contains a large number of negative stereotypes about the Orient. These stereotypes not only serve to reinforce the idea of European superiority over the native population of India, but also reveal a key mechanism that has been used since the late eighteenth century to assert and maintain Western dominance, namely the subjection of the Orient to a form of temporal stasis. The repetition and sheer number of stereotypes in Kipling’s novel create the impression of a timeless and unchanging India, transforming its dynamic culture into an inscribed discourse, or in other words a text. The individual elements of this text can then be delineated and categorised, thereby rendering India as a clearly definable entity which can be understood and controlled in spite of its diversity. Potential sites of resistance within the novel, which can be located in the characters of Kim, the lama and Hurree Babu as well as its engagement with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, are neutralised through their absorption into this overarching discourse, which presents the Orient as a static homogeneous entity that is fundamentally inferior to its European counterpart. In his seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said (2003: 3) argues that since the late eighteenth century, European culture has sought to “manage - and even produce - the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively”. This objective is reflected in popular Western discourse, which aims at “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, 2003: 3) through the internal consistency of its representation, and has aided the formation of a hegemonic view of Oriental culture based on Western simplifications and stereotypes. This is not to say that Western writers are always conscious of AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Nick Scott 176 their deception; on the contrary, they are almost certainly unaware of the role they have played in the “dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires - British, French, American - in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced” (Said, 2003: 14-15). However, they are nevertheless responsible for a conception of the Orient as a static entity with permanent characteristics that can be defined and subsequently understood. They have contributed, albeit perhaps unwittingly, to the way in which the Orient has been “contained and represented” by the dominating framework of Western society (Said 2003: 40). In this essay I argue that Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is no exception in this regard, presenting the Orient as inherently inferior to the West. My reading of Kipling’s novel thus stands in contrast to the interpretations of a number of critics who have sought to redeem Kim from the charges of racism and imperialism that have been levelled against it by Said and others. These critics can generally be subdivided into two categories: earlier critics, who praised the novel for its apparent objectivity, and more recent critics, who have acknowledged a degree of racism within the novel but argue that this is offset by the resistive potential of certain characters. I will now briefly outline the interpretations put forward by these two groups of critics before proceeding to demonstrate that they do not stand up to scrutiny and explaining why Kim should still be considered a representative example of Said’s theory of Orientalism. During the 1980s and 1990s, critics highlighted Kipling’s affectionate descriptions of India as “an enchantingly colourful, rather magical place with plenty of remarkable scenery along the Grand Trunk Road” (Bristow 1991: 196) as evidence of his appreciation of Indian culture. Others claimed that Kipling’s novel actively rejects racial stereotyping in its characterisation (McClure 1985). Indeed, there were even critics who went so far as to suggest that Kim represents as “positive, detailed and nonstereotypical portrait of the colonized that is unique in colonialist literature” (JanMohamed 1985: 78). More recently, there have been various attempts to repudiate the charges against Kipling’s novel by locating potential ‘sites of resistance’ within certain characters. Don Randall (2000), for example, interprets Kim’s occasional disappearances from St. Xavier’s to visit the lama or pursue his own schemes as evidence that he is not wholly bound to his British superiors. Others such as Matthew Fellion (2013: 905) see the lama as the main site of resistance within the novel because he stands outside of the Great Game and rejects conventional assumptions held by other characters based on notions such as caste. Still other critics argue that it is Hurree Babu who represents a challenge to the overarching Orientalist discourse of the novel. This reading of Kim is particularly popular among the Subaltern group, who have used Gayatri Spivak’s (1988) famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak? ” as an interpretive framework to The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s 177 examine narrative silences within Kipling’s novel. They conclude that although Hurree Babu does not have a voice that can be heard, the subaltern “can and does act” when he saves Kim and his companions at the end of the story (Khair 2008: 12). I shall start with a refutation of the claims put forward by earlier critics that Kim represents a non-racist or non-stereotypical portrayal of the Orient. It is true that Kipling’s novel includes positive descriptions of certain aspects of India such as the Grand Trunk Road, which he describes as a “wonderful spectacle” (Kipling 2002: 51), but it must surely be acknowledged that it also contains a large number of negative Oriental stereotypes. For example, Orientals are frequently characterised as duplicitous, in contrast to “open-spoken English folk” (Kipling 2002: 126). This opposition is referred to several times: Orientals are explicitly associated with lying when we learn that Kim can “lie like an Oriental” (Kipling 2002: 23), while the people of India are “eternally made foolish” because “the English do eternally tell the truth” (Kipling 2002: 119). This duplicity also extends to the use of money, as shown when Kim pays for train tickets and keeps one anna per rupee for himself, which is described as the “immemorial commission of Asia” (Kipling 2002: 26). Indeed, even the Westernised Hurree Babu is used to appropriating and concealing other’s possessions about his person, as we discover when he hides the packet taken from the foreign agents: “he stowed the entire trove about his body, as only Orientals can” (Kipling 2002: 232). The contrast between the European and Oriental view of temporality is perhaps even more significant. We are frequently told, for instance, that Orientals have little or no regard for time: we learn that “all hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals” (Kipling 2002: 26), and even characters in the employ of the British secret service such as Mahbub Ali possess “an Oriental’s views of the value of time” (Kipling 2002: 22). Mahbub’s retainers, too, have not yet unloaded the two trucks containing animals when Kim arrives, which is attributed to the fact that they are “natives” (Kipling, 2002: 116), and when they break camp it is done “swiftly - as Orientals understand speed - with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for things forgotten” (Kipling 2002: 121). These negative stereotypes about the Orient stand in direct opposition to the portrayal of Europeans, who are usually presented in an extremely positive light in Kipling’s novel. For example, we are told of the practiced efficiency with which the Maverick regiment sets up camp: Kim is very impressed by “the routine of a seasoned regiment pitching camp in thirty minutes”, and the end product resembles “an orderly town” (Kipling 2002: 71) as opposed to Mahbub’s “untidy camp” (Kipling 2002: 121). Similarly, Europeans are characterised by their bravery in contrast to the perceived cowardice of the local population. This bravery is explicitly attributed to their ethnic origin, as seen for example when Kim stirs at Kim Nick Scott 178 the mention of war: “where a native would have lain down, Kim’s white blood set him on his feet” (Kipling 2002: 42). This practice of connecting positive characteristics with a European origin or white ethnicity occurs frequently throughout Kim, not only in passages by the narrator. The Indian characters in the novel, too, are complicit in this form of racial distinction, as for instance when Mahbub Ali reminds Kim, “Once a Sahib, always a Sahib” (Kipling 2002: 92). Rather than presenting a nonstereotypical view of India, then, I would argue that Kipling’s novel is in fact rife with negative stereotypes about the Orient which are contrasted with positive depictions of Europeans in order to imply “European superiority over Oriental backwardness” (Said 2003: 7). Such stereotypes are, of course, not unique to Kim. As Said (2003: 31- 32) notes, the word ‘Oriental’ had acquired a number of specific connotations by the beginning of the twentieth century, to the extent that “one could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be understood”. What Kipling’s novel demonstrates, however, is not just that these stereotypes can be found in the literature of the period, but also one of the key methods by which Western superiority over the Orient was asserted and maintained. This method can be located in the different attitudes towards temporality held by Europeans and Orientals. In contrast to characters of European origin such as Kim, who is in a constant state of flux, the Oriental characters in Kipling’s novel are subjected to a form of allochronic representation which assigns them fixed characteristics based on conventional stereotypes. The Orient is portrayed in an ethnographic present that does not admit the possibility of change, but rather represents an inscribed discourse, or in other words a text. This notion of Oriental culture as a text which possesses permanent, definable characteristics is particularly apparent in the opening section of the novel. Teshoo Lama, a Tibetan Buddhist, visits the British-designed Lahore museum and is stunned by the array of Western Orientalist scholarship on display. The lama traces the life of the Buddha using the museum’s carvings, which are occasionally supplemented by the curator with books by French and German authors, and he is even able to show the lama a photograph of his own monastery. Although the lama is wellversed in the ways of Buddhism, he is clearly very impressed by the knowledge of the curator, whom he repeatedly refers to as “Fountain of Wisdom” (Kipling 2002: 11). The initial scenes of Kim thus present a clear “hierarchy of knowledge which privileges the British imperial archive and its Oriental scholarship (both textual and material) over the insufficient traditional knowledge of Tibet and China” (Towheed 2010: 12). The lama evidently has far greater practical experience of Buddhism than the curator, but this pales in comparison with the Western scholarship of the museum. Far from being a mysterious unknown, the Orient is represented as something which can be collected and catalogued, almost as if it were The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s 179 a British possession. This is precisely in accordance with the typical practice of Orientalism described by Said, which seeks to create an Orient “suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum” (Said 2003: 7). In contrast to this timeless, unchanging image of the Orient presented in Kipling’s novel, Kim himself is characterised by change. As a consequence of his familiarity with two different cultures, namely the India of his birth and the European culture inherited from his parents, he is able to move freely among different groups and change his identity almost at whim. It is this ability that makes him of such great value to the British imperial project, yet some critics have interpreted Kim’s liminal position within the novel as a potential site of resistance. Randall (2000: 12), for example, argues that his unauthorised absences from school and other clandestine activities such as becoming a Son of the Charm demonstrate a capacity in Kim “to resist, at least partially, the power that plays upon him”. Even if this capacity for resistance can be said to exist, however, it is never utilised in such a way that it represents a threat to the British interest in India. Indeed, in so far as they are aware of Kim’s misdemeanours, his superiors actually tend to be rather forgiving, and even view his actions in a positive light since they demonstrate Kim’s “resource and nerve” (Kipling 2002: 142) - two characteristics which are of vital importance within the context of the Great Game, indicative of the capacity to help preserve the British empire from external threats such as that of Russia. As a consequence, it is difficult to see how Kim can be interpreted as a site of resistance in anything more than mere potential. Instead, I would argue that the function of Kim’s character in the novel is akin to Said’s notion of the “median category” (Said 2003: 58) and thus very much a part of the process of controlling the Orient by encapsulating it within a dominating Western framework. Said (2003: 59) describes how the Orient became perceived as a “complementary opposite” of the West throughout history because certain familiar types or tropes were used in order to make it understandable to the European experience. Particularly where aspects of Oriental culture were radically different and thus seen to represent a threat, as for example Islam during the early Middle Ages, a middle ground was necessary in order to mediate this intercultural encounter and render it less threatening to the Western observer. New concepts such as Islam were portrayed as false imitations of previously-known cultural elements, in this case Christianity, thereby averting or at least reducing the fear of the novel customs of the Orient. It is precisely this role, I believe, which is fulfilled by Kim’s character in Kipling’s novel. His ability to occupy a medial position between the coloniser and the colonised, which stems from his hybrid identity as a white European born and raised in India, allows him to present the reader with an apparently inside view of Oriental culture and society while Kim Nick Scott 180 simultaneously filtering it through the lens of familiar experience in order to render it unthreatening for a European audience. There are two factors which make Kim ideally disposed to occupy this important role. The first of these is his youth: the fact that Kim is still a boy means that he is able to escape the stigma that was commonly attached to characters in Western literature who became integrated into a foreign culture. This is the case, for example, in the works of one of Kipling’s contemporaries, Joseph Conrad, who presents Kurtz as irredeemably lost after he becomes a tribal leader in Congo in Heart of Darkness. The difference in Kipling’s novel, however, is that Kim does not give up his European identity in order to become part of another culture. Rather, he is simply yet to acquire this identity, which he will later develop during his education at St. Xavier’s. As a consequence, he is able to acquire the inside knowledge of Oriental culture that is essential for his role as a cultural mediator as well as his success in the Great Game without the risk of compromising his European selfhood. The second factor is Kim’s nationality which, despite the narrator’s initial claim when Kim sits astride the Zam-Zammah, we later learn is actually Irish. This has been discussed most extensively by Tim Watson (1999), who argues that an appreciation of the contradictory position of the Irish within the British Empire is essential for an understanding of Kim. Watson shows how Kipling not only draws upon the popular tradition of likening India and Ireland in his novel, but also appropriates certain methods that were used by Irish rebels and reverses their import. The Fenian movement, which infiltrated Irish regiments of the British army during the second half of the nineteenth century, is known to have used code numbers beginning with A, B and C to designate its commanders, captains and sergeants respectively. This model is also used in Kim to refer to agents of the Great Game: Mahbub Ali is C25, his statements are corroborated by agents known as R17 and M4, and the man Kim helps to disguise on the train is E23. Watson argues that this similarity is no mere coincidence; on the contrary, the appropriation of methods used by rebels into the practices of an organisation which directly serves the interests of the British Empire is a way of representing and containing the Irish rebellion. The two figures of the coloniser and the colonised are subsumed by a single, hybrid identity, which neutralises the potential threat of the colonised. A similar process, I believe, is present in the character of Kim. As Watson (1999: 110) suggests, it is specifically Kim’s Irishness which gives him the capacity “to be a ‘native’ without being Indian, and to be a ‘Sahib’ without being English”. His hybrid identity allows him to occupy a liminal area in between two cultures - European and Oriental - which at once permits the existence of certain rogue elements within his character and yet simultaneously provides the means that can be used to contain them. As a result of his status as a fellow outsider, Kim is able to move The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s 181 freely within Indian society in a way that a pukka sahib such as Colonel Creighton will never manage. At the same time, however, any potential threat to the British interest in India is effectively neutralised by the European part of his identity, which leads to Kim working for the British secret service. His rebellious tendencies manifest themselves in various harmless ways, as discussed above, and are even considered beneficial for his role in the Great Game. Far from being a site of resistance, then, Kim in fact represents an enabling figure for the establishment and maintenance of Western dominance through his position as Said’s median category, which is made possible by both his youth and his hybrid cultural identity. The interpretations of critics such as Randall, who see in Kim a potential site of resistance, do not stand up to the scrutiny of close textual analysis combined with historical awareness of the period. The same might also be said to apply to other potential figures of resistance in the novel such as the lama, who is complicit in the British rule of India even if he is not an active part of it. Various critics have described the lama as a figure who is assumed to somehow stand outside of the Great Game, either because he is Tibetan as opposed to Indian or because his search is for religious transcendence rather than objects of material value. In a recent interpretation, for example, Matthew Fellion (2013: 905) argues that the lama “denies the existence of the categories that enable the kind of generalizing knowledge on which the Great Game depends”. As a result of his friendship with Kim, however, it should not be forgotten that the lama pays for the education which allows Kim to serve as an agent in the British secret service, and also provides him with the necessary cover through his role as the lama’s chela. As Karen Piper (2002: 53) points out, Kim’s friendship with the lama is, in reality, “nothing more than a means to absorb an object and thus own it”. He may initially appear to be outside the sphere of the Great Game, but in fact the lama unknowingly facilitates the activities of the British secret service in India, which are designed to preserve colonial rule and protect the British interest from external forces. Indeed, I would even go further than Piper in suggesting that the lama’s all-encompassing vision of “all Hind” (Kipling 2002: 239) at the end of the novel bears a striking resemblance to the ideal goal of Creighton’s colonial surveillance. For Kipling, it seems, political and religious pursuits are not separate activities with contradictory aims; on the contrary, in Kim they are shown to be mutually compatible, which lends greater authenticity to the British imperial project through the way that the lama’s search for spiritual salvation is effortlessly absorbed under the aegis of the Great Game. This “ideology of absorption”, to borrow Piper’s (2002: 53) term, is also found in other parts of Kim. One particularly notable example is the novel’s engagement with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which is presented Kim Nick Scott 182 in a very subjective manner. The Mutiny was in fact a significant historical event, which served to reinforce the division between the British imperial rulers and their colonial subjects in India. The immediate catalyst was provided by the suspicion of Hindu and Muslim soldiers that their bullets were greased either with tallow derived from beef or lard derived from pork, which they objected to on religious grounds, although it is highly likely that the Indian rebellion was also symptomatic of an underlying resentment of white Christian rule in a country comprising numerous races and cultures. In Kim, however, this tension between the coloniser and colonised does not even register. Kipling provides the reader with what appears to be an Indian perspective on the Mutiny, yet the veteran soldier who Kim and the lama meet shortly after they leave Umballa does not acknowledge any dissatisfaction within the Indian ranks. On the contrary, in fact, he suggests that the Mutiny was simply the product of “a madness” (Kipling 2002: 47) that temporarily gripped the army. This statement is significant not only because it resembles the common British rationale for events at the time, but also and more importantly because it is presented from the perspective of an Indian character. In a similar way to Kim and the lama, a potential site of resistance is taken up and absorbed by Kipling’s novel: the threat of the Indian rebels is neutralised by the fact that the Mutiny is condemned by a member of the very group that originally perpetrated it. The final site of resistance that has been identified by critics can be found in the character of Hurree Babu. Much has been made of his status as a hybrid figure within the novel, combining characteristic Oriental traits with an enthusiasm for the positivism of Herbert Spencer and aspirations to join the Royal Society (see for example Knoepflmacher 2008). His heroics at the end of the novel, where he not only saves Kim and his companions but also the British Empire in India from foreign agents, have been singled out by critics as evidence of his agency. The Subaltern group in particular has interpreted this as a potential site of resistance within the novel, demonstrating a capacity for action that might be equated to a voice within the novel (Khair 2008). Despite his usefulness to the British enterprise within the context of the Great Game, however, I would argue that Hurree Babu is first and foremost a comic figure. He represents what Homi Bhabha (1984) famously described as a “mimic man”, a native who tries to become like his colonial masters by adopting their discourse. Invariably, this attempt is only partially successful and results in an amalgamation of Western and Oriental traits. Hurree Babu is clearly a very capable man, but his imperfect imitations of Western behaviour only serve to produce the comic effect of a “grimacing stereotype of the ontologically funny native, hopelessly trying to be like us” (Said 1987: 33). The Representation of the Orient in Rudyard Kipling’s 183 Indeed, a close examination of his presentation in Kipling’s novel together with other contemporary texts reveals that his character incorporates a number of the stereotypes that had begun to attach themselves to the word Babu in the late-nineteenth century. Initially it was used as a Hindu title of respect, but by the 1880s it had become a somewhat disparaging term as we can observe in intertexts such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s The Poision Tree, where we frequently find the dismissive generic plural “Babus” (Chatterjee 1884). In a similar way, Kipling uses this plural in Kim to characterise an entire group, with Hurree Babu possessing several of its associated traits. He is described as a “fearful man” (Kipling 2002: 187), for example, which he himself attributes to the fact that he is Bengali, and the stilted form of his speech certainly appears to correspond with the stereotype of ‘babu English’, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “ornate and unidiomatic English regarded as characteristic of an Indian who has learned the language principally from books”. In light of the above analysis, I find it difficult to see how Kim can be seen as anything other than a demonstration of the practice described by Said as Orientalism. Kipling’s novel represents the Orient as a timeless, unchanging entity that is characterised by a set of permanent traits. The large number of negative stereotypes serves to subject India to a form of cultural stasis, transforming it from a dynamic country into a textual object which can be studied and subsequently controlled. This text is transmitted to the reader by means of a median category, represented by Kim, whose hybrid identity as a white European born and raised in India allows him to present an inside view of Oriental culture and society while filtering it through the lens of familiar experience. This hybrid identity has been seen by some critics as a site of resistance, but as I have shown its threat is effectively neutralised by an ideology of absorption that pervades the novel. Other potential sites of resistance such as the lama, references to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Hurree Babu are also negated in a similar way by absorbing them into the main discourse of the narrative. Consequently, I believe that the interpretations of various critics who have sought to redeem Kim from charges of racism and imperialism, either by praising the novel for its apparent objectivity or by identifying sites of resistance within certain characters and events, do not stand up to scrutiny. The novel continues to reiterate the contemporary notion of “European superiority over Oriental backwardness” that was first suggested by Edward Said (2003: 7) in his seminal work Orientalism, despite various claims to the contrary put forward by critics over the years. Kim Nick Scott 184 References Bhabha, Homi (1984). “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”. October 28. 125-133. Bristow, Joseph (1991). Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World. London: Unwin Hyman. Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra (1884). The Poison Tree: A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Fellion, Matthew (2013). “Knowing Kim, Knowing in Kim”. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 53. 897-912. JanMohamed, Abdul (1985). “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature”. Critical Inquiry 12. 58-87. Khair Tabish (2008). “Can the Subaltern Shout (and Smash? )”. World Literature Written in English 38. 7-16. Kipling, Rudyard (2002). Kim. New York: W. W. Norton. Knoepflmacher, U. C. (2008). “Kipling’s ‘Mixy’ Creatures”. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48. 923-933. McClure, John (1985). “Problematic Presence: The Colonial Other in Kipling and Conrad”. In: David Dabydeen (Ed). The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 154-67. Piper, Karen (2002). Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race and Identity. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press Randall, Don (2000). Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, Edward (1987). “Introduction”. In: Edward Said (Ed.). Kim. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 7-46. Said, Edward (2003). Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spivak, Gayatri (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak? ”. In: Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Eds.). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan. Towheed, Shafquat (2010). “Kim and the master narrative: jatakas, the Ajaib- Gehr and filling in the gaps”. In: Shafquat Towheed (Ed.). A815: Reading Guide for Block 7. Milton Keynes: Open University. Watson, Tim (1999). “Indian and Irish Unrest in Kipling’s Kim”. Essays and Studies 52. 95-113. Nick Scott English Department University of Graz AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 Rezensionen Werner Wolf ( d. in collaboration with Katharina Bantleon & Jeff Thoss), The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media. Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation (Studies in Intermediality 5). Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2011. Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff With the continuing boom of phenomena of metaand/ or self-reference in contemporary culture on both sides, the producers’ and the critics’, this essay volume is a timely book. The second of two volumes that originated from two conferences on the topic at the University of Graz, the essays collected in this book engage in the current scholarly debate on the forms and functions of metareference in a contemporary context. Following the lead of recent studies like Wilhelm Nöth’s and Nina Bishara’s Self-Reference in the Media (2007), Janine Hauthal’s and Ansgar Nünning’s Metaisierung in Literatur und anderen Medien (2007) and diverse essays and essay volumes by the editor Werner Wolf himself (e.g. Self-Reference in Literature and Music, 2010), the volume aims at finding explanations for the remarkable increase in manifestations of a ‘meta-culture’ in contemporary art and media: self-reflexive comments on, references to, or criticism of medial conventions, modes of production or reception and other kinds of media-related aspects in contemporary culture, from high art to pop. Indeed, the volume suggests that phenomena of metareference are so ubiquitous and all-encompassing in contemporary culture that, as Werner Wolf holds in his carefully crafted introduction, one could indeed speak of a ‘meta-referential turn’. According to Wolf, this turn exceeds academic discourse by far and reaches right into everyday life, where - as blockbusters like Shrek the Third and animated sitcoms like The Simpsons show - the devices that used to belong to the sphere of high art can now be found everywhere and encounter a media-trained audience. One of the merits of the present volume is that it gives plenty of evidence for the ubiquity of and quantitative increase in metareference in contemporary culture. On almost 600 pages, the contributors explore an impressive AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen E Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 186 array of artefacts that ranges from literature to visual arts, film, music and webcomics. While the biggest section is concerned with literary texts, the scope of approaches and variety of fields covered in this essay volume nevertheless leaves no doubt that metareference in contemporary culture has to be regarded as a transmedial phenomenon that both motivates and challenges current media production and reception. Another aspect that deserves accentuation is the diversity of functions that the authors assign to metareference in a contemporary context. Whereas the general idea that metareference is mainly a symptom of a “literature of exhaustion” that bids farewell to realism and self-consciously focuses on the condition of its production is not per se new, most of the essays manage to connect aspects of metareference to larger epistemological and cultural concerns. Thus, Andreas Mahler connects the topos of the writer’s block to the fundamental human condition of eccentricity and interprets it as a symptom of a heightened epistemological selfreflexivity in postmodern art of the 1960s. In her essay on fantasy fiction - a genre that is usually considered as inherently illusionist -, Sonja Klimek points to the relationship between metareference and aesthetic illusion. Her argument is that these seemingly irreconcilable aesthetic strategies have moved closer together in a postmodern age: metareference is not always antiillusionist since recipients have learned to combine media-awareness with the appreciation of aesthetic illusion. Although the essays collected in this volume explore the aesthetic, cultural and medial functions of metareference in an impressive depth and breadth, it is slightly disappointing that political aspects of metareference, or, as Dagmar Brunow has it, questions concerning the “relation between metaisation and subversion”, are largely neglected. This is, for example, the case in John Pier’s essay on metareference in William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, where the erotics of the fictional text (in the vein of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) are linked to the visual aspects of the book (they evoke a female body) without considering the gender aspect of this relationship at all. A positive example - and an essay that proves that focusing on the political significance of metareference can be very productive - is Dagmar Brunow’s essay on metareference in Black British filmmaking. Brunow successfully shows that films by John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien employ metaference in order to not only challenge dominant historiography but also to carve out spaces for identity, memory and history that would remain hidden in more traditional modes of representation. As a whole, the volume is a very informative book for anyone interested in the aesthetic, cultural and philosophic significance of current media production and reception. It points to a multiplicity of metareferential functions in contemporary media and arts without trying to homogenize or to categorize it by way of a typology. Moreover, as a kind of by-product, it takes on the worthy task of unearthing a whole body of artefacts - mainly novels - from the 1960s to the 1990s that, for various reasons, have somehow dropped off the academic and public radar. Yet, the question that immediately arises from the reading is if the abundance of metareference in contemporary culture and academic discourse justifies the claim of a ‘metareferential Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 187 turn’. This does not so much concern the omnipresence of metareference in contemporary culture (that can hardly be doubted) as the analytic and explanatory value of the term. As Wolfgang Funk justly claims, a ‘turn’ becomes interesting and significant when it - much like the linguistic turn - starts to transform the very fabric of the phenomena it describes. In his essay, he thoughtfully demonstrates this potential of the concept of metareference by connecting it to strategies of authentication in postmodern literature. As he shows with regard to Dave Egger’s novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, metareference has the power to instantiate a new authenticity in the literary text and could, therefore, offer an alternative to the relentless deferral of truthfulness and authenticity that has become regarded as the hallmark of postmodern fiction. Not all of the essays in this volume penetrate thus far into the epistemological deep structure of postmodernism. Yet, the book as a whole makes an engaging and nuanced read that will be relevant to scholars from a wide variety of fields. Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff Institut für Englische Philologie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Jochen Petzold, Sprechsituationen lyrischer Dichtung: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungstypologie (ZAA Monograph Series 14). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. André Otto Es ist nicht unangebracht, die Rezension von Jochen Petzolds Buch von hinten zu beginnen. In einer Art Nachtrag geht Petzold dort in der Zusammenfassung auf die Kritik von Jonathan Culler (2008) am jüngeren Umgang mit Dichtung ein. Culler greift vor allem die zunehmende Tendenz an, Gedichte wie narrative Texte zu behandeln und sich vornehmlich auf die Konstruktion binnenfiktionaler Sprechsituationen und die entsprechenden Ausformungen von Charakteren zu konzentrieren. Was er dabei als eine Intervention gegen die Sprechsituationsanalyse vorbringt, impliziert eine fundamentale methodische Herausforderung, in der es darum geht, wie mimetisch Lyrik zu lesen ist. Neben Angeboten der Historisierung lyriktypischen Sprechens, wie sie etwa von Jackson und Prins (1999) zu bedenken gegeben wurden, plädiert Culler wieder für eine stärkere Berücksichtigung und Einbeziehung dichterischer Ausdrucksebenen, die sich nicht dem Paradigma mimetischer Repräsenta-tion unterstellen bzw. deren Verhältnis zum binnenfiktional Repräsentierten erst zu klären wäre. Zu denken ist hier beispielsweise an das bereits von Gum- Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 188 brecht (1988) wie auch Mahler (2006: 229, Anm. 45) grundlegend kritisierte Konzept der Sekundärkodierung, bei dem dieses Verhältnis bereits hierarchisch zugunsten der mimetischen Lektüre geklärt ist. Dass Petzolds Auseinandersetzung mit Culler sehr kurz gehalten ist und nicht am Anfang steht, wo man sie systematisch erwarten könnte, kann verschiedene Gründe haben, zeigt aber die methodische Gewichtung an, die sich bereits zwischen Titel und Untertitel andeutet. Denn es geht in diesem Buch nicht primär um hermeneutisch-epistemologische Fragen. Vielmehr bedeutet der Plural „Sprechsituationen“, dass Petzold vor allem an einer differenzierenden typologischen Beschreibung interessiert ist, die wiederum im Dienste dessen steht, was der Untertitel ankündigt. Das Hauptinteresse gilt einem gattungstypologischen Zugang, der versucht, lyrische Dichtung auf der Basis des Kriteriums der Sprechsituation gattungstheoretisch auszudifferenzieren. Im Vordergrund steht dabei vor allem auch eine erneute Abgrenzung lyrischer Dichtung von Dichtung im weiteren Sinne. Die Grundthese lautet, dass sich lyrische Gedichte durch besonders gestaltete und transhistorisch mehr oder weniger invariante Sprechsituationen auszeichnen. Um diese These zu verfolgen, argumentiert Petzold im Wesentlichen in drei großen Schritten. Zunächst profiliert er auf der Basis eines Überblicks über bisherige Gattungsdiskussionen mit dem Schwerpunkt auf Lyrik, der aber so zentrale Beiträge wie etwa die Hempfers weitestgehend ausspart, die Neuartigkeit eines kognitionstheoretischen Zugangs. Sodann entwickelt Petzold das mentale Gattungsschema ‚Dichtung‘, wobei er für sich in Anspruch nimmt, erstmals die kognitive Schematheorie systematisch für die Gattungstheorie fruchtbar zu machen (vgl. 59). Dieser Teil umfasst die Kapitel eins bis vier und nimmt mehr als ein Drittel des Buches ein. In einem zweiten Schritt diskutiert Petzold sehr detaillierte Beschreibungsparadigmen für Sprechsituationen in lyrischen Texten, die sich an Kategorien der Narratologie orientieren und vor allem auf unterschiedliche Modalitäten der Sprecherpräsenz und deren Leistung für die textuell angeregte Wahrnehmungslenkung ausgerichtet sind. Der letzte Teil ist schließlich einer makroskopischen Fallstudie gewidmet, in der anhand von Palgraves Golden Treasury die These einer relativen historischen Invarianz lyrischer Sprechsituationen bei sich verän dernden Ausdrucksmitteln überprüft wird. Gleich zu Beginn legt Petzold seine theoretischen Prämissen offen. Der auch in der Narrativik in letzter Zeit immer verbreitetere kognitive Zugang muss sich auf keine größere systematische Diskussion hinsichtlich der Existenz(weisen) von Gattungen einlassen. Aufgrund seiner Zentrierung auf die Bedeutungskonstruktion des Lesers in der Interaktion mit dem Text kann Gattungshaftigkeit als immer schon rezeptionslenkend postuliert werden, insofern ihr eine heuristische Funktion zugesprochen wird. Demnach kann man gar nicht ohne Gattungserwartungen lesen. Zugleich ist mit dem Schemabegriff auch der lang diskutierte ontologische Status der Gattungen bei Petzold klar und in diesem Rahmen auch sinnvoll entschieden: „Gattung wird […]als mentales Schema verstanden, in dem Strukturen und Regeln für die Rezeption (literarischer) Texte verknüpft sind“ (5). Es wird für die Bestimmung der Gattung daher um jene Textelemente gehen, die die Lesepro- - Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 189 zesse steuern und „kognitive Prozesse auslösen“ (8). Diese sind entsprechend modellbildend transparent zu machen. Daran koppelt sich die zweite wesentliche Grundthese, dass „die Sprechsituation eine wesentliche Rolle in der Gedichtrezeption spielt und insbesondere für die Unterscheidung von Lyrik im engeren Sinn und anderen Untergattungen der Lyrik im weiteren Sinn verantwortlich ist“ (8). Auf der Basis dieses funktionalen Gattungsverständnisses lässt Petzold für die Entwicklung seines Gattungsschemas ‚Lyrik‘ verschiedene Bestimmungen der Lyrik in einem Forschungsüberblick Revue passieren, wobei er zunächst zwischen Dichtung im weiteren Sinne der Goetheschen Gattungstrias und Lyrik unterscheidet. Die Diskussion der traditionellen Definitionen der Lyrik im engeren Sinne, die sich an den Kriterien der Musikalität, der Subjektivität bzw. Emotionalität und des Redekriteriums orientieren, mündet schließlich in einer Kritik des Mehrkomponentenmodells Müller-Zettelmanns (2000). Dieses wird zwar als bisher avanciertester, aber gleichzeitig auch zu weiter Vorschlag dargestellt, da die für Petzold wichtige Unterscheidung zwischen lyrischer Dichtung und Dichtung allgemein nicht ausreichend berücksichtigt ist. Vor allem kritisiert Petzold sowohl an Müller-Zettelmann als auch an Lampings (1993) am Redekriterium orientierter Definition, die dem Petzoldschen Ansatz der Profilierung der Sprechsituation grundsätzlich näher stehen dürfte, jedoch die fehlende Berücksichtigung „der Funktion von Gattungen im System literarischer Kommunikation“ (41). Ausgehend von Wolfs (2005) Vorschlag, das in der Gattungstheorie breit akzeptierte Konzept der Wittgensteinschen Familienähnlichkeit mit der Prototypentheorie zu kombinieren, entwickelt Petzold die funktional-kognitiv ausgerichtete These, „dass ‚Gattung‘ insbesondere als mentales Konstrukt mit heuristischer Funktion aufzufassen ist“ (42). Demnach informieren Gattungen am Schnittpunkt zwischen Text- und Weltwissen den Zugang zu Texten besonders anhand unserer Erwartung typischer Merkmale, da diese den Leseprozess in der Interaktion zwischen dem, was Texte uns anbieten, und unseren aus Erfahrungen gespeisten Erwartungen steuern. Wie Petzold in gut in die Kognitionstheorie einführenden Kapiteln (bes. 3.2 & 3.4) darlegt, wird dies in der Kognitionswissenschaft als Interaktion zwischen datenorientierten bottom up- und schemagelenkten top down-Prozessen beschrieben. Eines der wesent-lichen Argumente Petzolds für die Entwicklung des Gattungsschemas ‚Lyrik‘ ist nun, dass diese Interaktion nicht nur rein textuelle Merkmale betrifft. Einerseits betont er die starke Subjektivität der jeweiligen Erwartungshaltungen und Schemata unterschiedlicher Individuen zu unterschiedlichen historischen Zeiten. Andererseits gehen in das Gattungswissen auch Aspekte ein, die sich nicht unmittelbar textuell niederschlagen. Fünf systematische Aspekte konstituieren für Petzold das Gattungsschema: Informationen zur Position im System ‚Literatur‘, zum physischen Erscheinungsbild, zur Ebene der sprachlichen Vermittlung, zur Ebene vermittelter Inhalte und zur adäquaten Rezeptionshaltung (vgl. 60). In gewisser Weise entsprechen diese den kommunikationstheoretischen Ebenen, die auf der Basis von Ansgar Nünnings (1989) Modell literarischer Kommunikation entwickelt werden (vgl. 142), um eine Definiti- Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 190 on für die Sprechsituation auszuarbeiten, die bereits prägnant in der Einleitung geliefert wird: Als Sprechsituation soll in dieser Studie die Verknüpfung aus den Fragen nach der Sprechinstanz (‚wer spricht? ‘), der Fokalisierungsinstanz, also dem Wahrnehmungs- und Bewertungszentrum im Gedicht (‚wer sieht? ‘), dem Verhältnis der Sprechinstanz zum Redegegenstand (‚eigenes oder fremdes Erleben? ‘) sowie dem Verhältnis der Sprechinstanz zum fiktionalen Sprechakt (‚Betonung oder Verschleierung der Vermitteltheit? ‘) bezeichnet werden. (3) Bevor jedoch darauf näher eingegangen wird, kondensiert sich das Gattungsschema ‚Lyrik‘ entsprechend der Aspekte in (proto-)typischen Erwartungen, wie sie Petzold am Ende des dritten Kapitels in einem Schaubild zusammenfasst. Sie reichen von der Nebenordnung der Lyrik zum Drama und der Epik über markantes Druckbild und Kürze, dominant monologisches Sprechen, Reduktion des Dargestellten sowie Emotionalität und Betonung der Sprecherperspektive bis hin zur Er-wartung und Toleranz von Schwierigkeit im Leseprozess, grammatikalischer Abweichung sowie lautlicher Überstrukturierung und Fokus-sierung auf das Sprachmaterial (vgl. 135). Leider bricht das Kapitel mitten im Satz ab, wodurch die Zusammenfassung unabgeschlossen bleibt. Methodisch bedeutet der Zugang zu solchen Gattungsschemata über prototypische Merkmalskomplexionen bzw. Lesererwartungen, dass man sich nicht auf historische Diskussionen und Beschreibungen oder metapoetische und/ oder intertextuelle Verfahren des kritischen Gattungsbezugs stützt, sondern auf statistische Verfahren. Diese fragen auch nicht nach den Brüchen oder prägenden Texten, sondern nach einer Art Mittelmaß und common sense. Denn für Typizität ist ent-scheidend, was zu bestimmten Zeiten als breiter Erwartungshorizont bei Rezipienten gelten konnte. Zumindest konstruiert Petzold die Methodik so. Als Basis dienen ihm neben statistischen Erhebungen unter verschiedenen Studentengruppen vor allem drei Anthologien, die Repräsentativität garantieren sollen, auch weil sie über akademisch orientierte Segmente hinausreichen. Völlig plausibel und erwartbar ist die Inklusion von Palgraves Golden Treasury und ihren Neuauflagen, deren tendenziöse Selektionskriterien abgesehen von der Nichtberücksichtigung narrativer und längerer Gedichte, die ganz im Interesse der Petzoldschen Lyrikdefinition sind, aber leider nur sehr knapp etwa hinsichtlich der Exklusion John Donnes in Fußnoten angedeutet werden. Überraschender sind die beiden anderen Anthologien, die jedoch in der Tat auf breiten gesellschaftlichen Konsens zielen und somit belegen wollen, was man gemeinhin unter Lyrik versteht (bereits bezüglich des Begriffsgebrauchs argumentiert Petzold mit gemeinsprachlicher Verwendung, vgl. 15). Es handelt sich um Bücher, die sich der verkaufsstrategischen Tendenz zum Ranking und zur vermeintlich partizipativen Selbstversicherung der Kanonbildung bedienen: die vom Radiosender Classic FM herausgegebene Anthologie One Hundred Favourite Poems und den Band The Top 500 Poems von William Harmon, bei denen man etwa im ersten Fall, der auf Hörerumfragen basiert, natürlich bereits nach Zielgruppen und Partizipations- und statistischen Ermittlungsverfahren fragen kann. Diese Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 191 wurden, wie Petzold in einer Fußnote zugesteht, auch ihm nicht offen gelegt (81). Harmons Buch richtet sich wiederum nach einem Index der am häufigsten anthologisierten Gedichte. Dass dies jeweils zur Selbstperpetuierung eines Kanons führt, der auf diese Weise eigentlich kaum noch befragt werden kann, ist nur die eine Seite. Typizität stellt sich jedoch als eine Kategorie der fast schon klischeehaften Verfestigung einer bestimmten Vorstellung von Lyrik heraus. Diese folgt im Wesentlichen den spätromantisch und viktorianisch gefilterten Vorlieben und Befindlichkeiten, die in ihrer Wirkmächtigkeit ein Gattungsverständnis und eine common sense-geprägte Sensibilität nach ganz bestimmten Parametern dessen einüben, was Subjektivität und die damit einhergehenden Wertvorstellungen betrifft. Diese Probleme verweisen nicht zuletzt auch auf eine methodische Grundfrage des Buches insgesamt. Denn obgleich Petzold in seiner Darstellung gattungsspezifischer Erwartungen eine Transhistorizität anstrebt, die durch die lange Tradition des Nachdenkens über die Gattung ‚Lyrik‘ ratifiziert wird, scheint seine nicht weiter begründete Dringlichkeit in der Fokussierung und Differenzierung der Lyrik im engeren Sinne gegenüber Dichtung im Allgemeinen just Prämissen zu entsprechen, wie sie sich vor allem in Palgraves Anthologie und ihren Präferenzen kondensieren. Ein entscheidendes Kriterium sowohl für die Unterscheidung lyrischer Dichtung von Dichtung allgemein als auch für die typologisch ausdifferenzierende Beschreibung der Lyrik sind für Petzold zu Recht die je unterschiedlich ausgearbeiteten Sprechsituationen. Über diese ist, entgegen Cullers Bedenken, ein kognitiver und auch didaktischer erster Zugang zu Gedichten wesentlich erleichtert, lassen sich doch daran bereits entscheidende Strukturierungen und Aussagemodalitäten ab-lesen, die sich zugleich mehr oder weniger illusionsstiftend über mentales Modellieren auf den Horizont des Lesers projizieren lassen. Ganz im Sinne dieser mentalen Modellierung legt Petzold nach der grundsätz-lichen Unterscheidung von fünf narratologischen Ebenen nach Nünning, die er allerdings für die Sprechsituationsanalyse im Wesentlichen auf drei Sphären (primäre Sprechinstanz, sekundäre Sprechinstanz, Gedichttext) reduziert (vgl. 142 f.), große Aufmerksamkeit auf die ebenfalls aus der Narratologie übernommenen Grundunterscheidungen zwischen primärer und sekundärer Sprechinstanz einerseits sowie andererseits zwischen Sprech- und Wahrnehmungsinstanz und deren Beziehung zum Sprechgegenstand. Während der Aufwand für die Unterscheidung zwischen primärer und sekundärer Sprechinstanz durchaus übertrieben erscheint, stellt die sekundäre Sprechinstanz doch einen Teil der von der primären Sprechsituation aufgerufenen fiktiven Welt dar, birgt die Differenzierung in Sprech- und Wahrnehmungsinstanz verschiedene Möglichkeiten der Sensibilisierung für die Konstruktion und Bewertung des Sprechgegenstands. Besonders hilfreich sind Petzolds detaillierte und intensive Ausführungen zur relativen Sprecherpräsenz. Hier zeichnet er verschiedene Verfahren der expliziten, aber vor allem auch impliziten Sprechersituierung nach, die über die bloße Deixis weit hinausgehen und den Blick für die raum-zeitlichen wie auch emotionalen oder wahrnehmungslogischen Positionierungen und Markierungen schärfen. So wird neben der anregenden Übertragung des narratologischen Fokalisierungsbegriffs auf Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 192 die Sprechsituationen der Lyrik auch ungewöhnliche Metaphorik als Anzeichen einer Sprecherpräsenz stark gemacht. Allerdings findet dort, wie Petzold auch anmerkt, eine Kollision zweier textueller Ebenen statt. Zu fragen ist nämlich, ob diese Metaphorik auf den Sprecher zurückzuführen ist oder auf das Gedicht. Ähnliche Zweifel betreffen Instanzen der ironischen Distanzierung des Textes von der Sprechinstanz oder grundsätzlich der Verschleierung der Sprechinstanz. Zwar geht Petzold vielfach auf diese Probleme ein, doch zeigt sich hier ein grundlegender methodischer Nachteil, der unter anderem die Kritik Cullers wieder ins Spiel bringt. Denn so sinnvoll der narratologisch geprägte Zugang über mentales Modellieren imaginär auszuarbeitender Sprechsituationen für einen Einstieg in Lyrik gerade auch für unerfahrenere Gedichtleser und Studienanfänger ist, scheint er doch einem Mimetismus unterworfen, der der Komplexität poetischer Textualität kaum gerecht wird. Dies zeigt sich nicht zuletzt am Problem des Verhältnisses der unterschiedlichen textuellen Ebenen zueinander. Während etwa Horst Weich bereits in seiner Arbeit zu Parisgedichten der Moderne (1998) ein Modell für die Analyse poetischer Sprechsituationen entwickelt hat, das diese ganz wesentlich in ein Verhältnis zu den anderen poetischen Ausdrucksebenen stellt, und Mahler (2006) ebenso in seinem pragmasemiotischen Ansatz von einer Textkonstitution ausgeht, die von dem komplexen Zusammenspiel der nur analytisch zu trennenden Ebenen bedingt ist, liegt Petzolds Hauptaugenmerk vorrangig auf der Sprechersituierung und damit auf einer binnenfiktional-mimetischen Kategorie, wobei weder Mahler noch Weich erwähnt werden. Darüber hinaus ist es wohl hauptsächlich dem typologischen Ansatz geschuldet, dass die kurzen Beispielanalysen Petzolds in erster Linie auf das Aufspüren unterschiedlicher Grade der Markiertheit einer fiktionalen Sprechsituation ausgerichtet sind. Dabei wäre es vor allem im Rahmen zu historisierender Poetiken interessant, sich über die Funktion mehr oder weniger ausgearbeiteter Sprechsituationen einerseits Gedanken zu machen und dadurch womöglich auf Erkenntnisse hinsichtlich der Konzeptualisierung von Subjektivität, der Macht der Sprache oder unterschiedlichen epistemologisch bedingten Weltkonstitutionen andererseits abzuzielen. Für diese wäre etwa die gezielte Unmarkiertheit einer konkreten Sprechsituation von großer Bedeutung. Zwar fielen derartige Texte womöglich nicht mehr in den engeren Bereich der Lyrik, doch scheint sich hier eben ein weitgehend zirkuläres Argument zu schließen, was man wiederum über die historische Differenzierung zwischen Lyrik im engeren und Dichtung im weiteren Sinne aufgreifen könnte. Der letzte Teil des Buches, die Fallstudie, scheint in gewisser Hinsicht genau darauf abzuzielen, insofern hier die Frage der Histori-sierung im Raum steht. Anhand von Palgraves Golden Treasury untersucht Petzold, ob sich die lyrischen Sprechsituationen über die in der Anthologie abgedeckten Zeiträume wesentlich verändert haben. Wieder geht er dabei überaus statistisch vor, indem er für einzelne Epochen besonders typische Gedichte über die Nähe zu den quantitativen Durchschnittswerten auswählt, die sich nach Länge der Gedichte und Häufigkeit der Sprecher- und Adressatenmarkierungen richten. Auf diese Weise kommt er zu dem Befund, dass die Häufigkeit der Sprecher- und Adressatenmarkierungen sich historisch zwar durchaus ändert und dies Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 193 auch Ausdruck korrespondierender historischer Entwicklungen ist, die sehr schematisch skizziert werden. Im Wesentlichen bleiben die Verfahren der Sprechsituationskonstitution jedoch stabil. Es ändern sich, laut Petzold, lediglich die „literarische[n] und poetische[n] Moden, insbesondere was die rhetorische Ausgestaltung eines Gedichts betrifft“ (272). Bereits, dass hier über Rhetorik und poetische Ausdrucksformen in der Oberflächlichkeit der Moden gesprochen wird, geht entscheidend an wesentlichen Forschungserkenntnissen der letzten Jahrzehnte vorbei, die immer wieder die Rolle der Sprache in Bezug auf epistemische Formationen betonen. Doch dazu bedarf es letztlich auch eingehenderer Analysen als Petzold sie hier typologisch liefern kann. Diese beträfen dann zunächst vor allem jenes Verhältnis von Sprechinstanz zu Sprechgegenstand, das Petzold zwar mit Blick auf die Wichtigkeit der Textebene als Konterkarierung der Ebene der binnenfiktionalen Sprechsituation ausweist, deren grundlegende Bedeutsamkeit für etwa historisch-episte mologische Belange aber nicht einmal angedeutet wird. Denn was bedeutet es etwa, wenn Sprechsituationen bereits dadurch extrem instabil werden, dass die Möglichkeit einer ironischen Distanzierung in den Text eingeschrieben wird? Dergleichen Phänomene sind aber gerade nicht über Verfahren zu beschreiben, die statistisch zu ermitteln wären, sondern sind stark von historischen Kontexten und beispiels-weise der Art und Weise abhängig, wie die Wirkmächtigkeit von Sprache gedacht wurde. Leider wird dafür bei Petzold keinerlei Sensibilisierung geschaffen. Stattdessen werden etwa im systematischen Teil zur Sprechsituations-typologie immer wieder Beispiele angeführt, ohne sie auch nur kurz in irgendeiner Form zu situieren und dadurch ein differenzierteres Nachdenken über eine für die Petzoldsche Lyrikde-finition so entscheidende Kategorie wie Subjektivität und Individualität zu ermöglichen. Ein romantisches Gedicht und ein frühneuzeitlicher Text mit statistisch ähnlichen Werten hinsichtlich der Sprechermarkierung können nämlich deshalb noch nicht als auf gleiche Weise die lyrische Selbstaussprache propagierend behandelt werden, weil sie unterschiedlichen Konventionen der rhetorisch völlig anders gedachten Verfahren der Sprecherkonstitution folgen. Da dies auf der reinen Sprachoberfläche natürlich nicht sofort ersichtlich ist, sind Petzolds Analysemethoden gerade für die Einführung in die Lyrikanalyse, auf die das Buch im Wesentlichen zu zielen scheint und für die es sonst gute Ansätze bietet, durchaus gefährlich. Um dagegen die systematischen Typologisierungskriterien historisch fruchtbar zu machen, müsste man gerade auf die Übergänge zwischen den analytischen Ausdrucksebenen des Textes achten, auf das Verhältnis ihrer gegenseitigen dynamischen Konstituierung, die dann auch die Kritik Cullers an der Sprechsitua-tionsanalyse produktiv integrieren könnte, statt sie mehr oder weniger auszublenden. Denn dabei käme man zu solch grundlegenden Fragen wie der nach der Rolle, die die mimetisch zu denkende binnenfiktionale Sprechsituation für das jeweilige Gedicht überhaupt spielt und in welchem Verhältnis zu den anderen Ausdrucksebenen sie steht. Wie Sprechsituation, besprochene Situation und Gedichttext interagieren und sich gegenseitig sowohl konstituieren als auch problematisieren, wird in Petzolds typologischem Ansatz letztlich ebenso wenig greifbar wie die historisch- - Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 194 epistemologischen Unterschiede, die sich daraus ableiten ließen und auf jene Phänomene verweisen könnten, die ein Gedicht jenseits der Mimesis an die vermeintliche Emotionalität der Sprechsituation leisten könnte. Allerdings begäbe man sich mit solchen Erkenntnisinteressen auch durchaus in Gebiete, die womöglich nicht mehr der typischen Lyrikrezeption entsprechen. Literatur Culler, Jonathan (2008). “Why Lyric? ”. PMLA 123/ 1. 201-206. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (1988). „Rhythmus und Sinn“. In: Ders./ K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Eds.). Materialität der Kommunikation. Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp. 714-729. Jackson, Virginia & Yopie Prins (1999). “Lyrical Studies”. Victorian Literature and Culture 27/ 2. 521-530. Lamping, Dieter ( 2 1993). Das lyrische Gedicht: Definitionen zu Theorie und Geschichte der Gattung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Mahler, Andreas (2006). “Towards a Pragmasemiotics of Poetry”. Poetica 38/ 3-4. 217-257. Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2000). Lyrik und Metalyrik: Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachigen Dichtkunst. Heidelberg: Winter. Nünning, Ansgar (1989). Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der erzählerischen Vermittlung: Die Funktion der Erzählinstanz in den Romanen George Eliots. Trier: WVT. Weich, Horst (1998). Paris en vers: Aspekte der Beschreibung und semantischen Fixierung von Paris in der französischen Lyrik der Moderne. Stuttgart: Steiner. Wolf, Werner (2005). “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation”. In: Müller-Zettelmann, Eva & Margarete Rubik (Eds.). Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 21-56. André Otto Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 195 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 1. König Heinrich IV. Teil 1. Englisch / Deutsch. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und kommentiert von Holger Klein (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 19048). Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2013. William Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part 2. König Heinrich IV. Teil 2. Englisch / Deutsch. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und kommentiert von Holger Klein (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 19105). Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2013. Christa Jansohn Pünktlich zum 40-jährigen Bestehen der zweisprachigen Shakespeare- Ausgabe in der Reihe ‚Reclams Universalbibliothek‘ erschienen 2013 die beiden Teile von Heinrich IV. mit einem Gesamtumfang von 1.182 Seiten für insgesamt nur € 24,60. Das Jubiläum gibt Anlass, einmal die Geschichte der Reclam-Shakespeare-Ausgaben kurz Revue passieren zu lassen, um Ziele, Erfolge und Defizite sichtbar zu machen. Bereits 1858 publizierte der Verlag eine wohlfeile zwölfbändige Shakespeare-Ausgabe, welche Reclam vom Stuttgarter Georg Wigand-Verlag (1836 ff.) übernommen hatte. 1 Wigands 37 Bändchen zu je 4 Groschen (ab 1839 je 6 Groschen), die 1838 in einem Band und 1839 in zwölf Bänden erschienen, stießen in der Kritik auf recht positive Resonanz, zumal „ihr Taschenformat“ und der „billige Preis“, ein größeres Publikum ansprach, „und Leute Shakspearn kennen lehrte, die nur auf diese Weise ihm den Eintritt gestatten.“ Zudem seien die Übertragungen besser „als die berüchtigte freye von Meyer“, denn jeder der zwölf Übersetzer „giebt den Geist, wie den Buchstaben des Dichters treu wieder, ohne wegen dieser Treue die eigene Sprache zu verändern, ohne nach veralteten, oder provinziellen Wortformen zu greifen, die nur Wenigen verständlich sind.“ 2 Dass die Übernahme dieser erfolgreichen Volksausgabe durch Reclam noch weitere Verbreitung erfuhr, zeigt, dass sie 1867 bereits in der 15. Auflage erschien und 1917 von Shakespeares Dramen 1 Vgl. hierzu die Einträge C 300, C 330, C 340 und C 530 bei Hansjürgen Blinn und Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, Shakespeare - deutsch. Bibliographie der Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen (2003). Für die Übertragung der Texte wurde nicht auf Schlegel/ Tieck zurückgegriffen, sondern der Verleger bemühte die folgenden zwölf Übersetzer: Adolph Böttger, Heinrich Döring, Alexander Fischer, Ludwig Hilsenberg, Wilhelm Lampadius, Theodor Mügge, Theodor Oelckers, Ernst Ortlepp, Leopold Petz, Karl Simrock, Ernst Susemihl, Ernst Thein. Für die Vorlagen der Umrisslithographien dienten Gemälde aus Boydellʼs Shakespeare Gallery bzw. die Illustrationen aus der von Boydell zwischen 1791 und 1805 veröffentlichten Shakespeare-Ausgabe. Je nach Aus-gabentyp wurden die Texte mit oder ohne Illustrationen angeboten. 2 Vgl. hierzu die namentlich mit ‚n‘ gekennzeichneten Besprechungen in: Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 225 (Dezember 1836), 358-360, Sp. 358 und 360, sowie Ergänzungsblätter zur Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 26 (Dezember 1837), 207-208, Sp. 208, und Ergänzungsblätter zur Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur- Zeitung 47 (Dezember 1839), 270-372. Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 196 4 Millionen verkauft waren (cf. Max 2012: 9, 33). Dazu trug sicherlich auch der weiterhin niedrig gehaltene Preis für die zwischen 1865 und 1867 erschienenen Einzelausgaben bei. In jenen Jahren wurden 25 der dort publizierten Dramen zu nur 2 Silbergroschen angeboten, ein Preis, den andere Verlage nicht unterbieten konnten. Freilich ging diese Verkaufsstrategie bereits im 19. Jahrhundert auf Kosten des Gesamtwerks, denn es wurden nur absatzstarke Dramen (und keine Gedichte) angeboten. Schon früh wurde so der Verlag aufgrund seiner auch heute noch praktizierten und überaus erfolgreichen Preispolitik Marktführer im Bereich erschwinglicher Klassikerausgaben, die wissenschaftliche Qualität zum niedrigen Preis anboten. Die Gesamtauflage der seit 1858 verkauften Shakespeare-Ausgaben liegt bei über 17 Millionen, darunter alleine 2 Millionen verkaufte Macbeth-Bändchen (cf. online 1). Als 1970 die verschiedenen farbigen Reihen (u. a. Gelb [einsprachige Ausgabe], Orange [zweisprachig], Rot [fremdsprachig]) auf den Markt kamen, war es vor allem der Bochumer Anglist Ulrich Suerbaum mit seinen Mitarbeiter/ innen (Raimund Borgmeier, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Dieter Wessels u.a.), die zwischen 1973 und 1978 pro Jahr zirka zwei bis vier Dramen in der orangen, zweisprachigen Reihe publizierten. Bis 1993 folgten in größeren Abständen weitere Ausgaben, während die früheren meist unrevidiert nachgedruckt wurden: So wurde zum Beispiel die 1973 publizierte King Lear-Ausgabe 1980, 1983, 1985, 1989, 1992, 1994 unverändert aufgelegt, bei anderen Ausgaben wurden die Nachdrucke zumindest bibliographisch auf den neuesten Stand gebracht. Somit werden neuere Entwicklungen bei den in die Jahre gekommenen Reclam-Bändchen gar nicht bzw. kaum berücksichtigt, was vor allem bei der 1974 erschienenen Sonett-Ausgabe mit ausgewählten deutschen Versübersetzungen aus den Jahren 1820 bis 1959 besonders schmerzlich ist. Auch hier wurde die Ausgabe 2003 lediglich bibliographisch ergänzt, während das längst überholte Nachwort zu „Shakespeares Sonetten in Deutschland“ unangetastet blieb, so dass die heutigen Leser/ innen mit Rolf-Dietrich Keils Übersetzungen aus dem Jahr 1959 die ‚aktuellsten‘ erhält. An der Zahl der Nachdrucke erkennt man sogleich auch die eindeutigen Bestseller der Reihe. Dies sind: 1. Macbeth. 1983; 1987, 1989, 1990 (Nachdrucke); 1993, 1995 (bibliogr. erg. Ausg. 1983); 1996, 2011, 2012 (bibliogr. erg. Ausg.). Engl./ Dt. Hrsg. u. Übers.: Rojahn-Deyk, Barbara. 224 S., € 6,00. 2. The Merchant of Venice - Der Kaufmann von Venedig. 1975; 1979, 1987, 1985, 1989, 1992, 1995 (Nachdrucke); 2006 (bibliogr. erg. Ausg.); 2012 (Nachdruck der bibliogr. erg. Ausg. 2006); Engl./ Dt. Hrsg., Übers. u. Komm.: Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara. 224 S., € 6,60. 3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Ein Sommernachtstraum. 1975; 1982, 1985 (Nachdrucke); 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995 (bibliogr. erg. Ausg.; jeweils Nachdrucke der vorherigen); 2012 (bibliogr. erg. Ausg.). Engl./ Dt. Hrsg. u. Übers.: Franke, Wolfgang. 223 S., € 6,00. Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 197 4. Romeo and Juliet - Romeo und Julia. 1979; 1986, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1995, 2009, 2012 (bibl. erg. Ausg.). Engl./ Dt. Übers. u. Hrsg.: Geisen, Herbert. 341 S., € 7,80. Demgegenüber wird man vermutlich auf folgende 16 Dramen (sowie auf Rape of Lucrece und A Lover’s Complaint) in der Orangen Reihe verzichten müssen, da der Reclam-Verlag scheinbar von Anfang an keine vollständige Ausgabe anstrebte: 1. All’s Well That Ends Well - Ende gut, alles gut 2. Coriolanus - Coriolan 3. Cymbeline 4. Henry VIII 5. King Henry VI, Part I - König Heinrich VI. Teil I 6. King Henry VI, Part 2 - König Heinrich VI. Teil II 7. King Henry VI, Part 3 - König Heinrich VI. Teil III 8. King John - König Johann 9. Love’s Labour’s Lost - Verlorene Liebesmühe 10. Measure for Measure - Maß für Maß 11. The Merry Wives of Windsor - Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor 12. Pericles, Prince of Tyre - Pericles, Fürst von Tyrus 13. The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Die zwei Herren aus Verona 14. The Two Noble Kinsmen - die beiden edlen Vettern 15. Timon of Athens - Timon von Athen 16. Troilus and Cressida - Troilus und Cressida Bis auf das Vorwort von Ulrich Suerbaum in der King Lear-Ausgabe (1973) erfahren die Leser/ innen nichts über die Konzeption der Reihe; auch fehlt ein Reihenherausgeber, so dass offensichtlich die Verantwortung ganz bei den jeweiligen Bearbeitenden bzw. beim Verlagslektorat zu liegen scheint. Auch das offenbar programmatische Vorwort von Suerbaum wird in den einzelnen Ausgaben nicht nachgedruckt, obgleich es auf einige wichtige methodische Überlegungen verweist. Man ging, so schreibt Suerbaum, bei der Arbeit von der Prämisse aus, „daß sich die Alleinherrschaft einer einzigen Übersetzungsmethode überlebt hat und daß der Spielraum der methodischen Ansätze verbreitert werden muß. […] im Wechsel des Übersetzungsverfahrens [ist] das beste Mittel gesehen, aus der Einflußsphäre der Schlegel-Tieck- Übersetzung auszubrechen. […] Als Sprachmaterial diente das Deutsch der Gegenwart, und zwar ohne Ausschluß bestimmter lexikalischer Register wie Fremdwörter und umgangssprachlicher Ausdrücke.“ (1. Auflage, 1973, S. 7-8) Weitere methodische Vorgehensweisen hinsichtlich des Kommentarteils und des Nachwortes wurden nicht gegeben. In den meisten Reclam-Ausgaben sind diese sehr knapp gehalten und richten sich offensichtlich - wie auch der Reihenname ‚Reclams Universalbibliothek‘ suggeriert - an ein allgemeines Publikum, das von Schüler/ innen bzw. Studierenden bis hin zu gebildeten Laien Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 198 reicht. Da die Ausgaben einzeln käuflich sind, können sich die Leser/ innen ihre eigene Bibliothek zusammenstellen, die freilich von der rigorosen Auswahl der angebotenen Dramen und Gedichte bestimmt wird. Da Reclam - im Vergleich zu anderen Shakespeare-Ausgaben - von Beginn an keine Gesamtausgabe in der Universal-Bibliothek anstrebte, tragen der Verlag und auch die Absatzzahlen maßgeblich zur Kanonisierung bestimmter Shakespeare-Werke bei, ein Phänomen, welches bisher zu selten in der Rezeptionsforschung berücksichtigt wurde. Da offensichtlich nur bei den absatzstarken Bänden zumindest die Bibliographie in größeren Abständen aktualisiert wird, erhalten die Käufer/ innen zudem häufig einen veralteten Wissensstand. Parallel zu der orangen Reihe wird in der gelben weiterhin der Schlegel- Tieck-Text zusammen mit einem knappen Nachwort zur Entstehung und Erstaufführung angeboten, deren Verkaufszahlen wiederum die Auswahl der 2014 angebotenen Edition mit dem irreführenden Titel William Shakespeare. Dramen. Nach der Schlegel-Tieck-Ausgabe letzter Hand 3 in der Reihe ‚Reclam Bibliothek‘ bestimmt hat. So heißt es im Vorwort: Die hier vorgelegte Auswahl von zehn Shakespeare-Dramen enthält die, nach den Absatzzahlen der einsprachigen Einzelausgaben in Reclams Universal- Bibliothek, beim Lesepublikum beliebtesten Stücke des Autors. Trotz gewisser Unwägbarkeiten des Absatzes hofft der Verlag, damit einen verlässlichen Gradmesser für eine repräsentative Auswahl aus dem Korpus der 38 Stücke gefunden zu haben. 3 Textgrundlage für die Reclam-Teilausgabe ist: Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke (1843/ 44). Übersetzt von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Ludwig Tieck. Ausgewählt wurden: Romeo und Julia, Ein Sommernachtstraum, Der Kaufmann von Venedig, Viel Lärmen um nichts, Was ihr wollt, Hamlet, Othello, König Lear, Macbeth, Der Sturm. Damit stimmen einige Dramen mit dem Klassikprogramm aus dem 19. Jahrhundert überein, wo 1868 der Reclam-Verlag mit insgesamt 40 Werken (meist aus der deutschen Literatur) ein kanonisches Bildungsprogramm realisierte. Unter diesen befanden sich auch neun Shakespeare-Werke, wovon insgesamt sechs wiederum mit der Auswahl von 2014 übereinstimmen. Diese sechs reflektieren auch die meist gespielten Stücke Shakespeares auf der deutschen Bühne. Anders ist indes die starke Konzentration auf die Tragödien innerhalb der 40 Titel von 1868, während man 2014 eine ausgeglichene Mischung aus Komödien und Tragödien anstrebte. Aufschlussreich ist zudem, wie man in regelmäßigen Abständen die 9 Titel unter die 40 ‚deutschen Klassiker‘ einfügte, wodurch Shakespeare innerhalb der deutschen Nationalliteratur solide verankert werden konnte. Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 199 Zum deutschen Kanon und Bildungsgut gehörten demnach zwei Komödien und sieben Tragödien, und zwar: Romeo und Julia (Bd. 5), Julius Caesar (Bd. 9), König Lear (Bd. 13), Macbeth (Bd. 17), Othello (Bd. 21), Die Kunst eine böse Sieben zu zähmen (Bd. 6), Hamlet (Bd. 31), Der Kaufmann von Venedig (Bd. 35) und Antonius und Cleopatra (Bd. 39) (cf. Kampmann 2011: 209-10). Welche Rolle dabei der Reclam-Verlag als Shakespeare-Lieferant für die deutschen Schulen und Universitäten spielt(e), wäre eine eigene Untersuchung wert und kann hier nur als Forschungsdesiderat genannt werden. Bei einer möglichen Analyse müsste schließlich auch die Fremdsprachenreihe (Rote Reihe) berücksichtigt werden, die Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello und The Sonnets im Original mit Übersetzungen schwieriger Wörter am Fuß jeder Seite, Nachwort und Literaturhinweisen sowohl als Taschenbuch-Ausgabe als auch als E-Book für jeweils zirka € 4,80 und 6,00 anbietet. Ebenso wichtig ist die Tatsache, dass seit dem 19. Jahrhundert im Verlagsprogramm die Historien kaum bzw. eine sehr untergeordnete Rolle spielen und nicht unter die ‚Top Ten‘ der deutschen Shakespeare-Klassiker gelangen. Auch die Orange Reihe hat sie bisher kaum berücksichtigt: Hier fanden sich bisher nur die 1978 publizierten und mehrfach nachgedruckten Ausgaben von Heinrich V. und Richard III. Ob in Zukunft der Absatz der beiden Teile von Heinrich IV. günstiger sein wird, wird die Zukunft zeigen. Nach Holger Kleins 395-seitiger Much Ado About Nothing - Viel Lärm um nichts- Ausgabe sind dies im Übrigen die ersten neuen Reclam-Ausgaben seit 1993 in der Universal-Reihe, rechnet man die Venus und Adonis-Ausgabe (2003), die keine neue Übersetzung bietet, nicht mit. Alle anderen, derzeit auf dem Markt angebotenen, sind Editionen aus dem letzten Jahrhundert. Holger Klein, seit Jahren unermüdlich in der wissenschaftlichen Kommentierung, Edition und Übersetzung Shakespeares für die deutschsprachige Leser/ innenschaft bemüht, legt nach einer anspruchsvollen zweibändigen Hamlet-Edition (1984, rev. Ausgabe 2014) und einer kaum weniger gründlichen Ausgabe von Much Ado About Nothing (1993, Nachdruck 1995), eine neue Fassung der beiden Teile von Henry IV vor, die alle charakteristischen Merkmale der beiden vorausgegangenen Editionen aufweist und damit nochmals der ansonsten sehr viel weniger ambitionierten zweisprachigen Reclam-Reihe eine neue Folge zusetzt. Ihrem Anspruch nach könnte man Kleins Edition eher als Parallelprojekt neben der unter dem Patronat der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft erschienenen und von einem deutschsprachigen Herausgeber/ innenteam betreuten ‚Studienausgabe‘ beschreiben, von der seit 1977 Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 200 bis auf zehn Dramen alle Werke vorliegen, 4 darunter auch ein zweibändiger Hamlet (2006) und seit 2010 der erste Teil von Henry IV (2. verbesserte Auflage 2013), welcher für € 19,50 erhältlich ist. Ein Vergleich der beiden Henry IV-Ausgaben böte sich an, ist aber wegen der Unterschiedlichkeit der Darstellungsmethoden schwierig durchzuführen. Auch ein Vergleich der beiden deutschen Versionen liefe wohl allenfalls auf persönliche Geschmackseindrücke hinaus, um sich bei grundsätzlich ähnlicher Zielsetzung nicht mit einseitigen und ungerechten Zufallsbeobachtungen aufzuhalten. Nach verschiedenen Stichproben zu urteilen, haben beide Übersetzer ausgesprochen gewissenhaft gearbeitet. Wesentlich auffälliger sind die inhaltlichen und methodischen Unterschiede: So steht der übersichtlichen, klar gegliederten und anschaulichen Einleitung der Studienausgabe die deutlich ehrgeizigere, auf möglichste Vollständigkeit bedachte, leider oft recht unübersichtliche und gerade dadurch schwerer zugängliche Diskussion der beiden Dramen mit 165 Seiten und 477 Fußnoten gegenüber. Im ersten Teil kommt dazu außerdem noch ein ebenso umfassender Anhang mit Informationen zur ‚Textgrundlage‘ (S. 449-472), zur Textgestalt des englischen und des deutschen Textes sowie zum Kritischen Apparat (S. 465-472); daran anschließend folgt ein Kommentarteil (S. 473- 632) zu Henry IV, Teil 1; der zu Teil 2 gehörige findet sich im 2. Band auf den Seiten 315-457. Den Abschluss bildet dort eine 91-seitige, fleißig zusammengetragene Bibliographie (S. 459-550), die freilich die wenigsten Leser/ innen für sich nutzen werden und die aufgrund der regen Publikationstätigkeit auch besonders schnell veralten wird. Man kann sich jetzt schon wünschen, dass der Verlag den Herausgeber bei einer weiteren Auflage bitten möge, dieses üppige Beiwerk kräftig zu stutzen. Dass dies durch gekonnte Bearbeitung durchaus erfolgreich geleistet werden könnte, zeigt seine 2014 überarbeitete Hamlet-Ausgabe, die nun in einer einbändigen, völlig revidierten und vor allem im Kommentarteil (S. 462-684) um etwa 60 Prozent gekürzten Ausgabe erschien. Diese Kürzungen sind m. E. notwendig und gerechtfertigt, zumal Kleins dargebotene Fülle an Informationen, Quellenangaben und bibliographischen Verweisen den mit dieser Form der Debatte weniger vertrauten Leser/ innen die Orientierung nicht leicht macht und oft sogar kontraproduktiv wirken dürfte, da der Herausgeber sich offensichtlich schwer auf wesentliche Details zu beschränken vermag. Seine Darstellung erinnert deshalb allzu oft an das 1. Buch Moses, 7.19, wo es heißt: „Und das Gewässer nahm überhand, und wuchs so sehr auf Erden, dass alle hohen Berge unter dem ganzen 4 In der englisch-deutschen Studienausgabe der Dramen Shakespeares fehlen folgende Werke: Cymbeline, Henry VIII, Henry IV (Part 2), King Henry VI (Part 2), King Henry VI (Part 3), King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Two Noble Kinsmen (Stand: 11. September 2014). (c.f. online 2). Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 201 Himmel bedeckt werden.“ Vermutlich wird die Mehrzahl wissbegieriger Leser/ innen und Shakespeare-Interessent/ innen lieber gleich zu einer englischen Ausgabe greifen, wie der ‚Arden-Edition‘ oder den Reihen des Oxford oder New Cambridge Shakespeare, wo man fast durchweg konzise und gleichzeitig ausgewogene Erläuterungen erhält. Auch die ‚Studienausgabe‘ sowie die Ausgabe im Rahmen der Gesamtübertragung von Frank Günther im ‚Ars Vivendi‘-Verlag wirken im Vergleich zu Kleins enzyklopädischen Ausgaben bescheidener und vor allem realistischer, was die Lese- und Aufnahmebereitschaft der anvisierten Leser/ innenschaft betrifft. Ein gewisser Unterschied wird auch in den jeweils angebotenen deutschen Prosa-Übersetzungen der Reclam- und Studienausgabe sichtbar: Während die Studienausgabe, getreu den ursprünglich von Ernst Leisi bestimmten Grundsätzen, in erster Linie die sprachgeschichtlich korrekten Wortbedeutungen wiedergeben will, legt Holger Klein offensichtlich auch Wert auf gefälligen Sprachstil und Sprechbarkeit. Mit berechtigtem Realismus und selbstkritischer Bescheidenheit schickt er voraus: „in einer Übersetzung sich um möglichste Genauigkeit und gleichzeitig um Klarheit, Prägnanz sowie Sprechbarkeit zu bemühen, ist ein hoffnungsloses Unterfangen. Aber man muss es versuchen, auch wenn man sich der Probleme nur zu bewusst ist.“ (Teil 1; S. 469) Dies wird bestätigt durch seinen Hinweis auf die anderen Übersetzungen, die er zu Rate zog (Schlegel, Frank Günther, Erich Fried u.a.; vgl. Teil 1, S. 471), und bei denen es ja offensichtlich nicht allein um semantische Präzision ging. Ein beliebiges Beispiel mag dies verdeutlichen. Nach der Schlacht von Shrewsbury spricht Prinz Hal seinen Bruder an: Come, brother John, full bravely hast thou fleshed Thy maiden sword. (5.4.150-1) In Schlegels Übersetzung: Komm, Bruder! Mannhaft hast du eingeweiht Dein junges Schwert. Wilfrid Harald Brauns Studienausgabe liefert dazu eine ausführliche semantische Erklärung mit einer längeren Fußnote und weiteren Belegen zum Verb fleshed; seine Übersetzung lautet: „Komm Johann, mein Bruder. Ganz tapfer hast du dein jungfräuliches Schwert Blut lecken lassen.“ Auch Klein übersetzt wörtlich, hier im Sinne von Alexander Schmidts Shakespeare-Lexikon: „Nun Bruder John, du hast dein jungfräuliches Schwert ganz tapfer ins Fleischtöten eingeführt.“ Das ist etwas weniger elegant, bemüht sich aber ebenso wie Braun um lexikalische Präzision. Ob damit der leichteren Sprechbarkeit gedient ist, muss der bzw. die Schauspieler/ in entscheiden. Wie Braun in der englisch-deutschen Studienausgabe legt auch Klein dem szenenweisen Kommentar besondere Bedeutung zu. Anders als in der Studienausgabe wird bei ihm weniger deutlich zwischen einzelnen Worterläuterungen und allgemeinem Szenenkommentar unterschieden, da der Text selbst nur mit textkritischen Verweisen auf den Seiten wiedergegeben wird, wäh- Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 202 rend der Kommentar im Anhang linguistische und allgemein interpretierende Erklärungen zusammenfasst. Aufgrund der Niedrigpreispolitik ist der Reclam-Verlag bei Shakespeare- Ausgaben sicherlich marktführend und andere Shakespeare-Großprojekte, wie die ‚Englisch-Deutsche Studienausgabe der Dramen Shakespeares‘ oder die im Ars Vivendi-Verlag betreute Neuübersetzung durch Frank Günther, haben aufgrund ihrer höheren Preise (bei oft auch höherer Qualität) kaum eine Chance, sich auf dem Markt behaupten zu können. Besonders schade ist dies bei der einzigen, derzeit geplanten neuen Gesamtausgabe der Dramen und Gedichte im Ars Vivendi-Verlag. Derzeit sind 34 Dramen erhältlich. Der Einzelpreis dieser hochwertigen, fadengehefteten Leinenbände liegt zwischen € 30,00 und € 33,00. Der Subskriptionspreis bei Abnahme aller 39 Bände, die bis zur Buchmesse 2016 vorliegen sollen, beträgt € 1.093,95 (c.f. online 3). Nicht alle werden sich diese Ausgaben leisten können oder wollen, weshalb es umso wichtiger wäre, wenn die im Reclam-Verlag Verantwortlichen endlich ein überzeugendes Gesamtkonzept für ihre wohlfeilen Shakespeare- Ausgaben entwickeln würden, welches nicht nur eine neue Prosa- Übersetzung, sondern auch gut strukturierte Ideen für den Kommentarteil, das Nachwort und die Bibliographie beinhalten sollten. Das Verlagslektorat sollten (evtl. mithilfe eines Herausgeber/ innengremiums) dafür Sorge tragen, dass der entwickelte Plan von den einzelnen Bearbeitenden auch realisiert wird. Die vorherrschende Marktpräsenz sollte hier für den Reclam-Verlag Verpflichtung und Herausforderung zugleich sein - vor allem in Zeiten alarmierenden Desinteresses an klassischen Autor/ innen. Bibliographie Blinn, Hansjürgen & Wolf Gerhard Schmidt (2003). Shakespeare - deutsch. Bibliographie der Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Ergänzungsblätter zur Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 26 (Dezember 1837). Ergänzungsblätter zur Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 47 (Dezember 1839). Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 225 (Dezember 1836). Kampmann, Elisabeth (2011). Kanon und Verlag. Zur Kanonisierungspraxis des Deutschen Taschenbuch-Verlags. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Klose, Dietrich (2014). „Zu dieser Ausgabe“. In: Dietrich Klose (Ed.). William Shakespeare. Dramen. Nach der Schlegel-Tieck-Ausgabe letzter Hand. Mit einem Nachwort von Peter von Matt (Reclam Bibliothek). Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. Max, Frank R. (2012). Der Reclam Verlag. Eine kurze Chronik. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun. [online]. (2. März 2015). http: / / www.reclam.de/ data/ media/ Der_Reclam_Verlag.pdf (11. September 2014). Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke (1843/ 44). Uebersetzt von August Wilhelm Schlegel und Ludwig Tieck. 3. Auflage. 6 Bde. Berlin: G. Reimer. Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 203 Webliographie [1] „Worte, Worte, Worte! “ (2013). boersenblatt.net. [online]. http: / / www.boersenblatt.net/ 659047/ (11. September 2014). [2] „Englisch-deutsche Studienausgabe der Dramen Shakespeares“ (n.d.) [online] http: / / www.stauffenburg.de/ asp/ reihe.asp? id=26 (11. September 2014). [3] http: / / www.arsvivendi.com/ media/ shakespeare-ga/ _html/ 001/ (11. September 2014). Christa Jansohn Lehrstuhl für Britische Kultur Universität Bamberg Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 19, no. 2 (2012): Jürgen Kamm & Bernd Lenz (Eds.), Representing Terrorism. Jürgen Kamm, Jürgen Kramer & Bernd Lenz (Eds.), Deconstructing Terrorism. 9/ 11, 7/ 7 and Contemporary Culture, Passauer Arbeiten zur Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft 11, Passau: Karl Stutz, 2013. Merle Tönnies These two collections derive from the same 2011 conference and complement each other thematically: they are linked by the parallel focus on textual (in the widest semiotic sense) responses to acts of terrorism. In addition, the editors took the useful decision not to allocate articles to one or the other volume on superficial grounds like the concrete event that is addressed or the medium used in the examples. Instead, they distinguish between the 'representation' and the 'deconstruction' of terrorism, as the volume titles announce. To start with the second case, 'deconstruction' can refer to the choice of material that deliberately opposes the standard 'meta-narrative' of terrorism and brings in new perspectives. At the same time, contributions can also themselves offer a critical view of established discourses on terrorism. In this instance, there can be a close connection to the more neutral concept of 'representation' used in the first volume. Its articles often also address the selected textual responses to terrorism critically and thereby to some extent contain a 'deconstructive' potential in the sense of the second collection. In this way, a productive continuum is created between the two publications. This is strengthened by two fundamental parallels between the volumes. Firstly, both books share the consensus of understanding the complex and controversial term 'terrorism' according to the definition advanced by Richard English (2009: 24). This theoretical basis is frequently quoted in individual articles as well and allows fruitful comparisons between the contributions of the two collections. Secondly, the two publications are held together by their Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 204 close attention to the concrete strategies through which the representations achieve their effects - the constructive side of 'deconstruction'. Visual elements play a very important role here. In this way, both books eschew the generalisations that can often be found with regard to ideologically charged topics like the present one and yield highly convincing results. Within the individual volumes, the contributions are ordered according to the different genres and media of the examples. As the editors' introduction states (121), Representing Terrorism focuses on "modern and postmodern" manifestations of terrorism, starting from the late nineteenth century onwards and leading up to the post-9/ 11 period in a total of four stages. Thus, a developmental perspective plays an additional role here. Each article focuses on a different kind of (written or visual) 'text'. Andrew Glazzard explores the connections between science and terrorism in the so-called 'dynamite fiction' of 1880s Britain. He sets the genre in the context of both actual security challenges of the time and of anxieties connected with scientific and technological advances. In another take on fiction, Michael Frank combines more 'literary' and more 'popular' approaches (Ian McEwan's Saturday, City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate and Chris Cleave's Incendiary) and examines in how far they try to counteract and/ or themselves contribute to the "politics of fear" after 9/ 11 (150). The fact that Frank defines 'fear' following Aristotle (cf. 144) introduces what will become one of the dominant leitmotifs of the two collections, namely the question in how far terrorist attacks and their impact are read and represented according to the model of classical tragedy. Birgit Neumann then moves on to film and offers a close reading of Neil Jordan's The Crying Game. The main focus is on the film's destabilisation of binary oppositions on a number of levels, particularly with regard to gender and identity. However, Neumann also includes a critical reading of these techniques, seeing them as a "decontextualising strategy" (173) which maginalises political issues. The following article by Hein Versteegen also analyses a visual medium, though one with very different genre rules - terrorism cartoons from the last forty years. Versteegen explains how they can both perpetuate and also undermine the standard political rhetoric. In comparing representations of Muslim and Irish terrorists and the strategies of othering involved, he uncovers attempts to de-historicise terrorism and depoliticise its representatives (cf. 190) which shows striking parallels to the apparently rather different example studied by Neumann. The final contribution moves towards representation through and in space(s) and addresses permanent memorials in two places (Manchester and London) that became the site of terrorist attacks. Frauke Hofmeister looks particularly at the tendency to represent the attacks as "natural disasters" (204), as the perpetrators and their motivations are ignored (cf. 210). In this way, binary oppositions between 'them' and 'us' are underscored - a direct connection to Versteegen's cartoons. Moreover, from the victims' point of view, these representations also imply a reading of the events as (fate) tragedy (although Hofmeister does not explicitly mention the term). In Deconstructing Terrorism the editors start out with a comparison between the responses to 9/ 11 in the US and 7/ 7 in Britain (cf. 12-18), thus Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 205 making clear straightaway that this collection sets out to cover a broader cultural spectrum than the first British-focused one. The temporal scope is narrowed down to the second half of the 20 th and especially the 21 st century (after the two terrorist acts singled out in the introduction). As the editors state, the volume is informed by a sense that the established conventions for narrating violence have become exhausted in this period (24) - hence the concentration on 'deconstruction'. Historical contexts are included in the analyses when necessary, and this is already the case in the very first contribution. Jürgen Kamm compares two Parliamentary documents dealing with 'terrorist' violence in Britain - 7/ 7 and the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 - and the ways in which they represent the events concerned. He juxtaposes the secure conviction in the first document about what took place and how the state triumphed over its opponents to the pervasive expressions of uncertainty in the second response. In this way, the representation of 7/ 7 is shown to have "a noticeable affinity to the genre of tragedy" (41). Vanessa Borsky's article moves to a very different cultural context - colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s - but also attached great importance to political discourse. She studies how both sides in the conflict tried to delegitimise their opponents by constructing them as the 'Other' against which the identity of the self was defined and how the term 'terrorist' was employed in these processes (71). Despite the pronounced differences in context, period and medium, the parallels especially with Versteegen's analysis in the first volume are striking. Borsky also crosses genre boundaries herself as she compares political constructions with other forms of texts, especially autobiographical narratives, revealing that the new Zimbabwean master narrative of the events is marked by exactly the same kind of binary oppositions as the old colonial discourse. Petra Grond then examines the interaction between political discourse and media language, prominently including the use to which images are put. She examines the criteria that turn some pictures (rather than others) into media "icons" (75) as well as the US government's instrumentalisation of images in the 'battle' against 'terrorism'. The use of the inclusive 'we' in a statement by Barack Obama is brought in to show how different discourses can be employed to achieve similar effects, which are again related to the construction of opposing groups. The next set of articles focuses on literary works, with the first three contributions dealing primarily with Britain and the next two with the American context. Joanna Rostek makes contemporary British drama her focal point and juxtaposes close readings of two examples to see in how far the established discursive othering of the 'terrorist' is subverted in them. Simon Stephens's Pornography is shown to go further in this respect than Robin Soane's apparently more empathetic Talking To Terrorists, while a coda at the end of the article (cf. 111-114) discovers possible ambiguities in the latter play as well. Benjamin Steinrücken then examines two novels, framing the study of how binary oppositions are (de)constructed by means of 'individualism' versus 'fundamentalism' and paying special attention to the use of narrative techniques. In this case, the overall focus is more on similarities (despite the obvious differences between the texts), as both Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 206 Clown and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist blur the seemingly clear-cut boundary between the two concepts and thereby try to reveal the ethnocentric thinking involved in many representations of 'terrorists'. Jürgen Kramer also compares two novels, Sebastian Faulks's A Week in December and the thriller The Fear Index by Robert Harris. He starts out with the thesis that the established view of novels on terrorism legitimating the existing social system (with the terrorist as the 'Other') “may no longer be true for tales of terrorism after 2001” (135). Indeed, despite their genre differences, both works are shown to mark out bankers as the "New Terrorists" (147) who threaten society and may themselves want to label anyone who opposes them a 'terrorist'. With Karsten Fitz, the focus shifts to America. There is also a close connection here to Petra Grond's reflection on media images, as the novels under consideration are shown to be preoccupied with reclaiming iconic photographs of 9/ 11 from their mediatised repetition. In this way, these texts can offer counter-narratives of the traumatic events and may achieve “a catharsis through narrativised remembrances” for their readers (166). The aspect of tragedy which resonates here is placed centre-stage again by Cyprian Piskurek. He refers the term back to Norman Mailer's distinction between absurdity and tragedy with regard to the Kennedy assassination (cf. 169) and demonstrates how novelistic representations frequently reconceive terrorism's inherent absurdity according to "the equally sad but more bearable logic of tragedy" (185). This can have a reassuring effect in the face of unsettling media images which seem too close and impossible to decode. In this way, novelistic and visual representations of 9/ 11 are linked once more. The last three articles then focus directly on visual narratives. Kathleen Starck analyses and contextualises Neil Biswas' feature film Bradford Riots, which wants to give a voice to the Asian perspective marginalised in discussions about the causes of the riots. Starck studies the techniques which the film uses to convey to its (presumably) British or at least Western audience that the responsibility for the perceived 'failure of multiculturalism' in Britain does not lie with the Asian community but with the British state itself (cf. 202). The strategies of visual narration which are uncovered offer interesting interconnections with the narratives devices examined for instance by Frank (in the other volume), Steinrücken and Pisurek. Elahe Haschemi Yekani stays with the same genre, comparing Rachid Bouchareb's London River and Christopher Morris' Four Lions with regard to their ways of representing British terrorism's apparent eruption from within British society itself. As with Starck, the narrative approach plays a central role, and Bouchareb's 'humanist' strategy ("emphasising shared humanity as a 'solution' to conflicts with" the constructed 'Other' [212]) are juxtaposed to Morris' reliance on humour. In its close relationship with the traditionally dark British humour the latter is shown to be the more effective technique in tackling "the absurdities of terrorism" (224). Lisa Peter then rounds off the volume (and to some extent brings all contributions full circle, when one recalls Glazzard's equally 'popular' topic) by dealing with TV spy thrillers after 2000. She compares an episode from the Spooks series with Britz, revealing how they work against the Rezensionen AAA Band 39 (2014) Heft 2 207 espionage thriller's traditional interest in national stability and represent 'security' as a not necessarily positive concept (cf. 242). Again, the audience's relationship with the characters is centrally important in this effect, and the article demonstrates how both thrillers disrupts 'them' and 'us' dichotomies to make it difficult for the spectators to take sides. All in all, as the overview of the individual contributions has shown, there is a high degree of coherence both within and between the two collections. They are held together by dominant leitmotifs like the notion of tragedy as well as questions of othering and how it can be disrupted. Moreover, what distinguishes all articles is the meticulous close reading of the chosen primary material, which makes it possible to observe numerous connections and parallels across genre and media boundaries. In this way, the two collections can prove inspiring and thought-provoking for readers from a wide range of disciplines - in the best cultural studies tradition. References English, Richard (2009). Terrorism. How to Respond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merle Tönnies Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Paderborn Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Rachel Falconer / Denis Renevey (ed.) Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science and Medicine Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, Vol. 28 2013, 256 Seiten, €[D] 49,00 / SFr 63,10 ISBN 978-3-8233-6820-5 This inter-disciplinary volume investigates the contiguities and connections that existed between poetic early modern periods. The aesthetic aspects of medical texts are analysed, alongside the medical expertise articulated in literary texts. Substantial common ground is discovered in the devotional, medical, and literary discourses pertaining to health and disease in these two periods. Medieval and early modern theatres are shown to have staged matter pertaining ones. Finally, the volume demonstrates how certain branches of learning, for example, marine navigation and time-measurement, were represented as forms of both art and science. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@narr.de • www.narr.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Christina Ljungberg / Mario Klarer (eds.) Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 29 2013, IV, 206 Seiten €[D] 49,00/ SFr 63,10 ISBN 978-3-8233-6829-8 looks at the tensions and disputes that pervade American culture. Focusing primarily on various structural areas of confrontation, the essays in this collection explore the diverse forms of artistic expression television, digital technologies, and advertising. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! JETZT BES TELLEN! Nicole Studer-Joho Diffusion and Change in Early Middle English Methodological and Theoretical Implications from the LAEME Corpus of Tagged Texts Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, Vol. 141 2014, XVIII, 238 Seiten Gb. €[D] 58,00 / SFR 74,70 ISBN 978-3-7720-8539-0 The present study examines the diffusion of three linguistic variables in Early Middle English with special focus on the East versus West Midlands divide, namely the reduction from four to three stems in the gradation of strong verbs, variation between Middle English <a> and <o> and the decline of the dual forms of the personal pronoun. The data is retrieved from version 2.1 of the corpus of tagged texts of the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) (Laing and Lass 2008-), in which two thirds of the 167 semi-diplomatically transcribed corpus files are localized, permitting innovative approaches to Early Middle English dialectology, such as investigations into spatial diffusion phenomena. The present study offers suggestions as to how modern diffusion models can be adjusted and applied to historical data. It also discusses the usability of LAEME for this specific purpose and develops a set of plausible hypotheses on spatial diffusion patterns in Early Middle English. At the same time, the study addresses the main issues of studying medieval manuscripts and of working with historical corpora, and it illustrates how maps prove to be a useful tool in the visual representation of linguistic change across time and space.