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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 · Heft 2 | 2020 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Allan James Linguistic layering and the play semiotics of postdramatic (and dramatic) theatre: The case of Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh ....................................................109 Andreas Mahler Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Barbara Freys Akademietheater- Inszenierung von Shakespeares Sturm.................................................................139 Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge Widening the Horizon - The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom ....................................................................................................153 Andreas Schuch Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool for Primary, Secondary and Higher Education: A Systematic Overview of its Educational Benefits, a Sample Project and Lessons Learned................................................................173 Michael Fuchs Going Where No White Man Has Gone Before: Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies......................... 197 Stefan Rabitsch Guilty Ahabs, Starbuckian Reason, and White Cetacean Contours in Outer Space: Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier ...............................217 Alwin Fill From environmental thinking to con-vironmental awareness: A personal tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (1925-2018) and his influence on ecolinguistics .....................................................................239 Rezensionen: Julia Sattler Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol (Eds.), The Fictions of American Capitalism. Working Fictions and the Economic Novel. (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics) Berlin: Springer, 2020 ............................247 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 40, 2015 ist nach AutorInnen alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / wwwgewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. Bezugspreis jährlich € 97,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 75,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft € 56,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. 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Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 A tribute to the editor for 45 years of AAA Liebe Leserinnen und Leser, als Mitherausgeber von Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik erscheint uns der vorliegende Band 45 nicht nur eine Gelegenheit zu sein, die Zeitschrift selbst zu würdigen, sondern auch Bernhard Kettemann, ihren Gründer und - man glaubt es kaum - über diesen Zeitraum ununterbrochen tätigen primus inter pares in wechselnden Herausgeberkollegien. Diese verlässliche Beständigkeit hat Dimensionen erreicht, die in editorischen Projekten des 19. Jahrhunderts vielleicht noch hie und da anzutreffen waren. Damals kam es auch vor, das wissenschaftliche Fachzeitschriften nach ihren prägenden Herausgebern benannt wurden. So firmierten die Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, die 1874 von Hermann Paul und Wilhelm Braune gegründet wurden, lange Zeit als „Pauls und Braunes Beiträge“ und werden auch heute noch oft mit dem Sigel PBB abgekürzt. Dieser fachgeschichtliche Hinweis ist natürlich kein Plädoyer für einen Wechsel von AAA zu KAA, dem sich Bernhard Kettemann aus Bescheidenheit und Rücksicht auf den Wohlklang der bestehenden Kurzform für die Zeitschrift ohnehin vehement verweigern würde, wohl aber gedacht als Hinweis auf den unermüdlichen Einsatz, den Idealismus und auch eine gewisse Leidensfähigkeit, die ein Zeitschriftenherausgeber mitbringen muss. Und das über sage und schreibe viereinhalb Jahrzehnte! Solche „Amtszeiten“ findet man heute kaum mehr in der Wissenschaft, sondern eher in feudalen Institutionen mit jahrhundertelanger Tradition - siehe die 67 Jahre der Regentschaft von Königin Elizabeth der Zweiten - oder vielleicht auch noch in den politischen Familiendynastien der USA - zum Beispiel Edward Kennedy, der mit den 46 Jahren und 292 Tagen, über die er ununterbrochen den Staat Massachusetts im US-Senat vertrat, eine Latte gelegt hat, die Bernhard demnächst „reißen“ wird. Wie Abbildung 1 zeigt, hat sich in den 45 Jahren fast alles in der Zeitschrift verändert. Das Schriftbild, der Verlag, die Produktionstechnologie und nicht zuletzt die Publikationssprache, which over the 45 years since its foundation has clearly shifted away from German and towards English. But one thing has remained constant: Bernhard Kettemann has been the editor-in-chief in fact if not in name. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Fig. 1: Cover and “Impressum” of the first issue Bernhard: let us take the opportunity to thank you for 45 years of service, for your commitment to AAA, the many thousands of hours of work you have invested, your ideas, your judgment and, not least, your sense of tact and diplomacy, which was needed on all fronts, in dealings with authors, publishers, funders and sometimes also with your fellow editors. You have made Arbeiten aus Anglistik what it is today, the only academic journal in English Studies which is based in Austria and which uniquely covers the entire field, linguistics as well as literary and cultural studies, and language didactics. Over the decades, AAA has provided a forum for numerous young scholars in Austria to publish their first papers. If the journal’s home base is in Austria, its reputation was international from early on - attracting contributions from numerous scholars from the Englishspeaking world, as would be expected in an English Studies publication, but playing an important role in international academic relations beyond that. It reached out across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War long before politicians cut the electric wire on the Austrian-Hungarian border and Berliners from the East and West scaled the Wall in 1989, and it fostered new contacts with Austria’s neighbours in the South and East afterwards. May the journal continue to prosper! A big thank you and wishing many more active years for its tireless editor! CM & ARJ Linguistic layering and the play semiotics of postdramatic (and dramatic) theatre The case of Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh Allan James The article considers the linguistic essence of postdramatic theatre by submitting its play-defining and play-realisational elements to analysis from a linguistic semiotic perspective. In doing so, it is argued that a ‘stylistics’ understanding of theatre and drama must connect directly to such characterising features and establish the linguistic structures that systematically express these dramatic and theatrical elements as ‘signs’. Since the ‘postdramatic’ is understood as a late 20th/ early 21st century set of trends in theatre production which complements but also challenges existing ‘dramatic’ practice and is characterised in relation to such, linguistic analysis must equally compare and contrast the two. In the present study, this is achieved by the further refinement of a linguistic semiotic framework of analysis for postdramatic theatre which has previously been developed for dramatic theatre (James and Gömceli 2018). The play under consideration, Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh, is chosen for the exemplification of the present analysis since it can be shown to manifest particularly explicitly both the dramatic and postdramatic of theatre practice. 1. Introduction The linguistic analysis of plays in the stylistics traditions of textual or cognitive analysis has concentrated its attention almost exclusively on the language and discourse properties of dramatic theatre, i.e. on plays which manifest the central drama-constitutive elements of characterisation, plot and setting deriving from the Aristotelian ‘ethos’, ‘mythos’ and ‘opsis’, respectively, and an orientation to his dramatic unities of action, time and place, all contributing to the further drama-defining features of the linearity of narrative development, i.e. ‘telos’, and mimesis as performance (for AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0016 Allan James 110 representative studies, cf., e.g. the monographs of Burton 1980; Herman 1995; Mandala 2007; and the shorter studies collected in Culpeper, Short and Verdonk 1998). However, at the same time there has developed in Western theatre from the late 20 th century onward a move toward verbal performance in plays bereft of controlled dialogue between characters, of a linear plot and a stable setting or series of settings, amounting to a denial of the totality of dramatic elements and unities previously stated. Theatre which does not follow dramatic conventions in this way, in which dialogues (and stage directions) as expressing the representation of a well-ordered fictional world of drama give way to the presentation of a vocalised text to an audience which bears no immediate reference to a dramatically ordered fictional world and where actors are ‘text bearers’ has been defined as postdramatic (Lehmann 2006). Prominent examples of plays exhibiting the postdramatic in different dimensions are those of British ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre (Sierz 2001), with representative individual plays analysed by Barnett (2008) and Izmir (2017). It must be noted, though, that such ‘In-Yer-Face’ plays still allow for elements of dramatic theatre to be prominent, such as character, plot and setting, if only to be problematised. Indeed, the postdramatic is not understood as signalling a total alternative to the dramatic in theatre practice, “but rather as a rupture and a beyond that continue to entertain relationships with drama and are in many ways an analysis and ‘anamnesis’ of drama” (Jürs-Munby 2006: 2, Introduction in Lehmann 2006). Following on from this, but from a linguistic perspective, the aim of the present paper is to reveal how one and the same vocal and verbal substance is employed differentially but in parallel to signal the semiotics of its dramatic and theatrical expression. In this sense, the present work relates to the earlier structural semiotic schema of Elam (2002), who distinguishes ‘dramatic’ and ‘theatrical’ subcodes of expression which employ equivalent verbal and vocal substance and structure, albeit only in relation to dramatic theatre. By contrast, and without reference to structural semiotic ‘codes’, the present intention is to establish the linguistic (paralinguistic and extralinguistic) features and the semiotics associated with the staging and performance of a play which realises both the dramatic and postdramatic of theatre. This is attempted via an extension of the linguistic stylistics model of textual analysis developed in James and Gömceli (2018) for the interpretation of dramatic discourse to that of postdramatic discourse, with additional reference to the postdramatic analysis of Gömceli (2017), which focusses on aspects of its language and physicality. Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 111 2. The linguistic challenges of postdramatic theatre 2.1. Language in postdramatic theatre As already stated above, postdramatic theatre understands its linguistic communication as in the first place that between the stage and spectators as opposed to that between the characters on stage as in dramatic theatre. In place of mimesis as the behavioural signalling force at the forefront of the actors’ performance in drama it is the ‘non-mimetic framed as if it were the mimetic’ (Carlson 2015: 593) that is produced by the performers in postdramatic theatre, the framing of the performance constituted by the theatre location itself, i.e. by an ‘ostending’ the discourse as theatre (Eco 1977: 110). This difference in the addressivity of the verbal message produced on stage leads to an ‘autonomization of language’ (“Autonomisierung der Sprache”) away from merely constituting the speech of dramatic characters to being part of ‘an autonomous theatricality’ (“eine autonome Theatralität”) (Poschmann 1997: 177). Language then becomes part of a total theatrical soundscape where “(I)nstead of a linguistic re-presentation of facts and meanings, we find a disposition and a ‘position’ of tones, tonalities, words, sentences, sounds which are not so much controlled by the meaning but exposed as a material open to manifold possibilities of understanding” (Lehmann 2007: 50) in which the physical presence of the text is the primary theatrical reality, with the “inner rhythm, the melos, the pleasure of the text reworking the signifying structure” (Lehmann 2007: 50). Thus emerges in postdramatic theatre an ‘independent auditory semiotics’ (Lehmann 2006: 91), the speech or discourse “without telos, hierarchy and causality, without fixable meaning and unity” (Lehmann 2006: 145). As these descriptions of postdramatic theatre indicate, language is seen as an equal part of the total physical display of performance, itself as vocality with its lexical and non-lexical semantics, to say the least, ambivalent to interpretation and in any case not representational of any accompanying fictional world depicted by drama. Indeed, it exists as its own physicality, and as part of a whole ‘energetic theatre’ (Lyotard 1984, after Lehmann 2006: 78) ‘presents’ as self-referentiality (Lehmann 2006: 94), as ‘auto-deixis’ (2006: 162). As much as the voice shares semiotic space with other signifying entities, physical and material, on stage, then vocality shares space with other acoustic resources such as music and staged sounds and noise(s). And in postdramatic theatre while vocality as physicality can be “presented in the form of breathing, groaning, whispering, and screaming; vocal articulation as a whole takes on a life of its own as a spatio-temporal and rhythmical tonal structure” (Kolesch 2013: 105), it can also produce its own musicality, a ‘melos’, shared or not with co-staged music and other sound effects (Bouko 2009). Allan James 112 In a general conclusion on the relationship between dramatic and postdramatic theatre, Fensham observes that “without the dramatic text with its literary devices and discursive traces, theatre approaches either dance - minus acting techniques and stagecraft - visual or performance art minus its repertoire of images” (2012: 8). In an even more reductionist conclusion on the relationship, Carlson (2015) states baldly: “(T)ake away mimesis and a narrative text and all that is left to prevent the postdramatic theatre from dissolving into the raw material of everyday life is the fact that it is presented to the audience within a theatrical or performative framework” (2015: 588). Given this acknowledgement of theatricality/ performance on the part of the audience, it is the case that, in the first instance at least, the staged world constitutes the ‘fictional’ world itself in postdramatic theatre, whereas in dramatic theatre the two are clearly separated by the audience’s acceptance of the former representing the latter. This initial assumption of equivalence between stage world and any fictional world suggested by postdramatic theatre, however, does not preclude a subsequent separation of the two in the belief that the performance must ‘stand for something’ beyond the immediate performance semiotics itself, even if the ‘something’ must be interpreted solely via the theatrical imagination of the audience. This ‘new spectatorship’ as addressees (Fensham 2012) indeed then co-create the meaning and process of the event as performative images subject to highly variable and diverse affective interpretations (even as ‘proto-dramatic narration’? ), while the addressers as ‘text bearers’ project the script in its vocality and physicality to express in the first instance the ‘emotive’ function of language (Jakobson 1960). The fact that the addressivity of text and performance is to the audience does not, however, in the practice of postdramatic theatre necessarily imply any explicit linguistic realisation of either Jakobson’s (1960) ‘conative’ or indeed ‘metalingual’ functions of language, but the language as perceived by audiences may well be interpreted as such. 2.2. A linguistics of postdramatic theatre: a first approximation A linguistic analysis of postdramatic theatre must foremostly address how the semiotics of its text and performance are systematically realised in/ via language. In comparison, it has been suggested above with regard to dramatic theatre that much linguistic analysis in the stylistics paradigm has focussed particularly on character dialogue, and such analysis has employed variously speech act theory, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and theories of turn-taking and politeness as frameworks of interpretation (cf., e.g. Burton 1980; Herman 1995; Mandala 2007). Other linguistic research has examined stage directions as well as dialogue from a reader’s cognitive processing perspective within text world theory (cf. Cruickshank and Lahey 2010), and specifically characterisation in plays has been subject to a comprehensive analysis in Culpeper (2001). From a Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 113 more semiotic point of view, it has been noted that the ‘multimodalities’ of a filmed play have been examined in McIntyre (2008), while both Aston and Savona (1991) and the above-mentioned Elam (2002) attempt a signsystem analysis of theatre text and performance of dramatic theatre, the former offering much empirical analysis of dialogue and stage directions, the latter offering a detailed theoretical framework for The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, including reference to linguistic systems expressed via the ‘cultural codes’ comprising linguistic rules, ‘pragmatic rules’, the ‘rhetorical’, the ‘paralinguistic’, the ‘dialectal’ and the ‘idiolectal’ (2002: 52). A social semiotic framework for the linguistic analysis of (literary) dramatic discourse has been established in previously mentioned James and Gömceli (2018) and this will be expanded upon further below. While both dramatic and postdramatic theatre expression avail themselves of the same verbal and vocal resources of language, i.e. the same linguistic structures and substance, they differ considerably in the realisation of their textual and performance semiotics, as indicated above. In the postdramatic dialogue is not shaped by dramatic conventions of character and plot development, but is projected rather as an audience-addressed polylogue by verbal performers in an ongoing discourse flow. Stage directions are often minimal in the script and serve to guide the physicality of the performance and materiality of the stage and no more. The play-constitutive elements of drama, i.e. characterisation, plot and setting give way to personification, message and stage scene. Returning once more to the linguistic wherewithal available to both modes of theatre with the question as to how the verbal and vocal is used to express the semiotics of the elements of postdramatic play-making just outlined, then first clues may be offered by the previously noted ‘inner rhythm’ or melos of the text, with ‘tones, tonalities, words, sentences, sounds’ exposed to different understandings and the word as ‘sonority and address’. From a viewpoint of linguistic structure this would suggest a general prominence of prosody in speech delivery and with it a prosodically marked lexis in a declamatory style of rhetorical delivery. Also the realisation of the characteristic ’emotive’ (function of) language of postdramatic theatre would suggest employment of prosodic (and paralinguistic) means of vocal expression. An important difference between the use of prosody for theatrical effect in postdramatic theatre and its use in dramatic theatre is that whereas in the latter, vocal expression is controlled (but not necessarily unemotive as such) in the service of ordered dialogue, characterisation and developing plot, in the former, vocal expression serves the moment of speaking of the performer and thus as theatrically ad hoc ‘emotive’ expression in ‘micro-events’ and is likely in comparison to be linearly inconsistent, eruptive and generally volatile in the course of the play. Linguistically, in the phonological system of language it is the prosodic level of structure that is mutable for grammatical, discourse, informational or affective (emotional and attitudinal) meaning. Thus a first conclusion in Allan James 114 the light of previous commentary might be that, with regard to the sound level of language, postdramatic theatre indeed favours prosodic and, by extension, paralinguistic means (cf. the ‘breath’, ‘groaning’ and ‘whisper’ noted by Kolesch above) for expressing the affective dynamics of theatrical meaning. Prosodic means include the systematic signifying variations of phonetic pitch, loudness and length in speech, with rhythm understood as a temporal regularity of prosodically marked words or syllables. Paralinguistic features signal affective meaning via variation of phonation types, such as breathiness, whisper, huskiness, etc., (i.e. Crystal’s ‘voice qualifiers’) and ‘voice qualifications’ such as laughter, tremolo, crying, etc. (Crystal 1969: 126-194; James 2017: 137-139). The semiotics expressed by the prosody and paralanguage is, via ‘auto-deixis’, that of the theatrical performance itself as executed by the ‘text bearers’, specifically as its vocality. As noted above, this vocality can be supplemented by extralinguistically produced sounds or noises to complete the ‘auditory semiotics’ of the play. 3. A checklist for postdramatic theatre: Linguistic implications in Disco Pigs (1996) A ‘palette of stylistic traits’ as a ‘phenomenology of postdramatic signs’ is offered in Lehmann (2006: 86-107), and while not primarily addressing language, nonetheless lends itself well to interpretation from a language perspective allowing an indication of the linguistic features and functions characteristic of postdramatic theatre. For this purpose, the items in the checklist will be introduced and assessed for their linguistic implications and evidence adduced from the script of the dramatic/ postdramatic play under consideration. A further linguistic analysis of play extracts focussing specifically on grammatical and lexical semantic structure follows in 4.1 and 4.2. below. The play Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh was premiered at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork in September 1996 and signalled his breakthrough as a playwright (and later director), joining the ranks of new generation Irish playwrights such as Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh. The play appeared as a film version in 2001. The written script as analysed here appears in Walsh (1997), while the theatre performance of the play adduced in the present analysis (especially with reference to 3.5, 3.10 and 4.1. below) is that by the Bloomsberg Theatre Ensemble of Bloomsberg, Pennsylvania, in June 2013 (YouTube video reference in bibliography). The play comprises a ‘duologue’ performed by two teenage figures, ‘Pig’ (male) and ‘Runt’ (female), employing a ‘duolect’ as ‘antilanguage’ (Halliday 1978) showing an amalgam of idiosyncratic baby-talk, slang and Cork English and containing countless word-plays, syllable, word and phrase repetitions, alliterations, assonances, interjections and expletives and trun- Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 115 cated syntax and morphology. In the script, the figures live and re-live experiences they share together and which re-define the love relationship between them during a two-day period before their joint 17 th birthdays, which is narrated largely through direct speech, with much imitation of the voices of other figures encountered in their ‘adventures’, complete with the appropriate reporting constructions and running commentary on the goings-on. The referred-to locations of their performed action are in ‘Pork City’ (Cork City), their ‘clown-town’, and environs. Even from this brief introduction to the play, it will be apparent that elements of both dramatic and postdramatic theatre may be discerned. There are indications of characters, plot and setting as characteristic of dramatic structure, whereas the duologue (as rendered in exclamatory style and urgent intensity, see further below) appears to be as much directly addressed to the audience as displayed language ostensibly conducted between the figures - an observation confirmed in Weaver (2015: 16). The countless word-plays, repetitions, mimicry, alliterations and assonances, interjections and expletives (with other paralinguistic and extralinguistic sounds) contribute further to a typically postdramatic soundscape. The checklist of characteristic traits of postdramatic theatre comprises: “parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, musicalization, visual dramaturgy, physicality, irruption of the real, situation/ event” (Lehmann 2006: 86). 3.1. Parataxis/ non-hierarchy With this is meant the equal status of the different modalities of theatre - for example, language as the dominant modality in dramatic theatre must share theatrical space with visual elements and other elements. “(D)ifferent genres are combined in a performance (dance, narrative theatre, performance, etc.); all means are employed with equal weighting; play, object and language point simultaneously in different directions of meaning”, where “the spectator of postdramatic theatre is not prompted to process the perceived instantaneously but to postpone the production of meaning (semiosis) and to store the sensory impressions with ‘evenly hovering attention’” (Lehmann 2006: 87). In Disco Pigs, although the language modality dominates as narrative and commentary, sounds, music and meta-performance enhance the theatricality of the play. Chanting to music, metadrama via mime and quotatives, intertextual miming, verbalised selfand other-reflection, auto-deixis in the use of the figures’ own nicknames together create a language referentially distal to the basic goings-on of the play’s action. Hence, performance and meta-performance are closely intertwined, narrative theatre combines with performance theatre, i.e. ‘doing’ is done as ‘telling’ and viceversa (cf. Herrero-Martin 2008). Allan James 116 In a literal interpretation of “parataxis” from a linguistic perspective, then sentence/ utterance succession is indeed overwhelmingly ‘paratactic’, i.e. simply adjacent and not related by any connecting means indicating structural ‘hierarchies’ such as, for example, syntactic subordination. 3.2. Simultaneity With “simultaneity” is meant that of signs in postdramatic theatre, where “the parcelling of perception here becomes an unavoidable experience” since “the performance often leaves open whether there exists any real connection in what is being presented simultaneously or whether this is just an external contemporaneity” (Lehmann 2006: 88). For instance, in Disco Pigs it is potentially unclear to spectators whether instances of verbal or physical other-mimicry are to be seen in connection to the figures’ auto-deictic performance as oral (life-) narrative, or simply indeed as an external contemporaneity. 3.3. Play with the density of signs “In postdramatic theatre it becomes a rule to violate the conventionalized rule and the more or less established norm of sign density. There is either too much or too little” (Lehmann 2006: 89). There is “an anaesthetic intention to make space for a dialectic of plethora and deprivation, plenitude and emptiness” (2006: 89). From a linguistic perspective, in Disco Pigs the language of the two figures manifests this dialectic between richness and poverty and there is also evidence of a formal reduction of signs via verbal repetition. The richness of the language of Pig and Runt is in the very structural idiosyncracy of their ‘duolect’ with its concentrated colloquiality. Also the shifting discourse functions it fulfils as verbatim mimicry, as reporting constructions of this direct speech, as ongoing commentary on figures, situations and events around them, as ‘conversation’ between them, even the figures’ own onomatopoeic ‘oinking’ as adding to the soundscape, all contribute to a linguistic richness, or, at least, versatility. The poverty is evidenced in the limited register variation and restricted syntactic and morphological patterning with frequent word-final phonological elision. Also the formal reduction of linguistic signs via repetition, alliteration, assonance and reduplication is highly evident throughout. Added to this, the unrelenting exclamatory identity of the utterances produced, whether as declaratives, imperatives or actual exclamations, is indicative of a pragmalinguistic poverty. Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 117 3.4. Plethora Plethora, as abundance, can result from the abandonment of the conventional form of dramatic theatre and takes the form of “a multitude of rhizomatic connections of heterogeneous elements. The division of stage time into minimal sequences, quasi-filmic ‘takes’….multiplies the data for perception” (Lehmann 2006: 90). This is indeed very evident throughout Disco Pigs, since from the initial birth scenario through off-licence through Provo bar through seaside through disco to the final scenario by the river, there are in total fifteen “quasi-filmic ‘takes’” - all as products of the figures’ verbal imagination in the approximately seventy minutes of the play’s typical duration in performance (of the twenty-six pages of the published script). 3.5. Musicalization “The consistent tendency towards a musicalization (not only of language) is an important chapter of the sign usage in postdramatic theatre” (Lehmann 2006: 91) and this is seen as a major indication of ‘the dissolution of dramatic coherence” (2006: 91). Reference has already been made in 2.1. above to the presence of music and staged sounds/ noise beyond language and in 2.2. to the melos of language itself. In Disco Pigs, true to the play’s title, music indeed is a prominent component of its soundscape cf. the stage directions in the first extract above and the subsequent stage directions ‘The music is loud’ (1997: 11), ‘Sound of a poxy dance tune is faded up’ (1997: 12), ‘Music begins’ (1997: 13), ‘PIG and RUNT watching an episode of Baywatch which we hear under music’ (1997: 19), ‘Music’ (1997: 20), ‘Music stops’ (1997: 21), ‘…..somebody singing Danny Boy” (1997: 22), ‘Be my Baby by The Ronettes comes on’ (1997: 22), ‘Music up’ (1997: 26). Whether other staged sounds or noises, which are also prominent in Disco Pigs contribute to a ‘”musicalization” of the play may be debatable, but cf. the stage directions in the first extract above and the following ‘Silence. Then we hear the sounds of babies crying’ (1997: 5), ‘Sounds of heavy breathing’ (p. 6), ‘We hear the sounds of them eating…..’ (1997: 7), ‘Sound of pissing’ (1997: 8), ‘Sounds of a quiet bar. Television can be heard’ (1997: 10), ‘Sound of a car’ (1997: 16), ‘Car sounds stop’ (1997: 17), ‘Sounds of the sea have been faded up…” (1997: 17), ‘The sound of a car horn is heard’ (1997: 18), ‘Sounds of Provo Bar faded up’ (1997: 21), ‘Sounds of extremely busy pub…” (1997: 22). The micro-events of the figures’ adventures are indeed framed by music and sounds, with the latter in part being electronically ‘faded up’, a technical innovation which itself characterises postdramatic theatre (Lehmann 2006: 92). Concerning the figures’ own producing of music, both scream the chant ‘Seventeen’ to disco/ techno music in the disco scenario itself and at a later stage ‘RUNT whistles God Save the Queen’ (1997: 10), provocatively, on their way to ‘a sleepy ol’ provo pub’. Allan James 118 A musicalisation of the language itself in postdramatic theatre has been briefly alluded to in 2.1. and 2.2. above in connection with the language use itself in plays with or without the addition of other staged sound(s) or noises. As just noted, music is in any case thematically prominent in Disco Pigs and it has been suggested that this and other sounds/ noises serve to frame its rapidly changing ‘takes’ or events. The linguistic musicality itself in the play has been succinctly summarised in Gömceli (2017) as “its privileging of ‘musicality’ over semantic meaning, which is achieved through the Cork accent and dialect with the playwright’s choice of phrases, vocabulary, grammatical and lexical items and with the peculiar arrangement of sound patterns, rhythmic structure, repetition of sounds (e.g. mainly in the form of alliteration and assonance) and of phrases in the whole text” (2017: 271). These features can all be observed throughout the play, with the specific ‘musicality’ of Cork English deriving from “its large intonational range characterised by a noticeable dip in pitch on stressed syllables” (Hickey 2008: 77). In the light of this analysis, Gömceli concludes that “(A)s a result, meaning is suspended and the spectators are led to develop the idea of “theatre as music” rather than “the role of music in theatre”. This fits the expectation in the practice of postdramatic theatre” (2017: 271). Indeed, since the language of Disco Pigs may be not unproblematic in comprehension linguistically, it affords an audience another level of perception “musically”. 3.6. Scenography, visual dramaturgy Lehmann (2006) introduces the importance of scenography thus: “As the example of musicalization shows, within the paratactical, de-hierarchized use of signs postdramatic theatre establishes the possibility of dissolving the logocentric hierarchy and assigning the dominant role to elements other than dramatic logos and language. This applies even more to the visual than to the auditory dimension. In place of a dramaturgy regulated by the text one often finds a visual dramaturgy” (2006: 93-94). In Disco Pigs, the theatrical visuality is conveyed through the imagined scenography of the rapidly changing locations of the figures’ actions and experiences. 3.7. Warmth and coldness With this Lehmann addresses the observation that with certain forms of postdramatic theatre “For an audience brought up in the tradition of textbased theatre, the ‘dethroning’ of linguistic signs and the de-psychologization that goes with it are especially hard to accept. Through the participation of living human beings, as well as the century-old fixation with moving human fortunes, the theatre possesses a certain ‘warmth’” (2006: 95). However, this hardly applies to Disco Pigs, where the human figures, although performed as behaviourally erratic and also physically violent, nonetheless Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 119 may attract a degree of human empathy through their constant struggle to define their emotional relationship with each other. 3.8. Physicality In postdramatic theatre “The body becomes the centre of the attention, not as a carrier of meaning but in its physicality and gesticulation” (Lehmann 2006: 95), presenting itself “as an auto-sufficient physicality, which is exhibited in its intensity, gestic potential, auratic ‘presence’ and internally, as well as externally, transmitted tensions” (2006: 95). This is very evidently the case in Disco Pigs, where the two figures are frequently racing, dancing and exercising physical violence and where this physicality, including the violence, is constantly present. In this ‘energetic theatre’, there is also a linguistic physicality which will be further expanded upon in 4.1. below. As Gömceli (2017) summarises, “the text of the play does not provide the spectators with any ‘linguistic input’ of any feeling or emotion, but rather it expects them to ‘see’ the feelings and emotions in their ‘manifestation’ through the presence and performance of the actors” (2017: 273). 3.9. ‘Concrete theatre’ With ‘concrete theatre’ is understood “the non-mimetic but formal structure or formalist aspects of postdramatic theatre”, where “theatre exposes itself as an art in space, in time, with human bodies” and “When theatre discovers the possibility to be ‘simply’ a concrete treatment of space, time, physicality, colour, sound and movement” (Lehmann 2006: 98). Language use in Disco Pigs has already been shown in the above to ‘embody’ concrete theatrical signification. 3.10. Irruption of the real Whereas dramatic theatre assumes a closed fictional world, a diegetic universe that is represented via mimesis “in which the ‘intentional object’ of the staging has to be distinguished from the empirically accidental performance……postdramatic theatre is the first to turn the level of real explicitly into a ‘co-player’” (Lehmann 2006: 100). “This irruption of the real becomes an object not just of reflection….but of the theatrical design itself”, resulting in an ‘aesthetics of undecidability’ (2006: 100) as to whether one is dealing with with reality or fiction. The ‘self-reflexive’ aesthetic of postdramatic theatre allows a switching between ‘real’ contiguity (connection with reality) and ‘staged’ construct, the perception of structure and of the sensorial level (2006: 103) as compared, for instance, to the dramatic switching between ‘staged worlds’ and ‘fictional worlds’ (cf. Cruickshank and Allan James 120 Lahey 2010). However, the ‘real’ in a postdramatic context is the ‘theatrical’ as performed staged discourse addressed to an audience constituted by a script vocalised by performers in a materially ‘theatrical’ setting (see also discussion above in 2.1. and 2.2.). And as Lehmann concedes, “It is not the occurrence of anything ‘real’ as such but its self-reflexive use that characterizes the aesthetic of the postdramatic theatre” (2006: 103). This, however, must include a thematisation of what constitutes a ‘real’, addressing the non-theatrical or ‘everyday’ world, the own ‘realities’ of the staged world, including metatheatrical disruption/ intrusion and indeed of dramatic theatre including metadramatic disruption/ intrusion and how these conceptualisations co-relate within a postdramatic perspective. Linguistically, in Disco Pigs the theatrical ‘real’ is signalled on occasion by explicit metadramatic audience address by the figures, as in Pig’s address “drama fans” (1997: 8) and Runt’s “ya seen da movie”, “But ya no” (1997: 15) and “An it well ovur, drama fans! ” (1997: 29). Otherwise, it has already been noted in 2.1. and 2.2. above that linguistically, prosodic and paralinguistic effects convey the auditory semiotics of postdramatic theatre and as such, theatrical meaning as ‘reality’, and this may be realised as a declamatory style of vocal delivery expressing an ‘emotive’ function, which in the case of Disco Pigs involves the frequent occurrence of short intonation units (e.g. as containing only two stressed syllables/ words - cf. e.g. “Pig da king”, “My bed da trone” “Me and Runt” (1997: 8); and “An we looka was happenin”, “Bonny and Clyde”, “ya seen da movie”, “But ya no”, “Is all differen” (1997: 15). As an analysis of the videoed play performance confirms, there is a marked predominance of wide pitch range, with high falls on the tonic syllable/ word, and increased loudness and tempo, in any case relative to the controlled prosodic patterns of dramatic discourse. With a staccato mode of rhythm, there is little prosodic cohesion in the sense of ‘key’, i.e. pitch height agreement signalling discourse links within a particular figure’s speech or across turns in a ‘dialogue’. Prominent paralinguistic features accompany the linguistic delivery such as the phonation types anterior voice, breathy voice and falsetto and the ‘voice qualifications’ scream, sob and laugh. The prosody is volatile in nature, appropriate to the lexis it accompanies, micro-situationally patterned and textually non-cohesive. 3.11. Event/ situation “(W)hen the signs can no longer be separated from their ‘pragmatic’ embeddedness in the event and the situation of theatre in general” (Lehmann 2006: 104), i.e. when ‘irruption of the real’ takes place and “the law that governs the use of signs is no longer derived from representation within the frame of this event of from its character as presented reality” (2006: 104), e.g. as in dramatic theatre, “it is a matter of the execution of acts that are Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 121 real in the here and now and find their fulfilment in the very moment they happen” (2006: 104). This description of the embeddedness of theatrical signs and their simultaneous theatrical ‘reality’ rings true for Disco Pigs. The emotion-laden utterance produced by the performers as characterised above will likely provoke an equally instant momentary and situationally determined ‘sensorial’ reaction on the part of the spectators. 4. Disco Pigs and the postdramatic continued 4.1. Focus on grammatical structure Completing here and in the following sub-section a linguistic analysis of the postdramatic of Disco Pigs, the opening lines of the playscript, depicting the scene of the two figures’ births, will serve as a further illustration of the signifying features discussed above, focussing particularly on grammatical structure. Lights flick on. PIG (male) and RUNT (female). They mimic the sound of an ambulance like a child would, ‘bee baa bee baa bee baa! ! ’. They also mimic the sound a pregnant woman in labour makes. They say things like ‘is all righ miss’, ‘ya doin fine, luv’, ‘dis da furs is it? ’, ‘is a very fast bee baa, all righ. Have a class a water! ’ Sound of door slamming. Sound of heartbeats throughout. RUNT. Out of the way! ! Jesus out of the way! PIG. Scream da fat nurse wid da gloopy face! RUNT. Da two mams squealin on da trollies dat go speedin down da ward. Oud da fookin way! PIG. My mam she own a liddle ting, look, an dis da furs liddle baba! She heave an rip all insie! ! Hol on mam! ! RUNT. My mam she hol in da pain! She noel her pain too well! ! She been ta hell an bac my mam! PIG. Day trips an all! RUNT. Da stupid cow! ! PIG. Holy Jesus help me! ! RUNT. Scream da Pig mam! Her face like a Christmas pud all sweaty an steamy! Da two trollies like a big choo choo it clear all infron! Oudda da fookin way cant jaaaaa! ! PIG. Da two das dey run the fast race speedin behine. RUNT. Holy Jesus keep her safe. Holy Jesus keep her safe! PIG. Mamble my dad wid a liddle mammy tear in da eye! I’m da liddle baba cumin oud, dada. I’m yer liddle baba racer! ! ! RUNT. Da trollie dey go on (1997: 3) As scene-setting, the intense soundscape is immediately created via the figures’ mimicry of an ambulance, of the sound of a pregnant woman, of the Allan James 122 utterances of the nursing staff, of the door slamming and of heartbeats. The mimicry continues in the figures’ utterances, of the nurse screaming, Pig’s mam screaming and Pig’s dad’s exhortations to the staff, all signalled with following quotation clauses (‘Scream da fat nurse’, ‘Scream da Pig mam’ and ‘Mamble my dad’), interspersed with commentary on the trolleys speeding, the condition of both mothers, Pig’s mam’s appearance and the two dads’ running. The concentrated succession of exclamatory utterances, indicated by exclamation marks, rendered vocally via marked prosody (in the staged version via wide pitch range, high pitch falls and prominent loudness, etc. - see above) all add to a dense scene-specific ‘auditory semiotics’. The employment of both reporting and commentary structures by the figures also produces strong metanarrative effect. The emotional intensity is underlined by the ‘squealing’, ‘pain’, ‘scream’ described, further augmented by the frequency of exclamatory utterances - exhorting (e.g. ‘Out of the way’, ‘hol on mam’, ‘Holy Jesus help me’) and commentary (e.g. ‘My mam she heave an rip all insie’, ‘She been ta hell an bac my mam’, ‘Day trips an all’). The hectic action is signalled by the ‘speedin’ trolleys, ‘like a big choo choo train it clear all infron’, ‘the fast race’, ‘liddle baba racer’ intensified by the use of expletives ‘Oud da fookin way’ (both mams) and ‘oudda fookin way cant jaaaaa’ (Pig’s mam), while ‘Da stupid cow’ constitutes an insulting interjection uttered in the midst of the panic. Repetitions abound, clausal, phrasal and word- ‘out of the way’, ‘my Mam she own…My mam she hol’, ‘liddle ting…liddle baba’ ‘Her face like……Da two trollies like’, adding local lexicogrammatical intensification. From a more structural perspective, one notes morphological and syntactic truncation: cf., e.g. ‘Scream’, ‘own’, ‘heave’, ‘rip’, ‘hol’ (“holds”), ‘noel’ (“knows all? ”) ‘clear’, ‘Mamble’ (“mumble”) as 3 rd personal singular verbs, ‘trollie’ as plural noun and instances of phonological clipping in ‘insie’ (“inside”), ‘infron’ (“in front”) ‘behine’ (“behind”) and ‘das’ (“dads”). In the stage directions there are the further clippings ‘righ’ for “right”, ‘furs’ for “first”. There is absence of auxiliary verb or copula in ‘Da two mams squealin’, ‘an dis da furs liddle baba’, ‘She been ta hell an bac’, ‘Her face like a christmas pud’, ‘Da two trollies like a big choo choo’. Additionally, there is frequent occurrence of subject repetition by pronoun as in ‘My mam she own’, ‘My mam she hol’, ‘da two das dey run’, ‘Da trollies dey go on’. While the last syntactic feature as ‘fronting’ is generally typical of the spoken colloquial, and the absence of auxiliary verb and copula is also found in fast colloquial speech together with phonological final clipping at the ends of words, the absence of 3 rd person singular ‘-s’ is decidedly more marked in speech, including in Cork English. One phonological feature of general vernacular Irish English is prominently present in the extract, i.e. the dental/ alveolar stop realisation of standard British English dental fricative / δ/ as ‘da’ for “the”, ‘dat’ for “that”, ‘oudda’ for “out the”,‘dis’ for “this”, ‘dey’ for “they”, ‘wid’ for “with” and / θ/ as ‘ting’ for “thing”. Additionally the indicated pronunciations of Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 123 ‘class’ (“glass”), ‘liddle’ (“little”), ‘cumin’ (“coming”) and ‘fookin’ represent Cork vernacular, while the those of ‘ya’ and ‘jaaaaa’ for “you”, ‘an’ for “and”, ‘ta’ for “to”, and ‘yer’ for “your” stand for the weak forms of the words which would likely be rendered as such in most forms of colloquial spoken English. Similarly the production of an alveolar ‘-n’ for “-ing” verb or adjective forms as in ‘doin’, ‘squealin’, ‘speedin’, and ‘fookin’ is typical of general informal speech. The language used in this extract depicts the frantic birth scene of the two figures, commented on by themselves, with direct address to their mothers and to unspecified others present, all expressed in their own antilanguage. However, the imitation by the figures of the nurse’s, one mam’s and one dad’s own commentary, i.e. of the specified other figures present, is represented as Standard English (cf. ‘Out of the way! ! ’, ‘Holy Jesus help me! ! ’ and ‘Holy Jesus keep her safe”, respectively.). This underscores the shared exclusiveness of their own (linguistic) world. With reference to postdramatic theatre, one may conclude that the grammatical structures which dominate at the most general level, i.e. successions of largely short non-finite clauses in an exclamatory mode of expression containing truncated lexis, serve to render the micro-event of a hurtling delivery scene as ‘energetic’ or actional theatre of an explicit physicality (see also 3.8. above). 4.2. Focus on (lexical) semantic structure It has been noted various times above (e.g. in 3.) that the figures’ ‘duolect’ and ‘duologue’ is characterised by idiosyncratic baby-talk, slang and Cork English, together with much word-play - all features using a manipulation of lexical semantics for their effect. It might be noted too that the periodic ‘oinking’ found in the play is actually a lexicalisation of a porcine sound. In this context the following play extract will serve the illustration of these prominent signifying structures. PIG. Ya noel wen Sonia finally become champion da wonder horse an gallop her way to success bak in ol Goddenburg, yeah? An Sonia stan on on da winny po-dium wid da whirl medal all a dangle from da pretty liddle neck as da nationalist rant-hymn blast da fuck oudda da sky an da green white an porridge all a flutter in da breeze. An all da Irish aroun da track an in da whirl, an anybody who even fuck an Irish dey all have a liddle tear a boy in der eye when dey say, ‘dis is a great day for Our-land! ’ Well Runt, dis is a bettur day! RUNT. Fuck, yes! ! PIG and RUNT go to enter the Palace RUNT. Stop! PIG stops. PIG. Ah bollix! RUNT. A gian cyclops a bricks wid bouncer tatooes on his toilea face. Allan James 124 PIG. Jus my luck, hey! So wers Hans gone, ol Chew-back-a? ! RUNT. Regular are ya? PIG. Once in da moring an again in da evening, doctur! RUNT. Pig too smart for dis tic toc! Da man he screw up da face an lookalike a playt a mash an mushy pea sept a bit more starchey. He look down na Pig an he say, ‘I think you know my little brother.’ PIG. Who he fat man? RUNT. He worked down in the off licence in Blackpool! But now he’s on the dole. PIG. Das a sad an sorry story. RUNT. I watch Pig as da past tap em on da shold wid a hi-dee-hi. Off licence. Blackcruel. Fuck me. PIG. Yeah I noel Foxy, good bloke yeah! (1997: 24-25) The extract displays much of the typical irreverent verbal wit of the figures, which is largely lexically based. First, concerning personal reference, the figures always refer to each other by the proper names ‘Pig’ and ‘Runt’ and not by pronouns, itself a feature of earlier child language, while it is ‘revealed’ elsewhere in the script that their ‘actual’ names are ‘Darren’ and ‘Sinead’, respectively. Ludic references to media-derived figures occur throught the script, here to ‘Sonia’ (O’Sullivan), who won the World Championship 5000 metres race in ‘Goddenburg’ (Gothenburg) in 1995, and to the figures ‘Hans’ (Han Solo) and ‘Chew-back-a’ (Chewbacca) from the film series of Star Wars starting in 1977, the latter signalling the double puns of original Chewbacca (=“chew (to)bacco”) and the present ‘Chew-backa’ (= “chew back of”). There is further intertextuality in ‘champion da wonder horse’ (who ‘gallop her way to suckycess’), which is reference to ‘Champion the Wonder Horse’ of the 1950’s children’s television series and in Runt’s ‘hi-dee-hi’ as reference to the greeting used in the eponymous television comedy series of the 1980’s. Typically, the locations of the figures’ actional scenes in and around Cork, are rendered by them as phonetically similar, but lexically distorted designations, here Blackpool (a suburb of Cork) as ‘Blackcruel’ (other examples elsewhere are ‘Crossheaven’ for Crosshaven (a village outside Cork), ‘Patsy Street’ for St. Patrick’s Street and ‘French Crotch Street’ for French Church Street in Cork itself). Similarly there is ludic near-punning of other lexical items: Pig’s ‘suckycess’ (success), ‘winny-podium’ (winning podium), twice ‘whirl’ (world), ‘rant-hymn’ (anthem), ‘porridge’ (orange), ‘a boy’ (a-boiling? ) ‘Our-land’ (Ireland) and Runt’s ‘toilea’ (toilet), the rhyming slang ‘tic toc’ (doc(tor)), ‘lookalike’ (look like), while Runt’s ‘past’ might be “bast(ard)” and ‘shold’ is “shoulder”. Other verbal humour is in Pig’s answer ‘Once in the morning an again in da evenin, doctor! ’ to Runt’s bouncer line ‘Regular are ya? ’. There is concentrated alliteration and assonance in Pig’s ‘Das a sad an sorry story’ and a representative occurrence of expletives in the Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 125 script. It could also be noted that the figures’ rendering of the bouncer’s speech is in Standard English, as with all ‘external’ figures in the play. The dense idiosyncrasy of the lexical semantics of the language employed by the two figures as analysed with its verbal wit linguistically defines as well as circumscribes the close(d) world the figures inhabit. At the same time, it confirms the prominence of language as a theatrical sign in the present play and of a rich verbality as its performed reality. 5. Brief conspectus and prospectus: Language in postdramatic theatre and language in dramatic theatre: Disco Pigs Much reference has been made in the analysis so far to the leading role language in general has in expressing the play semiotics of postdramatic theatre and indeed “language as protagonist” has been suggested as a suitable formulation for this (= “Sprache als Protagonist” of Poschmann (1997: 177)), as quoted by Barnett (2008: 18)). It is via a play’s language that two key processes of drama, its representation of an ordered fictional world and its structuring of time, are suspended in the postdramatic (Barnett 2008: 14-16), i.e. its representation as ‘mimesis’ and its linearity as ‘telos’ are abandoned and with them the dramatic unities of action, time and place (see also under 1. above). Hence, by and large the Aristotelian ‘ethos’ (characterisation), ‘mythos’ (plot) and ‘opsis’ (setting) as the playdefining elements of drama responsible for the maintenance of ‘mimesis’ and ‘telos’ recede in significance in postdramatic theatre, with their potential signifiers dissolving into a general theatrical, as opposed to dramatic, ‘semioscape’ with its own self-referentiality (see 2.1. above). This ‘semioscape’ is voiced in turn as an intense ‘linguoscape’ communicated as marked ‘vocality’ (see 2.2., 3.5., 3.10), ‘physicality’ (see 3.8., 4.1.) and ‘verbality’ (see 4.2. above), which have thus been pinpointed as defining elements of postdramatic theatre in their own right. Hence it is the very oral expressivity of ‘language’ itself that conveys the ‘theatrical’ of the postdramatic, and in the above it has been shown that a close linguistic analysis of the text written, but also oral (see video reference) of Disco Pigs confirms the prominent language-driven postdramatic of the play. However, at the same time, ‘ethos’, ‘mythos’ and ‘opsis’ have not been entirely abandoned in Disco Pigs, and the following section (6.) presents evidence from the text to indicate that their linguistically signalled presence is criterial to the continuing, and parallel, dramatic essence of the play. Allan James 126 6. Disco Pigs and the dramatic 6.1. A dramatic reading of the play Since the focus of the present discussion is heavily weighted towards the postdramatic of the play, as representing a contemporary complement to both the dramatic of modern theatre (as introduced in some detail in 1. above), the following will present only a bare outline of what is identifiable as dramatic in Disco Pigs in the conventional sense. Wallace (2017) points out that “Enda Walsh’s work cannot be described as postdramatic in any wholesale sense; he still describes himself as a playwright and he proclaims an interest in story and character” (2017: 38). To this one could add also ‘setting’ as a third central element of drama, which is prominent in the play as the sum of the micro-scenes performed in and around Cork. It is still possible for a theatre audience on one level of interpretation to (hope to) recognise ‘characters’, ‘plot’ and ‘setting’ which are enacted and not ‘just’ performed, and indeed it has been mooted in 2.2. above that audiences might be ‘conditioned’ for some evidence of ‘protodramatic narration’. There is indeed a very present narration and a reading of the play is imaginable as representing a closed fictional space, with the named teenage characters Pig and Runt acting out a sad ‘love story’, complete with adolescent emotional and physical violence, in Cork as the setting, if an actual fractured ‘development’ of characterisation, plot and setting is under-interpreted. The following sub-sections will briefly discuss these drama elements of characterisation, plot and setting from a linguistic point of view, making reference to the linguistic analysis of play-constitutive elements as developed in James and Gömceli (2018). 6.2. Characterisation A linguistic approach to characterisation concerns itself in the first place with the “implicit-figural verbal” technique of Pfister (1993: 185), which is expressed via the “voice quality, verbal behaviour, idiolect/ sociolect, register, stylistic texture” (1993: 185) of the characters’ language. In these terms, there is little to distinguish the characterisation of Pig and Runt, since they share the same idiosyncratic duolect, as has been described in previous sections above and mimic other appearing characters in the same way. The latter are characterised as external to the world of Pig and Runt by the employment of Standard English, as has been noted. The one and highly significant point in the play when Runt departs from her idiolect as duolect for her own self-expression occurs when she finally releases herself from Pig at the very end of the play, which is signalled by a gradual move into the standard language, i.e. that of the world beyond their own microcosmos: Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 127 RUNT………….I wan fur sumthin else! Sumthin different! Sumthin different! Fuckin freedom! ! Jus me! ! Jus da Runt! ! So mayb ta Crossheaven, mayb das where a girl can sleep sleep sleep an be alone. Jus me an da big big colour blue. Dat colour blue! (Pause.) An Runt take a breeder on Christy’s Ring . . . an I look a da sun creep up on my pal Pork . . . Cork. An Runt she alone now. But is okay now, is all rih. (Pause.) Runt, she calm, calm down . . . an I watch . . . da liddle quack quacks . . . I look . . . at the ducks . . . as they swim in the morning sun . . . in the great big . . . watery-shite . . . that is the river Lee. Where to? (1997: 29) This final self-release, looking at the River Lea from Christy Ring Bridge in Cork, as the poignant culmination of her emotional turmoil represents the sole significant development of characterisation in the play. Much has been noted above on the language of the figures from a postdramatic perspective including its vocality as a prominent feature of the play’s soundscape (2.2.) and it is a play, by the playwright’s own assertion of his work of the 1990’s, “driven by language” (Wallace 2017: 36). From a dramatic perspective, it has been shown in James and Gömceli (2018), that it is the lexicophonological layer of linguistic structure that is foremostly responsible for the expression of characterisation (2018: 207-211). In the case of Disco Pigs, linguistically it is the phonology, not just the prominent prosody as analysed above (2.2.), but also the segmental structure of their duolect which vocalises the words they produce and projects their characters into dramatic stage (sound) space. 6.3. Plot As already noted above, the plot of Disco Pigs from a dramatic perspective comprises the total of the numerous actions and transactions Pig and Runt are involved in the various activity tableaux they create for themselves. Their actions and transactions are to a large extent confrontational with characters from the ‘outside’ world and socially transgressive (e.g. not paying the bus driver, stealing from Foxy’s off-licence, intimidation of, and violence to a ‘rival’ at the Palace disco), at the same time serving to confirm and cement the close emotional bond between them. From a postdramatic point of view, commentary and analysis has been presented on the extreme physicality of the play with its corporeal actionality and violence (cf. 3.8 and 4.1.). The linguistic manifestation of these features of the play is carried explicitly by predominant types of grammatical structure (e.g. proliferation and succession of exclamatory sentence types, non-finite clauses and generally truncated syntax and morphology) with their associated (truncated) lexis. Returning to a dramatic perspective, it has been shown in James and Gömceli (2018) that it is the lexicogrammatical layer of linguistic structure that is foremostly responsible for the expression of plot (2018: 211-214). Allan James 128 6.4. Setting In dramatic terms, the setting of Disco Pigs is unambiguously the various locations created by the characters (e.g. the hospital, the off-licence, the disco, the pub, the seaside) in Cork and environs. The setting(s) are to some extent specified in the stage directions, frequently in formulations contributing to the ‘soundscape’ of the play, for example as in the initial hospital scene invoked via ‘the sound of an ambulance’, ‘the sound a pregnant woman makes’, ‘Sound of door slamming’, ‘Sound of heartbeats throughout’ (see also 4.1. above). Otherwise they are indicated by name in the characters’ own lines as in: “PIG. Crossheaven, da colour a love, dis where it is hun! ! (1997: 17)”. However, as has already been commented on in 4.2. above, the reallife names of these locations and other locations are lexically distorted by Pig and Runt while retaining largely the pronunciation identity of the originals. Attention has also been drawn in 4.2. to the numerous other examples of lexical distortions, alliterations and assonances, etc. which make up the strong verbal wit of the figures, and from a postdramatic viewpoint, this has been seen as constituting the prominent verbality of the play. In the case of dramatic theatre it has been shown in James and Gömceli (2018) that it is the lexicosemantic layer of linguistic structure that is foremostly responsible for the expression of setting (2018: 214). 7. The dramatic and the postdramatic: The linguistic semiotics of play-defining and play-realisational elements 7.1. Play-defining elements The previous section 6. has examined the linguistic expression of the playdefining elements of characterisation, plot and setting from a dramatic point of view, i.e. as the ‘ethos’, ‘mythos’ and ‘opsis’ of the fictional worlds represented, and the play-defining elements of vocality, physicality and verbality from a postdramatic perspective, i.e. as constituting characteristics of the theatrical performance. It has been pointed out that particular layers of linguistic structure have been analysed as prominent in the realisation of the elements of drama elsewhere (James and Gömceli 2018). Indeed, the above analysis in 6. of the linguistic structuring present in Disco Pigs in association with these play-defining elements leads to the same conclusion, i.e. that lexicophonological structure conveys characterisation, lexicogrammatical structure conveys plot and lexicosemantic structure setting. As conceded in James and Gömceli (2018), with regard to characterisation, and in principle also to plot and setting, other linguistic structurings can also Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 129 contribute to the expression of these elements (e.g. in part, syntactic structures in characterisation (2018: 211)), but the structural layers proposed constitute the most prominent in the dramatic discourse investigated. Regarding the postdramatic elements of vocality, physicality and verbality, it has been suggested above that the same linguistic layers as proposed for the expression of the play-defining elements of drama are connected to their realisation too. Indeed, the analysis of the linguistic characteristics of postdramatic theatre presented in 2., 3., 4., 5. and, latterly, 6. above point clearly in this direction; specifically, that lexicophonological structure conveys the vocality, lexicogrammatical structure conveys the physicality, and lexicosemantic the verbality of such theatre, respectively. With respect to the semiotics signalled by these linguistic patternings, in the first instance they realise the play-defining elements as, respectively, dramatic and (postdramatic) theatrical signs, but without recourse to specific structural semiotic ‘codes’ for doing so (cf. Elam 2002). It has been shown that the hybrid linguistic layers proposed bundle together the wide range of individual lexical, phonological, grammatical and semantic structures found in the play’s language (as semiotic resources) into this generalised higher level of significant linguistic organisation. However, a closer look at the relative weighting of the ‘lexical’ to the ‘phonological’, ‘syntactic’ and ‘semantic’ in these hybrid layers in a dramatic versus postdramatic perspective, leads to the suggestion that whereas in the former, the ‘lexical’, i.e. the word patterning, of the ‘lexicophonological’ in the expression of characterisation, the ‘lexical’ of the ‘lexicogrammatical’ in that of plot, and the ‘lexical’ in the ‘lexicosemantic’ in that of setting, is in each case more semiotically prominent in drama as a ‘logocentric’ medium. In the postdramatic it is the ‘phonological’ of the ‘lexicophonological’ in the expression of vocality, the ‘grammatical’ of the ‘lexicogrammatical’ in that of physicality, and the ‘semantic’ of the ‘lexicosemantic’ in that of verbality that are more semiotically prominent in postdramatic theatre as a ‘post-logocentric’ medium. Table 1 summarises the conclusions of the above discussion (where ‘+’ signals ‘more prominent realisation’; ‘-‘ ‘less prominent realisation’): Allan James 130 Table 1. Play-defining elements and linguistic layers Dramatic theatre Postdramatic theatre Defining elements characterisation vocality Linguistic layers lexico-phonological lexico-phonological + - - + Defining elements plot physicality Linguistic layers lexico-grammatical lexico-grammatical + - - + Defining elements setting verbality Linguistic layers lexico-semantic lexico-semantic + - - + Further reflection on the social semiotics of linguistic structuring, after Halliday (1978) on linguistic structuring and social semiotics and Fairclough (2003) on social semiotics and discourse, and as developed further in James (2008, 2014) and for drama in particular in James and Gömceli (2018), leads to the conclusions that lexicophonology serves an ‘identification’ function from this perspective, lexicogrammar an ‘actional’ function and lexicosemantics a ‘representational’ function. Relating these considerations to the present discussion of the linguistic semiotics of the play-internal elements (and following James and Gömceli (2018: 220-221)), a further conclusion is that lexicophonological structure signals not only characterisation in dramatic theatre and vocality in postdramatic theatre but also ‘identification’ in both, lexicogrammatical structure plot in the dramatic and physicality in the postdramatic and ‘action’ in both, and lexicosemantic structure setting in the dramatic and verbality in the postdramatic and ‘representation’ in both. However, the social semiotic functions have different referents in the dramatic and postdramatic: whereas in dramatic theatre ‘identification’ is of the characters in characterisation, in postdramatic theatre it serves that of the vocal performers themselves; whereas in dramatic theatre ‘action’ signals the (progression of) the plot, in postdramatic theatre it communicates the performance itself in its physicality; and whereas in dramatic theatre ‘representation’ is of the setting, in postdramatic theatre ‘representation’ is of the immediate staged world that the performance expresses via its vo- Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 131 cality. Note that here ‘representation’ (like ‘action’ and ‘identification’) expresses a social semiotic relation of realisation between the constituent of an entity of sociocultural life (character, plot, setting of dramatic theatre; vocality, physicality, verbality of postdramatic theatre) and its manifestation as ordered linguistic structuring. It is not to be compared with the theatrical ‘representation’ of the fictional world of drama in the form of acted mimesis and does not in any way contradict the staged realisation process of postdramatic theatre being termed ‘presentation’ (as opposed to the ‘representation’ of drama). Concluding the present discussion, it will be noted that ‘identification’, ‘action’ and ‘representation’ are conveyed more via the ‘lexical’ of the ‘lexicophonological’, ‘lexicogrammatical’ and ‘lexicosemantic’ in dramatic theatre and the corresponding ‘phonological’, ‘grammatical’ and ‘semantic’ in postdramatic theatre, following the previous discussion above. Table 2. Play-defining elements, linguistic layers and social semantic functions Dramatic theatre Postdramatic theatre Defining element characterisation vocality Linguistic layer lexicophonological lexicophonological Social semiotic function identification identification (referents) (of characters) (as vocal performers) Defining element plot physicality Linguistic layer lexicogrammatical lexicogrammatical Social semiotic function action action (referents) (of story) (as performers) Defining element setting verbality Linguistic layer lexicosemantic lexicosemantic Social semiotic function representation representation (referents) (of dramatic world) (of theatre as world) Allan James 132 7.2. Play-realisational elements and text addressivity In James and Gömceli (2018) a linguistic semiotics of dramatic discourse is developed that unites play-defining elements, i.e. the characterisation, plot and setting of above, with play-realisational elements constituting the three phases of a play’s realisation from presentation of the written text of the play to its staging (mise-en-scène) to its performance (2018: 215-219). While noting the obvious phenomenological and material distinctions between the three contexts of realisation, “(I)t is worthwhile remembering that it is the same text that is linked across the realisation levels as a relationship of intertextuality” (2018: 218). However, the text at each stage is defined by its addressivity. Building on previous analyses of play addressivity in dramatic theatre of, e.g., Feng and Shen (2001: 84), Baumbach and Nünning (2009: 58) and Cruickshank and Lahey (2010: 68), the present analysis follows James and Gömceli (2018) in positing a core addressivity of the text by writer/ playwright to reader(s) at a (literary) work of drama level of address, by playwright/ director to actor(s) at a staging level of address, and by character to character(s) at a performance level of address. And while there are other addressivities present in the play realisation process, such as between writer and director, actors and audience or between characters and audience, it is this core addressivity of the text “that is criterial to the dramatic realisation (and success) of the play at these three levels of literary work, stage production and theatre performance” (2018: 219). The identity of the text mutates from (literary) work to staging script to performance dialogue. Returning to a consideration of postdramatic discourse, and linking the play-defining elements of ‘verbality’, ‘physicality’ and ‘vocality’ to the playrealisation elements constituting the three phases of a play’s realisation from presentation of the written text of the play to its staging (mise-enscène) to its performance, following on from what has been concluded regarding the realisation of dramatic theatre, it may be noted that there are equally three phases distinguishable in a play’s realisation which are defined by the core addressivity between the participants. Postdramatic theatre does not typically result from a literary text or a dramatic text as employed in non-literary theatre, but from a text addressed by a playwright/ director to actors at the script level, the text ‘addressed’ from figure to figure(s) at the staging level and from performer to spectators at the performance level. These core addressivities are equally criterial to the realisation (and success) of postdramatic theatre as with the case of drama. Connecting the play-defining elements of the postdramatic to the play-realisation elements, one notes that regarding ‘verbality’, the play text is indeed ‘verbalised’ by the director to the actors, regarding ‘physicality’ the figure to figure(s) ‘address’ constitutes a ‘physicalisation’ of the text at staging level and regarding ‘vocality’ in performance, it is indeed ‘vocalised’ by performers to spectators. Table 3 summarises the conclusions drawn: Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 133 Table 3. Play-realisational elements and addressivity Dramatic theatre Postdramatic theatre Realisational element text as (literary) drama text as script Addressivity writer/ playwright  reader(s) playwright/ director  actor(s) Realisational element staging staging Addressivity director  actor(s) figure  figure(s) Realisational element performance performance Addressivity character  character(s) performer  spectator(s) Linking now to the linguistic analysis of play-defining elements in 7.1., as in James and Gömceli (2018) it can be posited for drama that characterisation as realised lexicophonologically is indeed closely related to character-character(s) addressivity at the performance level, plot as realised lexicogrammatically is closely related to playwright/ director-actor(s) addressivity at staging level, and setting as realised lexicosemantically is closely related to writer/ playwright-reader(s) addressivity at (literary) work of drama level (2018: 220). And from a linguistic semiotics point of view, these play-defining and play-realisation elements can be linked via the linguistic layer structuring to the social semiotic functions of ‘identification’, ‘action’ and ‘representation’ which emerge at the play-realisation levels of performance, staging and ‘literary text’, respectively (2018: 220- 221) As already noted above in 7.1. with regard to the play-defining elements of postdramatic theatre, linguistically, the lexicophonological realises ‘vocality’, the lexicogrammatical ‘physicality’ and the lexicosemantic ‘verbality’. From a social semiotic perspective, ‘identification’ is signalled via the linguistic layer at the play-realisation level of performance, ‘action’ via the linguistic layer at the staging level and ‘representation’ via the linguistic layer at the initial text communication stage. Allan James 134 Table 4. Play-realisation elements, play-defining elements, linguistic layers and social semiotic functions Dramatic theatre Postdramatic theatre Realisational element text as (literary) drama text as script Defining element setting verbality Linguistic layer lexicosemantic lexicosemantic Social semiotic function representation representation Realisational element staging staging Defining element plot physicality Linguistic layer lexicogrammatical lexicogrammatical Social semiotic function action action Realisational element performance performance Defining element characterisation vocality Linguistic layer lexicophonological lexicophonological Social semiotic function identification identification 8. Conclusion On the most general level of reflection, the present analysis has attempted to show that new forms of drama and theatre expression require new forms of linguistic understanding. More specifically, it argues that via a close empirical analysis a linguistics of drama and theatre must engage directly with the play-defining and play-realisational elements that are present in drama and theatre practice themselves and develop an approach to the language structuring they manifest which acknowledges the nature of the meanings they convey. Such meanings are in the first place dramatic and theatrical ‘signs’ which via their consistent language patterning in the second place also become linguistic signs in their own right. Thus emerges a linguistic Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 135 semiotics of drama and theatre, as opposed to an earlier semiotics of drama and theatre which limits ‘the linguistic’ to the specification of the particular codes and rules employed in the realisation of dramatic/ theatrical discourse in general (cf. the discussion of Baumbach and Nünning (2009) in 2.1. and Elam (2002) in 2.2. above). A relative absence of connection in linguistic analysis to the semiotic signalling of dramatic and theatrical structures themselves may also be noted in extant stylistics approaches to play analysis, which focus principally on the discourse of drama itself from a textual or cognitive point of view. Such approaches employ the frameworks of pragmatic or ‘discourse linguistics’ models of analysis such as speech act theory (Burton 1980) and conversation analysis (Herman 1995) or cognitively oriented text-world theory (Cruickshank and Lahey 2010), respectively, to capture the reader’s understanding of the text of plays (cf. also the discussion in 2.2. above). For the linguistic analysis of play semiotics it has been the intention to show that the hybrid layers of linguistic structure proposed have the propensity to capture the linguistic regularity of the dramatic and postdramatic meanings that plays signal. With the linguistic and semiotic challenges that postdramatic theatre poses, it has been shown that a ‘stylistics’ framework originally developed for the analysis of (literary) dramatic theatre (James and Gömceli (2018)) may be further refined to account for the specific meanings the former signals. In this respect Disco Pigs offers a particularly rich site for the development of a linguistic semiotics of drama and theatre, manifesting it as does the combined meanings of both the postdramatic and the dramatic via the shared linguistic substance in one and the same play. References Aston, Elaine & George Savona (1991). Theatre as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge. Barnett, David (2008). “When is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts”. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1). 14-23. Baumbach, Sibylle & Ansgar Nünning (2009). An Introduction to the Study of Plays and Drama. Stuttgart: Klett. Bouko, Catherine (2009). “The musicality of postdramatic theatre: Hans-Thiess Lehmann’s theory of independent auditory semiotics”. Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 17. 25-35. Burton, Deirdre (1980). Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Carlson, Marvin (2015). “Postdramatic theatre and postdramatic performance”. Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença 5 (3). 577-595. Cruickshank, Tracy & Ernestine Lahey (2010). “Building the stages of drama: Towards a text world theory account of dramatic play-texts”. Journal of Literary Semantics 39. 67-91. Allan James 136 Crystal, David (1969). Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan (2001). Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Culpeper, Jonathan, Mick Short & Peter Verdonk (Eds.) (1998). Exploring the Language of Drama. Text and Context. London: Routledge. Disco Pigs (2013, August 8). Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs [Video file, online]. https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=K9_jIyN6VIg [5 February 2020]. Eco, Umberto (1977). “Semiotics of theatrical performances”. The Drama Review 21. 107-117. Elam, Keir (2002). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London/ New York: Routledge. Fairclough, Norman (2003). Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Feng, Zongixin & Dan Shen (2001). “The play off the stage: The reader-writer relationship in drama”. Language and Literature 10 (1). 79-93. Fensham, Rachel (2012). “Postdramatic spectatorship: Participate or else”. Critical Stages: The IATC Webjournal 7. 1-10. Gömceli, Nursen (2017). “Language and physicality in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996): A postdramatic analysis”. In Alexander Onysko, Eva-Maria Graf, Werner Delanoy, Günther Sigott & Nikola Dobrić (Eds.). The Polyphony of English Studies. Tübingen: Narr. 261-276. Halliday, Michael (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Arnold. Herman, Vimela (1995). Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge. Herrero-Martin, Rosana (2008). “Language performativity in Donal O’Kelly’s Catalpa (1995) and Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs (1996): Two Radical Theatre proposals”. In Carrera, Maria José, Anunciación Carrera, Enrique Cámara & Celsa Dapía (Eds.). The Irish Knot. Essays on Imaginary/ Real Ireland. Valladolid: Universidad de Vallidolid. 239-250. Hickey, Raymond (2008). “Irish English: phonology”. In: Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upton (Eds.). Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 71-104. Izmir, Sibel (2017). “The oscillation between dramatic and postdramatic theatre: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing”. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 42 (1). 71-99. Jakobson, Roman (1960). “Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics”. In: Thomas Sebeok (Ed.). Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. 350-377. James, Allan (2008). “New Englishes as post-geographic Englishes in lingua franca use: Genre, interdiscursivity and late modernity. European Journal of English Studies 12 (1). 97-112. James, Allan (2014). “English as a visual language: Theorising the social semiotics of anglography in polylingual texts”. English Text Construction 7 (1). 18-52. James, Allan (2017). “Prosody and paralanguage in speech and the social media: The vocal and graphic realisation of affective meaning”. Linguistica 57 (1). 137- 149. James, Allan & Nursen Gömceli (2018). “The textual analysis of dramatic discourse revisited: Linguistic layers and the (social) semiotics of play-constitutive and play-realisational elements”. English Text Construction 11 (2). 200-225. Linguistic layering and the play semiotics in Disco Pigs by E. Walsh 137 Kolesch, Doris (2013). “Staging voices”. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1 (1). 103-112. Lehmann, Hans-Thiess (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. Karen Jürs-Munby (trans.). London/ New York: Routledge. Lehmann, Hans-Thiess (2007). “Word and stage in postdramatic theatre”. In: Christoph Henke & Martin Middeke (Eds.). Drama and/ after Postmodernism. Trier: WVT. 37-54. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Geoffrey Bennington & Brian Massumi (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mandala, Susan (2007). Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk: Speaking between the Lines. Aldershot: Ashgate. McIntyre, Dan (2008). “Integrating multimodal analysis and the stylistics of drama: a multimodal perspective on Ian McKellen’s Richard III”. Language and Literature 17 (4). 309-334. Pfister, Manfred (1993). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poschmann, Gerda. (1997). Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext: Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramatische Analyse. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Sierz, Aleks (2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber & Faber. Wallace, Clare (2017). ““. . . ultimately alone and walking around in your own private universe”: Metatheatre and metaphysics in three plays by Enda Walsh”. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 23 (1). 35-49. Walsh, Enda (1997). Disco Pigs and Sucking Dublin. London: Nick Hern Books. Weaver, Jesse (2015). “Enda Walsh and space: The evolution of a playwright”. In: Mary P. Caulfield & Ian R. Walsh (Eds.). The Theatre of Enda Walsh. Dublin: Carysfort. 13-26. Allan James Department of English and American Studies University of Klagenfurt Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Barbara Freys Akademietheater-Inszenierung von Shakespeares Sturm Andreas Mahler Focusing on the aspect of spatiality in drama and theatre, the article takes into view one particular German-language production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest staged in 2007 by the Swiss theatre director Barbara Frey for the workshop stage of Vienna’s Burgtheater. Intermedially drawing on Peter Greenaway’s movie adaptation Prospero’s Books, the theatre production takes the play’s marked dialectic between a well-nigh ‘classicist’ reduction of its real space and its concomitant expansion into an almost infinite amount of imaginary spaces on the dramatic level and congenially reproduces it on the theatrical level in using an extremely reduced stage (and cast) for an enormous extension of the play’s spatial possibilities, thus proving that, not only in terms of mimetic space but in terms of performance space, too, less is often more. 1. Gegen Ende der Saison 2006/ 7 inszeniert die Regisseurin Barbara Frey für das Wiener Akademietheater, die Werkstattbühne des Burgtheaters, Shakespeares letztes allein verfasstes Stück The Tempest aus dem Jahr 1611. Was die Wiener Presse umgehend mitleidsvoll als “‘Sturm’ für Arme” bezeichnet, erweist sich bei näherem Hinsehen als eine furiose 75-Minuten-Inszenierung von faszinierendem, vor allem faszinierendem räumlichen Reichtum, in deren als “radikal und virtuos” herausgestellter Umsetzung die Wiener Zeitung den Grund für “einen beglückenden und kurzweiligen AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0017 Andreas Mahler 140 Abend” sieht. 1 Dabei erscheint vor allen Dingen die allenthalben sichtbare, ortsbedingte ‘ärmliche’ Begrenzung des realen Raumes als Ermöglichungsgrund für eine Fülle vorderhand nicht-sichtbarer imaginärer Entgrenzungen, welche die bespielte Räumlichkeit des Akademietheaters gleichwohl verwandeln in eine gleichsam grenzenlose Vielfalt bespielter Welten. Dem will ich in der folgenden Skizze einer dezidiert raumbezogenen Aufführungsanalyse näher nachgehen. 2 2. Die ‘Zeichen des Raumes’ lassen sich klassischerweise grob gliedern nach der äußerlich-baulichen ‘Raumkonzeption des Theaters’ einerseits und den räumlichen, etwa durch Dekoration, Requisiten, Licht etc. bestimmten Koordinaten des in Szene gesetzten ‘Bühnenraums’ andererseits. 3 Näherhin spezifiziert dies die heutige Theaterwissenschaft zu vier verschiedenen Raumaspekten der Theateranalyse 4 : (1) dem des ‘dramatischen Raums’ als dem durch den Dramentext skizzierten ge- und erspielten Raum der Fiktion; (2) dem des ‘szenischen Raums’ als dem oben genannten bespielten Bühnenraum der Aktion und Performanz, seinen Koordinaten, seiner Ausgestaltung und seiner Nutzbarkeit durch das Spiel der Akteure; 1 So die ersten Reaktionen von Barbara Pietsch in der Presse vom 8.6.2007 sowie von Julia Urbanek in der Wiener Zeitung vom 7.6.2007 [http: / / diepresse.com/ home/ kultur/ news/ 309016/ Sturm-fuer-Arme; http: / / www.wienerzeitung.at/ nachrichten/ kultur/ buehne/ 272382_Die-grosse-kleine-Shakespeare-Welt.html; acc. 24.5.2017]. 2 Es handelt sich hierbei um die überarbeitete Version eines anlässlich des 8. Öffentlichen Interdisziplinären Workshops zu “Theatralität und Räumlichkeit im antiken und modernen Theater” unter dem Thema “Entgrenzung und Begrenzung von Räumen im antiken und modernen Theater” am 8. Juni 2017 an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz gehaltenen Vortrag. Ich danke Eveline Krummen und dem leider viel zu früh verstorbenen Kollegen und Freund Hugo Keiper für die freundliche Aufnahme und kompetente Organisation des Workshops sowie allen Teilnehmerinnen und Teilnehmern, insbesondere Walter Bernhart und Werner Wolf, für eine anregende und ausgiebige Diskussion. Alle verbliebenen Mängel fallen selbstredend zu meinen Lasten. 3 Zu den Grundkoordinaten theaterbezogener Raumanalyse siehe aus systematischer Sicht die zusammenfassenden Ausführungen in Fischer-Lichte 1998: 132-160 sowie in kurzer, prägnanter theaterpraktischer Anwendung die Analyse in Fischer-Lichte 1999: 123-126; zu Grundfragen der Relation von Raum und Theater vgl. auch Pfister 1977: 327-359, Elam 1980: 56-69 und 98-117, Esslin 1989: 73-79 und 93-108, für den Versuch einer kommunikativ orientierten Zusammenschau siehe Mahler 2010. 4 So in übersichtlicher Zusammenfassung etwa Balme 2003, 136-146; vgl. hierzu auch die Ausführungen bei Friedrich 2015. Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Shakespeares Sturm 141 (3) dem des ‘theatralen Raums’ als den baulich-statischen Gegebenheiten des Theaters selbst, dem Spielraum, seinen eigenen materiellen Grenzziehungen und Öffnungen; und (4) dem des ‘ortsspezifischen Raums’ im Sinne der geographischen Verortung des Theaters in der Lebenswelt, seiner Situierung in der Stadt, der Natur etc. Dabei folge ich der Unterscheidung von (vor)gegebener ‘Raumordnung’ und situativ bzw. performativ hergestellter ‘Raumpraxis’, derzufolge sich die soziale Institution ‘Theater’ verstehen lässt als ein ‘Mediendispositiv’ - näherhin als “ein relationales Gefüge, das nur durch die Interferenz von Körperpraktiken und technisch-materiell gestützten Inszenierungs-, Interaktions- und Wahrnehmungsformen beschreibbar ist, wobei sich je nach historischem und kulturellem Kontext divergierende Relationierungen der [jeweiligen] Teilaspekte theatraler Performanz ergeben”. 5 Dementsprechend beruht die “Funktionsweise” des Theaters, wie die “jedes Mediums als eines raumgebenden Dispositivs [...] auf der konstitutiven Wechselwirkung bzw. der Gleichursprünglichkeit von Ordnungsraum und körperbezogener Raumpraxis”. Dies ist eine Relation wechselseitiger Ermöglichung, mit anderen Worten: das Spiel macht den Raum, und der Raum macht das Spiel. 3. Shakespeares Geschichte vom Sturm ist selbst schon dominant raumorientiertes Spiel. Die späte Romanze basiert auf dem Komödienschema syntagmatisch-sekundärer Restitution als Ermöglichungsgrund paradigmatischprimärer Einfälle. 6 Ihr Sujet erzählt - quasi als Vorwand - die Geschichte einer Usurpation samt Flucht und Vertreibung ins Exil und nutzt den so entstandenen Raum der Unordnung zu ‘eigentlichen’ Inszenierungen theatralen Spiels bis hin zur - erwartbaren und erwarteten - finalen Wiederherstellung der ‘alten’ Ordnung. Dies basiert auf einer sujetgebenden Räumlichkeit. Ich beginne also mit einer Analyse des vom Text bestimmten ‘dramatischen Raums’. Es ist dies ein Raum der Grenzen, Grenzziehungen und Grenzüberschreitungen. Dies beginnt wörtlich mit dem ‘Sturm’ der ersten Szene. Das Stück inszeniert 5 Zu einer systematischen Begründung dieser Unterscheidung siehe die einleitenden Bemerkungen bei Dünne & Kramer 2009, das Zitat 17, das unmittelbar folgende Zitat 19 f. 6 Für eine grundlegende Diskussion des Komödienschemas als das einer syntagmatischen ‘Anderweitigkeit’, welche die jeweils punktuell bleibenden komischen Paradigmen allererst ermöglicht, siehe den bislang unüberbotenen Theorieaufsatz von Warning 1976; für eine Diskussion des Shakespeare’schen Tempest unter den Struktureigenschaften dieses Schemas siehe die Ausführungen in Mahler 2019. Andreas Mahler 142 gleich zu Beginn eine Grenzerfahrung. Die Bühnenanweisung schlägt als szenischen Raum vor eine Inszenierung von visueller Unüberschaubarkeit und akustischer Bedrohung: “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain.” (Tmp. 1.1.1.SD) 7 Vornehmlich auditiv wird hier zunächst ein Raum der Unordnung und des Chaos hergestellt, in den hinein sich bedrohte Figuren platziert finden, welche versuchen, mit den unkontrollierten Gewalten zurechtzukommen. Was ihnen gleichsam emblematisch fehlt, ist “authority” (1.1.22); unversehens ist bereits zu Beginn sogleich “All lost” (51); das Schiff zerbirst: “We split, we split” (60, 62); und in ironischer Brechung ereignet sich am Anfang schon die Katastrophe: “The wills above be done,” heißt es komisch zum Schluss von 1.1, “but I would fain die a dry death” (67 f.). Dies zeichnet den Ort des Spiels als den Ort einer ‘Enklave’. 8 Das Sujet baut sich auf über den Gegensatz der amorphen See und des - morphologisch zumindest - festen Lands. 9 Es setzt einander entgegen die topologische Relation ‘nah’ und ‘fern’ und verbindet damit semantisch widersprüchlich die Konzeptionen ‘fremd’ - ‘vertraut’, ‘wild’ - ‘zivilisatorisch’ , ‘natürlich rauh’ und ‘kulturell verdorben’; topographisch findet sich dies spezifiziert zur Gegensätzlichkeit eines im Herzogtum Mailand wie im Königreich Neapel konkretisierten, vermeintlich ‘zivilisierten’ ‘Italien’ im Gegensatz zum Schauplatz eines laut dramatis personae “uninhabited island”. 10 Die Insel ist signifikant der einzige dramatische Ort des Stücks. 11 Nach dem jugendlichen Wildwuchs einer sprunghaft optimistischen Zeitwie vor allem Raumgestaltung ist dies, vielleicht in Antwort auf Ben Jonsons klassizistisch angehauchtes Genörgel 12 , das erste und einzige Stück Shakespeares 7 Ich zitiere den Text des Tempest hier und in der Folge in der Angabe ‘Akt.Szene.Zeile’ unter dem Sigel Tmp. nach der exzellenten Ausgabe von Stephen Orgel (Shakespeare 1987). 8 Zu Struktur und Funktion Shakespeare’scher Enklaven siehe die Überlegungen in Mahler 2016. 9 Der Mythos der amorphen - und deshalb zu fürchtenden - See geht bekanntlich zurück bis auf Homer; für einen informativen historischen Abriss der menschlichen Einstellungen zum Meer und dessen Offenheiten und a-strukturalen Gefahren siehe die klassische Darstellung in Corbin 1994. 10 Die Handlungsanalyse folgt dem raumbasierten Sujetmodell bei Lotman 1972: 311- 357; für eine - wie in der Beschreibung durchgeführt - an Lotman orientierte systematische Vorordnung des Topologischen vor das Semantische und des Semantischen vor das oftmals lediglich im Fakultativen verbleibende Topographische siehe Mahler 1998: 6-12, v.a. 7; für die explizite Ortsangabe siehe Shakespeare 1987: 96. 11 Dies unterscheidet The Tempest auf entscheidende Weise von strukturell ähnlichen Sujetbildungen wie etwa As You Like It, King Lear oder Hamlet (siehe hierzu näherhin Mahler 1998: 12-28 sowie Mahler 2016). 12 Am deutlichsten manifestiert sich Ben Jonsons Kritik im Prolog zu seinem Auftaktstück Every Man in His Humour (1598), wo er sein eigenes poetisches Tun polemisch absetzt von seiner Ansicht nach eklatanten Regelverletzungen vor allen Dingen gegen Glaubwürdigkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit seiner Mit-Autoren, allen voran Shakespeares als Historiendichter, denen er vorwirft : “To make a child, now swaddled, to proceed / Man, and then shoot up, in one beard, and weed, / Past threescore years: Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Shakespeares Sturm 143 mit einer poetologisch überzeugenden, vollkommenen ‘Einheit des Raums’ - wie im übrigen auch das einzige Stück ohne erkennbar imitierte ‘Vorlage’. Die Konflikte entfalten und lösen sich also in etwa einem Tag ausschließlich auf ebendieser Insel. In dieser klassizistischen, kammerspielartigen Begrenzung erfüllt sich die Shakespeare-typische Restitution (Abb. 1). 13 Es ist dies der übliche Parcours A-B-C-A: Prospero, als F 1 -Figur ursprünglich und einstmals gemäß dramatis personae “the right Duke of Milan” (also zu Haus im Oben-Raum A) wird auf Geheiß Alonsos, des Königs von Neapel, durch seinen Bruder Antonio, “the usurping Duke of Milan” (jeweils meine Herv.) seines Amts ‘enthoben’ (hierarchiewidrig nach unten versetzt: B) und flieht mit seiner Tochter unverzüglich auf die Insel (also in die Enklave C), wohin ein mithilfe der Magie entfachter ‘Sturm’ die zufällig vorbeireisenden ‘Verbliebenen’ des Festlands treibt und ebendort schiffbrüchig werden lässt - bis sich schlussendlich alle Wirrungen und Verfehlungen klären und Prospero durch Alonso Mailand zurückerhält, um sich fortan dorthin in Altersweisheit zurückzuziehen (Rückkehr nach A), während Ferdinand und Miranda als neues Königspaar in Doppelung der wiedererlangten Harmonie dazu auserlesen sind, Neapel zu erneuern. Abbildung 1. Restitutionssujet or, with three rusty swords, / And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words, / Fight over York, and Lancaster’s long jars: / And in the tiring house bring wounds, to scars.” (Jonson 1979: Prol. 7-12) Demgegenüber verspricht er ein Stück, “Where neither Chorus wafts you o’er the seas; / Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please” (15 f.). 13 Zur Beschreibung von Komödienhandlungen unter dem Begriff des ‘Restitutionsschemas’ siehe Warning 1976: 283-287, näherhin 284; ich übernehme die Grafik aus Mahler 1998: 16. oben unten F 1 B C F 2 A Andreas Mahler 144 Der Parcours führt von einer hierarchisch bestimmten Unordnung oder ‘Verkehrung’ der feudalen Kultur über die neutralisierend-vergleichgültigende Enklave der vermeintlich ‘unbewohnten’, unzivilisierten, wilden Insel zur wiedergewonnenen hierarchischen Ordnung der Feudalkultur und damit zur Feier ihrer erneuten - erneuerten - Geltung. Doch betrifft dies lediglich das Syntagma - die Raumabfolge in der Horizontalen - und bleibt dementsprechend, wie gesagt, nur ‘anderweitig’, sekundär. Denn primär ist, was sich als Möglichkeit hieraus ergibt. Dies ist auf dramatischer Ebene in erster Linie der Möglichkeitsraum der Zauberei. Denn Prospero nutzt über den von ihm gefangen genommenen Ariel vornehmlich - und zudem widerwillig - die weiße Magie, um der Restitution beizuhelfen bzw. sich beihelfen zu lassen. 14 Die Paradigmatisierung zeigt sich vor allem in der Hochzeits-‘masque’ (Tmp. 4.1.60 ff.). Mit ihr öffnet sich ein Raum im Raum und präsentiert - nunmehr vertikal eingelagert und in gewissem Sinn gespiegelt - ein hypodiegetisches, wofern gar ‘heiliges’, Spiel im Spiel 15 , welches bezeichnenderweise eingeleitet wird mit den Worten: “No tongue! All eyes! Be silent! ” (4.1.59) Dieses Spiel zelebriert aus Anlass der Zusammenführung von Ferdinand, dem Sohn des Königs von Neapel, mit Miranda, der Tochter des einstigen Herzogs von Mailand, einen über heidnische Götter- und Nymphenfiguren laufenden und hierüber abgesegneten “contract of true love” (84 und 133), welcher von Prospero in seiner ambivalenten Haltung gegenüber der weißen Magie durch seine unterbrechende Rede zunächst vorerst selbst zerstört und ‘platzen’ gelassen wird (139), ohne dass aber damit der Möglichkeitsraum solcher Spiele im allgemeinen kassiert ist. Der dramatische Raum des Sturm zeigt also, so ließe sich zusammenfassen, auf der horizontalen Ebene eine drastische Begrenzung des fiktiven - syntagmatischen - Spielraums auf den alleinigen Enklavenort der Insel mit einer zugleich potentiellen vertikalen - und paradigmatischen - Entgrenzbarkeit dieses Raumes in die ‘unendlichen Weiten’ der Imagination und Phantasie. Dies entspricht dem generellen Trend der Romanzen in ihrer Funktion als innovationsfreudigen Theaterexperimenten mit den Möglichkeiten des Ästhetischen. 16 14 Zur Rolle der Magie im frühneuzeitlichen Theater siehe die differenzierenden Ausführungen in Tetzeli 1991; für eine Diskussion des Zusammenhangs von Zauberei, Vortäuschung und Illusion in Relation zum elisabethanischen Machtapparat wie insbesondere zum Maskenspiel vgl. auch Orgel 1991. 15 Zu den besonderen Bedingungen des Spiels im Spiel bei Shakespeare, allerdings ohne direkten Bezug auf den Sturm, siehe die nach wie vor einlässigen Ausführungen in Wolfgang Isers einstmaliger Würzburger Antrittsvorlesung (Iser 1962). 16 Für eine knappe Darstellung der These von Shakespeares insbesondere die Romanzen betreffenden Bewegung weg von den Referenzen und dem Historischen hin zu den Möglichkeiten des Spiels und zum Ästhetischen siehe die Überlegungen in Mahler 2009, v.a. 312 f. Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Shakespeares Sturm 145 4. Die Schweizer Regisseurin Barbara Frey hat dies für das Wiener Akademietheater, wie ich meine, in großer Einvernehmlichkeit und Kongenialität in Szene zu setzen gesucht. Auch die Akademietheateraufführung nutzt eine initiale Begrenzung ganz gezielt für eine er/ findungsreiche Fülle paradigmatischer Entgrenzungen auf der Bühne und im Spiel. So konstatiert etwa Annett Baumast anlässlich der späteren Zürcher Aufführung für The Shakespeare Revue, die Inszenierung biete “a very reductionist but congenial approach to The Tempest”, und fügt hinzu: “and certainly one to remember” - wohingegen wiederum Barbara Villiger Heilig für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung noch am Wiener ‘Original’ lediglich eine “Flaute im Wasserglas” zu entdecken vermeint. 17 Die Kongenialität zeigt sich zunächst im reduktiven Cast. Frey bedient sich lediglich dreier Schauspieler; sie streicht die Usurpatoren und besetzt neben dem Zentrum Prospero (verkörpert durch Johann Adam Oest, der kurzzeitig auch noch Trinculo verkörpert) die Figuren Ferdinand und Ariel (und überdies als Drittes auch noch Stephano) mit Joachim Meyerhoff sowie schließlich Miranda und erstaunlicherweise auch Caliban mit Maria Happel jeweils doppelt (dreifach). Das Stück selbst beginnt mit einem auf das Paradigmatische und die Medienbewusstheit der Inszenierung bereits aufmerksam machenden Palimpsest. Der theatrale Raum des Akademietheaters zeigt sich als ein kammerspielartiger offener, breiter Raum ohne Vorhang mit deutlicher Näheerfahrung von allen Sitzen, der begrenzt ist durch - wie von den Rezensionen mehrfach inkriminiert - die als solche sichtbare Brandmauer samt einem schwarz abgesetzten inneren magischen Kreis im Zentrum, welcher wirkt wie durch eine den Bühnenraum nach oben hin abschottende Blende. Der durch die Anlage entstehende Effekt einer kinoartigen Cinemascopesicht wird zugleich in der Gestaltung des szenischen Raums dahingehend genutzt, dass die Bühne neben einem angedeuteten Eingang und seitlich begrenzendem Gerüstwerk samt Kletterstange im Zentrum zwei Tische zeigt als eine Art Schreibtisch oder auch als Probetische mit Stühlen für eine durch die Schauspieler durchzuführende szenische Lesung. Die Bühnengestaltung zitiert mithin Peter Greenaways Tempest-Adaption Prospero’s Books als durchscheinendes Palimpsest; es ist dies eine Art intermediales Rückzitat mit gleichzeitig affichierter Illusionsdurchbrechung: Theater erscheint als Kino sowie zugleich auch als Probe mit vorwiegender Narration, 17 Siehe die Rezensionen von Annett Baumast in The Shakespeare Revue vom 26.10.2011 und Barbara Villiger Heilig in der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung vom 7.6.2007 [http: / / shakespeare-revue.com/ play.php? pid=15&action=review&rid=427 ; https : / / www.nzz.ch/ articleF8RI6-1.370149; acc. 24.5.2017]. Andreas Mahler 146 nicht dramatischer Präsentation, der Geschichte im Vordergrund. 18 Der szenisch-theatrale Raum ist also von Anfang an auf das Minimalste reduziert und zugleich palimpsesthaft geschichtet und bleibt so für das gesamte Stück konstant. Den Auftakt macht nach einer längeren synkopischen Pause Johann Adam Oest als Prospero mit einem weiteren Zitat, nämlich von Shakespeares “Sonett 73” als spielgebendem Rahmen. Dieses thematisiert bekanntlich Alter und Vergänglichkeit, Herbst, Abend und nahen Tod - in diesem Falle Prosperos wie nicht zuletzt auch Shakespeares. Das Sonett setzt das Zeichen für das folgende Spiel. Dieses folgt einer weitgehend durchgehaltenen Raumordnung. Frey platziert die Figur des zunächst rezitierend hereinschreitenden und sodann für immer sitzen bleibenden Prospero - und über das Sonettzitat gewissermaßen auch Shakespeare - als Schreibenden und damit zugleich auch als den das zu Sehende gleichsam unmittelbar Produzierenden am Schreibtisch im Zentrum der Bühne und hält ihn dort im szenischen ‘Zauberkreis’ auch weitgehend stabil (Abb. 2). 19 Dies schafft den Eindruck eines unmittelbar von ihm aus emanierenden Spiels, als sei er die Quelle der von uns wahrgenommenen Performanz, und es integriert zugleich nach vorn hin uns als Zuschauer mit ins Spiel in der - nicht unbedingt gewollten - Rolle eindringender Usurpatoren. Maria Happel als Caliban verortet die Inszenierung vorwiegend auf der rechten Bühnenseite und unten am Gerüst (Abb. 3); Maria Happel als Miranda und Joachim Meyerhoff als der mit den Schiffbrüchigen eintreffende Ferdinand stehen zumeist ein klein wenig idiotisch grinsend und schüchtern linkisch linkerhand des Schreibtischs auf der Vorderbühne. Joachim Meyerhoff als Ariel agiert dominant von der linken Bühnenseite aus (Abb. 4) in noch zu erläuternder, vielfältig beweglicher Weise. 18 Für eine ausführlichere Analyse der intermedialen Beziehungen zwischen dem Shakespeare’schen Tempest und Greenaways Prospero’s Books siehe die Überlegungen in Mahler 2019. 19 Alle Bilder folgen der damals aktuell bereitgestellten Webseite des Wiener Burgtheaters (Akademietheater); © Burgtheater Wien. Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Shakespeares Sturm 147 Abbildung 2. Schauspiel als Schreibszene oder Lesung Abbildung 3. Maria Happel als Caliban Abbildung 4. Joachim Meyerhoff als Ariel und Johann Adam Oest als Prospero Andreas Mahler 148 Hierüber gerät die im Zeichen strikter Begrenzung stehende Raumordnung in Bewegung. Die Raumpraxis der Figuren steht entsprechend in der Folge im Zeichen einer sich steigernden, entgrenzenden Dynamisierung: “The story unfolds in fast forward with even faster role changes”, konstatiert einlässig die bereits zitierte Shakespeare Revue. Sie bewirkt zunächst den Eindruck der Verlebendigung der Probenbzw. der Schreibtischarbeit. Aus der Lesung bzw. aus den Verschriftungen Prosperos / Shakespeares entstehen vor den Augen des Publikums zunehmend ‘unmöglicher’ scheinende, gleichwohl für uns sichtbare Szenen. Ähnlich der dramatischen Raumanlage wird dabei auch szenisch-theatral eine offensichtliche horizontale Räumlichkeit - in der Einbeziehung des Publikums sogar gewissermaßen eine sich weiter nach vorn hin öffnende doppelte horizontale Räumlichkeit - zunehmend genutzt für eine sich komplementär, wenn nicht gar supplementär darüberschiebende vertikale. Dies betrifft sowohl die Raumpraxis von Maria Happel in der Rolle des Caliban als ‘Untenwesen’ neben und unter dem Tisch als auch diejenige von Joachim Meyerhoff in der Rolle des Ariel als ‘Obenwesen’, welches vor unseren Augen gleichsam zu ‘fliegen’ und letzten Endes zuweilen auch zu ‘entschwinden’ beginnt, wie sich dies im Stück selbst wiederum anlässlich der noch abgebrochenen Zwischen-masque von Prospero formuliert findet als: “These our actors / [...] were all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air” (4.1.148-150). Der szenische-theatrale Raum entwirft mithin horizontal eine Emanation der Shakespeare’schen / Prospero’schen Imagination von einem ‘Innen’ in ein ‘Außen’ - metonymisch also von der Bühne hinein ins Publikum - und schafft zugleich vertikal eine Vergrößerung der allein sichtbaren Welt über die zwei Schwellen eines weithin unsichtbaren ‘Unten’ wie vor allen Dingen eines den Blicken gänzlich entzogenen ‘Oben’. Zugleich weitet sich so der Raum des sichtbaren Realen in den des mithereingeholten unsichtbaren, lebensweltlich ausgegrenzten Imaginären. 20 Maria Happels Raumpraxis als - im Wechsel mit der staunend-mädchenhaften Miranda - immer auch zugleich glatzköpfig-hässliche Caliban-Figur nutzt dabei das repetitive Auftauchen am Tisch (Abb. 5) etwa als stete Mahnung für Prosperos Ausgrenzungen des von ihm nicht akzeptierten Körperlich- Animalischen und entgrenzt so den eng begrenzten Spielraum des Imaginationsschreibtischs um ein stets bedrohlich brodelndes verdrängtes ‘Unten’. Joachim Meyerhoffs Raumpraxis als akrobatisch ‘schwerelos’ entschwebender Luftgeist Ariel (Abb. 6) entgrenzt den Schreibtischort zugleich um eine dem Menschen und auch Prospero nicht zugängliche empyreische Oben-Sphäre - um eine ‘Leichtigkeit des Seins’, welche vom 20 Zu der von ihm für das Komische und das Lachen in Anspruch genommenen Formel von der ‘Hereinholung des Ausgegrenzten’ als einer ‘Positivierung von Negativität’ siehe die grundsätzlichen Ausführungen bei Ritter 1989; zur Übertragung dieser Formel auf die Komödie und mithin das Ästhetische siehe auch Warning 1976: 325- 329. Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Shakespeares Sturm 149 normal sterblichen Menschen gewiss erträumt, gleichwohl nie erreicht werden kann. Wo Maria Happel als Caliban immerhin noch hörbar ist, ist Joachim Meyerhoff oberhalb der Querblende für das Publikum oftmals definitiv nicht mehr sichtbar - es sei denn, er lässt erahnbar etwas fallen. Abbildung 5. Entgrenzung aus dem Unten Abbildung 6. Entgrenzung ins Oben Raumpraktisch erreicht dies seinen Höhepunkt im szenischen Moment, wo Meyerhoff als Ariel - die einzig völlig frei bewegliche Figur - und zugleich auch als ein von Prospero durch Zauberei herbeigewünschter Hund den für seine gestohlene Insel auf Rache sinnenden, fluchenden Caliban - durch die Lüfte fliegend und am Boden kriechend - wild kläffend vertreibt (Tmp. Andreas Mahler 150 4.1.255 ff.). Obzwar gebunden an Prosperos Herrschaft, ist er mit einem Mal szenisch-theatral sichtwie bestaunbar ein gebietender Herrscher über Himmel und Erde: über das Oberhalb wie auch das Unterhalb der Bühne. Auf diese Weise wird der materiale Theaterraum für uns sichtbar zum ‘performativen Raum’, und er performiert in seiner ostentativen Begrenztheit vor unser aller Augen ‘wunderbar’ die ‘ganze Welt’ und letztlich doch auch nur allein sich selbst. 21 5. Der szenisch-theatrale Raum der Frey’schen Sturm-Inszenierung korrespondiert mithin - und hierin liegt das Kongeniale der Umsetzung - strukturell dem dramatischen Raum des Shakespeare’schen Tempest. Beide basieren auf einer programmatisch eingesetzten, initialen Begrenzung und nutzen diese für eine schier unbegrenzte Einfallsfülle von Entgrenzungen: der dramatische Raum nutzt die syntagmatisch angelegte mimetische Einschränkung auf die ‘reale’ Insel für eine paradigmatische Performanz ‘übernatürlicher’ Imagination (samt einer Fülle komischer Einfälle); der szenischtheatrale Raum nutzt in gleicher Weise den statisch-eng konzipierten, unimaginativen Spielraum der Akademietheaterbühne für ein fulminantes dynamisches Spiel performativer Entgrenzung (samt “quite a lot of situational humour [which] make[s] the evening a funny one, which is not always the case with productions of The Tempest”). 22 In beidem jedoch, so will es scheinen, liegt die Basis der entgrenzenden Überschreitungen vor allem gerade in der willkürlichen, vorgängigen, einschränkenden Begrenzung. Literaturverzeichnis Balme, Christopher ( 2 2003). Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft [1999]. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Corbin, Alain (1994). Meereslust. Das Abendland und die Entdeckung der Küste [1988]. Trans. Grete Osterwald. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer. Dünne, Jörg & Kirsten Kramer (2009). “Einleitung. Theatralität und Räumlichkeit”. In: Jörg Dünne, Sabine Friedrich & Kirsten Kramer (Eds.). Theatralität und Räumlichkeit. Raumordnungen und Raumpraktiken im theatralen Mediendispositiv. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann. 15-32. Elam, Keir (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents. London: Methuen. Esslin, Martin (1989). Die Zeichen des Dramas. Theater, Film, Fernsehen. Trans. Cornelia Schramm. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. 21 Zum Gedanken des ‘performativen Raums’ als einer performativen Hervorbringung seiner räumlichen Materialität siehe die Überlegungen bei Fischer-Lichte 2004: 188- 200. 22 So nochmals Annett Baumast für The Shakespeare Revue. Be- und Entgrenzungen des Raums in Shakespeares Sturm 151 Fischer-Lichte, Erika ( 4 1998). Semiotik des Theaters. Eine Einführung. Bd. 1. Das System der theatralischen Zeichen [1983]. Tübingen: Narr. Fischer-Lichte ( 4 1999). Semiotik des Theaters. Eine Einführung. Bd. 3. Die Aufführung als Text [1983]. Tübingen: Narr. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2004). Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Friedrich, Sabine (2015). “Raum und Theatralität”. In: Jörg Dünne & Andreas Mahler (Eds.). Handbuch Literatur & Raum. Berlin/ Boston: de Gruyter. 105-114. Iser, Wolfgang (1962). “Das Spiel im Spiel. Formen dramatischer Illusion bei Shakespeare”. Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 198. 209- 226. Jonson, Ben (1979). Every Man in His Humour [1598]. Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith [1966]. New Mermaids. London: Benn. Lotman, Jurij M. (1972). Die Struktur literarischer Texte [1970]. Trans. Rolf-Dietrich Keil. München: W. Fink. Mahler, Andreas (1998). “Welt Modell Theater. Sujetbildung und Sujetwandel im englischen Drama der frühen Neuzeit”. Poetica 30. 1-45. Mahler, Andreas ( 5 2009). “Das ideologische Profil”. In: Ina Schabert (Ed.). Shakespeare-Handbuch. Die Zeit - Der Mensch - Das Werk - Die Nachwelt [1974]. Stuttgart: Kröner. 295-319. Mahler, Andreas (2010). “Das Kommunikationssystem Theater”. In: Ulrike Landfester & Caroline Pross (Eds.). Theatermedien. Theater als Medium - Medien des Theaters. Bern: Haupt. 13-39. Mahler, Andreas (2016). “Shakespeare’s Enclaves”. In: Ina Habermann & Michelle Witen (Eds.). Shakespeare and Space. Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 17-37. Mahler, Andreas (2019). “Playing with Tempests. Shakespeare/ Jarman/ Greenaway”. Anglia 137. 53-69. Orgel, Stephen (1991). The Illusion of Power. Political Theater in the English Renaissance [1975]. Berkeley/ Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Pfister, Manfred (1977). Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse. München: W. Fink. Ritter, Joachim (1989). “Über das Lachen” [1940]. In: J.R. Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 62-92. Shakespeare, William (1987). The Tempest [1611]. The Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tetzeli von Rosador, Kurt (1991). “The Power of Magic. From Endimion to The Tempest”. Shakespeare Survey 43. 1-13. Warning, Rainer (1976). “Elemente einer Pragmasemiotik der Komödie”. In: Wolfgang Preisendanz & Rainer Warning (Eds.). Das Komische. Poetik und Hermeneutik VII. München: W. Fink. 279-333. Andreas Mahler Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin Widening the Horizon The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge With the introduction of Nigeria as a new country of reference in 2018 for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at higher level, the German federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) has taken a bold attempt to widen the horizon of educators and students alike. While this fresh perspective offers new opportunities for global education, the respective regulations and descriptors might diminish its potential by giving reductive options of implementation from an intercultural perspective. This theoretical article critically examines the (problematic) intercultural and postcolonial approaches, which are currently suggested, and proposes three principles of teaching Nigeria in the context of transcultural, cosmopolitan citizenship education. A practical example of how to teach aspects of religious beliefs in Nigeria concludes this article. Introduction With the beginning of the school year 2018/ 2019, Nigeria was introduced as a new country of reference for English at higher level in secondary schools in North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) (MSB 2018: 4-6). Hence, these binding guidelines establish Nigeria as an exam topic for those students taking the Abitur 1 , making it part of a two-and-a-half-year syllabus that includes rather varied topics, such as the role of English as a lingua franca in the global and digital age, the United Kingdom and its imperial history, the concept of the American dream and its history, Shakespearean drama and sonnets, and, finally, dystopic visions of the future (ibd.). Introducing 1 This is the final exam after twelve, respectively thirteen years of regular school education. Students successfully completing these exams are allowed to continue their education at the university level. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0018 Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 154 Nigeria as a further topic poses a challenge for both teachers and students, since Nigeria - unlike North America, Great Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand - has never been part of an official German curriculum before. Thus, in the summer of 2018, there were no teacher's manuals, guidelines, or textbooks that educators could fall back on. Teachers had to - and still are bound to - react quickly, since, from spring 2021 onwards, every learner who takes English at higher level in NRW will have to learn about Nigeria and be prepared to take centralised exams dealing with topics regarding this African country. Despite all this urgency, though, it is vital to be conscious about not only the choice of what to teach but also how to teach it. Depending on the chosen approach, the narrative in the classrooms could go either way: Nigeria could represent an “Africa rising” (Dabiri 2017: 206), or, based on the example of Nigeria, Africa could be presented as a “dark, failing continent” (Salami 2013). However, it is not just the views and opinions that will be formed which are at stake: EFL educators are faced with an immense opportunity to view cultural learning differently, to truly widen the pupils’ horizons, not only geographically but also from a cultural learning point of view. This article takes the clear stance that Nigeria, as a new country of reference, should be viewed as an opportunity to re-imagine cultural education and to open the EFL classrooms to more transcultural, global and cosmopolitan approaches, which especially have human rights education at its core. Considering the curricula restraints, which will be elaborated on in the first part of this article, this might seem challenging - but it is a challenge worth embarking upon, as will be discussed in the second part. An example of how this can be achieved in the EFL classroom will also be presented, when looking more closely at the religious aspects of Nigerian life-worlds. 1. Curricular Restraints Despite the fact that the binding curricular guidelines give a general outline concerning the thematic fields that must be covered in lessons, in NRW teachers are relatively free to choose the exact focus, materials and aspects they would like to teach. Considering that Nigeria “has by far the largest population of all African countries, with an estimated one out of every five sub-Saharan Africans being Nigerian”, is “one of the largest democracies in the world” and has “traditionally played the most active diplomatic role on the world stage of any African country” (Campbell/ Page 2018: 1), it might prove difficult to find a starting point, a perspective which does justice to the vastness and importance of this country and its people. The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 155 However, it is not just the agony of choice which poses a challenge: the curricular guidelines require educators to teach the cultural aspects in accordance with the model of intercultural education, as put forth by Byram (1997). Furthermore, the NRW curriculum is firmly rooted in both the Common European Framework of Reference (European Council 2001) and the German educational standards for English at higher levels (KMK 2012). As will be discussed later, this notion of (teaching and learning about) culture is problematic (not only) when teaching Nigeria because the concept of interculturality is based on the assumption that a nation has one identifiable culture, which students should learn about as well as interact with in a tolerant and sensible way, while supposedly checking their own values against those of the 'foreign culture'. 1.1 Thematic fields: The Balancing Act between Postcolonialism and Globalisation In the NRW guidelines, Nigeria is meant to be taught as a new country of reference following two thematic perspectives: 1) Political and social realities and 2) global challenges and visions (MSB 2018: 4-6), which are divided into subtopics, as illustrated in the table below. Political and social realities Global challenges and visions Postcolonialism - life worlds in an additional anglophone culture 2 Opportunities and risks of globalisation Voices from the African Continent: Focus on Nigeria Voices from the African Continent: Focus on Nigeria Table 1. Binding specifications Abitur 2021 (MSB 2018: 4-6, adapted F. M. & M. R.) By adding the postcolonial perspective, the students' attention is turned to the past, while the latter not only focuses on the present but also looks to a future unknown. To some extent, both perspectives might seem a logical choice: on the one hand, while Nigeria does have a (post-)colonial past, for better or worse, it would not exist within its current borders had it not been for the British. On the other hand, to place Nigeria within the field of opportunities and risks of globalisation also makes sense, as it is both an affected and aspiring country in terms of global and digital industries. To bridge these two theoretical but conceptually very different aspects of the same country, however, seems an impossible task- especially within an average 2 The advanced EFL class (Leistungskurs) has the additional clarification ‘and their historical backgrounds’ (“und ihre historischen Hintergründe”), which is lacking from the guidelines of the regular class (Grundkurs). The question hence arises if it is at all possible and desirable to include postcolonial aspects without considering Nigeria's historical background. Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 156 eight-week period that educators may have at their disposal to cover all topics. Yet, regardless of the time constraints, it seems difficult to fathom the original intention of choosing Nigeria as a new country of reference: the original aim appears to be lost in a possibly overzealous attempt to pursue an ambitious goal. In the following, the issues with those thematic fields are raised separately. 1.1.1 The Issue with Postcolonialism Learning about the “political and social realities” (ibd.) in an anglophone cultural area, aside from the countries that already belong to the established canon, makes sense: currently, over 70 countries have declared English as their official language, each of which could thus be chosen as a country of reference for an EFL classroom. Many of those countries have chosen English as the official language because of their colonial pasts, with their borders having been drawn in colonial times by the British colonisers, as has Nigeria. It is worth considering, however, whether a postcolonial perspective can actually be viewed as helpful when teaching “the political and social realities” in the “life worlds in an additional anglophone cultural area” (ibd.). The questions that educators need to ask themselves are a) whether a backward-looking approach can serve as a helpful introduction into the Nigerian life-worlds and their realities, and b) which life-worlds and whose political and social realities will be focused on. While this article does not dispute the importance and relevance of postcolonial theories in general, it may be important to raise an issue in line with Bauman’s objection to the continuous use of the term postmodernity (Bauman 2012): choosing postcolonialism as the first approach to teaching about Nigeria in a school context is, in essence, an unfavourable statement, in that it describes what Nigeria no longer is, instead of describing what Nigeria is today. It hence entails a negativity, as it does not encourage educators and students to ask what is new and what is different. Nigeria certainly has a colonial and, subsequently, a post-colonial past and present, but it also has newly developed identities, which should not be merely defined through a postcolonial lens. Therefore, it is important for teachers to be aware of their positions in this matter, as it will have implications on their choice of material, their approaches to teaching cultural topics and, hence, on the (possibly negative) narrative they present. The question could then be, in terms of the subject area, whether the term postcolonialism could be taken out of the guidelines and be replaced with more obvious and coeval concepts. Educators certainly have the intellectual tools at hand: as an approach to teaching Nigeria, concepts of global, even cosmopolitan citizenship education might prove to be more fruitful in understanding the political and social realities of these life-worlds. This by no means negates the relevance of historic facts of (post-)colonial times from a critical point of view. A postcolonial perspective, though, could and The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 157 maybe even should actually be a result rather than a starting point of teaching Nigeria. 1.1.2 The Issue of Teaching Global Challenges & Visions The fact that students are required to learn about “global challenges and visions” as well as “opportunities and risks of globalisation” (MSB 2018: 4-6) also makes sense in the context of Nigeria, as Nigeria certainly has the potential to be an important global player in terms of its industries, since both import and export are imbedded in global markets. Also, it is a country that is meeting some of the opportunities and risks of globalisation head on, while at the same time it is one of the countries suffering immensely from global developments (see, for example, issues connected with the global oil industry, cf. Wenar 2017). But again, the issue of choosing a focus is also a question of framing this debate within the narratives of either “Africa rising” (Dabiri 2017: 206) or the “dark, failing continent” (Salami 2013). The guidelines at hand do not state which global challenges are supposed to be dealt with in class, and - again - the choices are as plentiful as they are immense in their potential consequences on the portrayal of Nigeria as an example for the African continent. According to the UN, the population of Nigeria is projected to grow by 200 million between 2019 and 2050 (cf. UN 2019: 12), which means that it is estimated to become the third largest country in this respect. However, in 2019, life expectancy at birth is below 55 years (ibd.: 30) and there are currently no predictions that the living conditions will improve by 2050. Despite the official regulation that primary education is free and compulsory, currently “about 10.5 million of the country’s children aged 5-14 years are not in school” (Unicef 2019). The country suffers from several human rights violations, ranging from police violence, communal conflicts to sectarian violence by Boko Haram, as well as corruption and violent confrontations, in addition to environmental destruction in the Niger Delta (see, for example, Amnesty International 2019, Human Rights Watch 2019). The list of risks and challenges could go on, as could the list of opportunities, but the issue remains: an intercultural notion cannot serve as a helpful approach when dealing with any of these topics in class. Although at first glance it might seem logical that concepts of global education would be the more obvious approach, it is curiously missing from the NRW guidelines, since these are from the CEFR or the German educational standards. 3 It would be a logical assumption, however, that, in order to understand global phenomena and developments and to assess the opportunities and risks, as well as understand the differences between 3 This is also true for Beck's theory of Risk Society of Modernity (cf. for example, 2008). Due to the choice of the word ‘risk’, his theory is implied, though never explicitly mentioned. Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 158 them, students should be prepared to grasp the increasing interconnectedness of the world. This might be better achieved, as argued in the second part of this article, through global citizenship education (GCE), with a special focus on human rights education (HRE). 1.1.3 The Issue with (Far-Away) Voices from the African Continent The education players in NRW are currently discussing not only the choice of topics for the classrooms but also the literary texts that might serve as a basis for classroom discourses. Surprisingly, most exemplary curriculums currently recommend letting voices be heard that are far away from Nigeria and the African continent: most propose reading novels by authors, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole, who left Nigeria while at university and thus divided their time between Nigeria and the US. Although these texts surely have their literary and intellectual merits, it appears an odd choice, considering that these favoured, distant voices from the Nigerian diaspora give a somewhat estranged view of the country. While we do not dispute that “Africans outside the continent are Africans too” (Salami 2013), it is certainly not the perspective that a heading such as “Voices from the African Continent: Focus on Nigeria” suggests (italics F.M. & M.R.). As with the postcolonial perspective, educators must ask themselves if these are not in fact reductive options that may not lead to an understanding, let alone an analysis of contemporary Nigeria. Educators need to be critical of the direction this is taking, as a “reductive analysis fails to engage with the spaces in between, the fact that you have to be critical of the direction a movement is taking while also acknowledging that it is possible to imagine alternative possibilities for it” (Dabiri 2017: 205). In choosing such far-away voices, students may wonder why they are displayed as more relevant than voices from within Nigeria. Ogbechie (2008) raises this issue, not in connection with literature but with the arts, stating, In contemporary art discourses, “Africa” is everywhere but the African continent itself is everywhere invisible. It may come as a surprise to many that there is indeed an African continent composed of many countries where large numbers of artists live, work, and engage as best as they can in global discourses: their practice deserves recognition on its own terms. […] Globalizations shouldn’t always require Africa to emerge only in the West: people in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Mali and Zimbabwe are active agents of global change even though we tend to marginalize their existence and contributions. […] He concludes his observation with a comment worth considering in the teaching context, as he states that if “we don’t need to study Africa to understand Africa, then we should state so upfront and spare everyone the sleight of hand that passes for contemporary curatorial focus and scholarship on the subject” (ibd). The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 159 1.2 Intercultural Learning: Old and (Dis-)Trusted As previously mentioned, the binding curricular guidelines require teachers to teach cultural aspects in line with the CEFR and, thus, Byram's concept of intercultural communicative competence (ICC). 4 This means that, despite the recent academic discourse on this subject matter, the focus still (re)lies on an intercultural approach. This could and should be viewed as a problem, though: the CEFR clearly states that in “an intercultural approach, it is a central objective of language education to promote the favourable development of the learner's whole personality and sense of identity in response to the enriching experience of otherness in language and culture” (Council of Europe 2001: 2, emphasis added). This suggests that, firstly, Nigeria - and any other country of reference - is in fact to be viewed as 'the other', still abiding by the principle of binary oppositions, and that, secondly, Nigeria is expected to have only one variety of English and one identifiable culture. One crucial aspect of ICC is for the students to develop intercultural skills and know-how, which - again using the singular - is defined as follows:  the ability to bring the culture of origin and the foreign culture into relation with each other;  cultural sensitivity and the ability to identify and use a variety of strategies for contact with those from other cultures;  the capacity to fulfil the role of cultural intermediary between one’s own culture and the foreign culture and to deal effectively with intercultural misunderstanding and conflict situations;  the ability to overcome stereotyped relationships. (ibd.: 105, emphasis added) This analysis could be continued further but suffice it to state that, regardless of the (recent) interpretations, intercultural learning - as put forth by the CEFR and, hence, the German educational standards - is based on the principle of Fremdverstehen, on binary oppositions of 'self' and 'other'/ 'foreign' as well as on the concepts of cultures as being monolithic, which is, and always has been, highly problematic. 5 It also implies that students in 4 Despite some attempts to seemingly widen the perspective, allowing for slightly more open views (see, for example the Companion Volume which was published by the European Council as an addition to the CEFR in 2018), the concept of ICC within the CEFR has never officially been revised since its first publication in 2001, and criticism from experts in the field has never officially been openly recognised by the European Council. Hence, this model, which was first published over 20 years ago, is still binding, despite all the developments on a global scale since then. 5 The descriptors in the NRW curriculum also use 'culture' in the singular and describe, for example, that students should be open to gaining experiences with a ‘foreign culture’ (“fremde Kultur”, QUA-LiS 2019). The binary opposition between ‘foreign and own’ virtues and attitudes is also part of the descriptors (ibd.). Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 160 German classrooms have one singular identifiable culture, which is quite simply not a representation of students' life-worlds anywhere. Despite all attempts to make official guidelines to appear more open to diversity, suggesting a more 'democratic' approach (see Matz forthcoming), the problem inherent in the concept of ICC has been and sadly still remains to be this: We teach youth to think like states, or nations, in a time when global problems demand thinking beyond borders. The absurdity of the disconnect is stark - that despite mounting problems that cross boundaries, including migration, global warming, infectious diseases, war, we continue to use the nation/ state framework to solve problems that demand a different way of thinking. (Gaudelli 2019) The concepts of transculturality, of GCE as well as HRE are not new, and, yet, they are still simply neglected and marginalised within the European educational context. 6 The recent publication of the Framework of Democratic Education by the European Council (2018) serves as proof that there is no intention to even recognise the fundamental criticism intercultural learning has drawn from educators working in this field (see, for example, Doff & Schulze-Engler 2011, Freitag-Hild 2010). By choosing Nigeria as a new country of reference within EFL education, this article takes the stance that NRW has chosen a suitable example of why the intercultural approach is an ill-chosen one: Nigeria, as any other country for this matter, does not have one single, identifiable “foreign culture” to which students can relate their “own culture” of origin (Council of Europe 2001: 105). Hence, educators might miss a very valuable opportunity for cultural learning, for opening up to transcultural approaches, notions of hybridity and - as explored in the following - the opportunities that global and human rights education offer, by further promoting the idea of Fremdverstehen, of gaining socio-cultural knowledge of a single nation state. Since Nigeria was chosen as an example of the “[v]oices from the African continent” (MSB 2018: 3), a first aspect that teachers and students alike need to recognize is the inherent hybridity of this continent and its states. As Mbembe clearly states on behalf of citizens of all African countries: “Insofar as African states are total inventions, and recent ones at that, strictly speaking there is nothing in their essential nature that can force us to worship them - which is not to say that we are indifferent to their fate” (2017: 106). 6 This article especially bases its understanding of transculturality on the work of Delanoy (see, for example, 2006). The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 161 2. Three Principles of Teaching Nigeria After having raised the fundamental concerns we envisage, should Nigeria be taught according to the current guidelines, we propose three principles that are closely interlinked and which may open the teaching and learning process to a broader understanding of cultural and global learning. Nigeria is a vast and hybrid country with human rights issues, a constantly changing and developing country, which has gained enormous importance within the globalised world. Hence, it is exactly those aspects that not only deserve closer attention but that can even be viewed as guiding principles when approaching this country within the context of EFL education. 2.1 Cultural Hybridity Transculturality emerged at the same time as the concepts of intercultural learning, as an “approach to culture particularity suited to exploring the hybridity of individual and collective identities and the cultural 'connections between things' in an increasingly globalized world” (Doff & Schulze- Engler 2011: 3). Delanoy states that transculturality and cultural hybridity can be used interchangeably and defines both as “a diverse set of cultural practices” (2006: 223). When considering Nigerian cultures, it becomes clear that cultural hybridisation is not only a phenomenon of 'fluid' or 'liquid' modern times (cf., for example, Bauman 2000), but it appears to have been a fact of what we would now describe as Nigerian life-worlds. Hence, in the EFL classroom it is vital to find a way of looking at “African identity as fluid, relational and always in flux” (Kalua 2009: 23) and recognising that “culture, arising from people's actions, including their capacity to reinvent and reconstitute themselves […] cannot be a totality” (ibd.). Contemporary Nigeria encompasses more than 250 ethnic groups (Federal Government of Nigeria 2019) and languages; it was under official English colonial rule for over 60 years and, due to the richness in ethnic groups and languages, officially refers itself as “Unity in Diversity”, naming “dress modes, inter-ethnic marriages, shared religious beliefs and practices as well as commerce” as examples for this unity (ibd.). Hence, Nigeria could very well be considered to be what Jackson calls “mixing zones in cross-cultural contexts”, in which cultural change and transformation “are not rarities, or pesky exceptions. They are an important, normal aspect of human life” (2019: 26). Therefore, it is obvious that approaching Nigeria by using concepts of intercultural learning “where cultures are still treated as monoliths with clear boundaries” does not makes sense (Delanoy 2006: 223). Instead, models of transculturality that “conceptualize culture as an open, fluid (‘hybrid’) and individual (yet non-arbitrary) construct which cannot be seen as a separate ‘foreign’ entity and as such does not lend itself to be ‘understood’” (Doff & Schulze- Engler 2011: 7) appear to be more suitable. Adding a global perspective to this “Unity in Diversity”, we might even Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 162 state that “the idea that we can live in isolated moral cultures makes no sense” (Appiah 2017: 271), as the example of Nigeria might teach us how to live together in an increasingly interconnected world: Even if we grow up in places with different ideas about manners and cuisine and religion and even if, in part as a result, we disagree about some moral questions, the problem of how to share the world with people who have different views about these matters is not a theoretical, but a practical one. (ibd.) On a regional level, Nigeria can thus serve as a very appropriate opportunity of teaching students “against the notion that there is an easy fit among concepts of culture, race, and civilisation, as they learn to question and not assume a sense of loyalty to groups describing themselves as civilisations for political aims” (Jackson 2019: 25). On a continental level, by approaching Nigeria as an example for the African continent from a transcultural point of view, educators could hence pay respect to the fact that “[…] like any other continent, Africa is entitled to have multiple subcultural movements and we should reject all attempts to relegate African culture to a monolith” (Salami 2013). Furthermore, when also dealing with literature from the Nigerian diaspora - as suggested by the Ministry of Education in NRW - educators and students alike need to be aware of Afropolitanisms, which are hybrid and transcultural by definition, as they can be understood as an awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere on the here and vice versa, the relativization of primary roots and memberships and the way of embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness, and remoteness, the ability to recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner and make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness, to domesticate the unfamiliar to work with what seems to be opposites. (Mbembe 2017: 105) Thus, it becomes obvious that texts that deal with such hybrid and transcultural lives can certainly not be approached following the concepts of intercultural learning. 2.2 Global Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Education While Nigeria is seemingly not only supposed to serve as a gateway to teaching aspects of globalisation, it also serves as an example of a country outside the Western industrialised realm. However, as with the discussion of (trans-)cultural issues, when opening the canon to global issues, challenges and visions, one of the questions educators must raise is why this is not envisaged in light of a GCE approach. We base our understanding of global education on Gaudelli (2002: 52), who defines it as The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 163 a curriculum that seeks to prepare students to live in a progressively interconnected world where the study of human values, institutions, and behaviours are contextually examined through a pedagogical style that promotes critical engagement of complex, diverse information toward socially meaningful action. It is exactly this intention - to prepare students to live in this interconnected world - with the focus on human values and the promotion of critical thinking that we view as more pressing and important as the appropriate discourse in accordance with the concept of ICC. On the basis of this understanding, this article proposes that the principles of GCE and cosmopolitan education (cf. Appiah 2007) should be the starting point for teaching Nigeria. After all, the desirable learning outcomes may not be achieved through a mere intercultural approach. If we do not “encourage educators and learners to see themselves socially rather than individually, to imagine possibilities of working together in solidarity on issues that matter” (Gaudelli 2016: 59) or to “join their society in imagining and reimagining a better and more just world, from a personal and local to national and global” (Jackson 2019: 146), then we should refrain from such half-hearted attempts. As stated before, the narrative of Africa presented in classrooms can form a negative or positive view - especially in light of globalisation. It is vital to avoid an “unspoken subtext […] namely - how dare Africans not simply be victims, but also shapers of globalisation and all its inherent contestations? ” (Salami 2013). It is also important to avoid a mere superficial engagement and to make it “all too easy for teachers and students to dissociate” from the concerns discussed, thus “seeing them as someone else's problem” (Gaudelli 2016: 61). Nigeria as a new country of reference should instead encourage a discourse that allows for a “humanistic orientation to global learning” (ibd. 152). Perhaps, in this respect, it might not even be constructive to just follow the principle of 'think global, act local', but to explore a more cosmopolitan view, which might help express a universal concern about this interconnected world that focuses on valuing others. After all, in this interconnected world, “the idea that we can live in isolated moral cultures makes no sense” (Appiah 2017: 271). It is time that educators also start considering teaching “ethics in the world of strangers” (ibd 2006). Thus, in line with Gaudelli, this article argues for not merely allowing a GCE approach to teaching Nigeria, which could be defined as a form of education that embraces recognition of the local as profoundly interdependent upon a myriad other locales; the presence of vast, inherent and perpetuated historical injustices and building the capacity to act in solidarity to address these injustices (Gaudelli 2016: 167). We would also like to suggest going beyond global education towards a cosmopolitan perspective, as cosmopolitanism Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 164 with its claims for universal human rights, including the rights of those who legally have no state to guarantee such rights […] does not so much operate in opposition to ideas of national sovereignty but has transformed the status of sovereignty itself, so that the sovereign state (and any of its officers), instead of being the guarantor of rights, becomes answerable morally and in international law to the universal rights of humans. Cosmopolitanism, we might say, names a new form and practice of mediation, between the sovereignty of the state and the claims of the universal, between national and individual, between sovereign state and the ethics of human hospitality. (Young 2017: 136) 2.3 Human Rights Education As previously mentioned, Nigeria faces many human rights issues and it therefore may appear rather obvious that HRE might be a helpful starting point in teaching Nigeria. However, this article takes the stance that more is at stake here. In documents by the Council of Europe, both preceding and following the publication of the CEFR, HRE has been suggested as a helpful approach in foreign language education (see Matz forthcoming). Unfortunately, though, it has sadly lost the prominent position it once had, before the publication of the CEFR, and now appears to be included only to pay lip service to critical voices who insist on its importance within educational contexts: it is marginalised and not even considered as an addition, let alone as an alternative to ICC. In line with transcultural and cosmopolitan approaches on education (cf. Jackson 2019), HRE may be an obvious choice, nonetheless, as global or cosmopolitan citizenship education “invites a reimagining of the nation as cosmopolitan where its citizens are all connected to people in a world community extending beyond national boundaries” (Starkey 2018: 156). The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training defines HRE as encompassing learning about rights, through rights and for rights. As well as knowledge (learning about rights) there is an emphasis on learning through rights (democratic upbringing and school practices, such as student councils and a climate that promotes recognition and respect of difference). Finally, there is learning for rights. This involves empowering young people to be able to make a difference, and equipping them with skills for change. It involves seeing human rights education as a means of transformation. (Osler & Starkey 2018: 37) 7 With regard to Nigeria, it might certainly be the more uncomfortable position to choose an HRE perspective: when teaching and learning according 7 It is interesting to note that while this definition was, for some time, accompanied by the term ‘democratic education’ in European documents, it was gradually deleted from these (see Matz forthcoming). The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 165 to the principles of ICC, educators and students might just argue that, from their perspective, they disagree - in a tolerant and respectful manner - with the human rights violations in Nigeria and can then return to their everyday lives. HRE, however, demands that we think about our own possible contributions to the conditions that make these violations possible and take responsibility on a local or regional level, as human rights “demand human solidarity […], they are indivisible; they come as a package, they are not offered as a menu from which individuals or governments can select” (Osler & Starkey 2010: 48). Thus, in dealing with these issues, educators and students alike “need to be willing to recognize and defend the rights of strangers, including people with different cultures and belief systems from our own”, since “we have the responsibility to protect the rights of others” (ibd.). One might wonder how these three principles might be incorporated into a teaching sequence about Nigeria. The answer is as simple as it is logical: through topics that are closely related to the life worlds of students. 3. Religion - Nigeria as a role model for understanding and tolerance? As an example for teaching Nigeria in the EFL classroom, this article proposes to look at - amongst other topics -the diversity of religious lives within this country. A Gallup Poll in 2009 asked people worldwide about the importance of religion for their everyday life: while most European countries showed figures varying between 30 and 40% of the total population, in Nigeria, 96% of the people stated that religion was highly important for their everyday life (Crabtree 2010). This clearly underlines why Nigeria is often referred to as one of the most religious countries in the world (Campbell & Page 2018: 69). Accordingly, one cannot successfully grasp an understanding of Nigeria without having a closer look at its religions and the ongoing conflicts that are connected to them. Nigeria is by far the largest country in the world in which neither Christianity nor Islam is a minority religion, which might be one of the main reasons why Nigeria can draw on a long period of rather peaceful interaction between the different religious denominations (cf. Bourne 2015). Other religions also play an important role, ranging from Hinduism to traditional ethnic religions and beliefs. It is important to note that, in all its diversity, many hybrid forms of beliefs also exist, as many citizens “follow the traditional religion along with one of the world's major religions (Islam, Christianity etc.)” (Tersoo 2018). The main religious conflicts Nigeria faces today only started in 1978, after the military dictatorship had ended and Nigeria needed to introduce a new constitution. While the Muslim North mainly voted for the introduction of the Sharia law, Christian ethnic groups strictly argued against it. Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 166 Ultimately, after years of violent tensions, twelve northern states introduced the Sharia law in 2000 (Loimeier 2007: 65). The attacks of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram have further damaged the relationship between Christians and Muslims, thereby paving the way for a formal division of Nigeria between a Muslim North (supporters include, for example, the Hausa, part of Yoruba people) and a Christian South (supporters include Yoruba as well as, for example, Igbo and Ijaw people, cf. Tersoo 2018). However, at second sight, Nigeria’s religious conflicts bear the danger of reducing religious life to a(nother) “single story” or creating the impression that the differences between the two main religions in Nigeria, Christianity and Islam, can be held responsible for Nigeria’s complex ethnic and religious conflicts. As Campbell and Page (2018: 69) point out: Conflicts between Christians and Muslims receive widespread media attention, even though they may begin as ethnic rivalries or disputes over land and water use, or by politicians seeking to advance their own agendas. The resulting conflicts often acquire religious labels and even coloration. When examined closely, incidents in which Muslim mobs burn down churches in the North and Middle Belt - or where Christian militias attack Fulani herdsmen and Hausa traders - appear to be motivated as much by ethnic and socioeconomic tensions as by religious antipathy. When conflicts are reported in the Nigerian and international media, religion often stands in as a proxy for more complex causes of conflict. Accordingly, the main focus for the EFL classroom should not be on the religious conflicts in Nigeria itself (e.g. the violence caused by Boko Haram, the persecution of Christians in the Muslim North) but on the complexities of religions and mutual understanding that take place beyond the conflicts. In terms of GCE, it is important to let students critically reflect on the fact that Western media only offers a very limited coverage of the ongoing conflicts between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The main focus of European media appears to be on Boko Haram and the killings of Christians in Nigeria, while there is hardly any news about the peaceful understanding between Christians and Muslims in most parts of Nigeria. Over the last years, there has been a strong trend in Nigeria's civil society towards peace and reconciliation, which is underlined by many non-governmental initiatives that promote understanding and reconciliation. The award-winning documentary The Imam and the Pastor (2006, dir: Alan Channer) focuses on this process of reconciliation, by presenting the story of Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye in northern Nigeria. Both had led armed militias during the violent ethnic and religious conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Kaduna since the late 1990s, which were caused by the introduction of Sharia law in Kaduna. The riots, which ended in 2000, probably led to more than 2,000 deaths. After years of violence, both The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 167 men have since turned a different direction, are now co-directors of the Muslim-Christian Interfaith Mediation Centre and have joined their efforts to resolve the conflicts in northern Nigeria. The documentary, however, not only tells the story of the remarkable transition of the two religious' leaders, but it also puts a new light on Nigeria’s religious and ethnic conflicts, which might offer a helpful perspective in EFL education. Recent Nollywood productions, which could also be discussed in class, clearly underline the growing demand of Nigeria's society to overcome the conflicts and to find new ways of mutual understanding. The film More Troubles (2017, dir. Haggai Nwokolo) tells the story of a Christian young man and his Muslim girlfriend, who have fled from Boko Haram, and the everyday struggles between Christians and Muslims in the eastern parts of Nigeria. In a similar way, Hakkunde (2017, dir. Oluseyi Asurf) tells the story of a young graduate, who leaves Lagos to find work in Kaduna, in northern Nigeria. The film was Nigeria's first crowd-funded film production, which clearly shows that the film can draw on a wide consensus among Nigeria's society. It addresses a multitude of conflicts in Nigeria, including drug abuse, discrimination, unemployment, cultural conflicts and religious and ethnic diversity. In a rather light-hearted way, the film demonstrates how the protagonist is finally able to find his fortune in Nigeria, by realising the diversity of Nigeria, taking a different view and leaving stereotypes behind. For classroom contexts, it seems essential to stress Nigeria’s religious hybridity and, in light of an HRE approach, address the religious and ethnic conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, without putting too much emphasis on the conflict itself. Instead of generally blaming, for example, Boko Haram or Islamic extremism for the religious and ethnic conflicts, and thereby taking a post-colonial perspective on Nigeria, students need to be critically aware of the ongoing change in Nigeria's society and the peoples’ attempts to overcome cultural, ethnic and religious conflicts. At the same time, students would be given the opportunity to learn about the hybridity of religion in Nigeria itself, as both world religions cannot be seen as monolithic: In general, though with many exceptions, relations are good between the mainstream Christian denominations and the traditional Sufi-influenced Islam of the emirs of Northern Nigeria. Salafist Muslims, again with many exceptions, do not have close relations with any of the Christian denominations. Particularly poor, are relations between Salafist Islam and the “African” or Pentecostal churches, perhaps because each has a populist and dogmatic outlook and they compete for converts among those who were previously adherent to traditional religion. (Campbell & Page 2018: 71) Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge 168 The lesson that can be learned is that overcoming cultural hybridity can and should not be a goal (which, in Nigeria's case, would ultimately lead to the separation of the country into various religious and ethnic entities). Instead, students could be offered the opportunity to learn how to start a conversation about this hybridity, in an effort to reach a mutual understanding (cf. Appiah 2017). It is this understanding, which sometimes might even lead to change, that the example of Chrislam underlines. Chrislam is a syncretistic movement, which blends the basic ideas of Christianity and Islam, based on the connections that are to be found in the Bible and the Koran. It emerged in the 1970s in Lagos and has grown rapidly over the last 45 years. The emergence of the various Chrislam movements in modern Nigeria (Ifeoluwa and Oke Tude being the most prominent) can easily be explained by the geographical distribution of the various ethnic groups in Nigeria, as Janson (2016: 646) points out: That these movements originated in Nigeria is of course revealing because its inhabitants are strictly divided between Muslims and Christians along a predominantly north-south axis. […] Christian-Muslim conflict has played a role in Nigerian politics since the centralization of the political system in the 1970s, and it has become increasingly important since the political liberalization associated with the return to civilian rule in 1999, when Christians and Muslims competed for access to the state and its resources. It is therefore highly remarkable that, in Nigeria's southwest, which is predominantly mixed in denomination and has developed a culture of mutual understanding and peaceful co-existence, Chrislam has emerged to actually overcome the religious conflicts that seem to dominate Christian-Muslim relations in most other parts of Nigeria. In contrast to Christianity and Islam, which both focus on orthodoxy (i.e. the correct belief and doctrine), Chrislam puts more effort on orthopraxy (i.e. the correct religious practice) and provides its worshippers with practical tools for everyday religious practice, drawing from Christianity and Islam alike: […] Chrislam does not just promise peace and fortune in heaven; it wants to ensure its membership that peace and fortune can be had on earth too. Remarkably, whereas Christian and Muslim theological doctrines focus on salvation and the afterlife, Chrislam promises a better life on earth (Janson 2016: 663). In classroom contexts, the analysis of Chrislam promotes a different understanding of the role of religion in Nigeria, moving beyond the rather traditional understanding of the conflicts between Christianity and Islam (thus making a peaceful understanding between the two religious groups highly unlikely), towards a more hybrid and tolerant understanding of religion in Nigeria, which can be described as The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 169 a heterogeneous and unstable arrangement of practices that are not reducible to a single logic. Taking such a course may eventually shift the attention from a narrow analysis of ‘world’ religion as a coherent belief system towards a perspective that focuses on how religious practitioners actually live religion in their daily lives, and the ambiguities, inconsistencies, aspirations, and double standards as the constitutive moments in their lived religiosity (Janson 2016: 676). 4. Conclusion Choosing Nigeria as a new county of reference for EFL classrooms in North- Rhine Westphalia is a bold choice. It opens up the canon to an African country, which has not yet been considered in this educational context. At the same time, though, the possible effectiveness inherent in this choice may very well prove to be counteracted by the pursuit of an intercultural approach, as put forth in the current binding NRW guidelines, since this “reductive tendency […] to see others not as individuals, but as representatives of larger groups, and the subsequent way that we see ourselves in the light of others’ view of us, is seemingly connected to the categorical way we are wired to think about the world” (Gaudelli 2016: 83). We hope that educators might first use a hybrid/ transcultural approach to teaching Nigeria, presenting many voices and multimodal perspectives that might enable our students to entertain the possibility of being in “conversation with one another” and to recognise that “the heart of a conversation is not about the search for agreement. It is about getting to know each other in ways that mean we can share the world precisely without agreement” (Appiah 2017: 272). Furthermore, we also hope that different voices will be heard in our classrooms, as we also believe that, in Dabiri's words, “the problem lies in the fact that we still don’t hear the narratives of Africans who are not privileged per se” (2017: 207). As Jackson states in her observations about the importance of a global and cosmopolitan civic education, “Education is a moral act” (2019: 144), and it should be the aim of education to prepare students “for engaging in the dynamic, real world justly and meaningful” (ibd. 145). 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Everyday Transcendence. London: Routledge. Gaudelli, William (26 th March 2019). “Belonging in an Age of Global Migration”. Paper presented at the international conference on Educating the Global Citizen. International Perspectives on Foreign Language Teaching in the Digital Age of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich. Human Rights Watch (2019). Nigeria - Events of 2018. www.hrw.org/ world-report/ 2019/ country-chapters/ nigeria [8 May 2020]. Jackson, Liz (2019). Questioning Allegiance. Resituating Civic Education. London: Routledge. Janson, Marloes (2016). “Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos”. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 86 (4). 646-672. The Challenges of Teaching Nigeria in the German EFL Classroom 171 Kalua, Fetson (2009). “Homi Bhabha's Third Space and African Identity”. Journal of African Cultural Studies 21 (1). 23-32. Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) (2012). 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Frauke Matz and Michael Rogge Chair English Language Education Department of English Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool for Primary, Secondary and Higher Education A Systematic Overview of its Educational Benefits, a Sample Project and Lessons Learned Andreas Schuch Digital storytelling is a valuable tool for educators in primary, secondary and higher education. This article discusses the many benefits educators can expect from educational digital storytelling. It systematically categorizes these benefits in different ways to help educators in different fields and with different teaching goals decide how to best integrate digital storytelling into their specific teaching contexts. Furthermore, a five-step sample project structure is presented which has been tested extensively and successfully applied in both secondary and higher educational contexts. Finally, the article discusses a set of recommended practices for educators and lessons learned, compiled from other publications on educational digital storytelling and the author’s own analysis of anonymous feedback forms, live observations and experience from working with students and teachers. 1. Introduction Digital storytelling combines the age-old practice of storytelling with digital technologies to create short-form videos called digital stories. These digital stories typically combine a voiceover narration with various other media elements such as still images, video, music and sound effects. They usually emphasize a personal point of view and often contain emotional content. Nowadays, inexpensive and accessible technologies allow digital stories to be created and shared effortlessly with others, including the possibility for online publishing. Robin (2008: 224-225) identifies at least three major types of digital stories: (1) stories which are meant to instruct or inform the audience about a specific topic, (2) stories which examine a AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0019 Andreas Schuch 174 historical event and, perhaps the most common type, (3) stories which express a personal narrative 1 . For the purposes of this article, digital stories will be understood as primarily personal narratives if not explicitly noted otherwise. First experiments of combining multimedia elements with storytelling performances date back at least as far as the 1980s. In 1994, the Digital Media Center was founded in San Francisco, California, which later became the Center for Digital Storytelling and, in 2015, simply StoryCenter 2 . The center has played an instrumental role in developing and popularizing the practice of digital storytelling (cf. Lambert 2013; Rossiter & Garcia 2010: 37-38). The past two decades have seen a further surge of its popularity, partly propelled by advancements in digital technologies (Miller 2014: 49- 50) and an increasing interest from institutions and organizations worldwide. In 2020, digital storytelling is a widespread phenomenon, firmly established in spaces as varied as the health sector, various businesses and digital services, museums and libraries, and - of course - education (cf. Lambert 2013: Chapter 11). This article most directly builds upon and expands on the continued discussion on the educational application of digital storytelling in articles such as Robin and McNeil (2012) and Pölzleitner et al. (2019) and books such as Frazel (2010) and Ohler (2013). The contents of this article are equally aimed at curious educators who are inexperienced in the practice of digital storytelling as well as those who are looking to iterate upon pedagogical, organizational and technical aspects of their existing educational applications of digital storytelling. The presented insights and guidelines are further meant to enlighten and inspire people in key educational multiplier positions as well as parents, students and anyone interested in storytelling and technology in general. 2. Making the case for digital storytelling as a tool for teaching While many publications discuss the benefits of digital storytelling in education to varying extents, they seldom make comprehensive and systematic attempts at doing so (cf. Wu & Chen 2020). Instead, they often direct their attention to a narrow set of positive outcomes. However, a systematic overview can help educators make more informed decisions about how to best apply digital storytelling in their specific teaching contexts. 1 Lambert (2013: 19-22) further distinguishes between character stories, memorial stories, adventure stories, accomplishment stories and many other kinds of personal stories. 2 See https: / / www.storycenter.org/ history (accessed 5 September 2020) for more information. Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 175 One way to attempt to systematize the many reported benefits is to frame educational digital storytelling in terms of theories of twenty-first century skills. For example, Robin (2008: 224) argues that digital storytelling promotes student literacies aligned with technology, including digital literacy, technology literacy, visual literacy and information literacy. Niemi & Multisilta (2016) found that digital storytelling positively affected generic twenty-first century skills such as problem-solving, argumentation, decision-making and cooperation among students in elementary, lower and upper secondary schools. Wu & Chen (2020) developed their own categorization model in a rare attempt to provide a systematic overview of the benefits of educational digital storytelling in primary, secondary and higher education. In their analysis of 57 peer-reviewed empirical studies, they identify eight types of outcomes that are positively influenced by digital storytelling:  Affective outcomes (e.g. motivation, engagement, confidence, empathy)  Cognitive outcomes (e.g. critical and creative thinking)  Conceptual outcomes (e.g. understanding and critiquing of concepts and reconceptualization)  Academic outcomes (e.g. achievement, impact on study skills and research skills)  Technological outcomes (e.g. computer and media skills)  Linguistic outcomes (e.g. developing language abilities in terms of fluency, but less so in terms of vocabulary and accuracy (see Wu & Chen 2020: Section 4.1))  Ontological (identity-related) outcomes (e.g. self-awareness and awareness of others, including intercultural awareness 3 )  Social outcomes (e.g. collaboration and communication skills) Less prominently mentioned or accounted for in Wu & Chen's categorization scheme are what Di Blas & Ferrari (2014) would term ‘indirect’ benefits of digital storytelling projects, i.e., benefits which are “a-typical, nonforeseen, not even looked-for but still relevant” (49). While their research is concerned with school environments specifically, many findings can be assumed to be equally applicable to teaching contexts in higher education. For example, Di Blas & Ferrari documented that digital storytelling led to improvements in teacher-student relationships, they found students working on digital stories adopted a more serious, professional-like attitude and they highlighted how digital storytelling projects can reach beyond the walls of an educational facility by involving families or even the community at large; for example, when students’ digital stories are presented at a local theater (Di Blas & Ferrari 2014: 47-48; see also Frazel 2010: Chapters 3 By telling their own stories and listening to others’ stories, students become more aware of both their own and others’ cultural diversity. Andreas Schuch 176 7-8). Di Blas & Ferrari also note that digital storytelling led to a reconfiguration of students’ roles and relationships (e.g. with technology-proficient students often assuming more prominent roles). Digital storytelling promotes inclusion and self-efficacy 4 , student diversity, and serves as a ‘democratic equalizer’ that empowers students by way of giving each of them a voice and a platform to be heard (cf. Rossiter & Garcia 2010: 42-44). Banaszewski (2002: online) also argues how “technology can be instrumental in the perennial student struggle to find voice, confidence, and structure in their writing”. Pölzleitner et al. (2019) report that not only did students find the intimate nature of creating and sharing personal narrative digital stories to be highly rewarding, they also note how students “had learned more about one another than ever before” Digital storytelling can also trigger cathartic responses; the digital storytelling movement originally used digital storytelling “as a method for therapy, in which autobiography was used as a tool for self-discovery” (Boase 2008: 1). Benmayor (2008: 189) further notes that digital storytelling is “a self-reflexive and recursive process that helps students to make important intellectual (theorizing) and personally transformative moves, which is why students often refer to the digital story and the class as ‘therapy’”. In my own digital storytelling workshops, students have used the digital story format to process and share stories about the loss of a parent, health issues or other topics weighing on them. Curricula and institutional guidelines provide another way of framing the benefits of digital storytelling. For example, the European Commission defines eight key competences for lifelong learning, which are meant as “a reference tool for education and training stakeholders” (2019: 4). While the actual benefits will be dependent on the specific project implementation, digital storytelling projects can help student develop any or all of the competences described by the European Commission, and perhaps in particular their (1) literacy competence, (2) multilingualism 5 , (3) digital competence, (4) personal, social and learning to learn competence, and (5) cultural awareness and expression competence. The benefits of digital 4 Lawler et al. (2014) found digital storytelling increased self-efficacy and sociality in students with a disability. Di Blas & Ferrari (2014: 48) cite a teacher: “In my class there is a dyslexic kid. He tried to record his part some 15, 20 times. He did not want to give up! The whole class stood around him cheering and in the end, he made it”. But digital storytelling does not only allow for the integration of students with disabilities, it also encourages the integration of otherwise marginalized or less visible students more generally. 5 One simple way to emphasize multilingualism with the help of digital storytelling is to ask students to produce their digital stories in multiple languages. One such implementation can be found in the “Our roots and our treasures” project by Pölzleitner in which learners “explored their cultural roots and family treasures and produced digital stories in 13 languages” (Pölzleitner 2018: online). For further discussion on multilingual digital storytelling, see for example Anderson & Macleroy (2016). Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 177 storytelling can also be orientated towards the goals outlined in (inter)national standards and curricula. Frazel (2010: 25-28), for example, notes how digital storytelling can help meet all of the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for Students. In Austria, teachers of almost all subjects should be able to integrate digital storytelling in their classrooms to implement the general teaching principles and requirements for digital education in a competence-oriented way and as outlined in various curricula and the Austrian digi.komp standards. For instance, teachers can use digital storytelling to cover a specific topic while also promoting student autonomy, collaboration, problem-solving skills, the competent and responsible use of digital technologies and media or discussing matters of online research, copyright law and data privacy. See table 1 for a selection of teaching principles found in Austrian school curricula and the website of the National Competence Center eEducation Austria (2020) for a systematic description of the digital competences Austrian students should acquire in school. While no equivalent official documents exist for the higher education sector in Austria, it should be self-evident that many key notions found in the descriptions of the general teaching principles and digital competences should equally apply to teaching undergraduate and graduate students. For example, digital storytelling can help frame discussions and student reflections on issues such as intellectual property, citing sources, the public domain, fair use, Creative Commons, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), remix culture and conducting online research. The different categorization schemes presented so far share a certain ‘high-concept’ approach to discussing the educational benefits of digital storytelling. While such considerations are important (also as indicated by the space given in this article), as an educator, I also often find my pedagogical decisions to be driven by practical considerations for my day-today teaching. I suspect many other educators do too. What, then, are some of the benefits of digital storytelling from a practical educator’s perspective? Digital storytelling is a highly versatile tool that can be shaped to fit a wide variety of specific educational contexts. The level of complexity concerning technologyand subject-related aspects can easily be adjusted according to the existing competences and needs of the learners. It can be effectively applied in primary, secondary and higher education (cf. Wu & Chen 2020) to create digital stories “on every topic imaginable” (Robin 2016: 18). Digital storytelling activities are highly scalable: they allow for group work or for individual work in both large or small classes, they can be introduced and completed within a short (e.g. three-hour) time span or spread out across a semester, they can be worked on exclusively in class, partly in class and partly at home or fully at home (e.g. as part of online class), and a digital storytelling activity can be embedded within a larger project or research work or form a standalone project. In addition, both the type of digital story being produced—e.g. with an instructional, historical Andreas Schuch 178 or personal narrative focus (cf. Robin 2008)—and the general orientation of the story-creation process can be adjusted. Wu & Chen (2020) identify five distinct orientations of digital storytelling projects, each characterized by a different predominant learning focus and experience (see table 2). Table 1. A selection of general teaching principles found in the Austrian curricula for elementary school (Volksschule), middle school (Neue Mittelschule), academic secondary school (Allgemeinbildende höhere Schule) and a selection of curricula for vocational schools: the Secondary School for Economic Professions (Höhere Lehranstalt für wirtschaftliche Berufe), the Secondary College for Business Administration (Handelsakademie) and the Secondary Technical School (Höhere technische Lehranstalt). Synthesized and condensed by the author of this article. These curricula encourage teachers to integrate these and other principles in their general classroom teaching. The specific wording and details of the principles mentioned in the table may differ depending on the curriculum. Sources: Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung (2014, 2015, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) Original wording of teaching principle Explanation “Anknüpfen an die Vorkenntnisse und Vorerfahrungen der Schülerinnen und Schüler” Tap into students’ existing knowledge and previous experiences “Interkulturelles Lernen” Encourage intercultural learning “Mehrsprachigkeit” Encourage multilingualism “Diversität und Inklusion” Create diverse and inclusive learning spaces “Chancengleichheit” Ensure equality of opportunity “Differenzierung und Individualisierung” Allow for differentiation and individualization “Stärken von Selbsttätigkeit und Eigenverantwortung der Schülerinnen und Schüler” Encourage learner autonomy and students’ taking responsibility for their own learning “Herstellen von Bezügen zur Lebenswelt” Create authentic learning contexts Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 179 Table 2. Wu & Chen (2020) identify five different orientations of educational digital storytelling (DS). Each orientation emphasizes different learning foci or experiences. Orientation of DS activity Emphasis on appropriative Learners appropriate a given concept, less emphasis on criticality agentive Learner autonomy and self-direction reflective Learners reflect previous experiences (often used as final assignment) reconstructive Develop learners’ criticality by reconstructing meanings of a given concept and challenging deep-rooted beliefs and stereotypes reflexive Exploration and negotiation of learners’ own identity and that of others (closest to the original Center of Digital Storytelling model) As discussed earlier, digital storytelling integrates well with existing curriculum requirements and official guidelines, further demonstrating its versatility. Digital storytelling is “ideal for addressing controversial, interdisciplinary topics like sustainability” (Shelton et al. 2017: 66) and provides ample opportunities for interdisciplinary cooperation between school (subjects) or between various educational facilities and other institutions in national and international contexts (e.g. Gardner et al. 2019; Pölzleitner et al. 2019; see also tables 2 and 3 in Wu & Chen 2020 for helpful overviews). Digital storytelling has relatively low requirements. Teachers and students are not required to be particularly experienced or skilled in the use of technology. Digital stories can also be created with free software and inexpensive hardware, with the only requirement being having access to a digital device with a functioning microphone and internet access. Students could, for example, use their own smartphones to create digital stories or share a school-owned tablet as a group. Further adding to the list of low requirements, educators have to do comparatively little lesson preparation when considering that digital storytelling projects typically span multiple lessons, that—once prepared—projects and materials can be reused and quickly adapted for different age groups, topics or learning foci, and that educators can make use of a large number of already available educational resources on digital storytelling such as Pölzleitner & Schuch (2018) and this article. Digital storytelling allows educators to collect multiple grades or to assess students multiple times over the course of an ongoing project, which can help them justify allocating the required class time for the project. Edu- Andreas Schuch 180 cators can grade or take note of the quality of the digital story script (including improvements made over older drafts), the quality of the overall multimedia presentation (e.g. on the language level, content level, technological level) 6 and students’ active participation and engagement with the topic. Additional grading and learning opportunities present themselves when students are tasked to critically reflect their own digital stories, provide meaningful feedback to other students’ drafts or create a user guide to digital storytelling for future students. For certain types of digital stories, students can further be tasked to produce complementary documents— which could be graded separately—such as documents containing further information or examples not covered in the digital story or topic-related exercises for practicing and self-testing purposes. Digital stories can easily be shown off to a wider public. While many students proudly share their digital story to friends and families, educators or educational institutions can—with student and parental permission— also make a selection of stories available to the wider public on a website, at open day, parents day or at similar events. Digital storytelling naturally allows for differentiated instruction. Even if educators establish a general frame and rules for a digital storytelling project, students are free to personalize their learning activities within these given constraints in many ways (cf. Figg et al. 2009). For example, students may choose what (sub)topic they wish to focus on (input), how they will search for and process the relevant information (process), and how they will finally present this information in a digital story (output) while also accounting for different levels of learner readiness, learner interest and learner needs (cf. Tomlinson 2017). Digital storytelling allows educators to meaningfully integrate smartphones or other digital devices into their teaching. Here, technology is not merely used for technology’s sake; the purpose and function of technology-use in a digital storytelling project are clearly visible and defined. Finally, what do educators and students with experience in digital storytelling say? In September 2019, twenty-two secondary school teachers and students in pre-teacher training programs participated in a digital storytelling course led by me at the University College of Teacher Education of Styria in Austria. During the course, they were introduced to the digital storytelling format and produced their own digital stories following a similar step-by-step procedure as will be outlined in section 3. In the anonymous evaluation form, all twenty-two participants responded extremely positively to the digital storytelling format covered in the course, stating 6 Computer science teachers, for example, can grade various aspects of media and technology use. Language teachers have the opportunity to collect grades on writing, presentation and pronunciation skills during a digital storytelling project, but they can also use digital storytelling for activities such as reading story-scripts, listening to or watching stories made by others and speaking about one’s own story or story ideas with others. Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 181 that they intended to use digital storytelling in their own teaching contexts. Course participants most often praised the presumed positive motivational effects of digital storytelling on their students and the opportunities it provides for integrating media and digital technology in school classrooms. Evaluating anonymous feedback forms from students in secondary school, Pölzleitner et al. (2019) report how “[s]haring a personal story had been a challenging step for many [students], but in the end, they felt confident about sharing their stories with others, both in the class and outside” (415). Feedback from my own students in secondary school corroborate this finding, as the following verbatim responses illustrate: I am really happy about my end result, because now I have my story, which changed my life completely, in a video and I can listen to it every time I want to. Projects like this give me a lot of self-confidence! I am proud of me that I shared these moments. I am very happy because when I watched the story again, I thought about it again and I’m gladder than before. It’s cool that you have a personal film which nobody else has. My students in higher education also generally respond favorably to educational digital storytelling activities, as shown in these anonymous verbatim responses from undergraduate students of a summer semester 2020 course on researching intercultural experiences: I have learned that I have been involved in much more intercultural experiences that I used to thing and I have also learned to think different about the cultural aspects, the way we perceive those differences. The digital story can be saved forever, which would also be a very nice gift for the future. When we think of this exchange student life, we will remember this story. I learn things about my grandmother that I didn’t know before. 3. A sample digital storytelling project implementation for secondary and higher education Educators intent on executing a digital storytelling project are not required to start planning or create materials from scratch. They can access a wealth of information and resources made available by scholars, educators and Andreas Schuch 182 others worldwide (see, for example, Frazel 2010; Kearney 2011; Lambert 2013; Ohler 2013; Pölzleitner & Schuch 2018; Robin & McNeil 2012; Sylvester & Greenidge 2009). This section discusses a five-step project structure and guidelines developed to assist educators in conducting digital storytelling projects in secondary and higher educational contexts. It represents a comprehensive reworking of my earlier work on the MYSTY User Guide (cf. Pölzleitner & Schuch 2018), which in turn was based on the Digital Storytelling Cookbook (cf. Lambert 2010). In principle, all steps outlined below can be fully completed either during class time or at home. I recommend a mixed approach in which at least some class time is reserved for each step and particularly during the beginning stage of a digital storytelling project. While the outlined steps are primarily designed to elicit personal narratives, educators can easily adapt them for their specific teaching contexts. One such adaptation may, for example, consist of changing the focus of the project from personal narrative stories to instructional stories. It should also be stressed that these steps are guidelines and not meant to be interpreted as an authoritative or definitive set of rules. Some of the most interesting or most urgent stories will likely break out of the set constraints and educators are encouraged to allow students some leeway in this regard. The first step of the guide is concerned with introducing digital storytelling to students and establishing the frame (constraints) within which the ensuing project will take place. Educators communicate their level of experience with digital storytelling as well as project goals, expectations, deadline(s), the planned project timeline, and the system of assessment. Next, they communicate the intended uses of the digital stories. Will the stories be used for assessment? Will they be used for other purposes such as class discussions or research assignments? Then digital stories and the digital storytelling format are introduced, placing special emphasis on a delineation of what a digital story is and is not (cf. Robin 2016: 18-19) and what type of digital story students are expected to produce (i.e. personal narrative). Optionally, students will also form groups during this step. In step two, educators show a selection of digital stories to give students a first multimedia impression of digital stories. Ideally, this selection contains stories which are relevant or related to the given (course) topic while spanning as wide a range of form and content as possible. Certain aspects of each story’s form and content can be highlighted to draw connections to the digital storytelling format introduced in step one and to draw attention to the range of possible interpretations of the given (course) topic. Digital stories created in previous classes or courses are ideal showcases. If no (suitable) stories are readily available, however, there is always the possibility to search for published stories in online repositories. One Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 183 such publicly available repository can be found on the website of the Erasmus+ funded project MyStory: Digital Storytelling Toolbox for Diversity Training in Schools 7 . See also Sylvester & Greenidge (2009: 285) and Robin (2015: 438-439). Step three sees students enter the script writing phase. First, educators provide instructions and discuss recommended practices for writing a digital story script. In the interest of differentiated and inclusive instruction, this information should be made available to students in several formats. I initially present the relevant information orally in person, but I also make instructions and tips via video lessons, written checklists and an F.A.Q. (frequently asked questions) document. Students can help produce these additional materials (e.g. Pölzleitner et al. 2019: 415) which can then be reused in future projects. Instructions and writing guidelines should cover at least the following topics:  Tips for finding and developing story ideas and writing style considerations (see Pölzleitner & Schuch 2018: 4-9). This is one of the most time-consuming activities for many students.  Audience awareness (see Miller 2014: Chapter 8; Woodbridge 2017)  The importance of asking for peer feedback and teacher feedback (see Paulus 1999)  The KISS principle (Keep It Short and Simple)  Communicate to students if they are required to go beyond simply retelling past events or describing a present state in their story script. I always ask my students to add more complexity to their digital stories by reflecting, critiquing or exploring a central insight, idea or concept more ‘deeply’. Students then begin to work on their story scripts. This also presents an opportunity for educators to frame writing as a process that involves creating multiple story drafts and going through several feedback-loops. In secondary school, for example, students could collect feedback from various peers first and only after having received their peers’ ‘stamp of approval’ will they be allowed to turn to the teacher for additional feedback. Step four is concerned with assembling the digital story. First, educators walk students through the steps of how to create a digital story in one of the recommended software applications. They can do this as part of a live demonstration or play back a pre-recorded video (e.g. Schuch 2020). While students should be allowed to produce their digital story using any application and hardware of their choosing, I always recommend to my students that they use a smartphone or tablet and accessible, easy-to-use applications such as Shadow Puppet Edu by Seesaw Learning Inc. 8 or Com- 7 Website link: https: / / mysty.eu/ stories/ (accessed 5 September 2020) 8 More information about the iOS app Shadow Puppet Edu by Seesaw Learning Inc. can be found at http: / / get-puppet.co/ (accessed 5 September 2020). Andreas Schuch 184 Phone Story Maker by Simon Robinson 9 . If this is not possible or practical for some students, I usually suggest that they either record their story on a peer’s digital device or use a laptop and the slide show recording feature of Microsoft PowerPoint (Microsoft 2020) 10 . As another fallback measure, educators can organize or order several USB microphones that can be used in conjunction with a school PC. Following the initial live or video demonstration, educators move on to discuss the roles and functions of technology in relation to storytelling (particularly how technology should always be in service of storytelling) and cover at least the following topics:  Searching for pictures and other media (e.g. see table 3; Frazel 2010: 61-62; Pölzleitner & Schuch 2018: 9)  Online copyright and privacy, asking for permission, and Creative Commons (see table 3)  Storyboarding techniques (cf. Lambert 2013: Chapter 8)  The importance of using one's own voice effectively and the transformative power of different reading speeds and styles (cf. Lambert 2013: 63-65; 79-80)  Choosing and preparing a suitable recording location and how to use the microphone to maximize the audio recording quality (cf. Pölzleitner & Schuch 2018: 11)  The importance of continuously verifying technology output and to never blindly trust technology (see section 4) Students now start creating their digital stories. Educators should emphasize that if students run into any technical or usability issues, they can and should turn to each other for support. Technology-proficient students can also be encouraged to take on more prominent support roles. The fifth step sees the digital storytelling project come to conclusion. Students submit their digital stories and (optionally) a signed consent form, for example, giving permission that their digital story be published or used for research. See figure 1 for a sample consent form. 9 More information about the Android app Com-Phone Story Maker by Simon Robinson can be found on the Google Play Store: https: / / play.google.com/ store/ apps/ details? id=ac.robinson.mediaphone (accessed 5 September 2020). 10 For a video tutorial on the slide show function of Microsoft PowerPoint, see, for example, https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=Y5dgwwa5XRA (accessed 5 September 2020). Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 185 Table 3. A small selection of online resources educators can use to discuss issues related to online copyright, privacy and related topics. Digital resource Description Safer Internet Centres https: / / ec.europa.eu/ digital-single-market/ en/ safer-internet-centres Funded by the European Commission, these centers raise awareness and develop materials about internet safety-related topics. Creative Commons (multiple languages) https: / / creativecommons.org/ A non-profit organization that releases copyright licenses with the goal to make it easier to (re)use and share creative works. Electronic Frontier Foundation (English) https: / / www.eff.org/ teachingcopyright/ resources A list of resources for teachers on teaching copyright, compiled by an American non-profit digital rights group Lehrbuch für Lernen und Lehren mit Technologien (German) https: / / l3t.eu/ homepage/ - see also Schön & Ebner (2013) An open educational resource (OER) covering a large number of topics related to learning and teaching with technologies The collected digital stories, consent forms and any other relevant materials should be archived. It is good practice to rename all digital stories using the same naming scheme. This scheme should include the student’s name and story title or topic. Furthermore, the file name or folder structure could be changed to indicate the level of permission granted by the student. In my experience, these archiving practices tremendously shorten subsequent searches for digital stories covering a specific topic or digital stories which can be shown at open day or uploaded to a website. The fifth step sees the digital storytelling project come to conclusion. Students submit their digital stories and (optionally) a signed consent form, for example, giving permission that their digital story be published or used for research. See figure 1 for a sample consent form. The collected digital stories, consent forms and any other relevant materials should be archived. It is good practice to rename all digital stories using the same naming scheme. This scheme should include the student’s name and story title or topic. Furthermore, the file name or folder structure could be changed to indicate the level of permission granted by the student. In my experience, these archiving practices tremendously shorten subsequent searches for digital stories covering a specific topic or digital stories which can be shown at open day or uploaded to a website. This is also the time to ask students for their feedback on the digital story-telling project. Students can respond to each other's digital stories and/ or provide educators with thoughts on digital storytelling and the project as a whole. Andreas Schuch 186 Educators can organize a group showing or public showing of all produced digital stories to formally close the project and to appreciate students’ work. This also provides the opportunity for further discussion on the given topic(s) and for peer feedback. A showing can be organized as part of a larger event, too. For example, parents and others can be invited to join a school event that celebrates multilingualism and diversity (Pölzleitner 2018) or they can be invited to the local community theatre for a special digital storytelling showing (Di Blas & Ferrari, 2014). Conducting a successful digital storytelling project requires educators to keep many variables in mind. To assist them in this undertaking, table 4 presents a condensed overview of the different actions involved in a digital storytelling project. Figure 1. A sample consent form to be handed out to students. The form is designed in such a way that if no boxes are ticked, educators will be granted a basic level of permission and students will be credited in full. Students may choose to grant further permissions and adjust the level of anonymity by ticking the respective boxes. Permission to use digital story First name: ______________________ Last name: ______________________ I hereby grant permission to NAME OF EDUCATOR OR INSTITUTION (ADDRESS) to use my digital story for research and educational purposes, which includes showing it to other people in seminars, workshops, conferences, lectures and similar offline educational contexts. ☐ I also grant permission that my digital story be published online or offline in general (e.g. show my digital story at large public events, in a web seminar or on a website). Instead of being credited by first and last name... ☐ I wish to be credited by first name only. / ☐ I wish to remain anonymous. I may at any time fully withdraw this permission by informing NAME OF EDU- CATOR OR INSTITUTION (EMAIL) of my decision. Title of my digital story: ____________________________________________________ My email/ tel.: _______________________________________________________________ My address (optional): _____________________________________________________ Place and date Legal guardian signature Student signature _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 187 Table 4. A 5-step checklist for preparing and conducting a DS project. Digital storytelling (DS) checklist for educators (1) Intro and framing the DS project  Communicate own level of digital storytelling experience  Communicate what the digital stories coming out of this project will be used for  Communicate project goal(s), expected outcome(s), deadline(s), planned project timeline, and system of assessment  (optional) Students form groups  Present the DS personal narrative format o What is a digital story? o What is a digital story not? o Types of digital stories (this project: personal narratives) (2) Example stories  Show several digital stories produced by others o The stories are relevant or related to the given (course) topic and span as wide a range of form and content as possible  Highlight and discuss certain aspects of form and content of each story (3) Writing the script  Provide instructions and discuss recommended practices for writing a digital story script, covering at least the following topics: o Tips for brainstorming and developing a story idea o Writing style considerations o Audience awareness o Peer feedback and teacher feedback o KISS principle o Expected level of complexity of story script (simple retelling of events or ‘deeper’ engagement? ) o Writing as an iterative process  Provide students with a (written) summary of the instructions and recommended practices  Provide feedback for draft version(s) (potentially only after peer feedback) (4) Recording and creating the story  (Live) demonstration of how to record a digital story  Provide tools for recording the story on different platforms  Roles and functions of technology in relation to storytelling  Discuss recommended practices for recording a digital story, covering at least the following topics: o Searching for pictures and other media o Online copyright and privacy, asking for permission, Creative Commons o Storyboarding techniques o Voice and speed of narration o Recording location and handling the microphone o Never blindly trust technology.  Provide students with a (written) summary of the instructions and recommended practices  Troubleshoot issues on site or via email (involve technology-proficient students) (5) Submission and feedback  Collect digital stories and consent forms  Watch, celebrate and discuss student stories  Feedback (students-to-educator, students-to-students)  Archive digital stories, consent forms and other materials Andreas Schuch 188 4. Recommended practices and lessons learned This section discusses recommended practices for educators and key lessons I have learned from facilitating digital storytelling projects for students and teachers in secondary and higher education over the past three years. I have had students express a wide range of emotions during digital storytelling activities. I can corroborate Reinders’ (2011: 5) assertion that “storytelling is highly personal and can trigger emotions” and that as an educator “it is important to be prepared” (ibid.). However, while Reinders states that “[t]his is not necessarily a bad thing” (ibid.), I emphatically stress that the ability of digital storytelling to trigger emotions in students is one of its core strengths. Not only does students’ increased emotional involvement demonstrate that their attention has successfully been captured, it also tends to lead to deeper involvement and higher engagement with the topic(s) covered in digital stories and the digital storytelling writing and creating activities in general. For example, in one of my classes in secondary school, one student created a digital story about her returning to her country of birth for the first time in several years. After playback finished, some of her peers expressed genuine curiosity in her cultural heritage and a dialog ensued that consisted of students asking questions and her answering them. In another class, a student told me she spent weeks being preoccupied with writing and rewriting her story script about the loss of her mother and choosing appropriate pictures because she wanted her digital story to be ‘perfect’. Her final voice recording carried pride and strength all while tearfully reminiscing her parent, lamenting her loss and thoughtfully contemplating her own place in the world. On a lighter note, I was once asked by a student if she could leave the classroom while her story was being played back because she felt self-conscious about it and the sound of her voice. Pölzleitner similarly notes how several of her students mentioned “the odd experience of hearing their own voice” (2018: 415). Because the term ‘personal’ can be interpreted in different ways and to avoid potential confusion among students, educators should clarify that— for the purposes of the project—‘personal’ should be understood in a broad sense as ‘belonging to or affecting oneself’. The term is not (only) a synonym for ‘private’ or ‘intimate’ (cf. Oxford University Press 2019). The decision to which degree intimate information is shared in a digital story should be left to students. Digital stories may also contain personal elements when the author shares their own impressions, thoughts, and opinions on a topic in a more abstract manner. In the context of producing digital stories, the term ‘personal’ can perhaps be better understood as placing a spotlight on something belonging to or affecting oneself using emotion, intimacy, visuals, distanced analysis or other means. I recommend that students be encouraged to use their own pictures and voice to further Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 189 personalize and enrich their digital stories. In my experience, students who include such personal elements and who expect that their stories will be watched by people other than the teacher usually are more invested during the story production process, perhaps in part due to higher perceived personal stakes. While it is possible to include pictures and music from online sources instead, this should only be done sparingly or as a last resort. Mixing personal elements such as the speaker’s voice and story with impersonal elements such as unrelated pictures may elicit unwanted dissonance among viewers and reduce the overall impact of the story. Educators should also encourage their students to consider the quantity and level of detail of the private information they are willing share. In my experience, undergraduate students and teachers in my digital storytelling seminars tend to hold back on giving away private details about themselves and their lives. My students in secondary school, on the other hand, often feel more comfortable sharing intimate or private details about their lives. Within a class or group of learners, educators may find both types and thus face the challenge of both pushing some students to share more about themselves while pulling other students back on sharing inappropriate private information. Digital stories that contain personal and private elements tend to be more interesting, more relatable and leave a longer-lasting impression on viewers. In most cases the inclusion of personal elements will enrich digital stories while proving harmless in terms of privacy and other concerns. Students (and educators) should still always be wary of the potential (side) effects of including private information in their digital stories. But there may be times where students feel an urgency to create—and perhaps even share—highly intimate stories, as was the case with my student’s story on the death of her mother. Digital storytelling can take on a therapeutic function for some students and educators might be ill advised to deny them this opportunity for potential catharsis. Instead, I recommend educators use their own judgment to help guide and protect students in privacy-related issues. They can do this at several points during a digital storytelling project, for example when providing guidance on which of their story ideas they should develop further or when giving feedback on their first story drafts. It is crucial that educators communicate to students the expected level of cognitive engagement on a topic. Depending on the focus and learning goals of the digital storytelling project as well as students’ age and their abilities, it might be acceptable if students solely apply lower order thinking skills (requiring less cognitive processing; cf. Krathwohl 2002) such as recalling and summarizing a past event or describing a present state or relationship. However, digital storytelling can also be exploited to have students apply higher order thinking skills (requiring more cognitive processing) to reflect, critique, reconceptualize or otherwise engage more ‘deeply’ with a topic. This not only exposes students to a wider range of Andreas Schuch 190 learning benefits as outlined in section 2, the resulting stories also tend to be more complex and interesting. Producing digital stories is a time-consuming process and educators should reserve an adequate amount of time for the whole process. According to feedback I regularly receive in my teacher seminars on digital storytelling and in emails, it seems many teachers tend to (at first) underestimate the amount of time required to conduct a digital storytelling project in school. As Robin (2006) notes, It can take many hours to work on all of the Digital Storytelling components […] it may take students several attempts at creating digital stories before they demonstrate technological proficiency and an understanding of their selected topic. I usually reserve six lessons à 50 minutes of consecutive class time for a digital storytelling project in secondary school, typically towards the end of a semester. Pölzleitner (2018: 414) also reports having successfully completed a digital storytelling project using this same structure. At the university level, I have had success with shorter self-contained digital storytelling projects that saw undergraduate students learn about digital storytelling and write, produce and submit their own digital story within the span of three units à 45 minutes. While such a tight schedule can lead to quick results and many authentic (‘raw’) stories that would otherwise not exist in this form, not all students will produce usable results or will be happy with their result. Anonymous student feedback also suggests that additional time (e.g. at home) to develop and produce digital stories would lead to a less stressful experience and higher quality digital stories. While some educators underestimate project time requirements, other educators may overestimate the technological proficiency of students. The idea that students in today’s classrooms and university courses have sophisticated digital skills and multi-tasking abilities—that they are socalled digital natives (a term coined in Prensky 2001: 1-6)—is highly contested and untenable from an empirical standpoint (cf. Ebner et al. 2008: Section 5; Kirschner & Bruyckere 2017). Kirschner & Bruyckere (2017) refer to this assumption as a myth that can have detrimental effects on learning. What does this mean for educators who wish to integrate digital storytelling in their teaching contexts? Feedback from students and my own class observations support the view that most students today do not have sophisticated technical skills that allow them to effortlessly produce a digital story. Educators should not assume that most of their students are particularly technologically adept, but rather that digital storytelling can help them acquire or develop technology-related skills in an authentic way. Nguyen distinguishes between two distinct types of challenges in this regard: (1) to manage to perform a certain technological skill at all or (2) to manage to perform it well (cf. Nguyen 2011: 170-171). Digital storytelling Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 191 allows students to practice activities such as recording and editing videos and using the web for research and to discuss and reflect topics such as online copyright, ownership, and a person’s right to privacy. However, unless the main goal of the digital storytelling project is to specifically acquire digital skills, I highly recommend educators encourage students to use familiar hardware (e.g. smartphones) and simple, accessible software as discussed in section 3. This should minimize potential disruptions caused by technology. Students should further be reminded not to trust technology blindly. For best results, students must consider and work around the limits of the technology they use. Before starting the process of recording their digital story, they should familiarize themselves with the digital device and software of their choosing and verify that they work as expected. Furthermore, students should verify if the audio and video quality as produced at the chosen recording location and with the current application settings is satisfactory. Immediately after recording (a section of) the digital story, they should evaluate the recorded narration and check for any technical and other blemishes. Using the gathered information, students can then make the necessary adjustments and optimize the production quality of their digital story. I have had a number of students express their dissatisfaction with the final version of their digital stories for a variety of reasons such as low audio bitrates, audible reverb and unwanted background noises or the overall low volume of the recording. Students can be very critical of their own digital stories and expect them to meet certain technical standards. While not all technical issues can be avoided, the quality of the recorded digital stories can often be significantly improved by making a few simple adjustments and taking certain precautions. While the application of technology is a fundamental part of digital storytelling, students should be reminded that technology is meant to be in service of storytelling. Technology should be “secondary to the storytelling” (Banaszewski 2002: online) and for this reason I encourage my students to refrain from including transitions, animations, background music, video and large numbers of images. Any part of a digital story that distracts viewers from the narration should be considered for removal (see also the KISS principle). Digital storytelling can lead to a shift in student and teacher roles. Kearney (2011) highlights the importance of educators taking on the role of mediator during key stages of a digital storytelling project, which I can attest from my own experience too. Likewise, many students will shift towards a more traditionally teacher-like role as they provide explanations and feedback to their peers on content, writing, technology and other aspects. For example, in group work, one student might help others in structuring their writing or provide feedback and receive instructions and support from another student on how to use a video editor. Andreas Schuch 192 5. Conclusion Humans are storytelling animals. We use stories to make sense of the world and to connect with others. And even if some of our students may disagree, everyone has interesting stories to tell 11 . With the rapid proliferation of computers and mobile devices, new opportunities present themselves to educators on how they can leverage the power of storytelling. Digital storytelling helps students acquire a host of different skills and take pride in their work. It is well-suited for use in primary, secondary and higher education and for working on virtually any topic. 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Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool: Benefits and Lessons Learned 195 Woodbridge, Amy (2017). Cognitive perspective taking and audience awareness in second grade narrative writing [PhD Thesis, UCLA]. https: / / escholarship.org/ uc/ item/ 7zg6x6j1. Wu, Jing & Der-Thanq Victor Chen (2020). “A systematic review of educational digital storytelling”. Computers & Education 147. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.com pedu.2019.103786. Andreas Schuch English Department University of Graz Going Where No White Man Has Gone Before Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies Michael Fuchs “Of course you will. You’re white. You can do anything.” Indian foreman Abdullah to Irish engineer John Henry Patterson The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) In 1898, two maneless male lions obstructed the construction of the Uganda Railway and, hence, the progress of the British Empire in Africa. Workers believed that the lions were reincarnations of native chiefs trying to stop the railway from penetrating their land. This article draws on this idea of man-eaters as stand-ins for colonized and racialized human Others’ resistance to colonialism and discusses five movies featuring animal monsters, The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Anaconda (1997), Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004), Prey (2006), and Rogue (2007). Set in various former colonies, from South America to Australia, the films not only reveal the foundations shared between Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism, but also spotlight the social and environmental cruelties which have been perpetrated in the name of capitalism. In 1896, the British started to construct a railway line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Five years later, the line was completed, incurring costs of about £7.2 million (close to £1 billion in 2020 pounds), about £5.5 million of which were covered by the British government (Hill 1961: 422). Due to its prohibitive cost and numerous difficulties and delays, the construction of the railway was considered a “gigantic folly” during its time (Henry Labouchère in UK Parliament 1900). Officially, 2,498 men died (Wolmar 2009: 187); there were constant “quarrels and fights” between Hindu and Muslim workers (Patterson 1907: 51); hands repeatedly tried to kill British AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0020 Michael Fuchs 198 officers (Patterson 1907: 56-60); and the project failed to achieve the lofty goal of curbing the Arab slave trade in East Africa (McDermott 1893: 185- 189; Umbricht 1989: 8). However, the arguably “most interesting story” (Robins 1961: xi) took place between March and December 1898 when two maneless male lions repeatedly attacked the camps. Workers in Tsavo “were quite convinced that the angry spirits of two departed native chiefs had taken this form [i.e., lions] in order to protest against a railway being made through their country” (Patterson 1907: 21). To be sure, colonialist discourse fashioned “a resemblance between native and animal” in order to reinforce “the supposed gulf between coloniser and colonised” (Miller 2012: 2), which “helped justify imperial land seizure, eugenics, and other ‘civilizing projects,’” as “violence was enacted against colonized human beings through the differentiating logic of animalization, racialization, and dehumanization” (Deckha 2012: 539). The racialized and colonized human Others accordingly seemed to acknowledge the marginalization they shared with nonhuman Others, as they viewed the lions as symbols of rebellion against colonial oppression. Whereas the British Empire was driven by capitalist principles and thus committed to the cheapening of nature (Moore 2015: 62-79), the lions staged an uproar in an attempt to put an end (rather: a momentary end) to colonialism. Hence, the story of the Tsavo lions spotlights that “the very ideology of colonisation is […] one where anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism are inseparable” (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 5). After all, John Henry Patterson, who was sent to East Africa to build a bridge across the Tsavo River for the railway and eventually slew the lions, “f[ought] for the triumph of Western technology and persist[ed] against a hostile, cruel environment” (Reichart- Burikukiye 2012: 66). This article will explore these ideas by surveying a selection of films produced since the mid-1990s in which monstrous animals interfere in colonial and neo-colonial endeavors. I will focus on movies, as film “is the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene” (Fay 2018: 4). The discourse surrounding the Age of Man is relevant to colonialism because scholars have established various histories of the Anthropocene, this “loose, shorthand term for all the new contexts and demands - cultural, ethical, aesthetic, philosophical and political - of environmental issues that are truly planetary in scale” (Clark 2015: 2). One of these histories locates the start of the epoch in 1610 and views global trade and colonialism as two of the Anthropocene’s driving processes (Lewis & Maslin 2015). To return to film, cinema “makes the familiar world strange to us” by transforming material reality “into an unhomely image” (Fay 2018: 3). Jennifer Fay evokes the uncanny quality of film here, for “[g]hosts have been with cinema since its first days” (Leeder 2015: 4). Similarly, monstrous animals have been a mainstay on the silver screen at least since King Kong (1933). Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 199 Monsters such as Kong “ask us why we have created them” (Cohen 1996: 20). According to David Quammen, animal monsters - and potentially dangerous predators, in particular - tap into a kind of human evolutionary memory: apex predators have always frightened and fascinated hominids (2003). As a matter of fact, sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich has argued that the constant threat posed by large carnivores influenced “every aspect of human evolution” (1997: 56). Fictional encounters with monstrous animals accordingly evoke an earlier stage in human evolution, which civilization seeks to suppress (Fuchs 2015: 39-40). These encounters, as Mathias Clasen has explained, provide “a jolting, visceral reminder of a biological truth” (2017: 104) - that for “most of their history, extinct and living hominids have represented little more than a vulnerable, slow moving, bipedal source of protein” for large predators (Kerbis Peterhans & Gnoske 2001: 8). Approaching the question of animal monsters’ meaning from a different vantage point, Andrew Tudor has suggested that they function as cultural projection screens which reflect “unanticipated consequence[s] of human activit[ies]” (1989: 61). In the films discussed in this article, monstrous animals try to stop colonial expansion, the uncontrolled extraction of resources, the extermination of wildlife, and the reckless exploitation of labor and thus bring with them “echoes of the land’s resistance” (Rooks 2020: 139). The affiliation between monstrous animals and colonized and racialized human Others across Anglophone cinemas and across a variety of former colonies thus allows us to rethink “transnational circuits of power and identity […] within the circuits of imperial biopower” (Ahuja 2009: 556). The Lions That Stopped the British Empire Patterson’s book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures (1907) begins in a way that is characteristic of late nineteenth-/ early twentieth-century colonial tales, as Patterson describes the scenery: I was much struck with the strange beauty of the view which gradually opened out before me. Contrary to my anticipation, everything looked fresh and green, and an oriental glamour of enchantment seemed to hang over the island. […] As our steamer made its way to its anchorage, the romantic surroundings of the harbour of Mombasa conjured up visions of stirring adventures of the past, and recalled to my mind the many tales of reckless doings of pirates and slavers, which as a boy it had been my delight to read. (1907: 1-4) This passage would offer quite some material to unpack, but for the present purposes, two aspects are of particular significance: Patterson imagines the voyage to East Africa as (a) a travel back in time and (b) a decidedly fan- Michael Fuchs 200 tastic journey. Concerning the latter point, one should remember that Patterson wrote in a non-fiction genre. The book’s paratexts repeatedly stress this point; for example, the preface emphasizes that “readers […] will be inclined to think that some of the incidents are exaggerated. I can only assure them that I have toned down the facts rather than otherwise, and have endeavoured to write a perfectly plain and straightforward account of things as they actually happened” (Patterson 1907: vii). However, the fantastic seeps into the narrative when Patterson mentions the “oriental glamour of enchantment” and surfaces more explicitly when he likens his experience to the dime novels of his youth. This interconnection between fictional and real-life adventures reveals “anxiety about the waning of opportunities for heroic adventure” (Brantlinger 1988: loc. 4704). After all, “terra incognita disappeared from European maps” in the Victorian age (Phillips 1997: 7; italics in original), which “led many writers to seek [adventure] in the unreal world of romance, dreams, [and] imagination” (Brantlinger 1988: loc. 4704). The fantastic undercurrent in Patterson’s account also comes to the fore when he likens reaching Mombasa to traveling to the past. European imperial projects of the nineteenth century assumed that “modernity […] became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it” (Chakrabarty 2000: 7; italics in original). In the colonialist discourse, European progress situated other cultures in an earlier stage of human evolution. This “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983) legitimated colonial ventures, as colonialism was believed to be for the benefit - the advancement - of humankind. The “persistent and systemic tendency to place” non-European cultures “in a Time other than the present” (Fabian 1983: 31; italics and capitalization in original), “consigned Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history” (Chakrabarty 2000: 8). In the nineteenth century, railways promised the “capitalist emancipation from the limits of organic nature” (Schivelbusch 1986: 7) and “expanded the limits of the civilized world” (Neilson & Otte 2006: 1). The railway was both a product of modernity and transported modernity across the world, but it also functioned as a means to differentiating between European civilization and other cultures’ backwardness. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo taps into this “railway mystique” (Koponen 1994: 300): “It must be remembered that at the time these events occurred,” Patterson remarks in the preface, “the conditions prevailing in East Africa were very different from what they are to-day.” He continues, “The railway, which has modernised the aspect of the place and brought civilisation in its train, was then only in the process of construction, and the country through which it was being built was still in its primitive savage state, as indeed, away from the railway, it still is” (1907: vii-viii). However, as work on the bridge across the Tsavo River was underway, “[t]wo most voracious and insatiable man-eating lions appeared upon the Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 201 scene, and for over nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway and all those connected with it in the vicinity of Tsavo” (Patterson 1907: 20). The lions became increasingly adept at snatching humans, even dragging workers out of their tents at night. Patterson originally indicated that the lions killed “no less than twenty-eight Indian coolies, in addition to scores of unfortunate African natives of whom no official record was kept” (1907: 106). In an account written on the occasion of selling the lions’ skins to the Chicago Field Museum, the number increased dramatically, as he claimed that the animals “killed and devoured […] one hundred and thirty-five Indian and African artisans and laborers employed in the construction of the Uganda Railway” (1925: 89). 1 While the fabled figure of 100+ human deaths has enshrined the two lions among the most skilled man hunters in modern history (e.g. Ludwig 2012), recent studies suggest that they killed no more than 72 humans, with about 35 kills being the most likely scenario (Yeakel et al. 2009: 19042). The Tsavo lions’ attacks on humans have repeatedly inspired fiction, including several cinematic treatments. The film that arguably stays closest to the source material is The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). In fact, even some of the more unbelievable scenes in the movie, such as (fictional) Patterson’s (Val Kilmer) rifle failing when he stares one of the lions into the eyes and some workers’ inability to shoot a trapped lion from a few feet away, were inspired by episodes in Patterson’s book. Since the movie draws on Man-Eaters of Tsavo, The Ghost and the Darkness is very much aware of its role in re-fashioning a late-nineteenth-century story, as evidenced by its opening sequence. As the camera follows Patterson into a building, Samuel (John Kani), an African worker and Patterson’s right-hand man in Tsavo, begins to narrate: This is the most famous true African adventure. Famous because what took place at Tsavo never happened before. Colonel John Patterson was there when it began. A fine Irish gentleman. A brilliant engineer. He was my friend. My name is Samuel. I was there. Remember this: Even the most impossible parts of this story really happened. (Hopkins 1996) Beyond remediating the discourse of authenticity Patterson’s book engages in, the voiceover draws attention to the storytelling-in-progress and the pastness of the events that are about to unfold on the screen. Moreover, Samuel’s role as the narrator supports the notion that the story is an “African adventure” and (theoretically) allows Samuel to shape the story; as narrator, Samuel has a certain degree of agency, in contrast to the African 1 William John Ansorge (1899) reported a lion attack in the same region in October 1896. Likewise, when Ronald Preston reached the Tsavo River a few weeks before Patterson arrived, two men were quickly lost to lion attacks (Preston 1947). Michael Fuchs 202 hands and Indian laborers, whom the historical Patterson clearly considered inferior. At least, figuring Samuel as the narrator appears to grant him power; in fact, he is little more than a bystander to action put into mo-tion by the lions and Patterson and passive witness to the events unfolding. Moreover, the invisible narration of the camera frames Samuel’s narratorial voice. Whereas the physical manifestation of a narrator figure in the storyworld often emphasizes “the impossibility of equating the camera consciousness with a subjective narrator within the film” (Mroz 2012: 105- 106), in The Ghost and the Darkness, these two points of view converge. This aspect is crucial because the movie celebrates Patterson’s actions. By killing the lions, Patterson emerges as a white savior figure. As Matthew Hughey has explained, white saviorism “enables an interpretation of nonwhite characters and culture as essentially broken, marginalized, and pathological, while whites can emerge as messianic characters that easily fix the nonwhite pariah with their superior moral and mental abilities” (2014: loc. 66). Since the camera’s invisible narration absorbs Samuel’s voice, he implicitly applauds the white man’s destruction of the feline representatives of African nature, as well. By celebrating the obliteration of the rebellious beasts and Patterson’s heroics, the film communicates an important (and problematic) message. Even though a British character opines early on that the sole purpose of the Uganda Railway is “to protect the ivory trade; to make rich men richer” (Hopkins 1996), The Ghost and the Darkness depicts Patterson’s slaying of the lions in such a way that the film suggests the act were not driven by the need to continue the construction of the bridge in the service of colonial expansion and economic growth. Instead, Patterson’s determination to kill the beasts springs from his commitment to protect his workers and his ambition to be re-united with his wife and newborn child. Patterson is a benevolent colonizer who - true to the spirit of the 1990s - preaches multiculturalism to the various ethnic groups employed in the project. 2 He epitomizes the ‘benevolent empire’ that seeks to spread ‘civilization’ - and if that venture returns a profit, even better. In the end, the film erases the critique of the imperial enterprise that is expressed by human characters and embodied by the monstrous animals. The Ghost and the Darkness thus offers an interpretation of colonial history that has been “whitewashed in order to promote imperialist nostalgia” (Gilroy 2005: 3). In this way, the movie seems to have anticipated the statement by then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during a 2005 trip to Africa that “the days of Britain 2 Slavoj Žižek’s assessment of multiculturalism seems rather pertinent here: “[T]he ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people - as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected.’ That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism” (1997: 44). Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 203 having to apologize for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologize for it” (qtd. in Pilger 2007). This connection to the more recent past is also established through the introduction of a fictional American character, Charles Remington (Michael Douglas), whom “every man who’s ever hunted has heard of” (Hopkins 1996). His name evokes the Old West by referring to both artist Frederic Remington and the Remington Arms Company (which was founded by a cousin of Frederic’s), one of America’s iconic firearm manufacturers. While Frederic Remington has been called “the epic mythmaker of the American West” (Watkins 2008: 232) because he recovered an image of the Old West that was infused with nostalgia at the end of the nineteenth/ early twentieth century (cf. Nemerov 1995), firearms emblematize white domination of indigenous populations and the natural world, calling to mind that “the violence of colonization [was] justified through the assumed violence of the colonized” (Dovey 2009: 29). If one combines these references to these icons of the West with Remington’s Southern character in the film, the fact that he views Africa as “the last good place” (Hopkins 1996) implies a longing for something that never was. In addition, the fact that the U.S.-American Remington lends the British Empire a helping hand in East Africa draws on historical reality, as American companies were involved in the construction of the Uganda Railway (cf. Tuffnell 2020). This connection between the British Empire and the fledgling American Empire takes on additional significance. As the film concludes, Samuel informs the audience, “If you want to see the lions today, you must go to America” (Hopkins 1996). Whereas subduing the rebellious lions and completing the “Lunatic Express” (Miller 1971) more than a hundred years ago was testament to the power of the British Empire, another empire incorporated the lions’ remains in 1925 when Patterson sold them across the Atlantic. In this way, the movie not simply hints at the historical transition from colonial powers to informal empires, but also emphasizes continuities between the British Empire and the American Empire and suggests that the contemporary Empire (Hardt & Negri 2000) is an heir to a “continuous historical process” (Krueger 2002: xi) which centers on the exploitative, extractive, oppressive, and destructive practices characteristic of capitalism. Avoiding and Returning the Imperial Gaze In addition to functioning as a vehicle for colonial expansion, railways helped implement a particular “way of seeing” (Berger et al. 1972) the colonies; a particular visual relationship between the imperial powers and faraway colonies. Describing his journey on a train to the railway head in Tsavo, Patterson wrote, Michael Fuchs 204 For twenty miles after reaching the mainland, our train wound steadily upwards through beautifully wooded, park-like country, and on looking back out of the carriage windows we could every now and again obtain lovely views of Mombasa and Kilindini, while beyond these the Indian Ocean sparkled in the glorious sunshine as far as the eye could see. (1907: 12-13) This passage acknowledges that the carriage windows frame the colonial world. Looking at the world outside becomes akin to looking at a painting (or, in more contemporary parlance, a television screen or computer monitor), as the windows separate the relatively safe and civilized space of the train from barbaric and wild - but beautiful - Africa. E. Ann Kaplan has explained that “looking relations” such as this “are never innocent. They are always determined by the cultural systems people […] bring with them” (1997: 6). Indeed, this “colonial gaze distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at” (Rieder 2008: 7). The Ghost and the Darkness emphasizes this “practice of looking” (Sturken & Cartwright 2018) and its related politics early on. As Patterson and Angus Starling (Brian McCardie), a Scotsman sent to Africa to help Patterson build the bridge, are riding on a train, the camera captures the natural abundance and natural beauty of Africa. The colonial gaze reduces the landscape and the animals roaming the savannah “into objects and renders them passive, inert, manageable, and controllable” (Ivakhiv 2013: 3). This controlling look is accompanied by knowledge about the African continent: While Starling cherishes the view, Patterson explains that giraffes “only sleep five minutes a day,” that female spotted hyenas are bigger than the males because the latter “eat the young,” and that hippos “fart through their mouths” (Hopkins 1996). Patterson’s knowledge about Africa testifies to the significance of knowledge production to the imperial project: “[R]ecording the Empire, making a vast record of it using the new knowledges,” Thomas Richards has explained, “bec[ame] tantamount to controlling it. […] The familiar Victorian project of positive knowledge divided the world into little pieces of fact” (1993: 6). However, the lions cannot be controlled, as they “refuse[] easy categorization” (Cohen 1996: 6): “It’s not that simple,” Patterson notes in the film, for “[t]hese lions are not like lions” (Hopkins 1996; my emphasis). Within the diegetic world, the lions’ exceptional role pertains to both their atypical behavior and the onto-epistemological problems caused by being incapable of properly placing them (i.e., are they actual lions or ghosts? ). Notably, the lions’ opposition against established systems within the Western worldview also takes a visual dimension. Describing the visual relations between humans and animals, John Berger concludes that “animals are always the observed” (1991: 16). However, the Tsavo lions also repeatedly look back at their human observers. Moreover, the camera allows viewers glimpses through the animals’ eyes. These point-of-view shots “signif[y] Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 205 some type of negative vision” (Galloway 2006: 46). This ‘negative vision’ is highlighted by visual effects which help distinguish between the animals’ vision and the human (or, rather: camera’s) point of view. This difference between the lion’s and the human’s point of view becomes particularly significant in a scene preceding the killing of the first Tsavo lion. Patterson takes position on a “Machan,” which the historic Patterson described as follows: It “was about twelve feet high and was composed of four poles stuck into the ground and inclined towards each other at the top, where a plank was lashed to serve as a seat” (1907: 87-88). Once the sun had set, Patterson quickly understood that the construction was anything but secure, for “the lion began to stealthily stalk” him (1907: 89). The Ghost and the Darkness remediates the tension of this episode by constantly switching between Patterson’s point of view and the lion’s. Whereas Patterson is effectively blind in the pitch-black African night and nervously tries to spot the lion or get some sort of an idea as to where the beast might be, the lion is well aware of where Patterson is and what he does at all times. Through the lion’s eyes, the white man - despite his rifle - is a fragile piece of meat. In his essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (2002), Jacques Derrida reflects on his cat seeing him naked. One of his conclusions is that the cat’s “bottomless gaze” exposes “the naked truth of every gaze, given that that truth allows me to see and be seen through the eyes of the other, in the seeing and not just seen eyes of the other” (2002: 381; italics in original): The recognition of the animal’s gaze incites inquiries into the nature of the visual relationship between human and the Other. Indeed, after their second confrontation with the lions, the lion-hunting Masai come to understand that the big cats are, in fact, “not lions” (Hopkins 1996; my emphasis) at all. Ceci n’est pas un lion: This is not a lion, but rather a symbol; a symbol, which is anchored in the historical reality of about three dozen eaten humans; a symbol whose material manifestations still haunt humankind, as lions continue to prey on humans. 3 However, as Derrida implies, by imagining to see oneself through the eyes of another (or: an Other), one begins to wonder about oneself and one’s role in depicting and imagining the Other. In short, Derrida asks his readers to shift their perspectives and perceptions. The star-studded adventure horror film Anaconda (1997) explores this question in more detail, as the movie focuses on looking and the technologies used to make looking possible. 4 In the opening minutes of Anaconda, filmmaker Terry Flores (Jennifer Lopez) and Dr. Steven Cale (Eric Stoltz) discuss Cale’s search for 3 In Tanzania, for example, lions attack humans about once a week (cf. Kushnir et al. 2014). 4 Jonathan Burt (2005) has explained that ‘looking’ is an activity, whereas ‘seeing’ is the passive reception of sensory input. Michael Fuchs 206 the lost Shirishama tribe in the Amazon, which Flores is expected to capture on film. “You get me there and I’ll shoot it,” she remarks (Llosa 1997). Although Cale’s thirst for knowledge (and renown) drives the expedition, Anaconda exposes the documentary film’s complicity in the project of discovering the native tribe, which is rendered explicit when (the tellingly British) host Warren Westridge (Jonathan Hyde) introduces the narrative thrust of Terry’s documentary film: Our adventure begins 1,000 miles from the mouth of the mighty Amazon, deep in the heart of the rainforest. From here, we will travel by river barge up through shallow tributaries and unexplored backwaters in search of the elusive people of the mist: the Shirishama tribe - one of the last great mysteries of the rainforest. (Llosa 1997) The film crew’s willingness to take risks repeatedly gets them into trouble, such as when Gary (Owen Wilson) and Denise (Kari Wuhrer) venture into the jungle at night to “get some wild sound” (Llosa 1997), only to be chased back to the boat by a wild boar. Despite the various dangers they encounter, despite warning signs erected by the native populations, and despite a literal “wall that’s blocking [their] way down [the] river” (Llosa 1997), the crew advances deeper into the jungle. After Cale is stung in the throat by a large wasp, his drive to deepen knowledge about the Amazon tribes is replaced by Paul Serone’s (Jon Voight) hunt for the large snake which has started to thin out their numbers. This change in motivation manifests only on the level of the movie Anaconda, not the documentary-within-the-film, as its production is momentarily suspended. The giant anaconda - in combination with Serone’s Ahab-like urge to chase it - thus prevents the expedition from finding, studying, and filming the Shirishama. Once Terry and her cameraman Danny (Ice Cube) have killed the snake, a group of Shirishama appears. The human beings native to the region are depicted in the most stereotypical way imaginable: ghost-like, they emerge from the mist on boats apparently made by hollowing out tree trunks; the men wear loincloths; and both men and women wear necklaces and earrings that denote ‘native tribe.’ In this way, the native population is prepared for visual consumption as the film comes to a close. In these concluding moments, Serone’s earlier statement that the crew should not consider him “a monster” because he “didn’t eat” the ship’s captain takes on particular resonance (Llosa 1997). Besides his apparent disregard for human life, one of the traits which renders Serone monstrous is that he is willing to make money by removing the snake from its natural habitat and hence “upsetting the ecological balance of th[e] river” (Llosa 1997). The snake, however, resists and kills him, thereby punishing Serone’s various transgressions. Cale and the film crew, on the other hand, perform a dual role throughout the movie - both threatened subject and threatening subject. When Mateo (Vincent Castellanos) finds himself in the Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 207 anaconda’s deadly embrace, the degree to which the crew is threatened becomes manifest visually, as the captain becomes both the focal point of the spectacle of death and the object of the snake’s look. Yet when, in the final moments of the movie, Danny announces, “I’ll get the camera” (Llosa 1997), as the Shirishama appear, the filmmaking project not only becomes threatening to the native tribe’s way of life but also threatens to package their way of being-in-the-world into easily consumable images and narratives. Disrupting Exploration and Obstructing Resource Extraction While Anaconda primarily spotlights the production of images and gaining information from South America, the standalone sequel, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004), explicitly focuses on the extraction of a resource from a former colony. After an opening scene in the jungle of Borneo, the film moves to the concrete jungle of New York City. In a conference room, Gordon Mitchell (Morris Chestnut) and Jack Byron (Matthew Marsden) try to convince the board of the pharmaceutical company Wexler-Hall not to cancel their contract because an expedition has discovered an orchid that blooms for six months every seven years. The preliminary analysis of some samples “indicates the presence of a chemical […] that can significantly prolong cellular life” in the orchid (Little 2004). Since the Wexler-Hall board believes that the resultant drug might be “bigger than penicillin” and “bigger than Viagra” (Little 2004), they fund a trip to Borneo to collect orchids. The party’s drive to extract resources from the region extends far beyond the orchids, though. For example, when they come across a spider whose venom can paralyze humans, Gordon and Jack are quick to conclude that they “may have just discovered a valuable new anesthetic agent” which they can sell “to the highest bidder” (Little 2004). As it turns out, the orchid lives up to its promise. However, its life-extending ‘magic’ not only affects human cellular life, but also other members of the animal kingdom. And this is the idea Hunt for the Blood Orchid exploits: Reptiles grow throughout their entire life. Accordingly, if reptiles can get older, they also become bigger. In view of the movie’s title, it is not incredibly surprising that the expedition party discovers a group of giant anacondas guarding the orchids. The mere presence of animals native to South America on a Southeast Asian island could be said to point at the effects of globalization on ecosystems; however, such a reading would likely take interpretive freedom a little too far. Nevertheless, when Jack emphasizes the urgency of collecting the orchids, he highlights the consequences of globalization for the island: Waiting for seven years, until the orchids will bloom again, is not an option, as the entire region might have turned into “a giant rice paddy” (Little 2004). Jack’s delivery implies that his line is meant as an insult to low- Michael Fuchs 208 income countries, which cannot keep up with globalization, turn to agriculture and production, and blindly destroy other natural resources. Of course, such a simplistic view of globalization ignores both contemporary realities and historical processes that (co-)shaped the current situation. In Southeast Asia, the displacement of subsistence agriculture may be traced to commercial rice cultivation during colonial times (Chirico 2014: 421- 422), with plantation economies only taking shape toward the latter half of the nineteenth century (Kratoska 2008: 78). However, uneven as the power relations may have been “in favour of the colonising culture, such exchanges were […] often more complex in practice than th[e …] simple pattern of invasion, land-clearing and destruction” might suggest (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 8). Although Jack’s remark about Southeast Asia’s role in the global rice economy touches on the topic of globalization, the conscious destruction of the natural environment in an attempt to become part of global trade networks also raises the issue of humankind’s role on the planet. In this context, the charter boat’s captain, Bill Johnson (Johnny Messner), notes at one point: “Everything gets eaten out here. It’s the jungle” (Little 2004). The first sentence, of course, implies that humans are reduced to a source of protein in this environment. In this way, this short and poignant statement communicates two key messages. Western ‘civilization’ has manufactured an image of “ourselves as set apart [from the natural world] and special” (Plumwood [1996] 2012a: 16-17). In turn, this self-aggrandizing view has rendered the inhabitants of the Global North blind and deaf to their natural surroundings, which raises the potential threat of transgressing natural boundaries and limits they are blissfully unaware of. The late philosopher and ecofeminist Valerie Plumwood reflected on these issues years after a saltwater crocodile had attacked her in Kakadu National Park. During the confrontation, she (understandably) felt powerless. In part, this feeling of powerlessness was due to having entered a world she was aware of, but which she consciously ignored - she “was in a place that was not [her] own” ([1996] 2012a: 20). Although she knew that she was kayaking through ‘crocodile country’ and knew that she was surrounded by hundreds of reptiles, she did not view them as threats. However, she later came to grasp that by entering the crocodiles’ space, she had entered “a world in which we are all food” (2012b: 36). The Australian crocodile horror film Rogue (2007) perfectly illustrates these ideas. The narrative focuses on American travel journalist Pete McKell (Michael Vartan), who participates in a river cruise in Kakadu National Park. Tour guide Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell) announces early on that “[t]he Northern Territory is home to the biggest population of saltwater crocodiles in the world” (McLean 2007). When they pass a bigger boat, which offers one of these ‘jumping crocodile cruises,’ Kate’s group becomes a bit worried of crocodiles jumping into her boat. Clearly, the tourists perceive the salties as potentially dangerous animals. Whereas Kate initially Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 209 tries to calm down the tourists, she later emphasizes that the saltwater crocodile “is […] the most dangerous member of the crocodilian family. […] Croc can’t swallow you in one go, he will literally tear you to pieces” (McLean 2007). Although they seem aware of the risks, when they “stumble[] into [a crocodile’s] territory” (McLean 2007), the group are caught off-guard by the ways in which the ‘living dinosaur’ brutally challenges “the superior status of humans” (Aaltola 2002). Neil (Sam Worthington), a local, explains the situation: “Us being here, that’s gonna be driving him crazy. He’s gonna feel as if we’re moving in” (McLean 2007). 5 In other words, the group have not simply entered the crocodile’s territory; they have rather occupied it and want to make it theirs; they want to colonize the land. The crocodile responds in the only way he knows - through violence. By reducing human bodies to meat, the monstrous animal thus “provide[s …] us with a perspective that can help us to see ourselves in ecological terms” (Plumwood [1996] 2012a: 16). Stopping Touristic Exploitation Besides this ecological topic, Rogue addresses touristic exploration and exploitation. After all, the group trespasses into the crocodile’s territory on a tourist cruise. Indeed, the touristic invasion of the Northern Territory becomes an issue in the first few minutes of the movie, when Pete enters a backwoods general store. The owner explains, “A few years back, you’d be lucky if you saw any tourists up here at all. Too remote for most people. It’s changing pretty quickly; I can tell you” (McLean 2007). Despite its constant - albeit latent - presence in the background, Rogue never explores tourism in more detail, however. The 2006 lion horror film Prey is a different beast. Loosely inspired by the Tsavo man-eaters, the story centers on an American family on a business trip/ vacation in South Africa. Tom (Peter Weller) hopes that his young wife Amy (Bridget Moynahan) and his two kids from a previous wife, Jessica (Carly Schroeder) and David (Conner Dowds), will spend some quality time in Africa while he manages the construction of a nearby dam. On the second day of their journey, Tom goes to work while the other three family members take a safari tour. Their guide takes the tour off-road, as they can barely see any animals on the main road. During a toilet break, lions attack David and their guide and kill the guide. Amy, Jessica, and David barricade themselves in the ranger vehicle until Tom and the hired big-game hunter Crawford (Jamie Bartlett) discover them two days later. Crawford shoots 5 In the film’s opening scene, a saltwater crocodile (which is native to Australia - and parts of Southeast Asia) takes down a (feral) water buffalo, thereby transporting the topic of colonization into a different dimension of meaning. Michael Fuchs 210 one of the lions, but then gets quickly disposed of. In the end, Amy somehow manages to blow up the vehicle, with the male leader of the pride trapped inside. When discussing tourism, one must always remember that “[t]ourism takes place in the context of great inequality of wealth and power” (Nina Rao qtd. in Gonsalves 1993: 8). Indeed, the “view that modern tourism is an extension of colonialism (with all the attributes of a master-servant relationship” (Gonsalves 1993: 11) may be traced at least to Louis Turner and John Ash’s book The Golden Hordes (1975), in which they argue that once package tourism spread beyond Europe, tourism became “an agency for the consolidation of Empire” (1975: 58). As Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt have explained, “Both the characteristic First World ownership of much Third World tourism infrastructure and the origin of tourists from the First World have for many become an irresistible analogy of colonial and imperial domination” (2016: 58). This inequality and the (not-so-)latent colonialist imprint become manifest in the upper-class tourist lodge in which the Newmans reside. A secluded haven of civilization in the middle of the African wilderness, the lodge offers ‘traditional’ food and various performances of ‘Africanness,’ among others. On the first evening of their stay, the Newmans eat warthog roast for dinner. The scene taps into the semantic power of the “remarkably concentrated signifier” (Poole 1999: 3) that is food. By eating the warthog, the Newmans quite literally incorporate Otherness. Tellingly, when David tries the warthog, he concludes that it tastes like chicken. As the exotic food thus becomes an everyday meal, difference is flattened and absorbed. In fact, the Newmans (as stand-ins for tourists from the Global North) feed off difference in order to create experiences that they can base their identities on. As the hunter Crawford puts it: “You tourists - you come here and stay in your posh tents by the pool, and you go back, and you tell about your adventure stories” (Roodt 2006). In this context, Jessica’s vegetarianism and her attendant refusal to eat the warthog is significant, as she rejects consumption of ‘Africanness’ the other characters participate in. Likewise, on their way to the lodge, she is the only one not interested in the wildlife roaming the savannah. Her reaction to an elephant is laden with meaning: “So what? I’ve seen one at the zoo” (Roodt 2006). Similarly, when her dad offers her warthog, she remarks, “I don’t eat characters from The Lion King, especially not Pumbaa” (Roodt 2006). For Jessica, animals have found their habitat in zoos and Disney movies. In other words, the staging of animals in zoos and the representation of animals in film and television have become the primary reference points for what animals are and displaced actual, wild animals from her experience. The violent encounter with a pride of lions returns the material existence of wild animals to her life. At the same time, the Americans’ notion of a sheltered life collapses, as the lions make them understand that Monstrous Animals and the Disruption of Imperialist Fantasies 211 humans live “in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality” (Grosz 2004: 2). When Jess and Amy are about to be “reduced to food” (Plumwood [1996] 2012a: 12), poachers shoot a charging female lion in the very last second. Since the two men do not respond to the women’s attempts to communicate, Amy becomes increasingly frightened. Prey suggests that she views the two black men as potential sexual predators: the first thing Amy does back in the car is put on another shirt, she asks Jessica to wear her jacket, and she remarks that she thought they “would be of greater interest” to the poachers (Roodt 2006). That Jessica convinces Amy that she “will be fine” (Roodt 2006) if she accompanies one of the poachers to a waterhole thus indicates either that the teenager is desperately naïve or that society has yet to ingrain racist stereotypes in her belief system. Beyond representing the threat of black male sexuality, the two poachers tap into other stereotypes of Africans - and the Global South, more generally. In particular, their participation in the illegal trade of endangered and protected species and the attendant disregard of animal life in order to earn money renders them complicit in the cheapening and exploitation of nature. Of course, this stereotypical representation simplifies matters. After all, “today’s African political economy” - and hence also these poachers’ lives - “is profoundly shaped by its colonial roots as well as the contemporary forces of neoliberalism and imperialism” (Wengraf 2018: 11). In view of this colonial imprint, the American tourists’ survival - while the poachers and other locals become lion food - suggests a longing for (neo-)colonialism; as if the Global South was dependent on the Global North to thrive. Opposing the System—Changing the System? Although Prey’s final moments suggest that other lions are still lurking in the high grass, in all of the films discussed in this article, the animal foes are killed. Of course, killing animals is the most extreme form of dominating them by taking control of their lives. The eradication of the monstrous animals hence reveals humankind’s “pathological belief in our ability to control the […] natural world” (Williston 2015: 35). The monstrous animals in these films, which try to stop various (neo-)colonial ventures, from the colonization of land and the extraction of resources to imposing the colonial gaze on the Other and the touristic exploitation of the Global South, expose the interconnections between capitalism and colonialism, Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism. Notably, the monstrous animals might obstruct capitalist exploitation, but they do not succeed in dismantling the system. These symbols of rebellion accordingly do not suggest that capitalism and its side-effects of globalization, development, and progress can be bypassed, let alone stopped. Michael Fuchs 212 However, the monstrous animals spotlight the social and environmental cruelties which have been perpetrated in the name of capitalism. By turning the tables and (momentarily) turning humans into the hunted (if not even prey), the animal monsters suggest that “a re-imagining and reconfiguration of the human place in nature” requires the “interrogation of the category of the human itself and of the ways in which the construction of ourselves against nature […] has been and remains complicit in colonialist and racist exploitation from the time of imperial conquest to the present day” (Huggan & Tiffin 2010: 6). Problematically, the films (practically) erase (Rogue, Hunt for the Blood Orchid), sideline (The Ghost and the Darkness), and/ or stereotype (Anaconda, Prey) the (neo)colonized human Others. Through their affiliation with the monstrous animals, the human Others are relegated to “a borderlands between human and animal, a fraught zone of ambiguity, menace, and transgression” (King 2015: 24). 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Since the sea, the wonders it holds, and the narrative voyages it has inspired have all served as correlatives for a realm that is vaster than the high seas and as yet largely inaccessible to us—outer space—it is unsurprising that cetaceans, along with the mysteriousness and awe they command, have left an inedible imprint on the imaginarium that fuels space-based science fiction (sf). Melville’s white whale has migrated into the “ocean of space” that is the vast outer space world of a popular cultural behemoth: Star Trek. This article produces a complete chart of all intermedial sightings of Moby- Dick in the Star Trek universe in an effort to document how writers and producers have extracted the same few elements to tell stories about guilt caused by personal trauma. Star Trek’s selective and systematic lifting of elements from the novel amount to an intermedial transpositioning of the character dynamic that governs Ahab’s interactions with Starbuck, the philosophical discussion over whether the whale’s actions are driven by malicious intent or undiscerning instinct, and Moby Dick’s signature whiteness. What is it about whales in outer space, and entities inspired by cetaceans in Star Trek in particular? A first season episode of Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017-) provides a clue; the titular ship and its crew encounter an organic, space-dwelling creature known as a gormagander which is, as science officer Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) reminds them, “on the endangered species list,” due to a combination of overhunting and peculiarly weak reproductive instincts. (“Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” 1.07, 2017) The creature looks like a cross between a whale and a cephalopod; flappy ventral and dorsal fins extend from its elongated, tubular midsection, which opens in a sizable maw at the front and sports frilled AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0021 Stefan Rabitsch 218 tentacles in the rear. Gormaganders are not predators since they feed on particles generated by solar winds. Regulations stipulate that the crew captures and transports the creature, who appears to be injured, to a “xenologic facility” for its own safety. Once transported to the ship’s cargo hold, however, the crew is in for a surprise as the gormagander discharges a human stowaway - reminiscent of the biblical Jonah - who proceeds to wreak havoc on the ship for the remainder of the episode. An example of the science-fictional mode, the episode presents the gormagander as a plausible and thus believable entity along analogical lines. It makes that which is fantastic - an organic species who lives in the frigid, irradiated depths of interstellar space - stand in a discoverable and thus meaningful relationship with the audience’s cultural imaginary and its attendant historical memory. What is more, the ship’s encounter with the gormagander speaks to the fact that Star Trek, as I have comprehensively shown elsewhere (Rabitsch, 2019), models its adventures of future space exploration on ocean-bound voyages of discovery during the heyday of the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution. The gormagander is, however, not an isolated case of the Star Trek universe making use of cetaceans and the mysteriousness, awe, and conservationist concerns television and movie audiences commonly associate with them. For example, even those who are only superficially familiar with Star Trek will have likely encountered the fourth Star Trek motion picture, which has entered the wider popular culture consciousness as “the one with the whales.” A rather lighthearted time-travel romp that allegorically comments on humanity’s unsustainable, ecological practices, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) sees Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew return to Earth’s past to procure a pair of humpback whales which had become extinct by the 22 nd century. An interstellar probe arrived in Earth’s orbit seeking to communicate, not with humans, but with the long-extinct cetacean species, causing severe ecological disruptions in the process. In a third season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Syndicated, 1987- 1994), the crew of the Enterprise makes first contact with a creature called Gomtuu which turns out to be a large, organic spaceship. The sounds reverberating on its interior were drawn from whale songs. Ultimately, a special ambassador assigned to the ship for this mission decides to join with Gomtuu thereby alleviating the respective suffering and loneliness they both feel; a man occupying the bowels of a space whale taps into the same biblical imagery as the gormagander and its human stowaway. (“Tin Man” 3.20, 1990) While never shown on television, the blueprints for TNG’s Enterprise feature a “cetacean ops” facility, which presumably housed sentient, cetacean crew members on board. (Sternbach 1996) Given such an abundance of whales and whale-like creatures in Star Trek, it should not come as a surprise that one cetacean presence towers over all the others - Herman Melville’s white leviathan. Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 219 Over the course of more than fifty years, Star Trek writers and producers have repeatedly accessed Moby-Dick (1851) as a literary repertoire of meaning(s) to craft character-driven stories set in its future of human space exploration. Indeed, Melville’s novel teems with meaning(s), cetacean and otherwise. What exactly has been lifted from the novel and how that has been reconfigured intermedially to repetitive narratological ends is undergirded by a pattern - spanning different permutations of Star Trek - which has yet to be fully mapped, let alone appreciated comparatively in the vein of what Linda Hutcheon has labeled “adaptations as adaptations.” (2006: 4, original emphasis) Consequently, this essay seeks to produce a complete chart of all intermedial sightings of Moby-Dick in the Star Trek universe in an effort to document how writers and producers have extracted the same few elements to tell stories about guilt caused by personal trauma. The character dynamic that governs Ahab’s interactions with Starbuck, the philosophical discussion over whether the whale’s actions are driven by malicious intent or undiscerning instinct, and Moby Dick’s signature whiteness are the principle components that have been transposed into Star Trek’s world. The narratives constructed around them ultimately yield one of two outcomes - driven by excruciating guilt, the characters who embark to seek revenge on those who wronged them either succeed or fail in processing their trauma. Overall, the periodic, intermedial adaptation of Melville’s leviathan of 19 th century fiction resonates with Star Trek’s unquestionably nautical timbre. “Well versed in the classics”: Spacefaring literati There is no shortage of wholesale definitions and labels designed to capture both the scope and essence of Star Trek, a popular culture behemoth more than fifty years in the making. Daniel Bernardi has considered it “a megatext,” (1998: 7, original emphasis); Matthew Kapell has mapped it as “a kind of contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk,” (2010: 2) while Chris Gregory has identified Star Trek as “one of the most valuable ‘cultural properties’ in the world.” (2000: 2) First and foremost, Star Trek is a science-fictional vision of the distant future where humanity has taken its place in a galaxy that teems with life, sentient and otherwise. Taking place roughly between the 22 nd and 24 th century, the Star Trek world has been built and sustained by a total of seven live-action television shows, two animated series, and thirteen motion pictures to date. It has spawned a multi-million-dollar transmedia ecology, which encompasses everything and anything ranging from novelizations, comics, and video games to themed cruises, toys, apparel, and starship-shaped pizza cutters. The brainchild of former pilot-turnedtelevision-writer Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was conceived as a narrative vehicle to tell allegorical stories and morality tales while avoiding televi- Stefan Rabitsch 220 sion censors in the mid-1960s. Its fantastic world of future space exploration is little more than a reimagined age of exploration at sea which is infused with a large dose of an idealized and romanticized humanism, undergirded by Anglocentric, imperialist structures. Star Trek’s humanist endowment has left an indelible imprint on this science-fictional world’s literariness as the principle characters who populate it are more than mere swashbuckling heroes or unfeeling thinking machines; while they all specialize in various disciplines, Star Trek’s space explorers are explicitly modelled on Enlightenment polymaths. Among other things, they frequently extol the values and benefits of (canonical) literature and the (fine) arts. Mister Spock (Leonard Nimoy) reminding Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) that he is indeed “well versed in the classics,” (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, 1989) after the latter had misattributed a line from Sea-Fever (1916) to Melville instead of John Masefield, provides a bearing for mapping the intermedial appearances of Moby-Dick. Star Trek’s intertextual affinity for canonical literature amounts to what Larry Kreitzer has identified as a “veneer of cultural sophistication.” (1996: 1) He has catalogued a kaleidoscopic collection of instances where Star Trek: The Original Series (NBC, 1966-69) and its six motion picture spin-offs mined literary sources for episode/ movie titles, plotlines, and pieces of dialog which were quoted either verbatim or transmuted to fit into a world of fantastic space exploration. Kreitzer has concluded that these references and borrowings help “bridge the gap between the modern world [i.e., our empirical reality] and the imaginary 23 rd -century,” giving it “an intellectual credibility.” (27) Elisabeth Baird Hardy has ascertained that Star Trek’s literariness is a valuable teaching apparatus not only for instilling an appreciation for reading, but also for demystifying and dehierarchizing the shroud of elitism that has enveloped the literary canon and other examples of “high culture”; speaking to the intertextual realities of literary production, she reminds us that “both the great works and contemporary texts are part of a network, with one author influencing another, who in turn influences still others.” (2018: 4) For example, Moby-Dick’s intermedial surfacing on the final frontier is eclipsed only by the intertextual footprint of Shakespeare’s oeuvre on Star Trek which is particularly palpable, cutting across a broad range of the adaptation spectrum. Consequently, it has already attracted scholarly attention amounting to multiple chapters, articles, and an entire special issue of Extrapolation. (cf. Kazimierczak, 2010; Houlahan, 1995; Pendergast, 1995) Since intertextual borrowing and processes of adaptation are handmaidens to each other, it only makes sense to briefly lay bare the methodological tools that inform the subsequent charting of the white whale’s course on the final frontier. Questions about adaptation - what it is/ is not, how it works, what it achieves - are, while marred by excessive scholarly debate and terminological inflation, both fairly straightforward and yet still point at complex processes. Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) arguably stands Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 221 as one of the most comprehensive, taxonomically sound, and user-friendliest toolboxes for those traversing the mycelial network of migrating textual meaning(s). Understanding adaptation as “repetition, but repetition without replication,” she offers a “double definition of adaptation as process and product.” (7-9) Hutcheon positions her theory as an interposition to the latent influence of the “highbrow vs. lowbrow culture”-camp in that any adaptation is “a derivation that is not derivative […] It is its own palimpsestic thing.” (9) She instructs us to be attentive to what is adapted (e.g., themes, characters, storylines), how is it adapted (e.g., within the same medium or across media boundaries), and by whom and for what reasons/ to what ends (e.g., economic motivations, corrective criticism, homage). “[A] process of creation,” adaptation translates more often than not into “appropriation and salvaging” substance from one medium to another which amounts to “a different mode of engagement,” since “being shown a story is not the same as being told it.” (8-12, original emphasis) Not only does Star Trek’s selective adaptation of Moby-Dick speak to the “surgical art” (Abbott 2002: 108) of “subtraction or contraction,” (Hutcheon 19), but also to the result yielding in a remediation, i.e., a translation “in the form of intersemiotic transposition from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images).” (16) Consequently, Star Trek’s selective and systematic lifting of elements from the novel amounts to only a fraction of the palate offered by a text which, according to Robert Foulke, “swallows as much of the world as it can, reaching out from cetology and the history of whaling to theology, philosophy, literature, art, and the farthest reaches of human history in meteoric flashes of analogy and metaphor.” (2002: 118) Some of the instances where Star Trek remediates Moby-Dick have, of course, not gone entirely unnoticed. Michèle and Duncan Barrett have asserted that Melville’s magnum opus serves as a “pertinent critical commentary of the modern rationalism of Star Trek,” (2001: 10) as they briefly touch on only three of the six explicit sightings of the white whale on the final frontier. They conclude that Star Trek: First Contact (1996) is “the best place to start to consider the influence of this iconic sea-going novel on the world of Star Trek,” since it draws clearly marked parallels between Captain Ahab and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) as the latter seeks to avenge his cybernetic violation at the hands of a terrifying foe. While accurate in their assertion that the eighth Star Trek motion picture is significant, they might have been too engrossed by the gravitas of the actor’s performance as he balances Picard on the edge of Ahab’s descent into his self-inflicted, monomaniacal fatalism and rage. What is more, their reading was likely informed by him starring in a critically acclaimed direct-to-television adaptation of Moby-Dick which was released a year and a half after First Contact. In a similar vein, Elizabeth Hinds, focusing on only one instance of Star Trek remediating the novel, has located “an oblique reconfiguration of Moby-Dick,” in that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) “in the same way Stefan Rabitsch 222 as does Melville in Moby-Dick, severely questions Emerson’s Transcedentialism and sounds a warning for the true believer in the infinite progress and goodness of humankind.” (1997: 43, original emphasis) Despite providing pertinent pointers, these critics have failed to fully appreciate the systematicity and regularity of how Star Trek has put forth six intermedial adaptations of Moby-Dick to date. Only if looked in concert can we see a particular pattern emerge; it speaks to how Star Trek writers and producers have reductively extracted a series of repetitively performed character dynamics along with quotable passages and malleable cetacean contours from the novel. Largely eschewing the conspicuous focalizer of Ishmael, Star Trek’s intermedial adaptation of Moby-Dick builds heavily on two characters - Ahab and Starbuck - their motivations, and how they govern their relationship to each other and to the white leviathan. Ahab is reconfigured into a character strain, which is in fact spliced into two guises of the captain. There is the forlorn Ahab who pursues his quest until he meets his inevitable demise in a fatal encounter with the whale. Only characters who are not the principle Star Trek captains assume the role of this ‘original’ Ahab. The similitude between the forlorn Ahabs in Star Trek and the captain in the novel is accentuated by them sharing physical scars and/ or metaphorical equivalents thereof. However, there is also the redemptive Ahab; he echoes the captain in the novel when he revisits and briefly questions his own life and the choices he made in Chapter 132 (The Symphony). The redemptive Ahab is prevailed upon to desist in his quest lest he loses everything he holds dear, chief among which are his ship and his crew. Regardless of which permutation of Ahab appears in Star Trek, he is used to comment on and critically question the idealized humanism and its attendant rationalism that is the baseline of Star Trek’s world. More specifically though, the two permutations of the Ahab character strain are the products of either a Starbuckian failure or success in reasoning with the captain. Whenever Star Trek remediates Moby-Dick, there is one or more characters who re-enact the role of Ahab’s first mate. Starbuck represents the voice of reason, logic, and economically motivated pragmatism. As second-in-command, he is the only one on the Pequod entitled to repeatedly express concerns about his captain’s course of action; ultimately, he, of course, fails to reason with Ahab. However, Starbuck’s intermedial descendants succeed in some of Star Trek’s retellings of the tale. What Michèle and Duncan Barrett have labeled Star Trek’s “Melvillian treatment of revenge,” (23) primarily provides the action-adventure plots for those episodes and movies that remediate the novel. However, the “blind and self-destructive revenge” (20) of Star Trek’s Ahabs - regardless of whether they are forlorn or redeemable - serves as a mere foil for exploring the characters’ guilt and trauma which fuels their illogical need for revenge. They all feel guilty for having failed at something and/ or having failed someone. Whether or not the captains come to terms with their guilt Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 223 ultimately depends on Star Trek’s Starbucks and how successful they are in employing a discourse of reason. Lastly, the whiteness of the whale is not only transmuted and ascribed to the skin tone of the largely symbolic whales that come in humanoid form, but it is also maintained in nonhuman(oid) manifestations of the leviathan. Star Trek’s ocean of outer space is inhabited by creatures and entities whose physiognomy alludes more or less vaguely to cetacean shapes and contours. Thar she blows: Vaguely disguised whales The white whale makes its first intermedial appearance on the final frontier in a second season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series (“The Doomsday Machine” 2.06, 1967). The Enterprise responds to a distress call of her sister ship, the Constellation, only to discover that all the planets along their path have been destroyed. When they discover the badly damaged ship, its entire crew is missing except for the captain, Commodore Matt Decker (William Windom). Suffering from shock, they find him raving in the bowls of his ship; he is beaten, weary, and despondent. He informs Kirk that they were attacked by an enormous entity which destroys entire planets, feeding on the debris. Decker is transported to the Enterprise while Kirk and a small team remain on the Constellation to affect basic repairs. The planet killer then reappears and attacks the Enterprise, stranding Kirk and his team. Seeking revenge, Decker assumes command of the Enterprise and resolves to attack the planet killer, arguing that it must be stopped at all costs lest it destroys more planets. His attack, however, fails and the ship is almost destroyed if it had not been for Kirk who stages a diversion on the Constellation. Decker continues to believe that he can defeat the spaceborne leviathan with conventional weapons as long as he can get close enough. Based on an analysis of its composition, it is clear, however, that they have no chance of defeating it. When Decker orders another attack, Spock relieves him of command and orders him to sickbay. The mad commodore manages to escape in a shuttlecraft. He heads toward the planet killer, convinced that he can destroy it from the inside by blowing up his shuttle. Ignoring Kirk’s attempts to reason with him, his plan fails again and he is devoured in Jonah-like fashion. The Enterprise crew learns that Decker’s plan would have worked if he had detonated a vessel more powerful than a shuttle. Kirk repeats the manoeuvre with the damaged Constellation and succeeds in rendering the planet killer inoperative. Following the pattern outlined earlier, Decker obviously dons the guise of the forlorn Ahab. In Kirk’s absence, he assumes command of the Enterprise because he sees it as a new chance to take revenge on the planet killer. His self-destructive need for revenge stems from an openly articulated feeling of guilt which is revealed early in the episode. Kirk tells Decker about Stefan Rabitsch 224 the destruction of the planet which the latter used as a safe haven for his crew: Kirk: There is no third planet. Decker: Don’t you think I know that? There was, but not anymore. They called me. They begged me for help, four hundred of them. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Decker then breaks down in tears and shamefully adds, “It’s just that I, I, I never lost a command before.” He reveals the extent of how much the attack has hurt him since there is hardly anything more important for an archetypal Starfleet captain than his ship and the crew under his command. Decker feels guilty for having abandoned them and for failing to protect them. The planet killer is designed to be reminiscent of the white whale. Shaped like a cigar, with a small tail and a cavernous opening in the front, its hull is colored in a silvery gray, interspersed with brighter areas. Melville’s white whale was also not entirely white. Ishmael notes that “his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue.” (152) Melville dedicates an entire chapter (Chapter 42) to the whiteness of the whale where he discusses the whale’s distinct hue vis-à-vis a cultural history of the symbolism of whiteness. The beast’s color is “the monumental white shroud that wraps up all the prospect around him,” (163) which makes the creature ambiguous and unreadable; “an anomalous creature” with “a forehead, pleated with riddles.” (287-288) The planet killer’s visual features are underscored by the way the crew discuss its behavior, especially when they try to ascertain its nature and its intentions. Meeting his rescuers, Decker tells them that, “[t]hey say there’s no devil, Jim, but there is. Right out of hell, I saw it.” Irritated by his cryptic and unscientific statement, Kirk asks for more information. Kirk: What does it look like? Decker: Well, it’s miles long, with a maw that could swallow a dozen starships. It destroys planets, chops them into rubble. Kirk: What is it, an alien ship? Or is it alive, or is it... Decker: Both or neither. I don’t know. They echo one of the central ambiguities in the novel, i.e., the “misperception of the whale as the embodiment of all evil.” (Barrett 22) In other words, this unresolved ambiguity stems from a discussion of whether the whale’s actions are an expression of intent- and, thus perhaps indicative of a higher design and/ or sentience - or, simply a form of natural instinct. The ambiguity Decker initially ascribes to the planet killer echoes Ishmael who contends that “every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.” (152) He further relates “the unearthly conceit” that Moby Dick was “not only Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 225 ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time).” (151) In the episode, the conceit is addressed and the ambiguities are resolved. Science officer Spock, who is the epitome logic, suggests that the planet killer is an automated weapon used in a war many millennia ago which left no survivors. The self-sustaining doomsday machine simply kept following its original programming - read instincts - with none of the original programmers left alive to change it. Consequently, this space whale is not a malicious devil. Even though a reasonable, scientific explanation for the planet killer is provided, reason cannot be imparted to Decker. Both Spock and later Kirk employ a Starbuckian discourse of reason and logic but to no avail. Decker’s monomaniacal disregard for Spock’s arguments come to the fore on a number of occasions. Decker: That thing must be destroyed. Spock: You tried to destroy it once before, Commodore. The result was a wrecked ship and a dead crew. Decker: I made a mistake then. We were too far away. This time I’m going to hit it with full phasers at point-blank range. Spock: Sensors show the object’s hull is solid neutronium. A single ship cannot combat it. Decker: Mister Spock, that will be all. You have been relieved of command. Don’t force me to relieve you of duty as well. When Decker is approaching the planet killer for a final charge, Kirk implores him to desist on a more emotional level. However, the commodore is plagued by suicidal guilt - “I’ve been prepared for death ever since I, ever since I killed my crew.” - which drives his quest for revenge. Ultimately, it is his guilt as much as the planet killer that consume him. A few episodes later, the series revisits the tale of the white whale (“Obsession” 2.18, 1967). In this case, Kirk assumes the role of a redemptive Ahab, who, though reluctantly, listens to his Starbuckian advisors. The episode opens with the captain, Spock, and a security detachment surveying ore deposits on a planet. When the security team scouts the perimeter, they are attacked by a white, gaseous cloud. Two men are instantly killed and one barely survives; their bodies were drained of all red blood cells. Spock and Doctor McCoy are puzzled by the captain’s knowledge of many details about the attacks. They are even more perplexed when the captain ignores an order to transport much-needed, perishable medicine to a colony in order to investigate the attacks further. He returns to the surface accompanied by a new security team. Once again, the cloud attacks, leaving more crewmen dead. The captain continues to ignore his officers’ reminders about their relief mission and he becomes increasingly agitated. Slowly, details begin to emerge. When Kirk was a lieutenant, he encountered a Stefan Rabitsch 226 similar phenomenon, which killed two hundred crew, including his captain. Young Kirk was manning the ship’s weapons during the encounter and he happened to hesitate for a moment before he fired. Not only does he secretly blame himself for the deaths, he is also convinced that the cloud is an intelligent being. When his senior officers confront him about their medical mission, he asserts that he will pursue the cloud regardless of orders since it is an interstellar threat. The cloud then leaves the planet and the Enterprise pursues it at speeds which it can maintain for only a short time. Following his officers’ urging, Kirk is forced to discontinue the chase. The cloud returns shortly thereafter and attacks the ship, infiltrating its ventilation system. While they succeed in removing it from the ship, Spock is briefly exposed to the cloud. Having telepathic abilities, he sensed the creature’s intentions to find a planet in order to spawn its young. Based on a seemingly legitimate reason, they continue their pursuit, Kirk baits the cloud, and ultimately kills it by destroying half of a planet’s atmosphere. In this episode, Kirk’s obsessive behavior is redeemed once he reluctantly begins to listen to a voice of reason. At the same time, however, he provides a reasonable argument for killing the creature upon having convinced his Starbuckian advisors of its intelligence. In seeing reason, he succeeds in replacing his need for revenge with a more practical course of action. The final vindication of his motives is foreshadowed when he records his doubts in his log. Personal log, Stardate 3620.7: Have I the right to jeopardize my crew, my ship for a feeling I can’t even put into words? No man achieves Starfleet command without relying on intuition, but have I made a rational decision? Am I letting the horrors of the past distort my judgment of the present? This is further exemplified in moments where he blatantly disregards his officers’ concerns. Scott: The medicine for Theta Seven colony is not only needed desperately and has limited... Kirk: I’m aware of the situation, Engineer, and I’m getting a little tired of my senior officers conspiring against me. Forgive me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word conspire. In this scene, Commander Scott (James Doohan) assumes the role of Starbuck, reminding the captain of their mission. When Kirk temporarily loses his composure, he immediately apologizes; this is one way of how the monomaniacal captain of the novel is reconfigured to provide a redemptive permutation of Ahab. Kirk’s obsessive quest for revenge is once again but a foil for ascertaining the depth of his guilt so that he can come to terms with it. Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 227 McCoy: Monsters come in many forms. You know the greatest monster of them all, Jim? Guilt. [...] I was speaking of Lieutenant James T. Kirk of the starship Farragut. Eleven years ago, you were the young officer at the phaser station when something attacked. According to the tapes, this young Lieutenant Kirk insisted upon blaming himself. More Starbuckian discourse of reason makes the captain finally realize that he could have done nothing to prevent the tragedy. Spock: Captain, the creature’s ability to throw itself out of time sync makes it possible for it to be elsewhere in the instant the phaser hits. There is therefore no basis for your self-recrimination. If you had fired on time and on target eleven years ago, it would have made no more difference than it did an hour ago. Captain Garrovick would still be dead. The fault was not yours, Jim. In fact, there was no fault. Armed with an implicit understanding that he is on the road to redemption, he makes sure to alleviate the guilt felt by one of his officers whom he had chastised for having hesitated during their confrontation with the creature. The trope of the white whale is also maintained on both visual and discursive levels. Even though the creature appears to be amorphous most of the time, it resembles a cetacean shape when it is shown on the ship’s main viewer. As it heads towards the Enterprise to attack, its silhouette is reminiscent of a sperm whale charging the ship head on. The mysterious qualities of the whale’s white hue are accentuated by almost literalizing the metaphor of ubiquity; after all, the cloud can easily expand to fill an entire room, contract to occupy the top of a rock, or disappear altogether. The creature’s very existence - out of sync with normal spacetime - also adds to its ambiguous state. When Spock is asked for an assessment of the creature, he surmises that “[i]t seems to be in a borderline state between matter and energy.” The fact that the cloud feeds on hemoglobin recalls Ishmael’s ruminations on “the ignoble monster.” (150) He invokes naturalists who surmised the sperm whale “to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.” (ibid.) The ambiguity the crew feels over the creature’s intentions also undergirds the episode. Even though Spock believes the creature’s nature to be “[e]xtremely efficient,” he is still doubtful about “[w]hether that indicates intelligence.” Kirk, however, remarks, “I can’t help how I feel. There’s an intelligence about it, Bones. A malevolence. It’s evil. It must be destroyed.” Unlike in the earlier episode, the creature’s intelligence, and thus its sentient intent, is vaguely established by Spock; the creature “turned and attacked, Doctor. Its method was well-considered and intelligent.” The argument provides sufficient reason(ing) for killing it and Kirk-as-Ahab is redeemed. Stefan Rabitsch 228 One-time Star Trek writer, Lawrence V. Conley pitched a story for a fifth season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Silicon Avatar” 5.04, 1991) that aimed at bringing back a bizarre alien entity from the first season - the crystalline entity - based on what executive producer Michael Piller recalled to be a Moby Dick premise. (cf. Gross & Altman, 1995: 229) The episode opens with a detachment of the Enterprise crew assisting a group of colonists with establishing their settlement. The skies suddenly darken and they are attacked by an enormous, tree-shaped entity that immediately begins to vaporize all organic matter, including some of the colonists. Under the leadership of Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), the crew members and the remaining colonists seek shelter in a cavern whose mineral composite shields them from the entity’s energy beam, allowing them to survive until the Enterprise arrives to rescue them. In the meantime, the entity had turned a lush, habitable planet into a barren wasteland. This was not the first encounter the crew had with the entity; four years earlier, they visited the planet where the ship’s android officer, Data (Brent Spiner), was found after the same entity had wiped out that colony. (“Datalore” 1.13, 1988) With the entity returned, Starfleet sends its foremost xenologist, Doctor Kila Marr (Ellen Geer), to assist the Enterprise in tracking it down. Marr used to live on Data’s home planet; she was off-world when the attack that took her son’s life occurred. She has since made it her life’s work to study the crystalline entity, tracking its infrequent sightings across vast distances. She is visibly dismayed when Captain Picard tasks her with finding a way to communicate with the entity instead of simply destroying it. Reluctantly, she begins to work with Data, who happens to hold partial memories, letters, and diaries of the colonists who were killed, including those of her son. Seeking to cope with her sense of loss, which she has yet to adequately process, she repeatedly asks Data to tell her about her son’s activities during her absence, and recite his diary entries in his voice. Together, they develop a means to communicate with the entity which Marr ultimately misuses to shatter its crystalline structure, killing it in the process. Marr as forlorn Ahab diverges slightly from the established pattern in that her monomaniacal need to destroy the crystalline entity does not end in her own death. Her refusal to follow orders and, even more so, her blatant disregard for ethical scientific conduct ensure that her life’s work as one of the most esteemed scientists are all but null and void. This is made clear to the viewer when the captain has Marr escorted off the bridge. What is more, her (re)solution ultimately bars her from processing and overcoming the excruciating guilt she feels as a mother having lost her son. She articulates the true motivations that undergird her all-consuming interest in the entity in a series of private conversations where she confides in Data among other things, “I was wondering. Do you know? Did he blame me? ” When the android tells her that her son did not record any negative feelings toward her, she divulges that, “I chose to pursue my own career. I planned Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 229 to go back, but things kept interfering. I kept thinking, I’ll go next month. And there weren’t any more next months.” Similarly, after the crew failed to thwart another attack by the entity, having to listen to agonizing pleas for help over long-distance communication channels, Marr confesses to Data the nightmarish trauma she has been carrying around with her for years; “I found it hard not to think about my son […] I’ve read stories about soldiers in the battlefield, wounded, dying. They call for their mothers. And I’ve often wondered if my son called for me. If he died wondering why I didn’t come to him.” Once she did her deed, the doctor attempts one more time to seek not only comfort in Data’s memories of her son, but also the latter’s approval, indeed vindication and absolution by way of using the android as a proxy. Marr: Like you did before. Tell me that you understand, Renny. That you know I did it for you, because I love you. Because I wanted to give you peace at last. Data: I do not find such a file in your son’s journals. However, from what I know of him by his memories and his writing, I do not believe he would be happy. He was proud of your career as a scientist, and now you have destroyed that. You say you did it for him, but I do not believe he would have wanted that. Yes, I believe your son would be very sad now. I am sorry, Doctor, but I cannot help you. Instead of finding redemption, her guilt is exacerbated by a plain verdict of condemnation. As was the case in “Obsession,” this episode channels Starbuck’s discourse of reason and pragmatism through more than one character; it is the captain though who articulates ethical pragmatism most clearly. Once Marr, Data, and the ship’s chief engineer (LeVar Burton) have analyzed the clues left by the entity’s attack, the senior officers gather to arrive at a course of action. Marr elaborates that her findings will allow her to reprogram the ship’s weapons so that they will prove effective against the entity. Picard, however, makes it clear that they will destroy it only as a last resort, which engenders the doctor’s bewilderment and ire. In a private conference with her, the captain makes clear not only his rationale for wanting to communicate with the creature, calling into question her motivations, but, in doing so, he also compares it directly with the sperm whale, tentatively arguing that it might merely follow its natural instincts. Marr: I don’t understand. Why are we pursuing the Entity, if not to destroy it? Picard: We’re not hunters, Doctor. Nor is it our role to exact revenge. […] Picard: I want to try to communicate with it. […] Marr: To what end? Picard: If we can determine what its needs are, we might find other sources to supply it. Stefan Rabitsch 230 Marr: Its needs are to slaughter people by the thousands. It is nothing but a giant killing machine. Picard: Doctor, the sperm whale on Earth devours millions of cuttlefish as it roams the oceans. It is not evil. It is feeding. The same may be true of the Crystalline Entity. Marr: That would be small comfort for those who have died to feed it. We’re not talking about cuttlefish. We’re talking about people. Picard: I would argue that the Crystalline Entity has as much right to be here as we do. Commander Riker also approaches the captain, reiterating the doctor’s course of action only for the captain to rebuke him, asking whether he is “influenced by personal feelings,” given that he lost colonists on his watch. In the end, however, the captain’s discourse of reason fails to save the creature’s life. Before Marr enacts her plan to kill it, the viewers learn of a significant shift in the classification of the entity’s nature. The Enterprise’s initial attempts at communicating with it yield promising results, indicating that the creature is likely sentient after all. Marr: It’s working. That’s a response to our signal. Picard: Remarkable. Data: Captain, there is a pattern emerging from the signals. Picard: It’s trying to communicate with us. Data: I believe so, sir, but it will take some time to decipher the patterns. Picard: Then it’s possible. Communication, understanding. What is more, echoing the ambiguity Melville ascribed to his white leviathan, the crystalline entity succeeds in evading easy detection, making its exact whereabouts oblique. While it resembles a colossal tree when seen from close proximity, Picard comparing it to a sperm whale is underscored by visuals that show the entity as a rotund, gleaming white shape from a great distance. An uebermensch and a cyborg queen as whale Moby-Dick also serves as an intermedial building block in two Star Trek motion pictures which, significantly, see the white cetacean contours reconfigured and attributed to white human(noid) bodies. A genetically engineered uebermensch, Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalbán), who is the antagonist in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, assumes the role of the forlorn Ahab. He ascribes the role of the white leviathan to Kirk. In the movie, some of the obvious cetacean symbolism found in the television episodes gives way to a small corpus of passages lifted from the novel, which were then rewritten to fit the imagined nautical physicality of outer Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 231 space. The movie is rooted in a first season episode of TOS (“Space Seed” 1.24, 1967) in which Kirk discovers Khan and his compatriots, suspended in stasis, on a sleeper ship. Ignorant of the fact that they were exiled after their rule of eugenic superiority on Earth had been overthrown, Kirk revives them. Khan attempts to gain control of the Enterprise in order to restore his glorious rule. However, his plans are foiled by the captain who gives Khan and his people a second chance to put their superior abilities to the test. They are exiled to a harsh and isolated planet. In the movie, a Starfleet team accidentally (re)discovers them; they mistake Khan’s colony for a neighboring planet since a natural disaster has rendered their planet almost inhabitable. The cataclysm claimed many lives among his followers, including that of his wife. Khan blames Kirk for her death since the captain neglected to check on the colony’s progress. With a ship at his disposal, Khan takes his remaining followers on a quest to find Kirk. In their first encounter, Khan makes his intentions clear. Kirk: What is the meaning of this attack? Where is the crew of the Reliant? Khan: Surely I have made my meaning plain. I mean to avenge myself upon you, Admiral. I’ve deprived your ship of power and when I swing round I mean to deprive you of your life. But I wanted you to know first who it was who had beaten you. However, Khan’s hatred and his desire for revenge are once again but a foil to equip the character with psychological depth rooted in guilt. His guilt is alluded to earlier in the film when he condescendingly tells the Starfleet team who found him, “It was only the fact of my genetically engineered intellect that enabled us to survive.” However, his intellect alone proved to be insufficient to save his wife. Kirk knows that Khan’s quest for revenge belies an outsized ego and excruciating guilt. ‘White Kirk’ on his ‘white starship’ taunts the forlorn Ahab by stabbing right into his sense of guilt upon having escaped yet another attempt on his life. Kirk addresses his adversary over the com channel, “We tried it once your way, Khan. Are you game for a rematch? Khan! I’m laughing at the ‘superior intellect’.” Enraged, Khan sets out to engage Kirk a third time, intent on finally striking the killing blow. Reminiscent of the three-day final chase of Ahab, Khan meets his inevitable demise at the hands of Kirk in this third encounter. Nearly the entire remediation of Moby-Dick is carried by Khan as the forlorn Ahab. Apart from the missing leg, Khan’s physique is designed to recall Ishmael’s first impression of the captain. He looked like a man cut away from the stake [...] made of solid bronze [...] Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. (102) Stefan Rabitsch 232 When Kirk sees Khan for the first time in the movie, he is shown as a tall, brawny man whose chest is half-exposed. He has long gray hair and sports a bronze skin complexion. Khan also bears a distinctive scar; instead of blemishing his face, it marks his chest. Being a forlorn Ahab also means that Khan’s Starbuck, a follower named Joachim (Judson Scott), fails to prevail upon him to cease his quest. Their exchanges give rise to a number of quotes from the novel which are rephrased so as to fit into Star Trek’s re-imagined nautical future in space. For example, upon escaping their exile, Joachim brings a pragmatic consideration to the attention of his leader; since they are free, there is no need to jeopardize their freedom by hunting Kirk. Joachim: Sir. May I speak? We’re all with you, sir, but consider this. We are free. We have a ship and the means to go where we will. We have escaped permanent exile on Ceti Alpha Five. You have proved your superior intellect, and defeated the plans of Admiral Kirk. You do not need to defeat him again. Khan: He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him. Not only does he quote and slightly paraphrase Ahab when the latter talks to Starbuck on the quarterdeck of the Pequod - “He tasks me; he heaps me; ” (136) - but, by rejecting Joachim’s point, he also seals his fate much like Ahab sealed his upon rejecting Starbuck’s last, frantic appeal, “Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him! ” (465) Khan continues, “I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.” When he lies dying, his physical appearance echoes Ahab’s descent into madness - “his torn body and gashed soul bled into another” (153) - and as he watches the Enterprise recede into the ocean of space, he quotes the monomaniacal captain again, “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” (468) Such extensive quoting was arguably to be expected since Moby-Dick is also quoted visually; a copy rests on Khan’s bookshelf and it is safe to assume that he had enough time to study it during his exile. In the vein of Kirk, Picard also slips into the role of the redemptive Ahab when he is confronted with a nemesis from his past - the Borg - in Star Trek: First Contact. Similar to the relationship between Khan and Kirk, Picard’s interactions with the Borg are introduced in a series of TNG episodes only to come to a climactic confrontation in the eighth motion picture. The Borg Collective are a cybernetic species whose actions are devoid of any individual free will for they are governed by a hive mind. They aggressively expand their territory by assimilating other species, augmenting them with cybernetic implants, and thus integrating them into the Collective. The trauma of having once been assimilated by them comes to haunt Picard when the Borg travel back in time to change humanity’s past. They take Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 233 possession of the Enterprise in the process, leaving the captain and his crew as the last line of defense. As the situation becomes increasingly desperate, self-destructing the ship seems to be the only chance to defeat the Borg. While the crew agrees on this course of action, Picard rejects their suggestion in an uncharacteristic eruption of emotion. He is confronted by Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard), a young woman from Earth’s past, whom the captain has rescued from the Borg. Picard attempts to justify his irrational decisions which opens an avenue for her to glimpse at his rage. Six years ago, they assimilated me into their collective. I had their cybernetic devices implanted throughout my body. I was linked to the hive mind, every trace of individuality erased. […] We’ve made too many compromises already. Too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here? This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done. However, Lily is onto him and says, “It’s so simple. The Borg hurt you, and now you’re going to hurt them back.” Cornered, he attempts to argue that people in the 24 th century are no longer governed by obsessive revenge. Lily keeps pushing him, “I didn’t mean to interrupt your little quest. Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale.” Shortly before breaking into a violent outburst, the captain reiterates that “[t]his is not about revenge.” Indeed, like in all the other cases where Moby-Dick is woven into Star Trek’s intertextual veneer, Ahab’s all-consuming need for revenge belies a deep sense of guilt in those who assume the captain’s mantle on the final frontier. Picard articulates his sense guilt in a TNG episode (“Family” 4.02, 1990) which follows in the immediate aftermath of his assimilation and subsequent rescue. He visits his estranged brother in his hometown in France where at one point he drops his signature guise of imperturbability. You don’t know. They took everything I was. They used me to kill and to destroy, and I couldn’t stop them. I should have been able to stop them! I tried. I tried so hard, but I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t good enough. I should have been able to stop them. I should! I should! While he was a member of the Collective, the Borg not only violated him physically, they also misused him to defeat a large fleet of Starfleet ships; and just like Kirk blamed himself for the deaths presumably caused by him hesitating, Picard blames himself for all the deaths he was forced to cause. Ultimately, Lily’s Starbuckian discourse of reason allows the captain to come to terms with his misguided revenge. However, this happens only after he experiences a cathartic moment; he breaks some of the model ships that adorn the observation lounge, thus “symbolically destroying not only his own ship but the entire culture of rational exploration and enlightened Stefan Rabitsch 234 governance that Starfleet stands for.” (Barrett 21) Shocked by his destructive outburst, he retreats into contemplation and paraphrases Ishmael’s description of Ahab’s relationship with the whale, “And he piled upon the whale’s white hump, a sum of all the rage and hate felt by his own race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.” What is more, just like Ahab’s “subtle demonisms of life and thought” became “practically assailable in Moby Dick,” Picard projected his guilt onto the white, ashen faces of the Borg. (153) The symbolic whiteness is inscribed in those patches of skin which are not pierced by their harpoon-like cybernetic implants. The skin pigment loses its color in the assimilation process; all that remains is a patchwork of gray and white lines and blots. Similarly, by assimilating other races, i.e., by consuming them, the discussion about the whale’s intent and/ or instinct is revisited. Michèle and Duncan Barrett claim that “[t]he Borg, like the whale, are presented as a force in nature, as supernatural.” (20) While a force to be reckoned with, they are not supernatural. Their cybernetic evolution makes them posthuman, superhuman, and perhaps even post-nature. The leviathan that is Borg Collective is driven by the only spark of individualism/ intent that is allowed to remain at its governing center: the Borg Queen. Ultimately, her malicious intent indicts her to be slain by the redemptive Ahab who does not have to sacrifice his ship and crew in the process. A galaxy teeming with Ahabs and white whales The sixth and to date last intermedial sighting of Moby-Dick on the final frontier speaks to the fact that no matter how far one travels in Star Trek’s world, it seems to teem with monomaniacal, guilty ship masters and voracious, spaceborne behemoths. We find it in a fifth season episode of Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001), the fourth Star Trek live-action television series, which sees its titular ship flung to a distant part of the galaxy. The story (“Bliss” 5.14, 1999) features a forlorn Ahab, once again vaguely disguised cetacean contours, and a renewed exploration of the whale’s ambiguous state of being and its malicious deceitfulness. The crew encounters a massive space-dwelling being which, unbeknownst to them, uses its telepathic abilities to create illusions based on its prey’s desires in order to lure it within reach; the creature feeds on starships. Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), young Naomi Wildman (Scarlett Pomers), and the holographic doctor (Robert Picardo) are the only crew members who do not succumb to its illusions because they do not share the crew’s desire to return to Earth; Voyager is their home. They are at first unable to convince the crew of the deception and the ship is swallowed by the space whale. Once inside, the crew falls unconscious. They then discover a small ship, manned by Qatai (W. Morgan Sheppard), inside the belly of the beast. He has been hunting the creature ever since it devoured his family. While Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 235 he already tricked the creature many times in the past, his obsession has left him stranded to be slowly digested. Together, they devise a plan to upset the being’s digestive system so that it spits out their vessels. Once they have reached a safe distance, Qatai tries to recruit the doctor for his quest. Qatai: I could use a crewmate like you. The beast would have a difficult time manipulating a hologram’s desires. Holodoc: An Ishmael to your Ahab? No thank you. The vessels part company and in the last shots we see Qatai resume his hunt, heading straight for the creature. Since it takes the episode considerable time to dwell on the creature’s telepathic deception, there is little time left for developing the same gravity and psychological depth as in the previous examples. Still, the pattern of remediation remains the same. Qatai’s monomaniacal need for revenge appears rather subdued. In the opening sequence, we see him on his ship, which creaks and sways as if it were beaten about by rough weather, shouting at the creature. Ah! Surprised? What’s wrong? Can’t figure out why I’m still not running, ha, ha? Can’t read my thoughts? Go ahead, attack, take my ship. Damn ship. Hold together, hold. This is only a weak echo of Ahab when he is about to be drawn to the depths of the sea by the whale. (468) Even so, Qatai definitely looks the part; he is a tall, burly figure with gray hair and his forehead is crisscrossed with scars. Once again, his obsessive quest briefly gives rise to a discussion of his real motivation: guilt. It was the same way with the Nokaro. A crew of nearly three thousand, families mostly, mine included, looking for a new world to settle. But they came across our friend here and he showed them what they wanted to see. A glistening green paradise. By the time I responded to their distress call, all that was left of them was some fading engine emissions. He is tormented by the fact that he was too late to save his family as well as a hefty dose of survivor’s guilt. There is only a hint of Starbuckian reasoning in the Doctor’s and Seven’s scientific descriptions of the creature which Qatai are simply brushes aside, “It’s a beast. Cunning, deadly.” A strong link to Moby-Dick is maintained, however, by way of the creature’s shape and them discussing its intent. Though never fully shown against the blackness of space- it is always wrapped in a shroud of clouds which makes it all but invisible - a scan reveals the creature’s contours to Stefan Rabitsch 236 be roughly cetacean. It has two large tail fins and a large body which extends to a sizable maw at its front. At “[o]ver two thousand kilometers in diameter,” it is the largest space-dwelling creature Seven has ever seen. Further, the white whale’s “ubiquity in time,” (151) and his “intelligent malignity,” (152) are echoed in an exchange between Qatai and the doctor. Holodoc: I’d estimate it’s at least two hundred thousand years old. [...] It appears to operate on highly evolved instinct. I haven’t detected any signs of sentience. Qatai: Oh he’s intelligent, all right smart enough to fool your crew into taking you offline. By ascertaining that the creature acts on instinct rather than malicious intent, Voyager’s crew refrains from rendering it harmless once they have escaped from its clutches. Yet, they decide to launch warning buoys for other travelers. Moby-Dick’s six remediated sightings on the final frontier warrant particular attention not only because Star Trek continuum has repeatedly drawn on the text’s symbolism and its characters’ universal appeal to underscore its nautical future, but also because the novel provides an additional anchorage in its transatlantic, maritime imaginarium. Moby-Dick is arguably the most critically celebrated sea novel of 19 th century American literature, occupying a singular, mid-century position between James Fenimore Cooper’s many sea yarns and Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904). While Star Trek’s intermedial borrowing from Melville amounts to little more than a formulaic retelling of the novel’s quest and revenge theme with a view to explore characters’ guilt - including pertinent symbolism and reconfigured quotes from the novel - it nonetheless serves as a transatlantic counterweight to John Masefield’s Sea-Fever (1916), David Garrick’s Heart of Oak (1759/ 60), and Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) all of which serve as key maritime intertexts in Star Trek’s claim to literary and cultural sophistication. Ultimately, it is the white whale, as “a permanent fixture in literary consciousness,” (Foulke 119) and the cetacean contours it has discharged in Star Trek’s world which furnish physiognomic conceits that allow Star Trek to literalize its ocean of space metaphor. Works cited Abbott, H. Porter (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: CUP. 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Frakes, Jonathan (Director) (1996). Star Trek: First Contact [Film]. Paramount. Gregory, Chris (2000). Star Trek Parallel Narratives. London: Macmillan Press. Hardy, Elizabeth Baird (2018). “‘Where Many Books Have Gone Before’: Using Star Trek to Teach Literature”. In: Stefan Rabitsch, Martin Gabriel, Wilfried Elmenreich & John N.A. Brown (Eds.). Set Phasers to Teach! Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Cham: Springer International. 1-12. Hinds, Elizabeth (1997). “The Wrath of Ahab; Or, Herman Melville Meets Gene Roddenberry”. Journal of American Culture 20 (1). 43-46. Houlahan, Mark (1995). “Cosmic Hamlets? Contesting Shakespeare in Federation Space”. Extrapolation 36 (1). 28-37. Hutcheon, Linda (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Kapell, Matthew (2010). “Introduction: The Significance of the Star Trek Mythos”. In: Matthew Kapell (Ed.). Star Trek as Myth: Essays on Symbol and Archetype at the Final Frontier. Jefferson: McFarland. 1-16. Kazimierchzak, Karolina (2010). “Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation”. Studies in Popular Culture 32(2). 35-55. Lewin, Robert, Maurice Hurley (Writers) & Rob Bowman (Director) (1988, January 18). Datalore (Season 1, Episode 13) [TV series episode]. In: Gene Roddenberry (Executive Producer). Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount. Melville, Herman (1993) [1851]. Moby-Dick; or The Whale. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Meyer, Nicholas (Director) (1982). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [Film]. Paramount. Moore, Ronald (Writer) & Les Landau (Director) (1990, October 1). “Family” (Season 4, Episode 2) [TV series episode]. In: Rick Berman (Executive Producer). Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount. Nimoy, Leonard (Director) (1986). Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home [Film]. Paramount. Pendergast, John (1995). “A Nation of Hamlets: Shakespeare and Cultural Politics”. Extrapolation 36 (1). 10-17. Prady, Bill (Writer) & Cliff Bole (Director) (1999, February 10). “Bliss” (Season 5, Episode 14) [TV series episode]. In: Rick Berman (Executive Producer). Star Trek: Voyager. Paramount. Rabitsch, Stefan (2019). Star Trek and the British Age of Sail: The Maritime Influence Throughout the Series and Films. Jefferson: McFarland. Shatner, William (Director) (1989). Star Trek V: The Final Frontier [Film]. Paramount. Spinrad, Norman (Writer) & Marc Daniels (Director) (1967, October 20). “The Doomsday Machine” (Season 2, Episode 6) [TV series episode]. In: Gene Roddenberry (Executive Producer). Star Trek: The Original Series. Paramount. Stefan Rabitsch 238 Sternbach, Rick (1996). The Star Trek: The Next Generation USS Enterprise NCC- 1701-D Blueprints. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wallace, Art (Writer) & Ralph Senensky (Director) (1967, December 15). “Obsession” (Season 2, Episode 18) [TV series episode]. In: Gene Roddenberry (Executive Producer), Star Trek: The Original Series. Paramount. Wilber, Carey (Writer) & Marc Daniels (Director) (1967, February 16). Space Seed (Season 1, Episode 24) [TV series episode]. In: Gene Roddenberry (Executive Producer). Star Trek: The Original Series. Paramount. Stefan Rabitsch Center for Inter-American Studies Karl-Franzens-University Graz From environmental thinking to ‘con-vironmental’ awareness A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (1925 - 2018) Alwin Fill Michael A.K. Halliday became famous for creating Systemic-Functional Linguistics. For the author of this paper, however, Halliday is particularly important for addressing the role of language for the relation between humans and the socalled environment. For Halliday, language creates discontinuity between humans and the rest of creation, because many words (e.g. think and act) are reserved for humans, which makes us perceive Nature not as an active, but as a passive entity. Halliday’s critique induced the present author to create the word “con-vironment” to stress the togetherness of humans and Nature. Halliday was particularly critical of ‘growthism’ and pointed out that it is language which makes us think that growing, being large, fast etc. are better than staying the same, being small and slow. Thus, he was one of the first ‘peace linguists’, criticizing a thinking which leads to wanting to be larger than one’s neighbor, and thus to conflict and, as concerns nations, to war. Especially with his 1990 talk, he demonstrated that problems of our time such as classism and destruction of species are also topics for linguistics. 1. Introduction This paper is a tribute to Michael Halliday, who died in 2018 aged 93. Michael Halliday was born in April, 1925, in Leeds (GB). He studied Chinese at London University and spent three years in China, where he studied at Peking University and at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He became AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0022 Alwin Fill 240 lecturer in Chinese at Cambridge University, in Edinburgh and also at Indiana University and the University of Illinois. In 1976, he moved to Australia, where he founded the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He was awarded six honorary doctorates, among others from the Universities of Athens, Birmingham and Beijing Normal University. He died in Sydney on 15 April 2018 at the age of 93. 2. Systemic-Functional Linguistics Halliday’s greatest achievement in linguistics is his creation of Systemic- Functional Linguistics, which he founded in 1973 with his book Explorations in the Functions of Language and explained in more detail 12 years later in An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985). In his view, language should be regarded as a social-semiotic approach to the world. “In a functional grammar [1985: xiv], a language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized.” In this “systemic functionalism”, three (meta-)functions of language are distinguished: the ideational one, which construes experience of the outer and the inner world (1973: 37-41), the interpersonal one, which brings about social relations (1973: 41 f.), and the textual one, which creates spoken or written texts, whose structural elements are ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ (Halliday 1973: 42; see also Fill 2010: 23-26). Some of his work was written together with his wife Ruqaia Hasan or in partnership with the Swedish linguist C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, who showed how to construe a linguistic approach to cognition without invoking prelinguistic mentalism (see Halliday & Mathiessen 2000). Following Sapir, Whorf, Hjelmslev and Firth, Halliday presented his own form of linguistic constructivism, which he described as follows (2001: 179): It is the grammar - but now in the sense of lexicogrammar, the grammar plus the vocabulary, with no real distinction between the two - that shapes experience and transforms our perceptions into meanings. The categories and concepts of our material existence are not ‘given’ to us prior to their expression in language. Rather, they are construed by language, at the intersection of the material with the symbolic. Grammar, in the sense of the syntax and vocabulary of a natural language, is thus a theory of human experience. Halliday also demonstrates how the language system construes certain ideologies, such as speciesism and racism. As will be shown, Halliday thus became one of the founders of a certain school of ‘Ecolinguistics’, but he also contributed to the rise of what is now called peace linguistics. A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 241 3. Halliday and Ecolinguistics This tribute will not do justice to all of Halliday’s ideas and his achievements in linguistics. Rather, it will show a side of Halliday which is overlooked by most of his ‘adherents’: his contribution to creating an awareness that language is in part responsible for the climate change, for the diminution of the earth’s species and our wasting of resources. Halliday (2001) wrote about what language does to humans, animals and plants (all living beings): it separates humans from the rest of creation and it separates what is useful for humans from what is useful for other living beings. Thus, we talk about herbs (useful) and weeds (harmful), and our language ‘tells us’ that as humans we live in what is called our environment, i.e. we are surrounded by Nature, we are not part of it. The following paragraphs present some of Halliday’s theses, which he expressed in 1990 in a talk given at the Ninth World Congress of Applied Linguistics held in Thessaloniki (Greece), This talk was published several times; here it is quoted as Halliday (2001).  “Our grammar (though not the grammar of human language as such) construes air and water and soil, and also coal and iron and oil as ‘unbounded’ - that is, as existing without limit. In the horizons of the first farmers, and the first miners, they did. We know that such resources are finite.” (Halliday 2001: 194)  Language creates discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation, also because many words are reserved for humans, such as think, act and do. Through this, Nature appears as passive (cf. Halliday, 2001: 194 f.). Language “imposes a strict discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation, with ‘ourselves’ including a select band of other creatures that are in some semantic contexts allowed in” (2001: 195).  Useful and harmful - these are two contrasting words or opposites, as we call them. Halliday (2001: 194) showed that all opposites have a negative and a positive pole.  “The quality of a thing means either ‘how good or bad it is’ or ‘the fact that it is good’, but never ‘the fact that it is bad’.” Similarly, size means both ‘how big’ and ‘being big’. “The grammar of ‘big’ is the grammar of ‘good’, while the grammar of ‘small’ is the grammar of ‘bad’. The motif ‘bigger and better’ is engraved into our consciousness by virtue of their line-up in the grammar.” (2001: 194). Halliday calls this “the ideology of growth or growthism” (2001: 196; see also Stibbe 2015: 83 f.). His critique of growthism is one of the most important activities of peace linguistics, as will be explained later. Alwin Fill 242 Quite generally, Halliday says (following Whorf 1957): “Language does not passively reflect reality; language actively creates reality.” (2001: 179). 4. Michael Halliday and Overshootday In 2019, an investigation was carried out which showed that some countries, particularly some Arabian countries, but also the U.S.A., had already used up their natural resources in March, 2019. July 29 th , 2019, was world exhaustion day, or ‘Overshootday’, as it was also called. On this day, the whole Earth had exhausted its resources. In other words, we would need almost two planets to yield enough resources for humans. (The word resources is of course anthropocentric, because it sums up all things useful for humans in one word.) The danger of unlimited human growth was noticed even before ecolinguistics turned up:  In 1962, Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, in which she particularly turned against insecticides, which make our cereal crop larger - at the cost of killing animals. This is why she called them ‘biocides’ (killing life).  1970 was declared European Conservation Year.  In April 1970, America celebrated its first Earth day. This had something to do with the first landing of humans on the moon in 1969. One of the astronauts, William Anders, took pictures of the earth from the moon, which showed the earth “as a violable body” surrounded by a very thin atmosphere and flying alone through the universe. These pictures - one of them was called “earthrise” - were an early initiation to thinking of the earth as something special, which had to be protected.  In 1968, the Club of Rome was founded, which in 1972 published the book The Limits of Growth (authors: Dennis and Donella Meadows); this book already shows the dangers of unlimited growth. However, it concentrates chiefly on economic aspects. In all these initiatives and publications, important as they were, the role of language was not yet highlighted. But then Michael Halliday, in his 1990 talk at Thessaloniki, said that our world view is constructed by expressions such as “unmatched growth rates”, “traffic is expected to grow”, “output fell sharply” (2001: 193). Whatever we say, growing, becoming faster and getting higher are associated with GOOD, and falling, being lower and slower with BAD. Halliday even writes (ibid.): “should we not exploit the power of words by making shrink the positive term and labelling ‘growth’ very simply as negative A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 243 shrinkage? This would be using the power of grammar.” Halliday here follows two philosophers, who also took position against ‘growthism’: Ernst Friedrich Schumacher with his book Small is beautiful (1973) and the Austrian Leopold Kohr with Das Ende der Großen (1986). Schumacher (1973: 29) quotes Mahatma Gandhi, who said that the earth offers enough for our needs, but does not satisfy our greed. Growth to a limited aim is possible, but there should not be an unlimited general growth. Kohr (1986: 15) writes that the main problem of our time is not ideological, but “dimensional”. He quotes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who when living today would not say “to be or not to be” but “to be small or not to be at all, that is the question”. At the time of the corona crisis (March to July, 2020), many people have seen that our unlimited growth has led to great problems. Suddenly, it was impossible to uphold our faith in permanent economic growth, and many entrepreneurs had to find out how their businesses could survive when staying the same or even shrinking. The historian Philipp Blom said in an interview (Profil, April 8 th , 2020, Fill’s translation): “Suddenly we are influenced by a virus which we do not see nor taste nor smell, but which can nevertheless kill us. We are no longer sublime above Nature, but we are in the middle of it.” This means that the coronavirus has brought about a different thinking about Nature in us and has justified Halliday’s critique of growthism. 5. Halliday and Ecolinguistics 1990 - 2020 Perhaps as a result of Halliday’s talk, but perhaps also independently of it, in several countries nearly at the same time, the importance of language concerning our ‘environment’ and the climate change (originally called Global Warming) began to be realized. Denmark, Austria, Germany, Australia, Spain, Portugal and Brazil were among the countries in which almost simultaneously the importance of language for creating an awareness of this dangerous evolution became a research topic, and the importance of language for stopping this development began to be seen. Great Britain, Italy and China followed a little later. Halliday says (2001: 195) that language “imposes a strict discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation,” and thus Nature is called our environment (in German Umwelt). This word suggests that we are in the centre, and all other living and non-living beings are around us, so that we can use them. Following Halliday’s ideas, one could put forward the suggestion that we should no longer talk about our environment, but about our con-vironment (in German “Mitwelt”, cf. Meyer-Abich 1990), a word which shows that all living and non-living beings together make up what we call Nature. Admittedly, we are the part of this con-vironment which is Alwin Fill 244 most responsible for the survival of its members, but this is all we can say in our favour. 6. The Future of Ecolinguistics As Halliday wrote, language creates discontinuity between ourselves and the rest of creation. An awareness of this takes us beyond the traditional topics of ecolinguistics. Peter Finke writes (2018: 411) that “only transdisciplinary linguistics will succeed in playing a formative role in the future.” Ecolinguistics will therefore abandon the ivory tower of disciplines, as the quotation from Halliday at the end of this paper will show. Ecolinguistics will become a science which will deal with the climate change, but also with war and peace. I hope that this tribute to Michael Halliday will contribute to widening the concept of ecolinguistics. Peter Mühlhäusler, who quotes Halliday in his co-authored book Greenspeak (Harré, Brockmeier & Mühlhäusler 1999), and also several times in his Course in Ecolinguistics (2003), adds several topics to future ecolinguistic research, which, as he writes (2020: 8) have been “routinely excluded, for whatever reasons, from ecolinguistic inquiry”. Among these are:  The negative effects of tourism, including eco-tourism  Migration of human, plant and animal populations - their negative impact on endemic cultures and natural kinds  Ecological changes of all sorts brought into existence by digital technology  Military expenditure and conflict The most interesting of these topics concerning Halliday is the last one, which refers to ecolinguistics’ contribution to avoiding war and creating peace on this Earth. To conclude, an awareness of certain linguistic phenomena, which Halliday discussed for the first time (growthism, opposites, the discontinuity language creates between ourselves and the rest of creation) would help to ‘produce’ and maintain peace - not because language is responsible for causing war, but because language mirrors thinking, and becoming aware of these mirrored phenomena could avoid war. I would like to finish with the last sentence of Halliday’s article “New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics” (2001: 199) 1 . Classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution [and even war] - are not just problems for the biologists, physicists [and sociologists]. They are problems 1 The words in brackets have been added by the author. A Personal Tribute to Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 245 for the applied linguistic community as well. I do not suggest for one moment that we hold the key. But we ought to be able to write the instructions for its use. References Blom, Philipp (2020). “Wir erleben gerade eine Gesellschaft, wie sie vor 100 Jahren bestand.” Interview with Robert Treichler in Profil, April 8, 2020. Carson, Rachel (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Fill, Alwin (2010). The Language Impact. Evolution - System - Discourse. London, Oakville: equinox. Fill, Alwin & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.) (2001). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London/ New York: Continuum. Fill, Alwin & Hermine Penz (Eds.) (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York/ London: Routledge. Finke, Peter (2018). “Transdisciplinary Linguistics: Ecolinguistics as a Pacemaker into a New Scientific Age”. In: Alwin Fill & Hermine Penz (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York/ London: Routledge. 406-419. Halliday, Michael (1973). Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Arnold. Halliday, Michael (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold. Halliday, Michael (2001). “New Ways of Meaning. The Challenge to Applied Linguistics”. In: Fill, Alwin & Peter Mühlhäusler (Eds.). The Ecolinguistics Reader. Language, Ecology and Environment. London/ New York: Continuum. 175-202. Halliday, Michael & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3 rd ed. London: Arnold. Harré, Rom, Jens Brockmeier & Peter Mühlhäusler (1999). Greenspeak. A Study of Environmental Discourse. Thousand Oaks/ London/ New Delhi: Sage. Kohr, Leopold (1986). Das Ende der Großen. Zurück zum menschlichen Maß. Trans. by Edgar Th. Portisch. Vienna: ORAC Verlag. Meadows, Dennis & Donella Meadows (1972). The Limits of Growth. New York: Universe Books. Meyer-Abich, Klaus Michael (1990). Aufstand für die Natur. Von der Umwelt zur Mitwelt. München: Hanser. Mühlhäusler, Peter (2003). Language and Environment. Environment of Language. A Course in Ecolinguistics. London: Battlebridge. Mühlhäusler, Peter (2020). “Quo vadis Ecolinguistics? ”. Ecolinguistica. Revista de Ecologia e Linguagem 6 (1). 5-23. Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich (1973). Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper. Stibbe, Arran (2015). Ecolinguistics. Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Whorf, Benjamin L. (1957). Language, Thought and Reality. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Alwin Fill English Department University of Graz Rezensionen Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol, The Fictions of American Capitalism. Working Fictions and the Economic Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Julia Sattler In her collection The Network (2011), US poet Jena Osman uses semantics and etymology to point to the historical and present intersections of power, the financial markets, commerce and human existence in the city, in the attempt “to map a changing thing.” In an unlikely but not unprecedented turn, her poetry - shaped by notions of documentary poetics and archeological excavations alike - makes clear that there is no capitalism without language, and that capitalist ideas shape language and in turn are formed by it. Usually considered strange bedfellows at best, poetry and capitalism productively intersect in this work of cultural criticism, opening yet new doors for a twenty-first century (post-)capitalist poetics. Along similar and yet very different lines of investigation, Jacques-Henri Coste’s and Vincent Dussol’s collection titled The Fictions of American Capitalism. Working Fictions and the Economic Novel also establishes a productive relationship between economics - more specifically, American brand capitalism - and various genres of writing, arguing that “[f]or the United States, more so than for other countries, fiction and narrative were never the exclusive preserve of literature” (Coste & Dussol: 7). At the center of their investigation is the discussion of the market economy’s work with and reliance on stories and modes of storytelling as productive mediator between capitalism and ‘the world’ at large: “We argue,” the editors explain in their introduction, “that ideological and theoretical fictions, regimes of expectations and to some extent creative fiction […] should be counted among these mediating mechanisms” (ibid.: 7). The collection consists of three analytic parts - a Theoretical Overview, several discussions of Non-Literary Fictions of American Capitalism, as well as a third part on the Literary Representations of Capitalism. This is followed by AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0023 Rezensionen 248 a final section, which is called Coda here - a term referring to music and poetry alike - building and commenting on the connections established in the previous parts. The volume brings together the work of scholars from a variety of European countries, as well as from the United States with different research foci ranging from American literature and translation to politics to economic sociology. Reading this new publication during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, when, indeed, one can witness the global stock markets change in a matter of minutes depending on pandemic-related news - virus stories, if one were to use that term - was an especially interesting, yet certainly unintended, experience. Exploring fiction-led forms of capitalism in the first essay of Part I, Robert Boyer shows how “[f]ictions are necessary to overcome the radical uncertainty typical of capitalism” (63) - in other words, that the stock market or rather the entire economic system cannot function without stories that help make any predictions about the market. Jens Beckert’s article “Capitalism: Anticipating the Future Present” continues in this line with a discussion of how fictional scenarios move action on the market forward. Depicting the US as an ideal setting to explore the role of imaginaries in capitalism, this essay argues for the benefits of working with fictional scenarios under uncertain conditions, but also explores how the narrative of the “crisis” is used whenever an expected scenario does not play out. Concluding Part I, Stephen Shapiro’s work on what he calls “The Cultural Fix” looks back to the myth and symbol school and argues that “genres stand as resource fictions that become more pronounced when new social compromises are required for capital to continue, let alone expand” (91). One of several articles in the volume that build on Marx and Marxist ideas, Shapiro suggests taking Capital off the shelves and moving on to consider literature, especially American literature, beyond its periodization and in context of its social conditions. With a very interesting chapter investing in the role of storytelling techniques in branding and advertising efforts, Marie-Christine Pauwels starts off the second part of the collection focused on Non-Literary Fictions of American Capitalism. She unveils the role of storytelling in the development of new visions, and as a management tool - hers is an interdisciplinary approach intertwining research and practice that is certainly also useful to those wishing to work at the intersection of literary studies and marketing, or in the wide field of corporate social media, for example. Pierre Arnaud’s work in this part explores economic growth in connection with the American frontier myth suggesting the idea of endless expansion of the country, and, by implication, of the markets - capitalism, as he argues, is, essentially “a growth story” (126) with “the myth of the boundless economy” (134) at its center, which in turn lends capitalism its dynamics. Much in tune with the capitalist narrative of growth, he points to the storytelling of entrepreneurs as well as to the origin of what he calls “knowledge narratives” (142), Franklin’s Autobiography, which can also be read as a strategic development story. Much in tune with these findings, in his first of two essays in this volume, Jacques-Henri Coste addresses entrepreneurial capitalism, and the stories told by entrepreneurs, making evident that the literary and non-literary are intimately connected in those stories of rise Rezensionen 249 and fall, which also shed light on ideas about capitalism, progress and social agency at different times. The third part contains altogether ten essays and covers a variety of Literary Representations of Capitalism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics explored range from the issue of forwarding the economic agency of women via literature - in Julia P. McLeod’s article using the example of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner - to the first novels about the American businessman in the oeuvre of William Dean Howells in Guillaume Tanguy’s essay. Along with Evelyn Payen-Variéras’s discussion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the first three essays in this part clearly point to the role of literary works in establishing modes of agency and responsibility via literature. They show how such figures as the businessman, the speculator or the monopolist were established and found their way into the mainstream - and into the capitalist system - via their rather complex negotiation and perpetuation in fiction. All of these findings lead the reader to question what characterizes an economic novel - a question also asked by Jason Douglas in his essay titled “Naturalism and Economic Calculability” which mainly looks at the work of Theodore Dreiser. Starting from a discussion of economic determinism - an idea that emerged alongside Darwinist ideas - this article argues that in an economic novel, characters are presented according to their economic position, which is not necessarily their position along the stratum of social class. In his analysis of works by Richard Wright and Ann Petry, William E. Dow also speaks to questions of social agency and the constructedness of the economic system, albeit with a focus on racialized capitalism and its destructive forces. While these earlier analyses are linked to literary realism and dive into the Progressive Era, the following essays - by Vincent Dussol on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Jean-Louis Brunel on William Gaddis’s VR, Sina Vatanpour on the works of Paul Auster and Martin Amis, Jacques-Henri Coste on Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and, finally, Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd on Thomas Pynchon - are united by their focus on postmodern works and contexts. Dussol’s analysis of Atlas Shrugged, including a discussion of its links to Norris’s The Octopus, contests its status as a Great American Novel and argues that contrary to its reputation among readers, the dystopia does not present capitalism in a positive light. Several of the subsequent essays speak to the difficulties of addressing what Vatanpour names the “affiliation between money symbols and words” (281), the relationship between tenor and vehicle in capitalist imagery and the question of a supposed “reality” vs. a supposed “fiction”, especially under conditions where “[m]oney that does not refer to any material value outside itself parallels fictional worlds that dramatize their supposed association with the realm of the real” (ibid.: 285). Moreover, these explorations make clear that fictional negotiations of capitalism and its various manifestations can be productive resources to research processes of transformation on the global markets, but also ideas relating to entrepreneurial growth and the workings of progress, as well as the ambiguous nature of capitalism at large. Chorier-Fryd’s analysis, for example, clearly points to the duality of the market when looking at the notion of the “dump” and the “frontier” in the work of Pynchon, and the possibility of resistance that is part and parcel of his oeuvre. Rezensionen 250 The collection shows that capitalism and literature are not simply strange bedfellows, but also an inspiring combination to conduct a variety of studies which, taken together, may even lead to the establishment of Economic Humanities. These investigations, as also becomes clear when reading the volume, can start out from a literary or non-literary perspective, and with a historical or contemporary focus. There is still much work to be done - be it in relation to the prevalent skepticism of many literary movements towards capitalism, in relation to New Economic Criticism, in terms of literature’s potential to “demystify” the workings of capitalism - or in terms of the semantics and etymology of global markets, as exemplified in The Network. Julia Sattler TU Dortmund narr.digital ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Allan James Andreas Mahler Frauke Matz und Michael Rogge Andreas Schuch Michael Fuchs Stefan Rabitsch Alwin Fill Julia Sattler