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Band 48 · Heft 1 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0) 7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0) 7071 97 97 11 info@narr.de \ www.narr.de \ narr.digital Author Guidelines All submissions undergo double-blind peer review. To prepare your submissions please refer to the AAA style sheet available at https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa Please submit your contributions to: AAA-editors@narr.de To enquire about publishing a special issue please contact: AAA-editors@narr.de. For subscription information please contact: abo@narr.de. Editors / Herausgeber: innen Alexander Onysko, Ulla Ratheiser, Werner Delanoy Editorial Assistant / Redaktion Eva Triebl Editorial board (alphabetical) / Mitherausgeber: innen (alphabetisch): Sibylle Baumbach Marcus Callies Marta Degani Alwin Fill Walter Grünzweig Sarah Herbe Walter Hölbling Julia Hüttner Allan James Cornelia Klecker Ursula Kluwick Benjamin Kremmel Andreas Mahler Christian Mair Georg Marko Frauke Matz Simone Pfenninger Peter Siemund Ute Smit Laurenz Volkmann Max von Blanckenburg Werner Wolf Libe García Zarranz Founding editor / Erstherausgeber Bernhard Kettemann Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Table of Contents Preface: AAA continues with a new editorial team................................................. 5 “Every volume was a highlight: ” In conversation with Bernhard Kettemann ......... 9 Articles Part 1: Linguistics The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics Christian Mair ........................................................................................................ 15 Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research Marcus Callies........................................................................................................ 37 Part 2: Literature and Culture “We’re always playing ghosts”: A hauntological reading of Winsome Pinnock’s drama Rockets and Blue Lights Christoph Singer ..................................................................................................... 55 Secrets, leaks and the novel: Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two Jago Morrison and Alan Burton .............................................................................. 71 Part 3: Language Education Authors of everyday life: Towards learning with literary learner texts in English language education Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz .............................................................................. 99 ELT in the digital age: We have come a long way Thomas Strasser ...................................................................................................121 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Reviews Heinz Tschachler, Washington Irving and the fantasy of masculinity. Escaping the woman within. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022. Walter Grünzweig .................................................................................................137 Franz Karl Stanzel, Gratwanderung zwischen Facta und Ficta. Ziele, Zufälle und Umwege in meiner Karriere als anglistischer Literaturwissenschafter. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022. Heinz Tschachler ..................................................................................................141 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Ein alphabetisches Autor: innenverzeichnis der Jahrgänge 1 (1976) bis 45 (2020) finden Sie unter https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa. An alphabetical list of authors who published in volumes 1 (1976) to 45 (2020) can be found at https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa. 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KG Dischingerweg 5, 72070 Tübingen eMail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 ISBN 978-3-381-10751-3 Preface AAA continues with a new editorial team One year ago, the founding editor of AAA, Bernhard Kettemann, announced in the preface of Vol. 47 (1) that after 47 years of leading the journal, he will pass on the baton to a new team of editors. In the increasingly diversifying domain of English studies and the fast-paced world of academic publishing in the field, the last two decades have seen a rapid increase in journals, book series and in the sheer volume of publications in English studies. Throughout these developments, Bernhard has remained a rare and exceptional editor who has guided the journal from its foundation up to the present volume. The period of his editorship is truly outstanding in the field, as is his ambition to propel the journal forward, which has never wavered throughout all the years. We have had the opportunity to ask Bernhard some questions about his editorship of the journal and the current issue will commence with this conversation, titled “Every volume was a highlight”. In view of his extraordinary achievement, the new editorial team would like to thank Bernhard for his devotion and dedication to the journal, and we feel both honoured and humbled to be able to take over the editorship from him. To continue the tradition of AAA as a journal that caters for the whole field of English studies, we have decided to split the editorship thematically along the broad areas of linguistics (Alexander Onysko), literature (Ulla Ratheiser), culture (Ulla Ratheiser and Werner Delanoy), and language education (Werner Delanoy). We are also thankful to the longserving members of the editorial board, Alwin Fill, Walter Grünzweig, Walter Hölbling, Allan James, Andreas Mahler, Christian Mair, Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf and Werner Wolf, for continuing to support the journal. We would also like to extend our special thanks to Eva Triebl, who has been in charge of copyediting the issues of the journal for many years and will continue to do so with the new editorial team. Similarly, Georg Marko has been directly involved in both copyediting and the handling of book reviews. We are very happy that he joins AAA now as a member of the editorial board. The last year, up to the publication of Vol. 48, issue 1, served the new editorial team to prepare the ground for the change of editorship so that AAA will continue its tradition as a dedicated journal covering the wide range of English studies. In addition, we implemented a few changes concerning the editorial contents and editorial board of the journal. We have updated the information provided on the journal website (https: / / elibrary.narr.digital/ journal/ aaa), have introduced an additional English name that maintains the journal’s signature abbreviation (AAA), Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies, and have invited more colleagues in the field Preface 6 to join the editorial board. We would like to thank all the scholars who have agreed to become new members of the board (alphabetically ordered): Sibylle Baumbach, Marcus Callies, Marta Degani, Sarah Herbe, Julia Hüttner, Cornelia Klecker, Ursula Kluwick, Benjamin Kremmel, Frauke Matz, Simone Pfenninger, Peter Siemund, Ute Smit, Laurenz Volkmann, Max von Blanckenburg, Werner Wolf, and Libe García Zarranz. We would also like to express our gratitude to the publishing house Narr Francke Attempto for having given continuous and reinvigorated support to the journal during this transition period, for their excellent cooperation and their steadfast dedication to continue publishing the journal at the highest quality of production, both as print and e-copy. The first volume of the new editorship is inaugurated with a special issue. Vol. 48 issue 1 aims at showcasing future perspectives of research in the three main areas of English studies represented in the journal: linguistics, literature/ culture and language education. In each of the three main strands, leading scholars were invited to share their insights on current topics that are of central concern to the field. In the first contribution in the area of linguistics, Christian Mair reflects on how an understanding of world Englishes, and particularly the role of English as a global language, could be enriched by insights from disciplines beyond linguistics. He puts forward and exemplifies an approach that takes heed of the political economy of language learning and language planning in light of English as a lingua franca. In “Current perspectives on learner corpus research”, Marcus Callies discusses how the relatively young field of learner corpus research has evolved dynamically during the last three decades. He also highlights some of the challenges faced by this type of research and sees a change in the norms of English language teaching away from monolithic conceptions of standard English. Section 2 on Literature and Culture reflects on the relation between historico-political events and literary texts, and which relevance this interaction acquires for present-day dealings with the past. Firstly, Christoph Singer offers a reading of Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights (2020) against the backdrop of past and current engagements with the Zong massacre of 1781, during which 133 enslaved men, women and children were killed. By using the lens of hauntology, Singer shows how the play dismantles dominant historiographies of the slave trade and, by relying on trans-temporal plotlines, manages to draw our attention to the blind spots in Britain’s dealings with its colonial past. Secondly, in “Secrets, Leaks and the Novel: Writers, British Intelligence and the Public Sphere after World War Two”, Jago Morrison and Alan Burton investigate the interrelation between spy fiction and actual British Secret Service work in the post WWII era. The authors demonstrate how spy fiction has been employed by insiders to British intelligence to reveal the ins and outs, failings and successes of secret service operations. While other channels have been barred mostly for legal reasons, it is the spy novel, as Morrison and Burton Preface 7 argue, that has provided an authentic representation of British intelligence work during the second half of the 20 th century up to the present day. The section on Language Education features two articles focused on English language and literature teaching in the digital age. Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz show how practices like game playing and non-professional digital text-creation necessitate new theories for literature teaching and learning. These new theories go beyond Reader Response Criticism, the still dominant approach in literature pedagogy, by including new notions of authorship, digital literary practices like instapoetry and twitterature, and literary texts written by language learners. Thomas Strasser’s article takes a bird’s eye perspective on currently available digital tools that pose new challenges to English language education. He focuses particularly on how language teachers can creatively engage with Artificial Intelligence technologies. The current issue closes with two book reviews on recent publications in the field of literature and culture. We would like to wish the readers an engaging and stimulating time with the current issue and with those yet to come. Alexander Onysko, Ulla Ratheiser, and Werner Delanoy “Every volume was a highlight: ” In conversation with Bernhard Kettemann Ulla Ratheiser, Werner Delanoy and Alexander Onysko It started with a typewriter. Founding editor Bernhard Kettemann remembers how he launched AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik in 1976, and what it means to him to have edited the journal for close to fifty years. Almost half a century after the first edition he has passed on the editorial torch to the next generation - and Bernhard Kettemann couldn’t be happier, as he explains in this interview with the new AAA editors, Alexander Onysko, Werner Delanoy and Ulla Ratheiser. AAA editors: How did AAA get started? What was the initial idea? Bernhard Kettemann: When I came to Graz in October 1975, as assistant professor for English linguistics at the English Department of the University of Graz, I noticed a certain frustration among my new colleagues about the lack of opportunities to publish their articles. At that time, they were more involved in publishing the research of the professors in the department. Fifty years ago, nobody saw an urgent need for assistants to present their research to a wider public. How this has changed! While ‘publish or perish’ wasn’t a thing yet, I knew that I needed to provide a forum for young, original thought. I suggested therefore that we create our own journal, and two years later my colleagues at the department, Walter Bernhart, Peter Bierbaumer, Annemarie Karpf and Wolfgang Zach as well as Walter Hölbling from the Department of American Studies, joined in as co-editors. Later on, the AAA-team was completed by Alwin Fill, Walter Grünzweig from the University of Dortmund, Allan James from the University of Klagenfurt, Andreas Mahler from FU Berlin, Christian Mair from the University of Freiburg and Werner Wolf. AAA editors: So, it also was a team effort. What were the first steps in setting up the journal? Bernhard Kettemann: Our librarian, Karl Ofer, came up with the idea to contact the main University Library of Graz and ask them for technical support. This help was very welcome and so, in the spring of 1976, I started a call for papers among my colleagues, which led to the publication of the first volume of AAA in the autumn of 1976. Of course, what I got were type-written manuscripts from the authors, which I then edited, had the Werner Delanoy, Ulla Ratheiser and Alexander Onykso 10 authors do their final corrections before I passed the articles on to the printing office at the library. Several days later I had the first 100 copies of Volume 1 of AAA in my hands. Volumes 2 and 3 were published in the same way in 1977 and 1978. I soon realized that we needed to professionalize and internationalize the journal. I started looking for a publishing house and was delighted to get in touch with a young publisher, Gunter Narr in Tübingen, Germany. After several meetings and talks with him, in the autumn of 1978 he welcomed AAA in his publishing house, Gunter Narr Verlag. AAA editors: This all sounds like a smooth process. Have you also encountered any challenges? Bernhard Kettemann: Indeed, there were several issues, but none that I wasn’t able to overcome. As always, money was a big issue. While there wasn’t quite enough around, we did enjoy support from the English as well as the American Studies Department of the University of Graz. Soon some support came from the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research, later on also from the university and from private sponsors, and personally, I also considered “my” journal as my hobbyhorse. Additionally, in due course we also were able to attract more and more subscribers. Another challenge has been to fill each volume with high-quality papers, which would equally cover the whole field of English and American studies, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and language teaching. This was not always easy. And, as with all kinds of activities in this field, sometimes it’s been difficult to convince authors to stick to stylesheets and deadlines. AAA editors: Despite these challenges the journal has been thriving. What were your highlights of the past 47 years with AAA? Bernhard Kettemann: Every single volume that I have held in my hands, that I could leaf through, that I could read, feel in my hands and also smell, was a highlight, each one a pleasure in itself. A special highlight was the official presentation of Volume 40 of AAA in November 2015 at the University of Graz, with the publisher, the vicerector of the university, the dean of the faculty, several professors and my colleagues and family present. It was also a great moment, when in 1988 we founded an accompanying book series to AAA, which by now has published 26 volumes. And finally, I am thankful and thrilled that, after quite some time of search, I have found a new team of editors that is willing to take over AAA, thus ensuring the continuation of the journal. I couldn’t be happier to pass on the torch to this new generation of anglicists. In conversation with Bernhard Kettemann 11 AAA editors: And we will do our best to follow in your footsteps. What did you like best about being the editor of AAA? Bernhard Kettemann: The best thing about being the editor of AAA was being actively involved in the creative process of moving our field of research forward, thus navigating at the cutting edge of academic development. It meant getting to know so many different and interesting personalities in many parts of the world. And for me personally, editing AAA meant a huge increase in insights into many aspects of all our fields of research. AAA editors: Would you do anything differently in hindsight? Bernhard Kettemann: I used to be very bad at delegating and carried too much of the burden and responsibility of editing an international journal myself. I am very grateful for all the work done by my co-editors, colleagues from the University of Graz and academic friends. In my next journal, though, I would involve them even more in the day-to-day running of the business. A more collaborative approach would have made a couple of things easier. Publishing is such a social endeavor - it takes a village, to paraphrase, to publish a journal. Or at least a broader academic community. I therefore feel it’s a good decision that from now on AAA will be edited by a team of three, with the continuous support of their co-editors. AAA editors: Agreed - working in a team, also to reflect the different disciplines in our field, is definitely an advantage. What has changed most significantly with AAA over the past forty years? Bernhard Kettemann: The most important change clearly is technology. There is no comparison at all to my “library approach” of 1976. By going digital we are deepening our global impact and many more people know of AAA and read and cite its articles. Who knows, perhaps in the future editors will be even more creative in promoting the journal and its research. Why not tweet about it, post it on TikTok or cooperate with science influencers? AAA editors: What do you envisage for the future of the journal? Bernhard Kettemann: The future for AAA looks promising and bright. I am excited to watch the new developments and I wish all the best to Werner Delanoy, Alexander Onysko and Ulla Ratheiser upon embarking on their AAA journey! Ad multos annos! Part 1: Linguistics The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics Christian Mair The paper argues that, in view of the current boom in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and related developments of globalisation, research on English as a World Language should pay more attention to economic factors. Sociolinguistic models of postcolonial English which emphasise speakers’ desires to express new local identities as the driving force behind the ongoing differentiation of English remain valid, but should be refined through engaging with work on the political economy of language and language planning. The potential benefits of such dialogue across disciplinary boundaries are illustrated in two brief case studies on English in India and in sub-Saharan Africa (where the focus is on recent realignments in the traditional English and French zones of linguistic influence). The paper concludes that establishing English as the global lingua franca for a multilingual world and for multilingual speakers makes economic and political sense for the 21 st century world. Multilingualism of the ‘English Plus X’ type should also be embraced by global citizens whose native language is English. Alas, what decides is not the right of human beings to speak whatever language they wish, but the freedom of everyone else to ignore what one says in the language of one's choice. (de Swaan 2010: 65) 1. Introduction The motto introducing the present paper was chosen because it is a provocation. On the one hand, it formulates an obvious truth. In the end, we go for the language that gets us the widest communicative reach, the greatest gains in financial and cultural capital, and the best reputation. This ex- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0001 Christian Mair 16 plains why retiring German professors of Romance Studies working on Portuguese literature may continue publishing their findings in German and, perhaps, Portuguese. It also explains why their up-and-coming younger colleagues, who have their eyes on the future rather than the past, are thinking about adding English-language publications to their list (see Eichinger 2014 for empirical and theoretical support for this illustrative anecdote). On the other hand, the motto is irritating. After all, the situation it describes is - oh! - so unfair. Why should young German Romanisten have to struggle to express themselves in a language in which they may not be able to fully express what they want? Or spend money on language classes or translation services that native speakers can use to pay for their vacation? The paper will argue that linguists working on World Englishes are, perhaps, paying a little too much attention to culture and identity and, perhaps, not enough to the relation between languages and money in the global economy. This is advice that I first formulated in a different and more narrow context in Mair (2014). Many of my readers may still view it with reservations today, but I can assure them that there will be some reward at the end. They will learn that multilingualism makes good business sense even in the 21 st century and that we should therefore ‘domesticate’ global English for a multilingual and culturally diverse world. The structure and function of ‘global English’ is a research topic that has become too big for linguistics. This assertion is not intended to cast doubt on the value of the vast body of research on varieties of English around the world that has been carried out in English linguistics and in general linguistics. On the contrary, I am convinced that academic and public debates on the role of English in the world today would gain in depth if they incorporated basic linguistic insights into how grammar works or how prestige and stigma are assigned to accents and dialects. On the other hand, when it comes to accounting for the full complexity of a global language, (socio)linguistic approaches have much to gain from insights on language and communication achieved in other disciplines - cultural studies, history, political science, sociology, the law and economics, to mention just the most important ones. At the very least, looking at one’s object of study from the vantage point of other disciplines will add a fresh perspective, widen horizons and lead to a more balanced and comprehensive analysis. To use the case of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as an illustration: In our standard sociolinguistic models of World Englishes, such as Kachru’s ‘Three Circles of English’ (1982, 1992) and Schneider’s Dynamic Model (2007), the focus is still clearly on natively spoken (ENL) and postcolonial second-language (ESL) varieties. 1 ELF remains on the margins even in a very recent model developed in this research tradition, the Intraterritorial/ Extraterritorial Forces 1 This is the general picture, with exceptions proving the rule. Thus, Ostler (2010) uses “Lingua Franca Present” as the title of his chapter on the late 20 th early 21 st The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 17 Model proposed by Buschfeld and Kautzsch (2021). It explicitly addresses ‘non-postcolonial’ Englishes, but largely continues to do so in the EFL terms of Kachru’s ‘Expanding Circle.’ By contrast, lingua-franca uses of English (ELF) occupy prominent positions in analyses of global English produced by scholars in history (Northrup 2013) and the law (Salomone 2022). On the level of empirical facts, it is self-evident that it is ELF use that has promoted English from one of several competing world languages to the single global language that it is today. This development has come about rapidly and in such an unspectacular fashion that we need to remind ourselves that this privileged position of a single language is a world-historical first: “explaining how English became the first global language is an exercise in world history” (Northrup 2013: 1). The current “World Language System” (de Swaan 2002, 2010, 2020) that is organised around a single global hub has not come about because the number of native speakers of English has increased (though it has), nor because the number of second-language proficient users has increased (though it has, at an even faster rate), but because ELF use has exploded, both in the ‘Anglo’ postcolonial sphere and in the world at large. As EFL uses have become key to the present status and future development of the global ‘English Language Complex’ (ECL), 2 they deserve attention also in sociolinguistic models of English. In that way, much needed (socio-)linguistic expertise could be brought to bear on the study of some of the most dynamic linguistic developments involving English today, such as the rapid establishment of official English (mainly at the expense of Afrikaans) in Namibia (Buschfeld and Kautzsch 2014, Schröder 2020, Stell 2014), the competition between Russian and English as lingua francas in the post-Soviet states (Northrup 2013, Proshina 2014), or the management of English in the global call centre industry (e.g. Hultgren 2011, Bolton 2016). Needless to say, this latest chapter in the rise of English must not be framed as a grand narrative of Anglo triumph, but as a story that casts English as the global language for a multilingual world, thus raising awareness that spread of English comes with gains and losses and that communities throughout the world need to negotiate the right place for English in their multilingual ecologies. century manifestation of English as a World Language. Also compare Mauranen (2018), a programmatic call for closer cooperation between research on second-language acquisition, ELF and World Englishes. 2 This designation, coined by McArthur (2003) and taken up in Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008) and Mair (2013), is felicitous because it captures the insight that English continues to be a language like all others in vernacular usage, especially in ENL contexts, but has come to occupy a unique and privileged position among the world’s languages as the global lingua franca. Christian Mair 18 2. Putting ELF into World Englishes models Parallels between the interference-caused L1 learner errors of EFL varieties and the contact-induced emerging features of ESL varieties have long been pointed out in the World Englishes literature (cf., e.g. Williams 1987, Hundt and Mukherjee, eds. 2011). EFL (but not ELF) was explicitly incorporated into the probably most successful early model of World Englishes, Kachru’s (1982, 1992) ‘Three Circles’ of English. The focus of this model was on the native-speaker varieties (ENL) of the ‘Inner Circle’ and the emerging second-language standards (ESL) of the ‘Outer Circle’. With an element of almost prophetic foresight, Kachru placed both these circles in the wider context of a less well defined ‘Expanding Circle’ of EFL. In hindsight, the term EFL, with its resonances of the traditional foreign-language classroom, has become something of a misnomer. It does not even come close to capturing the dynamics of the fluid EFL-to-ELF continua that we encounter, for example, in the European Union (after Brexit! ), in the United Arab Emirates (where they co-exist with equally fluid ESL-to-ELF and ENLto-ELF continua), or in parts of the African continent, such as the Maghreb or Rwanda, where English has made recent inroads into traditionally francophone countries (Salomone 2022, particularly Chapter 6, “The ‘New Scramble’ for Africa”). As long as the focus remains on ENL and ESL varieties, the story of English as a World Language is one of emancipation, with a growing number of postcolonial nation states creating and embracing their own varieties of English in response to political and cultural decolonisation - a movement that started in the ‘Inner Circle’ settler colonies, but subsequently also affected the ESL Empire of the ‘Outer Circle.’ As Schneider (2007) argues, ENL and ESL varieties move along the same path of development, though not at the same time and at the same speed, making present-day English into a highly pluricentric constellation. ELF uses of English cannot easily be incorporated into this narrative of emancipation, in which new-dialect formation is assumed to reflect communities’ new postcolonial identities. ELF is not primarily about identification, but about successful communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries, about widening one’s communicative range (see Meierkord 2012). This is where the economic factor comes in - not only in the established sense of linguistic economy as communicative efficiency, but in the metaphorical sense of a linguistic and communicative market (Bourdieu 1980) in which we can study how financial buying power converts into cultural prestige and how languages, dialects and communicative styles are priced and costed. The parallels between the transnational flows of financial capital and linguistic resources become eerily literal for international travellers who start wondering at the diverse, but always limited range of languages that the automatic teller The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 19 machines ‘speak’ which they use for cash withdrawals. 3 A similar, if far more complex interface between technology, the economy and multilingualism is, of course, presented by the World Wide Web. Here, early fears that this new medium might become an English-dominated linguistic mono-culture have proved to be unfounded. On the other hand, the highly selective multilingualism that has emerged shows that the digital marketplace is even more competitive and more biassed against smaller languages than communicaton on the ground (Dor 2004, Danet and Herring, eds. 2007, Mair 2020). 4 3. The price and cost of English, literally Table 1 represents the very uneven distribution of the roughly 7,000 languages still spoken today over the world’s population: Number of languages with more than X native speakers Percentage of world’s languages Percentage of global population covered X > 100 million 9 0.1 40.4 X = 10 million to 100 million c. 80 1.1 39.0 X = 1 million to 10 million c. 300 4.3 14.8 X = 100,000 to 1 million c. 950 13.6 4.7 X < 100,000 c. 5,660 80.9 1.1 Table 1: Distribution of the world’s languages across the global population (figures adapted from www.ethnologue.com) In the order of number of native speakers, the nine top languages are Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian and Japanese. There is no reason to doubt that the around 90 languages in the top two categories will continue to thrive throughout the 21 st century. The future of many of the languages in the one-to-ten million range is safe too, although there are moderate concerns for some of them. Severe concerns exist for many of the languages with less than a million native speakers at 3 I owe this observation to Prof. Akinmade Akande, Awolowo Obafemi University, Ile- Ife, Nigeria, who has documented the recent additon of Nigerian Pidgin to the languages used for this purpose by the country’s banking sector. 4 Again the exception proves the rule. Digital communication in social media has been a liberating force when it comes to writing dialects and other nonstandard varieties. Also, politically conscious and technologically competent language activists have used the Web successfully to help maintain endangered languages. Christian Mair 20 present, especially those that - unlike Icelandic - are not supported by official status, a writing system, a long literary tradition, and significant media presence. Figure 1 presents similarly drastic asymmetries in the global distribution of wealth (Routley 2018, based on research by Credit Suisse and Forbes magazine): Figure 1: The uneven distribution of global wealth in 2018. As can be seen, 0.7 per cent of the world’s population are dollar millionaires and together control almost 46 per cent of the world’s wealth. At the other end of the scale, more than two thirds of the world’s population have less than 10,000 dollars at their disposal and thus control a mere 2.7 per The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 21 cent of the world’s wealth. While economists, at the World Economic Forum or elsewhere, are usually not concerned with millionaires’ native languages, it seems plausible to assume that most of them speak languages that are listed in the top two tiers in Table 1, if only for reasons of statistical probability. But what if the ‘buying power’ of languages reveals differences beyond the demographic weight of their speakers? If that were the case, it would definitely be interesting to find out in what ways English follows the money, and in what other ways, perhaps, the money follows English. These are questions that have been asked before, but usually in highly specific contexts. Almost half a century ago, François Grin started investigating how English-language skills paid off for employees in the multilingual Swiss labour market (e.g. Grin 2001) and thus proved a pioneer bridgebuilder between economics and linguistics. Since the turn of the millennium, the economics of language (and language policy and planning) has been taking shape as a definable interdisciplinary domain of enquiry, as is shown by several handbooks (e.g. Ginsburgh and Weber, eds. 2016, Gazzola and Wickström, eds. 2016). It seems that, at least in the early stages, with the exception of a pioneering monograph by Coulmas (1991), economists and political scientists were more active than linguists in bringing about a rapprochement between the two fields. This bias has definitely been redressed by Vigouroux and Mufwene’s (eds. 2020) Bridging Linguistics and Economics, a clearly linguist-led initiative, as is evident, for example, in its conscious inclusion of indigenous and nonstandard lingua francas alongside standard languages. An economic concept that was adopted early and eagerly in the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010, Coupland, ed. 2010) is the commodification of language, communication and identity (Heller 2003, Cameron 2012). These are notions that have direct appeal for economists, political scientists and lawyers. Consider how Rosemary Salomone defines 21 st century English at the outset of her study The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, a magisterial tour d’horizon of almost 500 pages that provided the immediate inspiration to write the present paper: English is no longer solely a language for ethnic or national identification as languages are conventionally considered. For better or for worse, it is an economic skill, a marketable commodity and a form of cultural capital. English is the most marketable language in today’s globalized economy. It is more sought after than any conventional commodity in the market, pervading the entire range of social and business relations in which it is used and discussed. It implicates accent, register, and levels of native fluency, which all carry economic value as markers of social class and educational background. It is the language of global communication, both driving the knowledge economy and gaining from it. (2022: 8-9) Christian Mair 22 The reference to “accent, register, and levels of native fluency” is welcome because it highlights a major potential gap in current economic-political approaches to English as a global language, namely lack of expertise in the fine-grained analysis of language at the levels of structure and interaction in discourse, which practitioners are usually aware of themselves: Accepting a naïve conceptualization of English as a monolithic entity putting everyone on the same footing is risky because we cannot disregard the practical relevance of the sociolinguistic concept of linguistic variety. For example, being a rich native British speaker abroad, say, in Spain, cannot be viewed as equivalent to being a poor African-born speaker of English who migrated to that country. Speaking English as such therefore does not mean all that much if we do not clarify who speaks this language with which accent and where. (Gazzola and Wickström 2016: 13-14; see also May 2016) If this is not an invitation for the World Englishes research community to enter into a more intensive dialogue with economists than many of them seem to be inclined to doing, what is? But to return to the main point. It is the ‘Promise of English’ sketched by Salomone that, in slightly adapted local variants, is at the heart of the language’s current attraction world-wide. Unfortunately, like economic markets, communicative markets may be efficient, but that does not necessarily make them free or fair. Access to English, especially to high-status expensive varieties of the language, is restricted for many, because their money only pays for the cheap version. This is not theoretical analysis, but lived experience for hundreds of millions of people all over the world, as the following extract from a focus-group interview with two Nigerians and two Cameroonians resident in Germany shows. Speaker 1 is male and in his thirties (see Mair 2022 for more information on the data and the project in the frame of which it was collected): Speaker 1: my point is that the kids they need to understand the correct English the Pidgin they will learn the Pidgin but you as a parent speaking with them the teenage the teenage you have to speak with them with correct English Speaker 2: uhm Speaker 1: because you are paying because you are paying for the English […] like the school that I attended in Nigeria […] The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 23 let me use Euro there is a school of two thousand Euros and there is school of hundred Euros the school of hundred Euros you can't expect them to speak the good English with your with your kids […] the teacher the teacher there in the school of hundred Euros they are secondary school drop-outs […] there is school of two thousand Euro the student the teacher there they are graduate they speak English with your kids everything but when they go outside they can learn the broken English but when they go back to the home English must be spoken For better or worse, the global Promise of English has come to regulate language use in this family. The task of the sociolinguist is to study to what extent the conflicting pulls of covert and overt prestige, of solidarity and power, or - to use Duchêne and Heller’s (2003) terms - pride versus profit help or hinder the implementation of the language policy. Another illustration of the Promise of English is provided by the following advertisement for a private language school in India: Figure 2: Advertisement, private language school - Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh, 2009 (photo: Dr. Andreas Sedlatschek). Christian Mair 24 This is clearly not the 19 th century promise of English in India, which was about cultural assimilation and limited upward mobility within the colonial system. It is about English as the supposed key to economic advancement, participation in a modern consumer lifestyle, self-realisation, personal autonomy, and unrestricted mobility. Millions of Indians have bought into the new version of the promise. They have created a booming market for private language instruction and education, and they have often been shortchanged. Fraudulent business with English has apparently become a social scandal to the extent that Outlook, one of India’s major weekly news magazines, devoted the entire cover of its 24 March 2008 issue to what it referred to as the “Torment of English: ” Figure 3: “Torment of English,” Outlook, 24 March 2008. This is very different from the torment of English experienced by Mahatma Gandhi in an earlier age, who was thoroughly convinced of - to put it in his own words - the “evil wrought by the English medium.” Nevertheless, he had to use the language of the coloniser in his struggle for freedom, and hence ended up with a sense of alienation, guilt and betrayal: Is it not a painful thing that, if I want to go to a court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium; [...] and that someone else should have to The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 25 translate to me from my own language? [...] Am I to blame the English for it or myself? It is we, the English-knowing men, that have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the nation but upon us. (Gandhi 1958, quoted in Bailey 1992: 144) As we know, independent India has not developed along the lines envisaged by Gandhi, into a secular, economically and culturally self-sufficient state with Hindi as its national language. Instead, English has sunk deeper roots in the country than it had before independence. Whatever desire there may have been to get rid of the language of the coloniser, it was overridden by a new and much more powerful Promise of English. Although the focus of the present paper is on the economy of English, one other discipline deserves at least a mention, if only because it is the closest disciplinary neighbour in the working lives of most researchers working on English linguistics in continental European English Departments, namely English literature and (postcolonial) cultural studies. Indeed, it is not hard to find recent Indian fiction in which the Promise of English plays a major role. A particularly striking example is Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). This darkly satirical novel is narrated in the voice of the protagonist, a poor rickshaw-driver’s son who rises to become a wealthy business mogul and powerful stringpuller in Bangalore’s booming IT industry, and it is a literary critique of globalisation unleashed in contemporary India. Not surprisingly, the call centre, one of the new sites for linguistic fieldwork in India, also figures in this novel, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist when he is still an illiterate ‘countrymouse’: ‘This building - the one they call a mall - the one with the posters of women hanging on it - it’s for shopping, right? ‘Right.’ ‘And that’ - I pointed to a shiny glass building to our left - ‘is that also a mall? I don’t see any posters of women hanging on it.’ ‘That’s not a mall, Country-Mouse. That’s an office building. They make calls from there to America.’ ‘What kind of calls? ’ ‘I don’t know. My master’s daughter works in one of those buildings too. I drop her off at eight o’clock and she comes back at two in the morning. I know she makes pots and pots of money in that building, because she spends it all day in the malls.’ He leaned close - the pink lips were just centimetres from mine. ‘Between the two of us, I think it’s rather odd - girls going into buildings late at night and coming out with so much cash in the morning.’ (2008: 127-128) The bright and gifted boy’s one ambition is to escape from destitution, custom, tradition and the fold of his extended family. Over the course of a very turbulent sequence of events, he achieves his aims, mainly by using Christian Mair 26 his wits to turn the corruption that surrounds him to his own advantage and literally getting away with murder in the process. At the end of his story - which, incidentally, is told to a visiting leading Chinese politician, apparently in English as a Lingua Franca - he reflects on his life: When I drive down Hosur Main Road, when I turn into Electronics City Phase 1 and see the companies go past, I can’t tell you how exciting it is to me. General Electric, Dell, Siemens - they’re all here in Bangalore. […] The entire city is masked in smoke, smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like? Maybe it will be a disaster: slums, sewage, shopping malls, traffic jams, policemen. But you never know. I t may turn out to be a decent city, where humans can live like humans and animals can live like animals. A new Bangalore for a new India. […] I think I might sell everything, take the money, and start a school - an Englishlanguage school - for poor children in Bangalore. A school where you won’t be allowed to corrupt anyone’s head with prayers and stories about God or Gandhi - nothing but the facts of life for these kids. A school full of White Tigers, unleashed on Bangalore. (2008: 317-319) This tongue-in-cheek celebration of the English language in India is suffused with irony. It mocks the intention of the 19 th -century language planners, Bentinck and Macaulay, 5 who formulated the case for English as the teaching language of the colonial education system in India, set out as follows in his often quoted words: The English language was to serve as a tool to create “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern - a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect” (1835: 9). As we can see from the example of Gandhi, Macaulay’s hope that English-language education would make the local educated elites docile interpreters was vain. He did foresee, however, that his decision would lead to a twotier system, in which a small number of privileged Indians would have easy access to a wide range of information and knowledge, whereas the greater proportion of the population taught in the local languages would be at a disadvantage. 6 5 Lord William Bentinck (1774-1839), first Governor-General of India in 1834/ 35, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, historian, politician, and advisor to Bentinck while in India from 1834 to 1838. 6 Classic quotes always suffer from being presented out of the context of the original argument. This is why I invite interested readers to consider the entire complex argument in depth: “I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813, that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied, that we are free to employ our funds as we choose, that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing, that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic, that The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 27 As the Indian example shows, the global Promise of English is held out in a communicative marketplace in which it will be heard by all, but will be fulfilled only selectively. A global lingua franca is a potential good, but only where access to it is provided for all in functioning educational systems and where it is managed in language planning regimes that benefit local communities. Where this is not so, the financial investment in English may be wasted, and an additional immaterial price - loss of linguistic diversity and cultural heritage - will have to be paid. This is precisely the problem that language planners, educators and sociolinguists are struggling with throughout the postcolonial world (see Vaish 2008 for India). The Promise of English remains an extremely potent force in top-down language planning in Africa, too - regardless of whether the policies are promoted by governments or NGOs from the global North. In view of this, it is not surprising that Africa should occupy such a prominent place in Salomone’s Rise of English. It is often remarked that Africa is the continent on which the future of French as a world language is at stake, not least because more and more people are taking up English in historically French colonial and postcolonial zones of influence. What may constrain the spread of English within Africa in the long term is the growing economic, political and cultural presence of China. As Salomone points out, China has become a major political and economic player in a very short time and is aware of the importance of education, language and culture as factors of soft power. But so far its growing influence has generally been exercised through the medium of English as a Lingua Franca, for example when large numbers of young Africans receive scholarships to study in English-Medium-of-Instruction programmes in China. From an empirical sociolinguistic perspective, it remains to be seen which of the grand designs in top-down policy-making will be implemented successfully, what the results at the grassroots level will be and, most importantly, what unanticipated consequences they may give rise to. the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic, that neither as the languages of law nor as the languages of religion have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our encouragement, that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed. In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.” These words convey both colonial arrogance and the realism of a competent language planner. Christian Mair 28 A country that occupies a prominent place in Salomone’s study is Rwanda, which broke with its francophone colonial past in the 1990s and switched its education system to English as a medium of instruction. From the beginning, there was significant British support for the shift, in the form of investment in language teaching and teacher-training, and the cordial links have continued to the present day. This drastic re-orientation was facilitated by two factors: (a) the 1994 genocide, after which the reputation of France was tainted in the eyes of many Rwandans because of what they perceived as collusion in the genocide and (b) the fact that Paul Kagame’s new government was formed by former Hutu rebels returning from exile in anglophone Uganda. It should be added that the shift was real, although it was accompanied with some experimental fine-tuning (relating to the role of Kinyarwanda, the population’s shared indigenous language, in primary education) and rather more tactical and political manoeuvring with regard to membership in various ‘Anglo’ and francophone international bodies. In the end, none of this stopped the advance of English to a dominant position in the country, which has recently been confirmed in a largescale empirical study of the pay-offs of competence in English, competence in French and bilingual competence in English and French in the country’s workforce (Muhawenayo et al. 2022). If Muhawenayo et al. are thus able to demonstrate a pay-off for English (and, in certain contexts, also for bilingualism in English and French), the question remains what percentage of the country’s total population are even affected by the shift, for example because they don’t even enter formal education, are left behind in a severely underfunded system or drop out before they become literate in either Kinyarwanda, English or French. As Romaine points out: As the only language with global reach, English is paradoxically positioned as both pathway and obstacle to development. […] Just as rising markets alone do not level the playing field between rich and poor or create sufficient conditions for equitable development, access to English on its own does nothing to improve the lives of the poorest. (2015: 253) From the evidence assembled by Romaine, it seems that a working Englishbased education system will take a lot of time to develop, and well focussed ESL-norms of local English usage may not have emerged yet (which, of course, does not imply that the World Englishes research community should not start systematically documenting developments, as it has done in the case of Namibia). One could argue that Rwanda’s change in postcolonial linguistic affiliation has been dramatic and has had dramatic effects, but these played out mostly on the policy level: Favorably positioning itself in the sphere of anglophone world powers and development partners has already proven to be a successful strategic move that The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 29 has paid off handsomely. Not only is the British Council investing substantially in the language transition throughout the country by supplying teachers and civil servants with English training. Britain’s Department of International Development has also increased its funding for education in Rwanda by over 50% over five years (2010-2015), committing approximately 27% of its total budget for Rwanda on education initiatives. This makes Britain the single largest donor to Rwanda […]. (Romaine 2015: 271) Cynically speaking, among those who seem to have benefitted most immediately from the Promise of English in this case are former British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, whose scheme to deport unwanted asylum seekers to Rwanda would have been more difficult to negotiate across the English-French African language divide. As Romaine points out, only a small segment of the Rwandan population will be directly affected by the shift from French to English even if it is eventually implemented sustainably at the grassroots level. At the time of her writing, in a country in which - unusually for Africa - almost the entire population shares the same language (Kinyarwanda), 8 per cent spoke French, and 4 per cent spoke English. As Muhawenayo et al. (2022) have shown, English has advanced since then, but it is still far from being an accessible and inclusive language within the country. 4. Conclusion: Pride AND profit - English as a global language for a multilingual world In sum, the illustrative examples sketched above show that the following major determinants are shaping English as a global language at the beginning of the 21 st century. - Pluricentric English is not a happy democracy of voices, but remains a hierarchically structured constellation of varieties and styles. They all command different prices in economic terms and are evaluated very differently in terms of cultural prestige. - In this constellation, it is ELF uses that are developing most dynamically. The ELF boom is driven by globalisation and more immediately responsive to economic factors than traditional ENL and EFL uses. - Educated native-speaker elites have lost some of their power to define norms of language use. A particularly striking example of a powerful new standardising force are globally operating IT corporations engineering usage norms into word-processing software, spell checkers, ‘grammar’ checkers (which - contrary to what the name suggests - aim to homogenise a much wider range of usage), editing and machine translation tools. - Links between ‘variety’ and ‘territory/ nation’ have weakened considerably in the world of increasingly mobile speakers, writers and texts. Christian Mair 30 With apologies for the hyperbole, I propose the slogan ‘All Englishes are everywhere’ (cf. also Mair 2013: 256, Mair 2018). - While Standard English, by and large, still commands the highest price in the global communicative marketplace, some nonstandard varieties of the language have also become good business, especially in the global media landscape. All these developments have given rise to three paradoxes of Global English: - The postcolonial paradox: Decolonisation has gone hand in hand with deeper entrenchment of English in ESL communities and a world-wide boom in ELF. In the course of this development, the terms of the debates around English have often shifted from issues of identity/ pride/ culture to considerations of communicative efficiency and economic profit. - The standardisation paradox: Global English is becoming more homogeneous and more heterogeneous at the same time. Standard language use on formal and public occasions tends to be homogenised along US norms throughout the world, whereas the internal differentiation of English is progressing apace in the United States itself and throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. ELF use is particularly likely to escape the regulatory power of traditional agents of linguistic standardisation. - The world-language paradox: The more English gets entrenched as the global language, the more it will enter into contact with other languages and the greater will be the proportion of multilingual speakers who use it alongside other languages. A striking illustration of this dynamic is the fact that the English-speaking world’s major metropoles - New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Sydney, to mention just a few - have always been multilingual places in their history and have become even more so in the recent past. This should not be surprising, as a major aspect of their attractiveness as immigrant destinations is the absence of a language barrier: Wherever the aspiring newcomer hails from, it is more likely that they speak English than any other foreign language. For at least two centuries, the world has learned to live with English. For most competent users today, English is not their native language, but they use it in the constellation ‘English Plus’ (that is ‘English plus whatever language or languages they speak in addition’). Many individuals and communities have adopted English at a price, either through cultural alienation or the ‘colonial cringe’ that made them be ashamed of their ‘new’ English, before they endorsed it through nativisation and asserted its legitimacy through endonormative stabilisation (stages 3 and 4 in Schneider’s The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 31 Dynamic Model). Two billion regular users in the world know from experience that ELF communication is not a level playing field, particularly in cases where native speakers participate. On the other hand, few would deny that competence in more than one language confers practical (including direct economic), cognitive and cultural benefits and that linguistic and cultural diversity are part of the human condition. This is a lesson that monolingual native speakers of English may have to learn in the 21 st century. As we know, linguistics straddles the boundary between the humanities and the sciences, for example in computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. However, I suppose that those of us who, like myself, are not directly active in these fields have been academically socialised in the humanities. This is why for most of my professional life I thought of the handicap of the monolingual English native speaker as one of culture and identity - such as it is, for example, presented in Wierzbicka 2013. Books like Salomone’s, however, have opened my eyes to a deeper truth. She shows that these days more and more intelligent young people in Britain and the US seem to avoid enrolling as students in foreign-language departments (and universities close down more and more of these departments as a result). However, if these young people do not feel the monolingual handicap, it is their countries’ military and business elites who have raised the alarm about the dangers of monolingualism. In response, five august academic bodies from the English-speaking world - the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, and the Royal Society of Canada - have recently issued a position paper on “The Importance of Languages in the Global Context: An International Call to Action.” 7 The text opens with the following diagnosis of the condition humaine actuelle, paying due respect to the public figures that inspired the initiative: We are at an extraordinary moment in human history. Cooperation within and across borders is vital as we work to solve global challenges. Clear and precise communication is more crucial than ever before to the health and security of every nation. As global businesses, diplomatic corps, and other leaders have repeatedly stated, language education, and the accompanying linguistic and intercultural competencies, are a necessity for social, political and economic development, and for effective collaboration. During a global health crisis, researchers, governments, and health care workers must be able to share accurate information. 7 The paper, published in 2020, can be downloaded from: https: / / www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/ publications/ the-importance-of-languages-in-global-context-an-international-call-to-action/ . Christian Mair 32 In such times, language matters, and fluency in our languages matters. The people of the world must be able to speak to each other and be understood - to communicate as effectively and as rapidly as technology allows. The text briefly mentions the cultural value of linguistic diversity and the need to respect the linguistic rights of minorities, but returns to the ultimately neoliberal utilitarian and economic argumentation at the end. Multilingualism is promoted as a necessary asset for the competitive global citizen of the future: The challenge of providing education in multiple languages has proven especially complicated in primarily Anglophone nations, and even in countries whose English-speakers are co-citizens with important populations speaking other languages. Today, Anglophone communities in particular are not producing enough speakers of languages other than English to meet 21 st -century needs, arguing that multilingualism is too difficult to achieve, or that English should be treated as a lingua franca. Nor are these communities sufficiently focused on what is needed for the preservation, maintenance, and invigoration of the other linguistic communities with whom they live. To help reverse this trend, the [academies] have issued complementary reports promoting the importance of languages in addition to English, within both education and wider society. Needless to add, I share the hope that 21 st century English can be managed in such a way that pride is reconciled with profit, and language for identity/ culture balanced with lingua franca for communication. This is also a challenge that should be put on the research and teaching agenda of English linguistics. I conclude with references to two writers who have been more courageous than I in venturing longer-term predictions on the future of English in a multilingual world. For Ostler (2010) English is the last lingua franca in history. This is not because it will remain entrenched permanently. He predicts that the power of English will be insufficient to integrate the rising global players of the 21 st century. Previous collapses of large linguistic empires usually led to fragmentation and breakdowns of lines of communication. Ostler is optimistic that, as the hold of English loosens, the world will not be ‘lost in translation.’ He assumes that advances in language technology will compensate for the loss of a global lingua franca. Whether or not this technocratic optimism is justified is a question beyond the scope of the present paper. Even more daring is David Crystal, who sketches his vision for the year 2500. He thinks it conceivable that by this time every human being will grow up with English, either the natural way or through as yet unknown feats of language-technological and bio-technological engineering that he does not spell out in any detail. Then he comes to the crucial point: The study of World Englishes: Impulses from beyond linguistics 33 If this is part of a rich multilingual experience for our future newborns, this can only be a good thing. If [English] is by then the only language left to be learned, it will have been the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known. (Crystal 2003: 191) An accessible and truly inclusive lingua franca for a world with many languages is a possibly utopian goal worth working for. A monolingual world would be an intellectual and cultural desert, its dystopian mirror. In this situation, more and more aspiring global citizens whose native language is English may begin to see monolingualism as a handicap. References Adiga, Aravind (2008). The White Tiger. London: Atlantic. Bailey, Richard (1992). Images of English. Cambridge: CUP. Blommaert, Jan (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: CUP. Bolton, Kingsley (2016). Linguistic outsourcing and native-like performance in international call centres: An overview. In: Kenneth Hyltenstam (ed.). Advanced Proficiency and Exceptional Ability in Second Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 185-214. 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Stell, Gerald (2014). Uses and functions of English in Namibia’s multiethnic settings. World Englishes 33: 223-241. Vaish, Viniti (2008). Biliteracy and Globalization: English Language Education in India. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Van Parijs, Philippe (2013). Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World. Oxford: OUP. Vigouroux & Salikoko Mufwene (eds.) (2020). Bridging Linguistics and Economics. Cambridge: CUP. Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford: OUP. Williams, Jessica (1987). Non-native varieties of English: A special case of language acquisition. English World-Wide 8: 161-199. Christian Mair Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research Marcus Callies 1. Introduction Learner Corpus Research (LCR) is a relative newcomer to the scene of research paradigms and methodologies within applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) research. In addition to other types of data that have traditionally been used in SLA research, learner corpora provide large-scale principled collections of authentic, continuous and contextualized language use by foreign/ second language (L2) learners that are stored in electronic format. They enable the systematic and (semi-)automatic extraction, visualization and analysis of large amounts of learner data in a way that was not possible before. Access to and analysis of learner corpus data is greatly facilitated by the digital medium, and the sheer quantity of data can help to explore SLA phenomena from non-experimental perspectives (Callies 2015). Although the majority of learner corpora may appear relatively small in size when compared to large reference corpora of several major European languages that comprise billions of words of text, they contain datasets for general use that are still many times larger than the oftentimes narrow(er) datasets collected in SLA research through more strictly controlled elicitation techniques. LCR as a field only emerged and became visible at the turn of the 1990s in the context of the popularization of corpus linguistics at large, but has rapidly evolved and grown in scope and sophistication over the past three to four decades. It now bears all signs of an established discipline: it has an academic journal, the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, that has been publishing studies in LCR since 2013; two handbooks that survey the field and its links to the major neighbouring disciplines of corpus linguistics, SLA and language teaching (Granger, Gilquin and Meunier, eds., 2015; Tracy-Ventura and Paquot, eds., 2021); and a biennial, international conference that has been organised since 2011 under the aegis of AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0002 Marcus Callies 38 the field’s own professional organisation, the Learner Corpus Association, officially founded in 2013. Because of its origin, LCR has initially been a relatively European-centred research field but has in the meantime made significant inroads into North America, South Africa (van Rooy 2019) and the Asia-Pacific region (Jung 2022). It is by now a vibrant and growing international community. This paper provides some perspectives on recent and current achievements and developments in the field, highlights several new trends and initiatives, but also discusses some challenges. The focus will be on LCR and the study of learner English. 2. LCR: Where are we now? As is not uncommon for a comparatively young and interdisciplinary academic discipline, the field is currently undertaking efforts to resolve several issues that concern key concepts, terminology and long-standing methodological practices. These efforts are increasingly informed by first assessments of the achievements and practices of LCR as well as an evaluation of its position within applied linguistics at large, and importantly, its role and impact vis-à-vis SLA. Paquot & Plonsky (2017) provide the first synthesis and empirical assessment of quantitative research methods and study quality in LCR, based on a systematic review of quantitative primary studies (N = 378) referenced in the Learner Corpus Bibliography 1 that included over 1,200 entries at the time of analysis. The study finds that the large majority of studies in LCR have been corpus-based (in contrast to more explorative, corpusdriven studies), quantitative, cross-sectional and comparative, i.e. comparing learner language either to some native-language (L1) yardstick and/ or to other kinds of learner varieties in a framework referred to as Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA; Granger 1996, 2015). This usually implies a focus on the learners’ L1 as a variable, comparing quantitative findings from learner corpora to those obtained from L1 control corpora of different kinds. Paquot & Plonsky (2017) note an oversampling of written data in LCR in that available corpora mostly include texts vaguely classified as ‘essays’ of various kinds (usually of an argumentative nature) that have been produced in instructed settings of higher education by young adult learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) rather than English as a second language (ESL). These learners have achieved a relatively advanced level of proficiency according to their institutional status, being assessed in terms 1 https: / / uclouvain.be/ en/ research-institutes/ ilc/ cecl/ learner-corpus-bibliography. html Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research 39 of number of years of English-language instruction and years spent at university studying English. Much in line with the preference and predominance of quantitative approaches in corpus linguistics at large, learner corpora (or components of them) are still (too) often taken as being representative of a certain language variety at large and are used as aggregate data sets to abstract away from individual language users without reflecting on or controlling for the influence of other variables (e.g. proficiency or study-abroad) and task conditions (e.g. timing, access to reference works) despite the fact that learner data are subject to a significant degree of interbut also intra-learner variability. As a newcomer to the repertoire of research methodologies for the study of learner language, LCR has, despite high expectations within the community itself, not yet impacted SLA research to the degree that it would like to and potentially could. 2 The reasons for that have been widely discussed in numerous recent publications many of which are summarised in Le Bruyn and Paquot (2021) and Tracy-Ventura and Paquot (2021). Some of the major reasons for the apparent disconnect between LCR and SLA that have been identified are: a lack of theoretical grounding of much of the purely descriptivelyoriented early research in LCR, also reflected in an overemphasis of the (potential) effects of the learners’ L1 on the L2 in terms of transfer / cross-linguistic influence that is too often readily taken as the most obvious explanation for observed differences in the data; the field’s preoccupation with errors and deviations from a suggested native-speaker norm that has resulted in a discourse of deficit (i.e. highlighting what L2 learners can not do when compared to native speakers) while SLA research has arguably advanced beyond the comparative fallacy. Several of the abovementioned publications invited a mutual reflection on the apparent disconnect and called for concerted efforts to bring the two fields closer together. These efforts are most visible in the two recent collections referenced above. In particular, Tracy-Ventura and Paquot (2021) give a comprehensive and up-to-date overview and assessment of how SLA and LCR have come closer together in recent years. In their opening chapter they argue that LCR suffered from various teething problems, but the field has evolved tremendously since its beginning, and it is important for the field of SLA to recognize these recent developments. [...] The field has also matured in how it analyses learner corpora: more attention is devoted to individual differences and individual contributions by different learners, with more studies focusing on a wider 2 But for a recent comprehensive overview of SLA research using corpus methods and tool see Lu (2023). Marcus Callies 40 range of explanatory variables than only the learners’ first language and adopting multifactorial designs (Tracy-Ventura & Paquot 2021: 4). Similarly, Myles (2021) concludes that it is nonetheless evident that much progress has been made, with LCR research generally better theoretically framed, and with many of its powerful tools now being used more systematically to address complex SLA agendas. [...] Overall, the gap between the two fields has definitely narrowed, and respective needs, strengths and weaknesses are now better understood (Myles 2021: 270). Tracy-Ventura, Paquot and Myles (2021) in their concluding handbook chapter provide suggestions for future research in three main categories: (1) corpus design and preparation, (2) corpus analysis, and (3) Open Science and methodological expertise. In the following sections I will discuss some recent research developments and initiatives within LCR in light of some long-standing conceptual issues and methodological practices in LCR with a focus on the English language. 3. Reform and innovation: Recent initiatives 3.1. Reform: Research methodology and metadata The abovementioned research synthesis by Paquot and Plonsky (2017), in addition to taking stock of the research output of LCR in terms of learner demographics, data sampling and research topics, also explicitly set out to “systematically describe and evaluate quantitative research and reporting practices in LCR both cumulatively and over time” in order to “inform future LCR research practices and contribute to their improvement” (Paquot and Plonsky 2017: 62). As for study quality in LCR at large, they summarise that “improvements over time, however, are clearly noted and there are signs that, like other related disciplines, learner corpus research is slowly undergoing methodological reform” (Paquot and Plonsky 2017: 61). Calls for methodological reform often address and sometimes arguably overemphasize ‘shortcomings’ to do with quantitative approaches and advanced statistical modelling which have been and are being discussed in corpus linguistics at large (see Paquot and Plonsky 2017: 63f). While this is certainly desirable for purely quantitative approaches, there are many different ways to analyse learner language data and the increased quantitative and statistical sophistication apparently has come at a price. For instance, Larson et al (2022) find “a diminished focus on linguistic description, evident, for example, through fewer text excerpts and linguistic examples, which appears to be symptomatic of increasing distance from the language Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research 41 that is the object of study” (2022: 137). The authors discuss these shifts and suggest some ways of employing sophisticated statistical techniques without sacrificing a focus on language. Nevertheless, conceptual and methodological reform and innovation remain a strong desideratum in a young discipline like LCR. To provide a certain incentive for researchers to document and share their methodological practices and tools, and to give researchers engaged in advancing the methodological expertise of the field the recognition they deserve, the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research decided to introduce new publication formats (see Paquot and Callies 2020). This can be seen as another initiative in line with a “growing trend towards methodological awareness and reflection” in LCR (Paquot and Callies 2020: 122). The journal thus now invites and publishes corpus reports, materials and methods reports and software reports, and, to answer calls for reflection and assessment of methodological practices, also review articles, position papers and replication studies (which receive growing importance in SLA) to reproduce findings of previous LCR studies. Another initiative concerns the collection and documentation of metadata in LCR. In view of the many variables that affect SLA, rich metadata are crucial (Myles 2021: 260f.). In LCR, however, research data management seems to have attracted less attention. A recent initiative (König et al. 2022) is aimed at the standardization of corpus description including metadata at the level of the corpus as a whole, but also metadata used to describe the individual learners and task types/ registers that the corpus represents. This would enhance corpus findability, usability and comparability. König et al. (2022) propose a metadata schema that features a set of core metadata fields considered necessary to describe learner corpora consistently and informatively. 3.2. Innovation: Towards exploring the writing process in LCR The focus on written data and the fact that learner corpora of written language typically contain only the final product of the writing process entails that the data are of limited explanatory power when it comes to studying the actual process. While corpus data allow for a detailed analysis, quantification and cross-textual comparison of the linguistic features of texts, the data are static and researchers can only make assumptions as to the processes that led to the final product and the reasons behind the choice of certain linguistic features. Recently, however, the field has seen some initiatives and some innovative research that seeks to address this gap. One possibility to come closer to examining the writing process, or rather changes between different versions of a text that are the result of this process, is the compilation and analysis of corpora that include several drafts of the same text or corpora that represent handwritten texts with Marcus Callies 42 traces of alterations (Gilquin 2021: 77). For example, Kreyer (2015) suggests to include text-internal mark-up to account for alterations and revisions in the writing process in “a quasi-facsimile fashion trying to give an idea of what the hand-written text looked like” because such revisions “provide valuable information about various interlanguage phenomena that are at play in the writing process” (Kreyer 2015: 24). More recently, technological advances have allowed the relatively easy and inexpensive collection of data gathered by means of keystroke logging (e.g. through the software Inputlog, Leijten and Van Waes 2013) or screen recordings during the writing process. These offer insights into the evolution of the text, and especially into textual revisions being made in the course of writing (Gilquin 2022b), the use of electronic writing tools (Gilquin and Laporte 2021) and intertextual resources and text structuring (Wiemeyer 2022). One of the first initiatives into that direction was taken in the compilation of the Corpus of English as a Foreign Language (COREFL; see Lozano, Díaz-Negrillo and Callies 2021). A subcomponent of that corpus consists of 100 written narratives elicited through a picture-story from advanced L1- German EFL learners. These narratives were directly typed on a laptop by the participants with Inputlog running in the background. The data, the full potential of which has yet to be explored (see Ballier et al. 2019 for a first study using the data) enable researchers to undertake process-oriented studies of narrative writing such as revision analysis. Wiemeyer’s (2022) dissertation project used a mixed-methods design to investigate intertextuality in L1-German university students’ academic writing in English, combining a corpus and a process study of writing assignments (reading reports) based on a single source text. For the process study, students wrote reading reports in an experimental setting. The writing process was recorded using screen recording software and subsequently, the students were asked to comment on their writing processes in a stimulated recall procedure for which the recording of the writing process served as a stimulus. The screen recordings were segmented so that each segment contained the writing process of an individual sentence. Microlevel processes were recorded for each segment in chronological order of occurrence. These were then analysed to identify the L2 writers’ strategies of source use and acknowledgement. By combining evidence from multiple sources, the study thus sheds light on how intertextuality is realised both in the writing process and the product. The most recent initiative into that exciting but also very challenging new research field is Gilquin’s (2022b) Process Corpus of English in Education, a learner corpus of English produced by L1-French writers which, in addition to the actual texts, consists of data that make the writing process visible in the form of keystroke log files and screencast videos, including an extra component made up of similar data produced by the learners in their L1. Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research 43 4. LCR and EFL: Changing contexts, changing input, changing norms? The forces of colonization and decolonization, as well as the ongoing globalization and technologisation of the early 21 st century, have brought about a unique historical expansion, global spread and diversification of the English language. English today is recognised as a pluricentric language that has developed several supra-regional standards. L2-learners of English are exposed to a large amount and extent of variation in Englishes around the world almost on a daily basis, be it through varied forms of extramural input by means of streaming-services offering English-language TV shows and movies, English used on various social media platforms, music, computer games, or through contact with speakers of different Englishes though international mobility 3 . These developments have major implications for the inclusion of language variation in the English-language teacher education curriculum and the teaching of English around the world in the 21 st century, but also for empirical research interested in the study of EFL, for example in the field of LCR as I will discuss further below. The diversity of global Englishes challenges several long-standing principles of English language teaching (ELT), such as the adherence to idealized ‘standard varieties’ and their associated cultural conventions as the only target varieties in teacher education and the language classroom. Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT; Rose et al. 2019) and the closely related approach of (Teaching) English as an International Language (TEIL; Callies et al., eds., 2022) are the most visible manifestations of a current trend towards a paradigm shift. Additionally, there is increasing evidence of the global influence of American English on all other Englishes (aka ‘Americanisation’, see Mair 2013, Goncalves et al. 2018, Schneider 2020) and the assumption that EFL learners increasingly use and are exposed to hybrid varieties. ‘Mid Atlantic English’ (MAE) as discussed for instance by Modiano (1996) is a hybrid variety consisting of features of British English (BrE) and American English (AmE) used among EFL learners, but also teachers. On the one hand, MAE is influenced by the strict exonormative orientation towards BrE and AmE varieties in ELT, but on the other by the highly variable input that EFL learners receive and their mixed language-learning biographies (with extended stays in different English-speaking countries). The result is a hybrid language use of secondary-school and university students as well as English language teachers on all linguistic levels, ranging from spelling, pronunciation to lexico-grammar (see Mering 2022). 3 See Mering (2022: 105-108 and 154-158) for results of a recent survey among secondary-school and university students in Germany and Switzerland Marcus Callies 44 As for the choice of reference language variety, Modiano argued that MAE should replace BrE as the educational standard in Europe and predicted that the development of MAE would most likely continue, in time establish its own frame of reference, and as such be less dependent on American and British standards. This prediction has turned out to be too optimistic in hindsight because in many (western) educational contexts around the world, ELT and teacher education are still characterised by an almost exclusive exonormative orientation towards either ‘standard’ BrE and AmE and their corresponding socio-cultural norms. However, as discussed above, the formation and hence orientation towards a hybrid reference norm has advanced considerably. For ELT in Germany, Hutz (2023: 26-31) describes the evolution from a period characterized by a strong monocentric approach (BrE being the unchallenged and most prestigious reference variety), to a bicentric period which is characterized by the coexistence of two reference norms, and - potentially - a new stage characterized by a pluricentric approach. The bicentric approach is characterised by a gradual process of Americanization that has taken place in the ELT context leading to a de facto coexistence of the two reference norms of BrE and AmE which, Hutz argues, needs to be acknowledged by teachers, curriculum developers, and textbook publishers. Hutz concludes that “hybrid language use has become the norm rather than the exception which is a clear indication that the monocentric era de facto has ended” (Hutz 2023: 31). The shift towards MAE is apparently largely student-driven (Hutz 2023: 31) with curricula and textbooks being, unsurprisingly, relatively resistant to change (see e.g. Meer 2022). What then are the implications of these developments for the study of EFL in the framework of LCR? Recently, it has been suggested to introduce a new parameter of analysis to LCR: diachronic change or the short-term evolution of learner language on the basis of corpus data to “investigate the evolution of learner language (as produced by different generations of learners from the same proficiency level) over the course of time, to determine whether this variety of language is different now from what it was twenty or thirty years ago” (Gilquin 2022c: 42; see also Gilquin 2021). This approach called “diachronic learner corpus research” is explicitly distinguished from longitudinal studies in LCR that make use of corpora featuring data collected from individuals or small groups of informants at periodic intervals over a prolonged period of time in order to obtain information about language development. The rationale for introducing this diachronic parameter is that like ENL and ESL varieties used in institutionalised contexts, EFL varieties could equally be subject to diachronic change that can be traced in relatively short time intervals. Gilquin’s (2022c) findings, drawn from two small but reasonably comparable learner corpora representing written learner English produced by advanced L1- French students at a university in French-speaking Belgium, largely confirm the findings reported by Mering (2022) for German learner English: Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research 45 EFL learners, at least in the two contexts examined, are increasingly influenced by the changing informal and extramural input coming from American English sources and the manifold extramural contexts of learning which leads to an increased use of informal and US-American, mostly lexico-grammatical features in a mixed repertoire. But are EFL varieties subject to diachronic change that can be traced in relatively short time intervals? Are we dealing with a diachronic change of learner English in terms of the fundamental patterns of language acquisition, development and use which are at the core of interest in both SLA and LCR? Diachronic change in institutionalised ESL varieties can be conceived of as an often contact-induced development of a linguistic system away from a historical input variety in terms of nativization and endonormative stabilization as described in Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model. There are several recent initiatives to compile corpora of World Englishes to examine such diachronic change (see e.g. Brato 2019 and Unuabonah et al. 2022). By contrast, EFL varieties are much less susceptible to internal diachronic change. EFL varieties are less discernible, stable sociolinguistic communities like ENL and ESL. They remain exonormatively-oriented as they are subject to the strong forces that are at play in instructed educational settings: the curricula, including the hidden ones manifest in teaching material, as well as teaching and assessment practices in which learner English is being evaluated and corrected by teachers on the basis of an external reference norm. In contrast to ESL varieties, for which we are witnessing an increasing degree of codification of their lexico-grammar (see e.g. Lambert 2020 and Salazar 2021), EFL varieties are not codified in reference materials or textbooks. Moreover, in contrast to ESL-settings where the social context of language use provides ample opportunities for innovation and change to spread, catch on and eventually become conventionalised, for EFL learners the opportunities for communicative situations between speakers to arise are still limited outside of educational settings. It rather seems that what we may be observing is a changing normorientation along the lines of a convergence of BrE and AmE norms that results from the global dynamics of using and learning English in the digital era: increasingly informal, variable and hybrid input through the use of English online, changing input through the increasing Americanisation and globalisation of English (as Gilquin 2022c: 45f. notes herself). These are coupled with changes in linguistic and socio-cultural role models and contexts of learning in which learning English exclusively in an instructional context without access to other input has become rare and will further affect the external reference norms of ELT. In sum, it can be argued that EFL varieties are subject to linguistic and social change in terms of an Americanisation and liberalisation/ colloquialisation manifest as changes in the reference norm, but not the system of learner English per se. Whether “diachronic learner corpus research” will establish itself as a new field of research as Gilquin (2022c: 66) suggests, remains to be seen. Marcus Callies 46 However, the emerging changes in the reference variety of English in educational contexts has implications for the use of a methodological reference frame that has frequently been used in LCR to analyse learner data. A (still) widely-debated but yet unresolved issue in LCR is the question of corpus comparability, in particular as to the appropriate basis of comparison for learner corpus data, i.e. if, and if so, against which yardstick learner data should be compared and evaluated (see Gilquin 2022a for a recent comprehensive discussion). Should this be only corpora representing the language of (often monolingual) native speakers? And if so, what variety should serve as the comparative basis? Granger (2015) proposed a revised model (CIA²) that explicitly acknowledges the central role played by variation in interlanguage studies and is thought to be more in line with the current state of foreign language theory and practice. Most importantly, Granger introduces the concepts of ‘reference language varieties’ and ‘interlanguage varieties’. The term ‘reference language varieties’ replaces the native-speaker target (NL) in ‘traditional’ CIA, indicating that there is a large number of different reference points against which learner data can be compared (traditional inner-circle varieties, outer-circle varieties, as well as corpora of competent L2 users, e.g. a corpus of texts produced by expert language users, for example academic writers, who may or may not be native speakers). Granger stresses that the word ‘reference’ in particular makes it clear that the corpus does not necessarily need to represent a norm. The term ‘interlanguage varieties’ is introduced to acknowledge the inherent variability of learner language and to draw attention to the large number of variables whose effect on L2 use should be investigated more in LCR. Gilquin (2022a) concludes her survey of norms used in LCR by summarising that “LCR need not restrict itself to one single norm, and not even a native one” and that it “has the capacity to liberate itself from the shackles of the norm, either by not relying on any comparison with native language or by considering the norm as purely indicative of differences, rather than deficiencies” (Gilquin 2022a: 96). It is indeed liberating to note, as Paquot and Plonsky (2017) do, a “steadily decreasing number of studies using one or more reference corpora” with LCR possibly “moving away from looking at L1-L2 differences and more towards describing L2 production data as a worthwhile endeavour in and of itself” (Paquot and Plonsky 2017: 75). However, both in SLA and LCR some form of comparison to a nativespeaker norm is still commonplace. To add to this, the persistent use of evaluative terminology like ‘non-native’, ‘overuse’, ‘underuse’, and ‘misuse’ clearly evokes associations to (often monolingual) English native speakers as the (sole) source of ‘correct’ language use which perpetuates the deficit view towards language varieties that are supposedly not ‘native’, a view that has plagued LCR for long (see also Callies 2015: 49-50). Gilquin argues that in “the same way as native norms are still relevant in LCR, they arguably still have a key role to play in the foreign language classroom, Current perspectives on Learner Corpus Research 47 not only because many learners have native language as their target, as we saw earlier, but also because, in real life, learners are likely to be judged according to native standards” (Gilquin 2022a: 95). We have seen earlier in this section that the native-language target that learners may aim at (if they do so 4 ) is in flux and changing. And it is precisely the pervasive judgment of multilingual learners against a monolingual “native standard” that constitutes the major obstacle to break free from the norm. Who else but not we as linguists with a strong interest in applied linguistics, language learning and teaching should take initiative and transfer our research findings and its pedagogical implications to the classroom? Do “research norms” and “pedagogical norms”, as Gilquin (2022a: 94) argues, always have to be separated? Elsewhere, I have emphasised the need for greater curricular coherence in language teacher education by crossing disciplinary boundaries to enable future teachers perceive linguistic knowledge as linked to and relevant for pedagogical reasoning and teaching practice that can at the same time inform their feedback and assessment practices (Callies & Hehner 2023). For example, large electronic corpora of World Englishes and electronic dictionaries can be used as resources for teacher trainees to explore the spread and extent of use of innovative and variable linguistic structures in Englishes around the world and to help them make research-informed decisions about the source and gravity of their students’ potential errors (Callies, submitted). Feedback and assessment practices in teacher education and ELT should also be informed by linguistic research on EFL and ESL varieties which have found manifold similarities between the two types of varieties, identifying some underlying cognitive mechanisms that lead to the creation of potential innovations (see Callies 2016 and 2023 for further discussion). Based on such research findings, the conflicting views on the origin and status of linguistic features can be put into perspective. In view of evidence from actual language usage we should abandon the fuzzy and often overprescriptive, evaluative categorization of surface forms according to the assumed institutional status of language users (ESL vs. EFL) which is based on an idealised, monolingual native-speaker norm. The use of a native-speaker yardstick fails to recognize ESL and EFL as varieties in their own right. It is based on an underlying pedagogical perspective that considers native speakers’ language as a gold standard against which differences and features of learner language are evaluated and characterised as native-like, or rather, as non-native-like. This perspective has certain advantages in that it facilitates empirical work because it provides a norm against which data can be measured and evaluated, but it centres around a target-deviation perspective in which interlanguages are merely seen as 4 See again the recent study by Mering (2022) for findings that partially challenge this view. Marcus Callies 48 more or less successful attempts to reproduce an implicit target-language norm. 5. Conclusion This contribution has provided some perspectives on recent and current achievements and developments in LCR, highlighted new trends and initiatives, but also pointed towards some challenges, focusing on the study of learner English by means of learner corpus data. Being a relatively recent research paradigm within applied linguistics, it is remarkable that after some 30+ years LCR already bears all signs of an established discipline. It is currently also concerned with a critical self-evaluation of its role and impact vis-à-vis SLA. This seems to have acted as a catalyst for the field to discuss several issues that concern key concepts, terminology and research methodology. Some of these discussions are clearly visible in a growing trend towards reflection and assessment of some long-standing methodological practices and their potential pitfalls. Recent publications suggest that LCR and SLA have come closer together during the last decade. I have argued that we are observing a change in the norm-orientation in ELT, evident in an emerging paradigm shift towards GELT which seems to be fuelled by classroom realities: EFL learners and teachers increasingly use a hybrid repertoire that is heavily influenced by the informal and extramural input coming from American English sources and the manifold extramural contexts of learning. EFL varieties thus appear to be subject to linguistic and social change in terms of an Americanisation and liberalisation/ colloquialisation manifest as changes in the reference norm. LCR should respond to these emerging changes in educational contexts and adapt its methodological reference frame to analyse learner English data. 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PhD dissertation, University of Bremen, Germany. https: / / media.suub.uni-bremen.de/ handle/ elib/ 5756 Marcus Callies Universität Bremen Part 2: Literature and Culture “We’re always playing ghosts” A hauntological reading of Winsome Pinnock’s drama Rockets and Blue Lights Christoph Singer The Zong-massacre of 1781, when 133 enslaved women, men and children were thrown overboard a slave ship by British crewmembers, has turned into a central event in the discussion and commemoration of the slave trade. Literary texts from poems such as David Dabydeen’s Turner and NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! to novels like Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts and Lawrence Scott’s Dangerous Freedom (2021) probe different ways of approaching the silences surrounding the crime as well as the ensuing court cases in which the slave ship’s owners demanded compensation for their ‘lost property,’ rather than facing charges of murder. In this article, I will discuss Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights (2021), which not only revolves around the Zong-massacre but approaches the slave trade by employing discourses and images related to the theoretical concepts of hauntology. Pinnock deconstructs hegemonic historiographies of the slave trade and counters British postcolonial amnesia by means of, what I would like to call, spectral temporalities. These temporalities are presented as non-linear and a-chronological. Full of revenants of the past, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, the play’s trans-temporal plots address the gaps and silences in British Histories. Firstly, this article will outline the Zong massacre and its thematic resurgence in contemporary literature and culture. Secondly, I will read Pinnock’s play with theories of hauntology and spectral temporality. Thirdly, this article will discuss how Rockets and Blue Lights explicitly addresses and dramatizes this paradox double-nature of the presence of the past on the theatre-stage. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0003 Christoph Singer 56 1. Introduction The British dramatist Winsome Pinnock discusses in a scholarly article entitled “The Spectre of the Slave Ship” (Pinnock 2018: online) the representation of traumatic historical events on stage, an interest that is translated into her work as a playwright. In this article Pinnock is especially interested in Caryl Philip’s dramatic adaptation of Simon Shama’s study Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Philips 2008; Shama 2007). Both, Philip’s play and Shama’s study, were published to mark the bicentennial celebration of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. Fourteen years later, in 2021, Pinnock published the play Rockets and Blue Lights, which, amongst other themes, discusses these very commemorations. Pinnock’s play is particularly interested in the question of how to remember the slave trade and its victims as well as British culpability with the trade, a question Pinnock approaches in theory and dramatical practice. Her approach counters a lack of historical testimonials, thus defying the ‘social death’ of the enslaved to refer to Orlando Patterson’s concept. To do so, Pinnock employs the concept of “hauntology, which suggests that the legacy of the past resonates within or haunts present day reality” (Pinnock 2018: online). In this article, I will discuss Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights (2021). The play deconstructs hegemonic historiographies of the slave trade with the help of discourses and images that are deeply related to theories of hauntology and by means of, what I would like to call, spectral temporalities. These temporalities are presented as non-linear and a-chronological. Full of revenants of the past, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, the play’s two trans-temporal plotlines counter the silences in British histories. These spectral temporalities support Marc Fisher’s argument that “[h]aunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time” (Fisher 2012: 19). And in Rockets and Blue Lights, one such site is the Zong, particularly J.M.W. Turner’s rendition thereof. I will, firstly, outline the Zong massacre and its thematic resurgence in contemporary literature and culture. Secondly, I will link these plays to theories of hauntology and spectral temporality. Thirdly, this article will discuss how the play explicitly addresses and dramatizes the paradox of the past’s simultaneous absence/ presence on the theatre-stage. This theme links Pinnock’s play to Jacques Derrida’s introduction to hauntology in The Specters of Marx which is equally concerned with non-linear temporalities which Derrida framed with Hamlet’s statement that “The time is out of joint” (Derrida 1993: xxi). A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 57 2. The spectre of the Zong The theory of hauntology questions the limits of linearity and narrative emplotment of historiography. Hauntology also highlights the silences in historical archives and the very colonial logic and discursivity of these archives. As argued by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin the emergence of history in European thought is coterminous with the rise of modern colonialism, which in its racial othering and violent annexation of the non-European world, found in history a prominent, if not the prominent instrument, for the control of subject peoples. (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1995: 317) To rewrite and amend these histories becomes an essential moment of undoing these processes of othering and of claiming a place within these historical discourses and their production. This need is also expressed by Lou, the protagonists of Rockets and Blue Lights: “You and I - the descendants of slaves - we’ve got a duty to tell that story” (Pinnock 2021: 37). The massacre of the Zong is predestined for such a reading, even though or because the account thereof is based on few, incomplete historical documents. The central aspects of the Zong massacre can be summarized as follows: in October 1780, the Gregson Syndicate dispatches a slaver called William. The William leaves Liverpool and anchors on the African Gold Coast from January to August 1781. Here the Gregson syndicate acquires another slaver, a Dutch ship called Zorg, which was taken into possession by the Royal Navy and renamed Zong. The crew of the William was then divided between both ships which lead, firstly, to the Zong being understaffed and, secondly, to the William’s surgeon Luke Collinwood being promoted to captain of the Zong. The unexperienced captain and his understaffed crew overcrowded the ship with enslaved Africans: 442 women, men and children were taken onboard. Under the Dolben-Act of 1788, which seven years later would have restricted the number of enslaved, the Zong would have been allowed to carry 175 enslaved (Kirkler 2012: 411). On the middle-passage from the island of St Thomas to Blackwater, Jamaica, the crew mistook Jamaica for Hispaniola which resulted in a detour of several weeks and a depleted stock of water. To ‘save’ - in the inhumane logic of the slave trade - their ‘chattels and goods’ (Hoare 1820: 239) the crew threw overboard 133 of the enslaved before Zong finally arriving in Jamaica on December 22, 1781. Two years later the Gregsons, the owners of Zong, sued the Gilbert insurance company, demanding they cover the prize of the murdered Africans. The historian James Walvin calls this court case, which was decidedly presented as matter of insurance not of murder, “[t]he most grotesquely bizarre of all slave cases heard in an English court” (Walvin 1992: 16). The fact that Judge Lord Mansfield presided not over a case of murder but one Christoph Singer 58 related to insurance claims garnered public attention and turned the proceedings into a major case for the abolitionist movement. Nonetheless, few historic documents remain. Here particularly noteworthy is Olaudah Equiano, who alerted the abolitionist Granville Sharpe. Granville Sharpe’s Memoirs (Hoare 1820) as well as Sharpe’s recently discovered letter to the Admiralty (Faubert 2017) as well as reports on the court cases (e.g. Roscoe 1853) are few of the archival sources, while others vanished. Michelle Faubert confirms: “very few primary sources on the Zong massacre exist. […] much of the paper trail connected to the Zong case, such as Captain Collingwood’s logbook, has conveniently disappeared” (Faubert 2017: 179). Despite and even maybe because of this lack of archival material, the Zong massacre has become a central site of trauma, contested historiographies and a fight for recognition and justice. Yet, the Zong’s central position in these debates, Srividhya Swaminathan argues, was not an immediate one: “Though this insurance case did have a profound influence among anti-slave trade organisers and became iconic in abolitionist literature, there was almost no immediate impact on the public consciousness” (Swaminathan 2010: 483). Central for the Zong’s current perception was a re-enactment organized in 2007 by the Centre for Contemporary Ministry. The historian Anita Rupprecht relates how the ministry, as part of the bicentennial celebrations, organized an event in which “the Zong sailed out of history, up the Thames and docked by the Tower of London.” (Rupprecht 2008: 266) Accompanied by the HMS Northumberland, the replica of the Zong hosted a Christian choir and both ships held exhibitions on the slave trade and its abolition. This event, alongside literary publications, firmly established the Zong in cultural memory. Today, the name Zong is a metonymical short-hand for the Zong massacre in 1789, the related court cases at Whitehall and Westminster and the dehumanizing discourses that justified the slave trade. While the Zong’s replica sailing on the Thames may have been an important event in the process of fixing the Zong in cultural memory, it was not the first. A number of (non-)literary texts deal with the challenge of commemorating the Zong-massacre in particular and the British involvement in the slave trade in general. In 1993, for example, Michelle Cliff published the novel Free Enterprise, which contains a discussion of the painting “The Slave Ship - Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on,” by the Victorian painter J.M.W. Turner, whose 1840-painting has often been approached either as a depiction of the Zong massacre, or of the continued ‘jettisoning’ of the enslaved after the slave trade and slavery itself were abolished. In David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994) the painting is even more central to this lyrical discussion of the Zong massacre. Another text, which explicitly alludes to hauntology and the spectral is Fred D’Aguair’s 1997-novel Feeding the Ghosts. The novel imagines one survivor of the massacre, a woman called Minta, finding her A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 59 way back onto the slaver. The Caribbean-Canadian author NourbeSe Philip’s poem Zong! (2008) is equally concerned with the (im)possibility of depicting an historic event which is only documented in a few legal notices. Philips takes these texts, cuts them up and uses the words and phrases to create a poem that is indebted to hauntological thought. Philips states in an interview: I come - albeit slowly - to the understanding that Zong! is hauntological; it is a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves present […] in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space. (Philip 2008: 201) The film Belle, from 2013, approaches the Zong massacre from yet another perspective. It depicts the life of Elizabeth d’Aviniere, daughter of Maria Belle, a formerly enslaved women and of John Lindsey, a British captain of the Royal Navy. Elizabeth is also the great-niece of the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, the judge who, as mentioned above, presided over the Zong case. While the film focusses on the romantic side of the plot, the love-story does not completely overshadow the Zong case. Less interested in the romance but more concerned with the fragile freedom of Elizabeth and her children in pre-abolition England is Lawrence Scott’s novel Dangerous Freedom (Scott 2021). The novel focusses on Dido observing her uncle Lord Mansfield dealing with the Zong case as well as on her relationship with her absent mother. A final literary example, Mojisola Adebayo’s 2020-play Wind/ Rush Generation(s) is, broadly speaking, a history-play reconstructing British histories, as stated by the author’s note: “This is a play about the British Isles, its past and its present” (Adebayo 2020: 2). In Wind/ Rush Generation(s), a group of characters is related to the Zong. Their names combine the various discourses that justified the slave trade: economic trade is represented by Captain Luke Collingwood and first mate James Kelsall, the legal system by Lord Mansfield, and religious discourses are indicated by the sailors which are named after the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, ranging from Matthew and Mark to Jude and Paul. In Adebayo’s play, similarly to Pinnock’s, different genres, various temporal planes and characters constantly merge to unsettle linear historiographies. In Wind/ Rush Generation(s) the ghost’s interaction with the teenagers is less an expression of trauma but a call for justice and reminiscent of Avery Gordon’s argument that the “ghost is different from trauma, for haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done” (Avery 2008: xvi). To give a non-literary example that will allow for a transition to Winsome Pinnock’s play, I would like to refer to an artwork by the U.S.-American artist Sondra Perry. The 2018-installation at London’s Serpentine Gallery was called “Typhoon Coming On” - an explicit reference to J.M.W. Turner’s painting. Perry’s installation employed digital media to transform Christoph Singer 60 Turner’s painting as well as the Serpentine Gallery into a space of traumatic haunting. Arabella Stranger reads the location itself in hauntological terms: “This building, so vitally a part of Perry’s seascape, holds in its walls the histories of British military power and pageantry. The architecture, though, is also haunted by the more specific imperial histories of Britain’s participation in the trading of Black lives” (Stranger 2019: 12). 3. History and hauntology It is no surprise that the Zong massacre and the ensuing legal case have turned into a focal point of (fictional) historiographies of the slave trade. Both exemplify the dehumanisation based on commercial interests and remind us that the victims remain voiceless. The aforementioned texts, however, do not merely fill these gaps and counter the silences. Rather they highlight how the suppressed past haunts the present, how absence becomes a spectral presence in contemporary discourses. They are deeply connected by their discursive strategies of approaching the slave trade as a topic. This connection between hauntology and the slave trade is not new, the trope and its notions of non-linear and traumatic historiography are central to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) as well as to Fred D’Aguair’s Feeding the Ghosts, NourbeSe Philipp’s Zong! and Mojisola Adebayo’s Wind/ Rush Generation(s). Winsome Pinnock uses hauntological theories to tackle the challenges of dramatizing traumatic events and experiences. In her article on Caryl Philip’s dramatic adaptation of Rough Crossings, Pinnock argues: The representation onstage of traumatic historical events is met with various challenges: for example, the conventions of dramaturgy may humanize the perpetrators of wide-scale criminal acts through the requirement for complex characterization; there is a risk of misrepresentation when the fictional content diverges from reality. There is also the problem of archival silence around those who were the victims of atrocities such as the slave trade. (Pinnock 2018: online) Pinnock relates this notion of “archival silence” (ibid.) to the theme of postcolonial amnesia and the whitewashing of history. In Rockets and Blue Lights a character called Reuben, an African-American marine biologist, argues: “Our history, hidden in plain sight, the white abolitionists’ story squashing the story of the Africans who spoke up, who alerted the public to the massacre in the first place. […] I’m trying to hear those people whose stories have been erased” (Pinnock 2021: 44). This intra-textual critique of a self-congratulatory celebration of the abolition of the slave trade is expressed similarly by the English rapper and activist Akala. In Natives: Race A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 61 & Class in the Ruins of Empire, Akala expresses his dismay at a historiography which centres on white abolitionists, such as Granville Sharpe or William Wilberforce, at the expense of Black British abolitionists such as Quobna Ottobah Cugoano or Oloudah Equiano. Akala mockingly refers to this form of commemoration as “Wilberfest” (Akala 2018: 126). With Kojo Karam and Kerem Nisanciouglu one can place this overt focus on white abolitionists within a wider postcolonial amnesia. They identify a “pervasive collective amnesia, almost as if the country has forgotten - within a mere generation - of the existence of its imperial past” (Koram and Nisancioglu 2020: online). In Pinnock’s play the theme of postcolonial amnesia takes centre stage. The aforementioned Reuben states: “The thing is history tells you only so much. The real stories are lost in time” (Pinnock 2021: 14). And hauntology facilitates the deconstruction of these hegemonic historiographies. As quoted above, Pinnock argues that the theory of hauntology is useful to analyse the incomplete representation of the slave trade. Doing so is also a form of reaffirming the forgotten voices as historical subjects in their own right. These arguments are reminiscent of Avery Gordon’s statement that “any people who are not graciously permitted to amend the past, or control the often barely visible structuring forces of everyday life, or who do not even secure the moderate gains from the routine amnesia […] are bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts” (Gordon 2008: 151). Such an “official inquiry” is intended to achieve a societal recognition of actions of the past which in turn is intended to lead to a reckoning in the present. The theoretical figure of the spectre is helpful in this regard, which, as Guillermina de Ferrari argues is a hybrid between different temporalities, forms of perception and requires an engagement with the historical past (Guillermina De Ferrari 2018: 273). In Pinnock’s play this engagement is dramatized on stage. The theatre stage has been read as a spectral space par excellence, in Philip Schulte’s words: “Die unklare Ontologie des Gespenstes ist gleichzeitig die Ontologie des Theaters, das ebenfalls ist und nicht ist. Im Theater bedeutet Sein oder Nichtsein immer zugleich zu sein und nicht zu sein” (Schulte 2015: 91). [“The ambiguous ontology of the ghost is at the same time the ontology of the theatre, which similarly is and is not. In theatre to be or not to be always equals both states at the same time.] Pinnock argues similarly. Hauntology, she claims, “postulate[s] that the theatre space is haunted by apparitions, the meaning of whose presence is interpreted by the collective memory of the audience during performances” (Pinnock 2018: online). Additionally, this form of anti-hegemonic theatre allows Pinnock to carve out a stage of her own. Goddard argues that “Pinnock is well aware of the influence of trends in theatre production and berates the white, male, director-led trend setting for British theatre, which has led to the marginalisation of black women’s plays” (Goddard 2004: 25). Pinnock is deeply interested in the economic, philosophical, religious reasons of the slave trade as much as Christoph Singer 62 she is concerned with exposing the institutionalized levels of performing and commemorating these histories. 4. Rockets and Blue Lights The title of Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights is a reference to another painting completed by J.M.W. Turner in 1840, who himself is as a central character in the play. Whereas Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” depicts the horrors of the slave trade, “Rockets and Blue Lights” shows sailors firing rockets as a distress signal as well as a warning for other ships. Pinnock reads this also as a practice of slavers that continued their trade despite being abolished, here the rockets are seen as a warning of the incoming Royal Navy. Simultaneously, according to the production notes, the painting’s blue colour-scheme is translated onto the stage, as it is “reminiscent of the feeling of being underwater - like the slaves who were thrown overboard” (National Theatre Collection 2021: 10). The play was first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in March 2020 and can be read as an implementation of Pinnock’s hauntological considerations on how to perform a play on the atrocities of the slave trade. Rockets and Blue Lights interweaves two plotlines. This approach via spectral temporalities recalls De Ferrari’s argument on hauntology that “in the intersection between past and present narratives, there is a responsibility; the ghostly is about the obligation to choose from one’s inheritance” (Guillermina De Ferrari 2018: 271). The first plot is set in the year 2007 and follows Lou, a Black British actress, who is reasonably successful as a cast-member of a US-American science fiction TV-show. Her passion-project, however, is a film called The Ghost Ship, which revolves around J.M.W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” and commemorates the horrors of the slave trade. The second plot is set in the year 1840 and follows a Black sailor called Thomas, who leaves his wife Lucy and his daughter Jess to work on a merchant’s ship called The Glory. Here he meets the elderly Turner who, under a disguise, also joined the crew. Both plots, at first sight, seem to follow a rather conventional structure in that the initial, integrated expositions are being followed by complications. In the case of Lou, the complication arises from her becoming increasingly critical of Trevor King - the film’s director - and his conceptual decisions, including the decreased presence of her character Olu, an enslaved woman. Lou deems these discursive devices too conventional and the depicted physical violence too close to ‘torture-porn’ to fit the complexity of the topic. The second plot, set after the British abolition of slavery, depicts a lecherous Turner looking for artistic inspiration on a merchant ship. This ship turns out to be a slave ship in disguise and as such - like the spectre of hauntology - represents the unclear ontological and legal status of Black A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 63 crewmembers like Thomas, who is both simultaneously: free and un-free, citizen and enslaved, human and commodity. Fighting against the enslavement of others Thomas is quickly apprehended and sold into slavery on a plantation. The two initially linear plotlines become entangled and intertwined in the course of the play. While at the beginning both plots are mainly connected by their respective themes - slave trade, agency, freedom, and the representation of traumatic histories - these thematic echoes are transformed into instances of a dramatic haunting: past and present merge, different characters become doubles of each other by means of being played by the same actress, and the linearity and teleology of historiography is upended. However, not only does the past haunt and impact the present. The present and its victims of (institutional) racism become a presence in the past. In the final scene, the enslaved Thomas works at gunpoint on a plantation in 1840. He asks his overseer, and the audience, to remember the victims of racism throughout history, but particularly those of the late 20 th and the early 21 st centuries, such as Yvonne Ruddock, David Oluwale, Kelso Cochrane and Stephen Lawrence (Pinnock 2021: 79). This straight line, from slavery to contemporary racism, and back, implies causality. Such an effect of the silenced past on the present is confirmed by historian Allyson Hobbs. Taking her cues from Turner’s painting the “Slave Ship” and its contemporary socio-economic background, Hobbs argues, however, within the context of US-American history and culture: “Today’s frightening levels of political corruption, economic inequality, racial terror, voter suppression, xenophobia, and misogyny hark back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Hobbs 2020: 264). Pinnock also relates to this inheritance and to the methods of communicating these histories and the images they have been producing. In line with hauntology as a dramatic reappearance of the past in the present, Rockets and Blue Lights avoids to offer a sense of an ending. The play also refuses closure for its characters, audiences and readers. This refusal to provide closure is indicated on the structural level, as the play consists of only two acts rather than the more conventional structure of three or five acts. Consequently, the play’s exposition and climax are neither followed by dénouement nor singular catastrophe. The fact that the sailor Thomas is enslaved once again is certainly catastrophic, but Pinnock’s play stresses that this event is not a singular crisis but a systemic and repetitive one. At the play’s very end, Thomas confirms this endlessly repetitive cycle: “I am not afraid of death. I have lived and died ten million times. And I will live and live again” (Pinnock 2021: 79). Still, it matters that Rockets and Blue Lights does begin in a conventional, dramatic way as it foregrounds the ensuing trans-temporal interruptions and stresses the connections between past and present. The play’s central scene, where past and present, and different plot-lines merge, happens on the film-set of The Ghost Ship. Here, Lou’s character and double, Olu, an Christoph Singer 64 enslaved African woman, is whipped mercilessly, which results in a complete, if short, merging of Lou and Olu and her striking back at her fellow actors turned slavers. This illustrates Brydie’s argument on the temporal effects of haunting: “The cyclical loop of past and present feeds evolving discourses of each, blurring temporalities into a Möbius strip that draws the past into the present, and projects the present back into the past” (Brydie 2020: 905). Past and present, fiction and reality merge, the two plot-lines and temporalities become one. 5. Against empathy - the spectres of identification Resulting from these interwoven temporal planes and plotlines, haunting and ghosts take on various shapes and forms in the play. Lou herself is increasingly frustrated with her role in the film as her character is literally turned into a ghost: “A ghost, for fuck’s sake. We’re always playing ghost in one way or another. We’re not seen as real functioning people” (Pinnock 2021: 37). Lou’s exasperation is reminiscent of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. Here the protagonist, Aminata Diallo, similarly insists on writing her slave narrative by herself, refusing the intended interference of white abolitionists: “I have my life to tell, my own private ghost story” (Hill 2009: 7). In contrast to the play’s complex temporal structure and open ending, the film inside the play, the Ghost Ship, adheres to a conventional plot by offering the very sense of closure the play refuses. This closure is expressed by the clichéd appearance of a grateful ghost who can finally rest. Lou is expected to play this ghost of Olu, whose apparition thanks Turner for painting “The Slave Ship” with the following words: “You told my story - the story of the Zong massacre. And now I can be laid to rest” (Pinnock 2021: 35). Olu stresses “the unburied are restless” (Pinnock 2021: 35). Kosima argues: “The arrival of the spectre requires the haunted subject to address the unfinished business of the past that the ghost represents and remedy the problems that cause the ghost to be unable to move on” (Brydie 2020: 908). The ghost finding rest is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s argument on the importance of mourning and the hauntological, whereby mourning requires a fixed locale for the dead and a public and private reckoning with their lives and their passing. The play, however, makes clear that the victims of the slave trade are neither provided a site of mourning, nor are they recognized as individuals. Pinnock uses the theme of a pacified ghost to, firstly, criticize the belief that history can be laid to rest. Secondly, she addresses the problematic power-structure at hand: it is the white painter Turner who supposedly brings peace to the ghost of the enslaved Olu. While superficially the trauma seems to be healed, justice has not been served, which reflects Brydie’s argument on the reasons for the ghost’s appearance in the first A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 65 place. “The ghost appears when and where it is required in the present to demand justice in the future for the past” (Brydie 2020: 908). Additionally, the whipping-scene’s voyeuristic display of violence results in Lou falling out with Trevor, the film’s director and her erstwhile collaborator. Lou accuses Trevor of reverting to the tired and problematic tropes of cinematic slave narratives. She argues I took this job because I thought Trevor got away from the usual torture porn: A black body gets a whipping. Check. A black body is sold at auction. Check. White people getting off on the sentimental horror while every single lash of that whip sends home a subliminal message that to be white means to have never been a slave. (Pinnock 2021: 44) Lou criticizes the underlying sentimentalist discourses for pretending to create a sense of empathy of the audience with the beaten and subjugated characters. Actually, such portrayals, she argues, result in the white audience being confirmed in their identities and histories. As such, this scene alludes to the white audiences’ desire to have it both ways in this “abolition theme park” (Pinnock 2021: 10). They get to superficially pride themselves of their empathic and sentimentalist ‘understanding’ of the perceived realities of the slave trade, without being reminded of their own complicity in these actions. The affective politics of the Rockets and Blue Lights question the notion of creating empathy, if empathy becomes a form of voyeurism and reproduces problematic narratives. Hence it is no surprise that Pinnock repeatedly employs Brechtian interventions to counter any form of sentimentalism. Once again, Pinnock takes dramatic cues from her analysis of Philip’s Rough Crossings: “It is an alienation technique that invites the audience to engage critically with the performance” (Pinnock 2018: online). The filming of the whipping scene of the film is performed on stage, for the theatre audience to see. Lou’s subsequent critique of “[w]hite people getting off on sentimental horror” (Pinnock 2021: 44) is consequently directed at the audience itself, an accusation that is reminiscent of Brecht’s anti-sentimentalist estrangement-effect. 6. Intertextual haunting One central intertext that alludes to attempts of painting real events as a merely dramatic spectacle is Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In a central scene of Rockets and Blue Lights, Roy, a fellow actor of Lou, tries to console her after a fight, by quoting from Shakespeare’s tragicomedy: “Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort” (Pinnock 2021: 72). Pinnock subverts cultural narratives and highlights how pre-existing intertexts shape and mis-shape what we see and how we see: “Therefore not only is the play haunted by the Christoph Singer 66 memory of other plays and performances, but it also could be said to haunt itself” (Pinnock 2018: online). Lou is aware that she is contributing, as an actress, to this discursive double-movement of, firstly, hiding the victim’s voices, while, secondly, further perpetuating problematic narrative structures and images of suppression. In conversation with her sister Vonnie, Lou remembers an episode of the science fiction TV-show where she plays a character called Captain Sola Andrews of the spaceship SS Rego. In this specific episode, Lou recalls that we transported these androids to the island of Phobos, but we didn’t realise that they had this malware, which made them go against the robotic code of servility. This gave them an instinct for rebellion. This is stupid […]” (Pinnock 2021: 58) This sci-fi allegory of the middle-passage and the slave trade equates her fictional character, Captain Andrews, with a slave trader. Important to note is Lou identification with the character she plays; her repeated use of the pronoun “we” indicates her identification with the character and his actions, which leads Lou to read the robots’ desire to be free as a “malware” (Pinnock 2021: 58). While this allegory of the slave trade presented as a sci-fi narrative is rather on the nose, the play uses this episode to highlight how ingrained certain narratives remain in cultural memory. On the one hand, one could read this as an example of the repressed past haunting the present. On the other hand, it could be approached as an attempt of hiding the black experience in the background of a sci-fi-narrative, a process that evokes Isiah Lavender III’s notion of the Blackground (Lavender III: 2011). Another central intertext is of course J.M.W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship,” which not only features prominently in the very first scene, but throughout the play. The first scene addresses the intermedial interplay and the problem of seemingly mimetic reproduction. The stage directions indicate that Essie, a Black teacher in her thirties, and Lou “stare at Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (which the audience can’t see) on the ‘fourth wall of a museum on board a ship, which is the reproduction of a slaver” (Pinnock 2021: 8). In the background, a group of schoolchildren are asked to perform a coffle-walk, that is a recreation of group of chained and enslaved people walking to their unknown destination. Standing on a replica of a slave ship and looking at Turner’s painting, Lou claims: “England is an abolition theme park right now, and I hate the way this painting contributes to the abolitionist narrative of white saviourism” (Pinnock 2021: 10). This statement sets the scene for the ensuing discussion of Lou’s and the audience’s complicity with this “abolition theme park.” Pinnock highlights these forms of complicity by means of various dimensions of hauntology, which are described by Tina Paphitis as follows “hauntings are also personal memories, collective histories, or physical remains” (Paphitis A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 67 2020: 342). In Pinnock’s play these hauntings range from Lou playing a ghost herself, to past and present increasingly merging. This set-up also highlights the thematic interplay of absence and presence. Whereas readers of the dramatic text will be immediately alerted to the painting’s identity by the stage-directions, a theatre audience must rely on Essie and Lou’s description thereof: “nightmare”, “feeding frenzy by the undertow,” “[a]mber, gold, chrome, the darkest sea” (Pinnock 2021: 8). Only later, Essie explicitly mentions the name “Turner.” The audience does not see a reproduction of the real work but Essie’s and Lou’s reactions to the painting and, consequently, a pre-mediated interpretation thereof. The different levels of removing the historical event from its artistic representation, however, do not diminish the painting’s disturbing effect. Lou wonders: “Why does he [Turner] make something so ugly beautiful? ” This scene’s intertextuality becomes problematic when Lou also alludes to John Ruskin, one of Turner’s supporters and friends: “I am not surprised that this painting drove Ruskin mad. It’s beginning to have the same effect on me” (Pinnock 2021: 12). Interestingly, Lou shares Ruskin’s reaction to the painting. Just like him she feels forced to focus on the representation rather than the represented. In 1843, John Ruskin’s book on Modern Painters relegates several pages to Turner’s painting, in which Ruskin expresses the oft-quoted sentiment: “I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this” (Ruskin 1848: 377). The significance of Ruskin’s analysis of Turner’s artwork lies in his eliding of the depicted crime. While Ruskin does refer to the “guilty ship” (ibid.) he refers to the murder in a single footnote. Here he states: “She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near sea is encumbered with corpses” (Ruskin 1848: 377). And while these two sentences reduce the enslaved to a passive group, Ruskin does personify the heaven and does humanize the sea as seen in “The Slave Ship: ” the “rain-clouds are moving” and “lose themselves; ” the ocean lifts “its bosom,” after the “torture of the storm” (Ruskin 1848: 376). The victim, for Ruskin, it seems, is the sea rather than the drowned. In Rockets and Blue Lights, Lou - despite being attuned to the atrocities of the slave trade - is similarly distracted by the painting’s beauty in contrast to the terrific events depicted: “I look at this painting and I don’t think about what’s just happened to those poor men, women, children. They’re invisible” (Pinnock 2021: 9). However, the play makes clear that the past literally speaks to the present. When Lou studies Turner’s painting, she feels haunted: “I thought I saw … That’s ridiculous. There! Look, she did it again. She pulled her head out of the water. She looked right at me” (Pinnock 2021: 12). This spectral presence depicted in the exposition recalls Derrida’s description thereof: “because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. […] One does not know if it is living or if it is dead” (Derrida 1993: 5). Christoph Singer 68 Throughout the play, Lou becomes acutely aware of her own complicity with the abolition theme park she criticizes. The replica of the slave ship she is standing on, was, after all, the central set-piece of the film The Ghost Ship she starred in, and for which she is about to receive an award. She does so, knowing that the film itself neither lives up to her standards, nor is well-received by those interested in the topic. Essie, for example, cautiously states: “Yes, I’ve seen it. It has its moments, but …” (Pinnock 2021: 9) Lou is made to realize that the film’s message, regardless of her own political intentions, will ultimately be influenced by those providing the funding. The film’s director Trevor points out: “The conditions for the grant from the Abolition Legacy Foundation require that the film commemorates the bicentenary of the abolition” (Pinnock 2021: 36). The scene hints at the limitations of counter-hegemonic discourses within the very hegemonic structures that make them possible in the first place. This recalls Derrida’s statement “that hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (Derrida 1993: 46). 7. Conclusion Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights is a play intent on telling a more inclusive as well as critical history of Britain, an approach that is evoked by Brydie’s following argument To remember the past in a certain way or with a certain intention presupposes an implicit assumption of what the future is or could be. The spectre and its ghostly companion memory represent a means of grappling with non-linear understandings of past, present, and future meanings, and thus demonstrate a mechanic for handling past and future temporalities in the pure present of postmodernity. (Brydie 2020: 907) What makes Pinnock’s implementation of hauntological thoughts so appealing is that they are not merely reduced to either a dramatical gimmick on the conceptual level or to a cheap way of creating suspension on the plot-level. The play not only manages to point out the silences and gaps in historiography and to dissect the discourses that keep select historical narratives in place. Pinnock presents a play that, on the one hand, stands in the neo-Brechtian tradition of playwrights like Edward Bond and Howard Brenton, a play that invites the audience to ask questions without necessarily providing the comfort of answers. This method is reminiscent of Pinnock’s own approach to J.M.W. Turner’s “Slave Ship.” In a comment, which was published on the Tate Gallery’s homepage, Pinnock states that “Turner’s work asks you to think, and to take action - something the Black A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 69 Lives Matter movement has suggested people have not been doing. Now, more than ever, it’s important that people see this painting, and think about what it is saying” (Pinnock 2020: online). This practice of seeing the hidden, of grappling with Turner’s beautiful rendition of a terrifying event and its place in cultural memory, to become aware of the hidden and the forgotten past in the cultural texts and behaviours of the present Pinnock adapts to and transforms for the stage, a place where interpretation and analysis becomes in Pinnock’s words a communal practice (Pinnock 2018: online). References Aguiar, Fred (1997). Feeding the Ghosts. London: Granta Publications. Adebayo, Mojisola (2020). Wind/ rush generation(s). In: Connections: Plays for Young People. London: Methuen Drama. Akala (2018). Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. London: Two Roads. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Hellen Tiffin (1995). Introduction to Part Twelve: History. In: Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Hellen Tiffin (eds.). The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Cliff, Michelle (1993). Free Enterprise. New York: Dutton. Brydie, Kosmina (2020). Feminist temporalities: Memory, ghosts, and the collapse of time. Continuum 34 (6): 901-913. Dabydeen, David (1995). Turner: New and Selected Poems. Leeds: Jonathan Cape. Derrida, Jacques (1993). Specters of Marx. Transl. Peggy Kamuf. New York/ London: Routledge. Faubert Michelle (2017). Granville Sharp’s manuscript letter to the admiralty on the Zong Massacre: A new discovery in the British Library. Slavery & Abolition, 38 (1): 178-195. Fisher, Marc (2012). What is hauntology? Film Quarterly 66 (1): 16-24. Gordon, Avery F. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. With a New Introduction. Minneapolis/ London: Minnesota UP. Hall, Stuart (1997). Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. In: Anthony D. King (ed.). Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. 41-68. Hill, Lawrence (2009). The Book of Negroes. London: Doubleday. Hobbs, Allyson (2020). Violence in the gilded ages, then and now. The Journal of the Gilded and Progressive Era 19: 264-270. Hoare, Prince (1820). Memoirs of Granville Sharpe, Esq. Composed from His Own Manuscripts and Other Authentic Documents in the Possession of his Family and of the African Institution. London: Printed for Henry Colbourn and Co. Kirkler, Jeremy (2012). A chain of murder in the slave trade: A wider context of the Zong massacre. International Review of Social History 57: 393-415. Koram, Kojo & Kerem Nisancioglu (2017). Britain: The empire that never was. 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[online]. https: / / eprints. kingston.ac.uk/ id/ eprint/ 41111/ 1/ Pinnock-W-41111-AAM.pdf [Dec. 2022] Pinnock, Winsome (2020). Winsome Pinnock on J.M.W. Turner’s painting ‘Slave Ship’. 6 October. [online] https: / / www.tate.org.uk/ tate-etc/ issue-50-autumn- 2020/ winsome-pinnock-jmw-turner-slave-ship> 6 October 2020 [Dec. 2022] Roscoe, Henry (1853). Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of King’s Bench in the Twenty-Second, Twenty-Third, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Fifth Years of the Reign on George III. Vol. III. Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, Law Booksellers. Rupprecht, Anita (2008). ‘A limited sort of property’: History, memory and the slave ship Zong. Slavery and Abolition 29 (29): 265-277. Ruskin, John (1848). Modern Painters. Volume 1. Parts 1 and 2. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Scott, Lawrence (2020). Dangerous Freedom. London: Papillote Press. Shakespeare, William ([1611] 2011). The Tempest. Virginia Mason Vaughan & Alden T. Vaughan (eds.). London: Arden Shakespeare. Shama, Simon (2007). Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. London: Vintage. Schulte, Philip (2015). “Geschichte und Heimsuchung.” In: Lorenz Aggermann, Ralph Fischer, Eva Holling, Philip Schulte & Gerald Siegmund (eds.). Lernen, mit den Gespenstern zu leben. Das Gespenstische als Figur, Metapher und Wahrnehmungsdispositiv in Theorie und Ästhetik. Berlin: Neofelis. 87-96. Stranger, Arabella (2019). Bodily wreckage, economic salvage and the middle passage in Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts. 24 (5): 11-20. Swaminathan, Srividhya (2010). Reporting atrocities: A comparison of the Zong and the trial of Captain John Kimber. Slavery & Abolition 31 (4): 483-499. Walvin, James (1992). Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London: HarperCollins. Walvin, James (2019). The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery. Yale: Yale UP. Lynette Goddard (2004). West Indies vs. England in Winsome Pinnock’s migration narratives. Contemporary Theatre Review 14 (4): 23-33. Christoph Singer Department of English Innsbruck University Secrets, leaks and the novel Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two Jago Morrison and Alan Burton This article makes a pioneering effort to explore the relationship between spy fiction, intelligence and the public sphere in Britain after World War Two. The secret British achievements of code-breaking, atomic science and deception in the World War of 1939-45 were outstanding. Similarly, the British contribution to spy fiction in the twentieth century has been seen as exceptional. However, the complex interconnections between the history and fictions of intelligence in the post-war decades have never been closely examined. This is a period during which the British state aggressively sought to suppress memoirs and histories written by wartime secret warriors. Other writers who chose to disclose aspects of their intelligence work through the idiom of spy fiction, however, met with a rather different response. In this period, we argue therefore, the relatively unpoliced spy story emerged as a tolerated form of leakage for wartime secrets. The public reputation of the British security establishment underwent a serious decline in the post-war years, in the wake of successive scandals and defections. British intelligence made a number of attempts to repair its battered image in this era, for example publicising a key case involving a Soviet double agent working for the West. However, fiction remained a key terrain on which an ongoing battle for the reputation of British intelligence continued to be fought out. From the early 1960s a significant new form began to emerge: the ‘New Realism’ of John le Carré. Widely accepted as an authentic image of the British intelligence ‘circus,’ these stories portrayed the British secret state in a strikingly harsh and revealing light. Working directly in response to le Carré, writers like John Bingham sought to counter with an altogether more positive impression of secret service. Again, the spy novel provided a key platform on which struggles over the public image of intelligence were fought out. In this way the essay draws together the history and fictions of the post-war decades AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0004 Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 72 to reveal an intimate correspondence between writers, secret service and the public understanding of intelligence. 1. Introduction From the time of the Second World War, a culture of secrecy intensified around British Intelligence. The press were largely compliant, accepting de facto censorship on matters of national security through the D-Notice system. 1 With few exceptions, histories and memoirs by serving and ex-officers were suppressed. In the wake of spy scandals which threatened permanently to undermine public trust in the agencies, propaganda value was extracted from Soviet defectors where possible. However, almost all attempts to report on the internal culture and modes of operation of British intelligence met with determined resistance. Despite this, we suggest, one cultural form emerged in which disclosures of officially guarded secrets were treated with surprising indulgence: the spy novel. This article examines the emergence of spy fiction as a tolerated form of leakage from the 1940s onwards. In an era of official refusal, we argue, it was often fiction that provided the public with an understanding of British intelligence’s successes, but also influential pictures of its corruption and decay. In this way, fiction becomes a key terrain on which struggles for the reputation of British intelligence are fought out in the aftermath of World War Two. The article examines the key moments in this battle of representation, from early stories of wartime triumphs to the arrival of John le Carré’s New Realism - a scathing first-hand portrait of the British intelligence ‘circus’ that would shape public perceptions for a generation. In the inter-war period, the celebrated cases of two authors who had served in intelligence and who ventured to write on espionage set important precedents on how disclosures were likely to be dealt with. Compton Mackenzie published the espionage novel Extremes Meet in 1928, his wartime work in intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean providing “the material for the novel” (Mackenzie 1967: 129). Meeting with no official sanctions, he drew further on personal experience for a second spy novel The Three Couriers (1930). Although both novels contained significant disclosures, this was lost on reviewers who praised his comic invention at the “expense of realism” (ibid.). When Mackenzie turned to the writing of his wartime memoirs, Greek Memories in 1932, however, he faced a very different response. It was with this third instalment that Mackenzie, this time writing more specifically about his work in wartime MI6, fell foul of the authorities and was successfully prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act (Masters 1987: 66-76). Although he was allowed to “plea bargain” 1 The D-Notice system, established in 1912, was essentially a gentlemanly arrangement through which the press accepted civil service guidance on matters of security. Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 73 (Hooper 1987: 65), and was fined only £100, the book was banned on its first day of publication. Somerset Maugham encountered difficulties even when publishing his fiction. He had made a considerable impact on the genre with his veiled autobiographical stories centred on the agent Ashenden (1928), which had emerged with only faint official resistance. However, a further fourteen stories prepared for publication in the same realistic style were allegedly burnt by Maugham after he had been advised by Winston Churchill that they went too far in disclosing official secrets (Morgan 1980: 206). The relatively lenient treatment of Maugham seems to have been a very unusual one and we should look to Mackenzie as the influential precedent for the spy-authors who would follow. Espionage experience presented as fiction was much more likely to escape the ire of the authorities than any account of sensitive material presented as ‘fact.’ As the Second World War drifted into the Cold War, this difference in treatment appears to have become entrenched. At a time when the authorities were highly reluctant to disclose anything about war-time intelligence, including atomic secrets, code-breaking and deception operations, the novel often seemed to enjoy an unspoken exemption. 2 2. Writers and British intelligence after World War II: Selling (out) the secret etate Upon the fringe of the Deception Section of the Joint Planning Staff there were innumerable people in MI5, MI6, MI9, ISSB, SOE, the FO, MEW, PWE and other bodies who knew a limited amount about Deception operations; but only the seven officers who formed that Section know the whole truth and not one of them has published anything about our activities. The available accounts are a sprinkling of facts among a bulk of speculation. (Dennis Wheatley 1976: 87) The Double-Cross System run by J. C. Masterman and the deceptions on which Dennis Wheatley worked are widely acknowledged to have helped shape the course of World War Two. According to one of the most influential figures in this field, Commander Johnny Bevan, strategic deception had proved itself so vital in the war that, in his words, it “may almost be classed as a new weapon” (quoted in Andrew 2010: 318). 3 In the immediate postwar period, however, most aspects of the intelligence campaign that had helped the Allies to victory remained officially guarded secrets. From a 2 While there was seemingly no direct attempt to suppress a spy story in the post- World War Two decades, there was still vigilance. John le Carré, significantly, recalls the legal adviser to MI5 agonising over “literary defector” Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958) for being too revealing of an agent ’ s operational relations with his embassy. In the event, the novel was allowed to publication (2017: 20-21). 3 For details on wartime deception see Howard (1995) and Holt (2004). Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 74 strategic point of view, MI5 and MI6 had sound reasons for insisting on this - many techniques employed during the war were still in use and a major escalation of the intelligence war with the Soviet Union was looming.However, this policy of silence also had an important downside. Politically, the early 1950s were a difficult time for the security establishment, with a series of high-profile defections and other security scandals working to undermine public trust. Both MI5 and MI6 had made major contributions to the war effort but were almost completely unable to take credit for their successes. In this context, many of the writers who had been involved in wartime espionage argued strongly for the benefits of publishing their stories. Right up until the 1980s, nevertheless, the instinct of both government and senior officials was to deny permission. Most forms of public disclosure, even less sensitive ones, were strongly opposed. When the Head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, sought to publish his memoirs in 1955, for example, he encountered determined resistance. As Art Cockerill says in his biography: He was obliged to submit the manuscript to the Home Office for approval, and almost everything of interest about his MI5 intelligence work was rejected. Later, discussing the censorship with a former colleague, he remarked with some bitterness, “The government tore the guts out of the book and completely emasculated it.” To his family he was equally blunt: “They’ve torn the bloody guts out of it, torn it to shreds.” (Cockerill 1975: 178) The view of the Head of the Civil Service, Edward Bridges, and Head of the Foreign Office, William Strang, was the same: that intelligence officers simply should not write at all. “Anything he writes will in some measure reveal the man, and anything that reveals the man will give an insight into the mind of the official and the climate and ways of thought of his department” (quoted in Harrison 2009: 786). This position remained largely unchanged for more than twenty years, as John Masterman discovered when he repeatedly tried to publish his account of wartime deception in The Double-Cross System (1972). When the book finally emerged with Yale University Press in the United States, he was told by the serving head of MI5, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, that, “I consider your action disgraceful and have no doubt that my opinion would have been shared by many of those with whom you worked during the war” (quoted in Andrew 2010: 317-18). It is true that Masterman’s history of the Double-Cross System had been written immediately after the war for official consumption only. At that time its purpose had been to capture important lessons learned in strategic deception during that conflict. As the public reputation of British Intelligence continued to decline through the 1950s and beyond, however, Masterman began to see a stronger and stronger case for its publication. His first representations in 1954 elicited Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 75 a firm refusal from the Director General of MI5, but from 1961 he began to press again. Writing to the prominent Conservative Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Earl of Swinton, he argued that, “publication now would increase public confidence and help stop the curious from criticising and enquiring too much into the methods of security departments” (quoted in Harrison 2009: 789). To the heads of MI5 and MI6, Roger Hollis and Dick White, he argued even more explicitly that, “publication would create confidence in the value and efficiency of the Security Service, and impress public opinion with the need of allowing it to work ‘anonymously’,” without which the service would be “hamstrung” (quoted in Harrison 2009: 790). As it entered the 1960s, British Intelligence was about to be hit by some of the most damaging scandals in its history, including the Profumo affair and the defection of double-agent Kim Philby. As the British press became steadily more critical, the agencies’ reputational problems deepened. Commentary on Philby in the popular Evening Standard on 2 July 1963 typified this: “the real culprit in his case is the Security Service. Our intelligence service has spent millions and achieved nothing but darkness” (quoted in Harrison 2009: 791). By publicising some of MI5’s striking successes, Masterman hoped to combat such negative assessments and begin to set the record straight. Nevertheless, even after four further years of declining public confidence and bruising coverage, the agency remained steadfastly opposed to his plans to publish. Government records document Hollis’ position in full, as set out to Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend at the Cabinet Office in 1965: While I appreciate Masterman’s concern for the reputation of this Service, I have been and remain strongly opposed to the publication of his booklet. My main reasons are as follows: I believe it is essential to maintain the position that no member or ex-member of the Security Service is permitted to publish material about its activities. If such permission is given to one, I should have great difficulty in justifying the withholding of it from others; and where is the line then to be drawn? I have been fortified in this view by the example of other departments. The booklet deals in detail with techniques which are still employed in intelligence and counter-intelligence work. While the existence of these techniques is perhaps well known, this fact does not, to my mind, justify publishing an account of our view on the value of these techniques, of the extent to which the intelligence community depended on them during the last war and of the lessons we drew from our experiences at that time. I think G.C.H.Q. would also view with disfavour the proposed publication of an account so revealing of their successes. An authorised publication on this subject would undoubtedly encourage editors and writers to believe that a relaxation in the official attitude towards accounts of clandestine operations had taken place. In other words, I fear it Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 76 would add to our difficulties in securing compliance with the existing ‘D’ Notices covering current Security Service activities. As you know this has been a very uphill struggle at times. 4 Twenty-seven years after the end of the war Masterman’s campaign finally bore fruit, at least to the extent that he was allowed to release the book with an overseas publisher without being prosecuted at home. Ultimately, according to Richard Aldrich, it was his contacts and social prestige that forced the matter: Masterman managed to persuade Whitehall to relent on its secrecy because he was the ultimate ‘insider.’ He was a governor of the most eminent public schools and a famous amateur sportsman. As History tutor at Christ Church he had taught a remarkable number of the ‘great and the good.’ Whitehall's senior inhabitants, and indeed the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, had been taught by him at Oxford. Remarkably, his former students were reluctant to argue, regarding themselves as inferior in rank. (Aldrich 2004: 931-2) Later, as Aldrich records, Douglas-Home recalled to historian Michael Howard: Let me tell you an extraordinary thing about J. C. [Masterman] […] You won't believe this, but when I was Foreign Secretary they tried to make me lock him up. They actually tried to make me lock him up. It was that book of his. Both MI5 and MI6 were determined to stop his publishing it. MI5 pushed it up to the Home Secretary, and he pushed it over to me. I squashed it pretty quickly, I can tell you. Lock up the best amateur spin bowler in England? They must have been out of their minds. (Aldrich 2004: 931-2) 5 Masterman’s long battle to publish invites a revealing comparison to the experience of Sir Alfred Duff Cooper with his novel Operation Heartbreak (1950), which drew clear inspiration from an actual wartime deception operation. The two texts have an important difference, though: Cooper’s text uses the idiom of fiction, while Masterman’s is a work of history. However, they also have a key similarity: both reveal significant official secrets about the conduct of deception in World War Two. While, as we have seen, Percy Sillitoe met with a united front of resistance and a rigorous process of censorship when trying to publish his (much less sensitive) memoirs two years later, Cooper’s diary reveals that in late 1950 when publishing Operation Heartbreak, only “[f]aint resistance was offered by certain branches of the secret service, but I was able to overcome them” (quoted in Norwich 4 Roger Hollis, Letter to Burke Trend. Plans to publish intelligence related works by Sir John Cecil Masterman and Sir Peter Fleming, 4/ 1/ 1965 (CAB 301/ 422). 5 For an outline of the sequence of events leading to publication of The Double-Cross System, see Moran (2013c: 264-273). Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 77 2005: 481). Emerging only five years after the end of the war, the publication of Operation Heartbreak therefore marks an important milestone in the history of intelligence leakage after World War Two. While the writing of memoirs remained strongly discouraged and direct disclosure actively opposed, fiction was beginning to emerge as a medium through which the operation of Britain’s secret state could be revealed, with relative impunity for the writer. In Operation Heartbreak Cooper’s revelations concern Operation Mincemeat, the now-famous deception operation to cover the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The latter was strategically important in allowing the Allies to establish control over the central Mediterranean and formed a prelude to the fall of Mussolini, so Mincemeat can be reasonably regarded as one of the most important deception operations in the war. Its aim was to deceive the German High Command into believing that the Allies intended to launch an attack on Greece, so that they would draw their defences away from the real target, Sicily. This was achieved by arranging for the body of a (fictional) British officer to be discovered off the Spanish coast, bearing (fake) top secret documents purporting to lay out Allied battle plans. In reality, the body was that of a rough sleeper Glyndwr Michael, who had died in January 1943 having eaten rat poison. He was dressed in the uniform of an officer of the Royal Marines and, together with a briefcase containing the faked top-secret documents, despatched by a British submarine just off the Spanish coast where, as planned, the body was discovered and turned over to authorities who informed the German Abwehr. In Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak, a deception operation is mounted in the Mediterranean along exactly the same lines: A military operation of immense magnitude is in course of preparation. That is a fact of which the enemy are probably aware. Its success must depend largely upon the enemy's ignorance of when and where it will be launched. Every security precaution has been taken to prevent that knowledge from reaching him […] It is our business to provide him, through sources which will carry conviction of their reliability, with information that is false. In a few days from now, Colonel Osborne, the dead body of a British officer will be washed ashore, on the coast of a neutral country, whose relations with the enemy are not quite so neutral as we might wish them to be. It will be found that he is carrying in a packet that is perfectly waterproof, which will be firmly strapped to his chest, under his jacket, documents of a highly confidential character - documents of such vital importance to the conduct of the war that no one will wonder that they should have been entrusted to a special mission and a special messenger. These documents, including a private letter from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff to the General Officer Commanding North Africa, although couched in the most, apparently, guarded language, will yet make perfectly plain to an intelligent reader exactly what the Allies are intending to do. (Cooper 1973: 141-2) Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 78 In Cooper’s text, as in the actual deception, the body is dropped off the Spanish coast bearing a trove of secret documents to be found by enemy intelligence. In the real operation, the dead man was styled as ‘Major William Martin.’ In Cooper’s novel he is, almost identically, ‘Major Willy Maryngton.’ In Operation Mincemeat, it was decided that Martin should be made as believable as possible on a personal level. A photograph of a girl in a swimsuit purporting to be his fiancée and a suitably penned love letter were supplied by MI5 secretaries to help establish his character. Even in these small details, Cooper’s novel follows suit almost exactly. Operation Heartbreak may have been published in the form of a novel, but there is no doubt that it discloses both the substance and many of the details of an important wartime intelligence operation. The impunity with which Cooper was able to make this classified information public, then, is certainly significant. After 1945, Operation Mincemeat remained top secret, like other key aspects of wartime intelligence including the successful code-breaking activities at Bletchley Park. A senior Conservative politician, Cooper had been head of the Security Executive at the time it had taken place and as such had detailed oversight of it. According to the official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, Mincemeat’s success impressed Cooper profoundly, prompting him to brief Winston Churchill for the first time on the range of deception operations currently being carried out by British intelligence. Churchill’s “evident fascination” (Andrew 2010: 284), prompted MI5 to begin preparing a monthly report on current operations for him from that time. These reports substantially upgraded the Prime Minister’s appreciation of the contribution deception could make to the war effort, laying the groundwork for the “bodyguard of lies” (Brown 2002: 10) created to cover the Normandy landings fourteen months later. Seen in this context, Cooper’s decision to brief Churchill on Operation Mincemeat can be argued to have had some importance within the larger history of the war. Certainly, he can have been in no doubt whatsoever that Mincemeat was a classified operation, protected under the British Official Secrets Act. All the more surprising, then, is the brazen way in which he was willing to disclose its major details in his novel. As a high-ranking member of the British establishment, why did he choose to do so? If a motive for leaking the details of operation Mincemeat can be gleaned from Cooper’s diaries, it was not the desire to glorify the achievements of wartime intelligence or any other higher purpose, but simply financial. On 28 December 1949, Cooper wrote of concerns over money and the way his writing helped to keep his family afloat. “My Sergeant Shakespeare appeared at the end of November. I have written 13 articles this year, 9 of them for the Daily Mail at £200 each, and I got a new cinema job which is worth 3,000,000 francs a year, but my contract runs only until the end of 1950 […] it is rather alarming to find I have spent over £4,000. I have no idea Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 79 how much Diana has spent, she keeps no account” (Norwich 2005: 475). Cooper clearly did not much enjoy writing the book, commenting: “I doubt whether fiction is my affair” and certainly worried that the book might “probably, prove a complete failure” (Norwich 2005: 475-6). When Operation Heartbreak achieved strong sales on its release, however, he felt that his efforts were justified. “Nearly 30,000 copies were sold by Christmas. I am hoping it will do as well in America. I am selling the film rights there for 40,000 dollars” (Norwich 2005: 481). 6 That financial rather than political motives drove the publication of Operation Heartbreak also helps to explain an important difference between Cooper’s narrative and its historical model, Operation Mincemeat. One key area where Cooper does make substantial changes is in the characterisation of the operation’s central figure. Glyndwr Michael, whose dead body was used in 1943, was destitute and homeless, the son of a father terminally affected by syphilis who had eventually died of pneumonia in 1925. For the purposes of the operation, he was given a very different persona - that of officer William Martin, an up-and-coming member of the Royal Marines. In Operation Heartbreak, is Cooper’s protagonist modelled on Glyndwr Michael or William Martin? In effect, we would argue that Willy Maryngton effectively hybridises these two figures, as an honourable man and a soldier who, nevertheless, leads a lonely and unfulfilled life. Cooper decides against rat poisoning for his hero, instead allotting him the fate of Glyndwr Michael’s father, death from pneumonia. Like Martin, Willy’s love life is central to his characterisation, but like Michael, he is repeatedly beleaguered by setbacks. Importantly, though, these are filtered through a mood of heroic melancholy, building towards the historic role he will play after his death. Glyndwr Michael himself evidently enjoyed few life chances: in composing his novel, Cooper clearly shies away from reproducing the conditions of abject privation he endured. In Operation Heartbreak, Willy certainly finds that key opportunities elude him, but the problems he faces are matters of duty and the heart rather than bare subsistence. “It seemed to be his fate, he sometimes thought, to be a soldier who never went to war and a lover who never lay with his mistress” (Cooper 1973: 90). In the novel’s title, substituting the word ‘mincemeat’ for ‘heartbreak,’ the author underlines these dynamics. In a gesture towards Michael’s desolate circumstances, Cooper makes him homeless towards the end of the novel when his house is destroyed in the Blitz. Again, however, this situation is given a romantic twist when he is taken in by the girl he loves and she at last allows him into her bed. If his life has been lonely and his patriotic dreams unfulfilled, Maryngton is redeemed at the climax of Cooper’s novel by the service he performs after his death. At last - albeit posthumously - he is able to play a pivotal part in the progress of the war, fulfilling all his heroic ambitions. Clearly, 6 In the event, there was no Hollywood film. Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 80 once again, this treatment stands in contrast to that of Glyndwr Michael, who seems to have been regarded as worthless by the intelligence officers running the operation. As Ben Macintyre observes, Ewen Montagu himself wrote of Michael as “a ne’er do well, and his relatives were not much better […] the actual person did nothing for anyone ever - only his body did good after he was dead” (quoted in Macintyre 2010: 55). One effect of the romantic and patriotic filter through which Cooper casts Willy’s narrative is to foreclose the ethical questions implicit in this dismissive attitude towards Michael, including the use of his body without family permission. It also allows him to avoid themes of destitution and social exclusion which Michael’s actual story would inevitably have required him to explore. Operation Heartbreak would certainly have made more of a challenging read - perhaps less suited to a mass-market paperback - had it attempted to do so. Cooper, however, seems to have been as careless about authenticity to his subject matter as he was about disclosing classified details of a major wartime operation. The evidence suggests that his concern was with money, and little more. In a significant irony, the fact that Operation Heartbreak disclosed key details of a classified wartime operation was not initially recognised by the British press. The Observer praised Cooper’s inventiveness in imagining how a dead body might be used in a deception operation, a device “so well used that you can forget its improbability” (12 November 1950). The Daily Telegraph was similarly impressed with the appearance of truthfulness Cooper had managed to create in a text which “is in fact a work of fiction” (17 November 1950). From a historical perspective, however, Operation Heartbreak would prove to be an important milestone in intelligence leakage after World War Two. As we have already suggested, it was certainly not the first work of fiction to include significant disclosures about the modes of operation of British intelligence. However, it did help to reinforce the status of the novel as a form in which leakage of classified information was often officially indulged. Before the beginning of the war, both John Masterman and Dennis Wheatley had established themselves as successful novelists: both would avail themselves of this permissive attitude towards leakage in the novel during the 1950s. Each of them had written historical accounts of their wartime intelligence work immediately after the conflict and each received firm discouragement when they moved to publish. As we have seen, despite Masterman’s influential position and high political contacts he was not able to do so for more than a quarter of a century. Wheatley’s historical account The Deception Planners did not see the light of day for even longer, finally emerging in 1980 after the author’s death. In the meantime, both Wheatley and Masterman published novels in which sensitive aspects of their wartime experiences were incorporated. Significantly, both Wheatley’s novel Traitors’ Gate (1958) and Masterman’s The Case of the Four Friends (1957) were allowed to proceed to publication unhindered. Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 81 Traitors’ Gate is a light-hearted spy thriller featuring Wheatley’s established hero Gregory Sallust. As with its forerunners in the Sallust series, it combines a number of real historical elements with a generous dose of light-hearted escapism. Among the former elements there is no doubt that Wheatley draws directly on his experience in wartime intelligence and takes liberties with classified material. Sallust is posted - just as Wheatley was - to a division within the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet, under a commander named ‘Johnny’ who is clearly a portrayal of the real Deception Controller, Johnny Bevan. In the novel Flight Officer Sallust - like Flight Office Wheatley - works with a small team of deception specialists who formulate plans to cover major offensives such as Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. Like Wheatley, he also becomes involved with MI5’s plan to cover the Normandy landings, a grand deception to disguise the Allies’ real target on D-Day. As we have seen, a key concern of officials at this time was that revelations of any kind by those involved in intelligence operations might reveal the culture and ways of thinking of their organisation. In Wheatley’s novel, several scenes cut directly across this policy, depicting the culture and organisation of an intelligence outfit which, although it is not named as such, is plainly the London Controlling Section. Both the existence of the LCS and its wartime activities remained classified at the time the novel was published. Similarly, while Wheatley does not name the Double-Cross System, his novel freely discloses the nature of its work including its central achievement, control of the entire Nazi espionage network in Britain. In chapter twenty-one of Traitors’ Gate, for example, Sallust consults with a colleague in deception planning: I’m on pretty good terms with one or two people in M.I.5 , and they tell me that they have the Nazi spy system taped. If one is parachuted in or lands from a Uboat, they can nab him within twenty-four hours. So all the leaks that take place are through the neutral Embassies and Legations … and they get the stuff out in the Embassy bags. (Wheatley 1961: 307-9) Would the novel have been less engaging as a thriller if it did not include such disclosures? Probably not, we would argue. The fact that it was able to do so with apparent impunity for its author, however, is again significant. 7 In Masterman’s The Case of the Four Friends, details of wartime intelligence are incorporated into the back-story of one of the central characters, Toby Bannister. During the war, we learn, he worked as a double agent for 7 Following Traitor’s Gate, Wheatley appeared emboldened enough to publish some of the ‘War Papers’ he had been invited to prepare in the first year of the war. Stranger than Fiction (1959) also revealed some aspects of the writer’s involvement in wartime deception, but notably refrained from disclosing anything about the big deception operations centred on double-cross or D-Day. Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 82 the British out of Lisbon, one of the key hubs through which deception and counter-intelligence were indeed conducted during World War Two. In the novel, we discover how double agents are run through the city, the modes of their interactions with German intelligence and how they could be used to spread disinformation to the enemy. Clearly, Masterman’s wartime experience as chair of the XX committee gave him an unprecedented understanding of these matters. What is less clear, however, is why they needed to be incorporated into a murder mystery set in Oxford and around a London law firm. While being energetically suppressed as a historian of wartime intelligence, Masterman (like Wheatley) seems to have recognised that in relation to the novel, a culture of surprising permissiveness could be enjoyed. Fiction, in other words, was becoming established as a tolerated form of leakage. One notable exception, a historical text which did find its way to publication after the war, was Ewen Montagu’s account of Operation Mincemeat The Man Who Never Was (1953). Unlike its fore-runner Operation Heartbreak, Montagu’s text explicitly presents itself as a true, first-hand account and goes so far as to reproduce a range of classified documents, including operational orders, letters from senior commanders, the procedures adopted by the submarine which dispatched Michael’s body and some of the faked documents which accompanied it. Given the refusals meted out to Masterman and others, on the surface it seems extraordinary that such a text was allowed to be published. The circumstances surrounding The Man Who Never Was themselves therefore reveal something about the treatment of intelligence disclosures in this period. Three years earlier, according to Richard Aldrich, one of the main ways in which Duff Cooper had silenced official opposition to Operation Heartbreak was by claiming that his knowledge of Operation Mincemeat had come from Winston Churchill himself. Since “no one was going to prosecute Churchill or his circle under the Official Secrets Act” (Aldrich, 2004: 929), Cooper therefore enjoyed an exemption from official sanction over the novel. Actually, as we have already seen, it was Cooper who had briefed the Prime Minister back in 1943. In practice, however, Cooper’s senior social and political position meant that he could behave as if he was above the law, Aldrich argues. Notably for our argument here, however, it was also Cooper’s untouchability which opened a path to publication for Montagu: In the preface to his account, Montagu gives the impression that the authorities wanted him to write the book to correct previous accounts, a veiled reference to Duff Cooper. But the authorities did not want further material in the public domain. In reality, Montagu fought a bitter struggle in order to publish by pressing the Attorney General to prosecute Duff Cooper. Cooper had been warned not to publish, he complained, but had “flouted these objections” and published, “relying on his eminent position as protection against prosecution.” While Duff Cooper enjoyed the pleasure and profit of publishing, Montagu was specifically Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 83 ordered to deny all knowledge, in response to frequent newspaper enquiries. By January 1951, as Montagu explained to a friend, he was busy “putting on pressure that they should either allow me to publish or prosecute Duff Cooper.…” “I have been slogging away hard,” he added. By March 1951, he had forced “their capitulation” and was at last allowed to publish. (Aldrich, 2004: 930) As in Cooper’s case, the writing of Montagu’s book seems to have been motivated less by the desire to glorify British intelligence than from a more basic desire to secure financial gain for himself. In The Man Who Never Was Montagu’s account is certainly self-aggrandising, minimising the roles of many others who, in reality, helped formulate and operationalise the Mincemeat deception. After publication, Aldrich writes, he “immediately contacted Life magazine “who are the best payers of this sort of thing.” They had offered him between $2,500 and $3,000, but Montagu suspected that this was their starting price and was “suggesting more.” He was also looking for serialisation in the Sunday Express and the possibility of films” (Aldrich, 2004: 930). In 1956, his efforts bore fruit when Twentieth Century Fox released a major film version of The Man Who Never Was with Academy Award nominee Clifton Webb starring in the central role, as Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu. 3. Scandals and defections: Managing the public perception of intelligence and security It is difficult not to adopt a tone of journalistic hysteria when writing of the spy ‘scandals’ and ‘revelations’ of the past thirty years which have provided so much sensational newspaper copy. (Barley 1986: 84) Public understanding and awareness of intelligence and security was transformed following the war. While the authorities and intelligence community vainly sought to preserve their traditional stance of secrecy and silence regarding security matters, the vastly changing landscape of espionage in the post-World War Two period meant that details of spy trials, high-profile cases of treachery, and various breaches of security found their way to the public. Principal among the new sources of information were several official enquiries conducted into Soviet espionage, first in Canada, then in the United States and Australia. The Report of the Royal Commission into the Canadian spy case published in 1946, gave extraordinary insight across its 733 pages into the extent and operations of a Soviet spy network rooting out military and political secrets. Several US American reports, including Soviet Atomic Espionage (1951), The Shameful Years: Thirty Years of Soviet Espionage in the United States (1952) and Expos é of Soviet Espionage (1960), were representative of the mounting hysteria in that country to the ‘Red Menace.’ In 1955 the Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage, at 483 Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 84 pages, recounted in detail the Soviet espionage effort in Australia. While not strictly intended for the general public, such reports were pounced on by reporters, and extensive details and widespread commentary appeared in the press. Popular accounts of the various spy cases appeared, drew heavily on the official reports, and further spread awareness of espionage matters. Early examples in Britain included The Red Spider Web: The Story of Russian Spying in Canada (Bernard Newman 1947), The Soviet Spy System (John Baker White 1948), Soviet Atomic Spies (Bernard Newman 1952), The Atom Spies (Oliver Pilat 1954) and The Spy Web (Francis Noel-Baker 1954). Journalistic interest in intelligence and security reached a new height in the saga of the ‘missing diplomats,’ which, from the spring of 1951, unfolded before an enraptured British public. The mystery followed intriguingly close on the heels of Bruno Pontecorvo, the ‘missing atomic scientist,’ and it was widely suspected that Burgess and Maclean, senior officials at the Foreign Office who had served important liaison roles with the Americans, and Pontecorvo of Harwell, the government’s atomic establishment, had defected to Soviet Russia. This fact would only be confirmed some years later, and the tight-lipped attitude of the authorities, dubbed the “Four Years’ Silence” by a frustrated press, added to the fervent speculation of press and public (Seaman & Mather 1955: 18). Historian Anthony Glees has seen in the case of the ‘missing diplomats,’ “the making of a national obsession” and a revelation that “horrified an innocent nation” (1987: 1, 7). The populist Daily Express offered on two separate occasions (June 1951 and April 1953) a reward of £1000 for information which would clear up the mystery, and this was increased to £10,000 by the rival Daily Mail in September 1953 (Seaman & Mather 1955: 22, 87). The Government’s belated attempt to smooth over the crisis with the Report Concerning the Disappearance of Two Former Foreign Office Officials of 23 September 1955 only succeeded in adding fuel to the fire and led, in the words of the Daily Express, to a “National Uproar” (quoted in Seaman & Mather 1955: 141; see also Purdy & Sutherland 1963: 34-44). Critics were stung into action by what they considered a farcical handling of security, by what was felt to be evasive tactics, even deceit by the Foreign Office, and by unwarranted denouncement and vilification of media reporting over the scandal. There inevitably followed accusations of a hopelessly incompetent Security Service, of Establishment cover-up, and of ‘special protection’ afforded its privileged sons. The case of Burgess and Maclean marked the beginnings of a sustained period from the 1950s through the 1980s in which press and public hung on every twist and turn of a seemingly never-ending sequence of security disasters and intelligence cock-ups. The accumulation of lapses and blunders, and persistent questioning from newspapers and MPs, led to a series of enquiries in which the British authorities sought to exonerate officials and calm disquiet by proposing a tightening of procedures. The Romer Report (1961) came in the wake of the Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 85 Portland spy case, The Radcliffe Report (1962) followed on the heels of double agent George Blake, The Report into the Vassall Case (1962) inquired into the spy at the Admiralty, and the best-selling Lord Denning’s Report (1963) investigated the humiliating Profumo scandal in which the Minister of War was exposed in a love triangle with a Soviet naval attaché. 8 The British press and its public were treated to an unprecedented insight into the activities of Soviet intelligence and British counter-intelligence, and this was reinforced by popular accounts of recent treachery such as John Bulloch and Henry Miller’s Spy Ring: The Full Story of the Naval Secrets Case (1961) and E.H. Cookridge’s Traitor Betrayed: The True Story of George Blake (1962). The occasional defector, minor spy case, and intelligence fiasco such as the ‘missing frogman’ affair of 1956, 9 kept journalists’ pens active and the mounting national obsession was kept well-stoked. The critical nature of much of the press coverage of security matters, the various popular accounts of treachery, and occasional awkward questions in Parliament led a reluctant intelligence service into attempts to improve its public perception. In essence secretive and silent, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and MI5 were forced onto the defensive. The public image of intelligence and security, they began to realise, was something that needed to be managed. This situation mirrored that in America, where, in face of the disastrous misadventures of the U2 overflights of Russia and a failed coup in Cuba, the Central Intelligence Agency had been publicly depicted as “a monster on the rampage” (de Gramont 1962: 13). 10 Facing a “serious image and credibility problem” and under attack, “a beleaguered CIA went on a charm offensive” (Moran 2013a: 337, 338; Willmetts 2015a, 2015b). In Britain, the late 1940s and ‘50s saw a handful of tentative efforts to manage the image of, and deflect criticism from, the intelligence services. Lieutenant Colonel Grigori Aleksandrovich Tokaev, the first senior Soviet official to defect to the British, was triumphantly presented to the world’s press in London at a tumultuous meeting in 1948 (The Times and Daily Telegraph, 7 September 1948). With assistance from MI5, Alexander Foote, a disillusioned former agent of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), published his story as Handbook for Spies (West 1993: 11). In an effort to offer a more balanced account and possibly help mend Anglo- 8 Indicative of the exceptional nature of press interest, the tribunal appointed to inquire into the Vassall case consulted some 250 separate press articles which had appeared following the exposure of the spy: 4. 9 Aging wartime hero Commander Crabb was used as a diver in a misguided operation mounted by MI6 to inspect two Soviet cruisers on a friendly visit to Britain. Crabb inexplicably went missing, the Soviets made much of the intrusion, and a headless, handless corpse, thought to be the commander’s, surfaced in the waters a year later. 10 Despite official American denials, spy plane overflights of Russia were confirmed when a high altitude U2 was downed by Soviet air defences in May 1960 and the authorities were able to mount a humiliating show trial of its pilot Gary Powers. Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 86 American relations in the face of perceived British incompetence and perfidy, Alan Moorhead was given MI5 support to publish The Traitors: The Double Life of Fuchs, Pontecorvo and Nunn May (Goodman 2005: 145). A prominent example of authority relaxing its vigilance came in the early 1960s, a difficult period for the intelligence community. In March 1961, the trial of the Portland Spies was held in open court which allowed unfettered access to the press. A commentator at the time explained the unusual decision in terms of a response to Russia’s indignant stance to the West’s spying in the recent U2 incident, the British authorities deciding “to make full use of this unexpected propaganda gift” and to publicise the hypocrisy of the Soviets who were clearly seeking out military secrets themselves (Bulloch & Miller 1961: 10). The furore that was whipped up by the scandal of the ‘missing diplomats,’ and the seeming negligence and incompetence surrounding the Portland, Blake, Vassall and Profumo scandals of the early 1960s, drew the intelligence and security services into ever more urgent need to counter their damaged image. In her widely read study into treachery published in 1964, Dame Rebecca West wrote of the “quickening march past of spies” in these years, thus adding her own elegant yet cutting criticisms of officialdom and the intelligence and security establishment to the general outcry (1964: 294). A further, literary dimension was brought to Cold War propaganda in the form of spy memoirs exposing Soviet machinations. Such publications offered the opportunity to trump up recent triumphs, discredit the enemy, and sow seeds of doubt among opposition intelligence organisations. Under mounting pressure, both the CIA and British Intelligence were dealt a perfect opportunity in the Oleg Penkovsky case of the early 1960s to stem the tide of criticism and gain some much-needed credibility, as well as deal the Soviets a wounding blow. In a jointly-mounted operation, the Red Army colonel provided extensive military, political and technical information to the West, which, among other things, enabled President Kennedy to call the bluff of Premier Khrushchev over the siting of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The unprecedented decision was taken to exploit this extraordinary espionage coup by publishing an edited version of Penkovsky’s notes and jottings as The Penkovsky Papers (1965, extracts serialised in the Washington Post and London Observer), and by allowing Greville Wynne, the British businessman who acted as courier on the operation and who had served 18 harrowing months in a Soviet gaol, to give a serialised account of his experiences in the Sunday Telegraph, to promote The Penkovsky Papers through news conferences in America (see for example Daily News (Chicago) 11 November 1965), and to publish his adventures as The Man from Moscow (1967). Asked why he was free to publish his story, Wynne dutifully claimed his book to be a ground-breaking account of a peace-time operation and that it was “about time we blew our trumpet” (Guardian, 8 September 1967). Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 87 The Russian counter to these initiatives was to publish accounts of its own recent espionage successes in the West. The first of these was Spy. Twenty Years in Soviet Secret Service (1965), the memoirs of Gordon Lonsdale (Konon Trofimovich Molody), the head of the Portland Spy Ring. In a highly public spy swap, Wynne literally rubbed shoulders with Lonsdale during an exchange in 1964. Wynne judged the publication of Lonsdale’s Spy to be an “extraordinary turnaround in Soviet policy against discussing Moscow’s intelligence activities,” an action no doubt provoked “by word that The Penkovsky Papers would be published” (Washington Post and Times Herald, 12 November 1965). Later in the decade, the KGB staged its biggest publishing coup with Kim Philby’s My Silent War (1968), his account of serving as a traitor within British Intelligence. There was considerable press interest in all of this, the Guardian’s communism expert Victor Zora sensing a “new school of literature that combines a spy’s adventures with psychological warfare, intelligence intrigues with political propaganda, and publishing with money-making” (22 October 1965); and the Observer declaring an “East-West war of spy books” (10 September 1967), and heralding in a new phase of the ‘spy story’, one where “the memoirs of an agent may prove as useful to Intelligence as a microfilm” (10 September 1967). 4. Writers, spy fiction and the image of British intelligence The perfect spy-story is one that you can not only swallow but also accept as being the way things really do happen. (Maurice Richardson, review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Observer, 15 September 1963) By the early 1960s, then, the reputation of British intelligence was being fought over throughout the media at home and abroad. Once again, we would argue, fiction proved to be a key idiom within these struggles. The sometimes symbiotic relationship between espionage fact and spy fiction has been acknowledged by historians like Christopher Moran, who has demonstrated how the leading spy novelist Ian Fleming promoted the image of the CIA in his James Bond novels (2013b). Like other national intelligence agencies, the CIA pursued a policy of anonymity, secrecy and silence. Through the popular representations of Fleming, Moran argues however, the CIA was given a “public identity,” and through his writings “millions of people learned about the CIA for the first time” (Moran 2013b: 128). Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 88 The public image of MI6 undoubtedly received a boost through the Bond novels and the films that followed them. Overall, however, the circumstances in Britain were a little more complex. 11 If Bond provided a strongly affirmative image of British intelligence, the more disturbing aspects of post-war developments in British security were reflected in a cycle of stories which could be described as ‘novels of treachery.’ The first of these was Nigel Balchin’s A Sort of Traitors (1949), wherein scientists seek to circumvent the publishing ban put on their secret work, and which appeared in the wake of the exposure of the first atom spy Alan Nunn May and his conviction in May of 1946. The cycle included John Pudney’s The Net (1952), which dealt with a rogue security officer who tries to spirit a scientist behind the Iron Curtain, and Hugh McLeave’s The Steel Balloon (1964), which featured a conspiracy of communist scientists attempting sabotage at British atomic establishments. Literary critic Clive Bloom has seen the Cold War spy thriller as being marked by its treatment of the conditions governing traitorous behaviour. The genre type and characteristically paranoid style were encapsulated, he suggests, in Robert Harling’s The Enormous Shadow (1955), in which a secretly communist Labour politician cultivates a Harwell scientist for defection. Such novels, distinct from the previous generation of adventurous spy stories, make an appeal to the ‘real’ through an invocation of history. This is achieved through reference to real-life traitors in the stories. In The Enormous Shadow Harling has the investigator refer to the conspiracy he is facing as a “Pontecorvo-Nunn May-Burgess-Maclean story all rolled in one”; the compounded litany of actual traitors, according to Bloom, serving as a “talisman of realism” (Bloom 1990: 9). 12 Fiction scrutinising the darker side of British intelligence took on a new intensity in the early 1960s with the appearance of the espionage novels of John le Carré. In most cases, these were sophisticated variants on the ‘novel of treachery,’ Call for the Dead (1961) centring on suspected betrayal by an official in the Foreign Office, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) treating a false defector from British Intelligence, and A Small Town in Germany (1968) involving a man-hunt for a suspected traitor who has absconded with classified files from the British Embassy in Bonn. In the inaugural novel, le Carré invokes the sense of realism and authenticity typical of the cycle of novels of treachery, making reference for example to the actual treachery of scientist Klaus Fuchs and diplomat Donald Maclean. 11 In his review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Maurice Richardson found le Carr é ’ s spy boss Control “much less of a joke than James Bond’s M” (Observer, 15 September 1963). 12 Harling was a friend and wartime associate of Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence, and therefore another writer of spy fiction who had some intelligence experience. Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 89 Through making the key suspect in the story an official in the Foreign Service, the author clearly intends a telling comparison with the historical traitor. The breakthrough novel for le Carré was the phenomenally successful The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which the reviewer at the Guardian significantly described as a “spy story documentary” (11 October 1963). This was a publication which even the security agencies took seriously, with a book reader at the American Federal Bureau of Investigation alerting the Soviet section of the organisation to its appearance and potential significance (Burton n.d.). One of the most widely commented on aspects of le Carré’s story was its depiction of a cynical and self-serving intelligence service, and one that, most disturbingly, was in moral and operational equivalence with its totalitarian counterparts. The mystique established for British Intelligence in the period before the Second World War, one robustly promoted in the contemporary spy literature, began to disintegrate. Le Carré’s disgruntled agent Leamas, callously treated by his own service, could now bitterly describe the business of spying, in a famous passage in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, as “a squalid profession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives” (le Carré 1964a: 246). In a revealing article published in The Telegraph, le Carré admitted to his patient examination of the literature of spying during preparation of the groundbreaking novel. For the author, “the extraordinary variety of espionage shook down into a kind of nightmare.” It seemed that it was a world in which “men betray one another by instinct and spies are drab, ordinary creatures who take to betrayal as they might have taken to shoplifting.” Weaving an imaginative thread out of the recent public history of espionage, le Carré constructed a pessimistic image of Intelligence that was to prove profoundly influential. “It seems to be a world where the corrupters are corrupted”; he concluded, “one visualises an anarchy of treason” (1964b). Reviewers readily acknowledged the realism and downbeat quality of the narrative. For The New York Times this was most apparent in its emphasis on “the ruthlessness, treachery and deliberate frightfulness of contemporary espionage,” in contrast to the fanciful “glamour, sex, impudent daring and masterful heroics” exemplified by the rival James Bond stories. Not for the last time, and a significant point in the appreciation of a sense of realism, the reviewer speculated on whether the author with his thoroughgoing respect for practical details had some previous experience in intelligence (10 January 1964). 13 Other writers constructed a more sympathetic image for the intelligence and security services. James Barlow’s The Hour of Maximum Danger, a further ‘novel of treachery,’ the historical referents in this case being Fuchs, Pontecorvo, Blake and Lonsdale, presents a deliberate riposte to le Carré’s 13 For the most recent investigation of realism in le Carré, see Willmetts (2022). Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 90 spy fiction. First published in 1962, the story is comparable in its literary accomplishment, in its portrayal of a run-down urban national landscape, and in its Hoggartian distaste for ‘massification’ and the shiny insubstantiality of consumer society. 14 Barlow’s story carefully details the establishment of a Soviet spy ring in London, aimed at ensnaring Antonov, a defected Russian rocket scientist and bringing him back into the fold. 15 In a signed statement presented on the jacket of the paperback edition of the novel, Barlow acknowledges his debt to the recent public history of espionage, explaining that he made “detailed study of the known Communist techniques of infiltration and espionage” in preparing the story, and there are clear borrowings in the story from The Report of the Royal Commission of Canada, for example. In his painstaking re-creation, though, and in obvious contrast to le Carré, he aimed for a sympathetic portrayal of Intelligence, wanting “to show how infinitely difficult in a democracy is the work of the security forces” (Barlow 1963). The writer’s intention is achieved through the characterisation of the security officer Sam Bellamy, conscientious, dedicated, without noticeable disillusion, and broadly in harmony with his counter-intelligence service. There is no question that he will resign in disgust as does George Smiley in le Carré’s Call for the Dead. John Bingham’s The Double Agent (1966), another ‘novel of treachery,’ offers the most revealing comparison with le Carré. Unknown to the reading public at the time, Bingham was a serving officer with MI5 and something of a mentor figure for David Cornwell (le Carré) when he worked there in the late 1950s. Bingham, an established writer of crime fiction, encouraged Cornwell to emulate him, helped get the younger man taken on at his publishers Gollancz, served as one of the principal models for le Carré’s spymaster George Smiley, and possibly provided the pen name under which Cornwell would publish, the young author adopting his first name and adding le Carré (Square), this being the nickname he ascribed to the older man (Sisman 2015: 200-213; Jago 2013: 186). The Double Agent was Bingham’s first spy story, and this time he was encouraged to follow in the footsteps of Cornwell after the huge success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. However, his aim was wholly different, understandably so given the “fundamental differences of ideology” between the two writers (Jago 2013: 188). The Double Agent was clearly constructed to counter the critical image of British Intelligence found in le Carré’s novels. One way to achieve this was to base the story on the successful Penkovsky-Wynne operation, which was unfolding at the time of 14 Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy was published in 1957 and quickly established itself as an influential critique of popular culture. It is in the author’s oft-mentioned distaste for Ian Fleming and his agent James Bond that le Carr é ’s correspondence with Hoggart is most evident. 15 Antonov was likely based on the Soviet aeronautical scientist G.A. Tokaev who defected to the British from East Germany in 1948 and published his story as Comrade X (1956). Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 91 the writing of the novel. Bingham similarly has an English businessman serve as a ‘courier-agent’ for British Intelligence, who is snatched by the Soviets in Vienna after unexpectedly flying over Budapest (Wynne was taken in the Hungarian capital), and flown to Moscow for interrogation. For those readers who needed a reminder, the Penkovsky case is referred to in the story and serves as the main historical referent for the unfolding action. In The Double Agent, Bingham acknowledges the spy stories of le Carré before countering their overt cynicism with regard to the intelligence hierarchy. His intentions are laid out in a ‘Foreword,’ unusually affixed to the novel, where he makes explicit his concern with image-making and the intelligence community. Bingham’s biographer refers to this as a “broadside against critics of the intelligence services” (Jago 2013: 191). “There are currently two schools of thought about Intelligence services” Bingham asserts in the ‘Foreword’ (1970: 5). The first school, an obvious if unstated reference to le Carré, “is convinced that they are staffed by murderous, powerful, double-crossing cynics.” The second school refers to the image prevalent in parts of the press, somewhat jaded after reporting endless treachery and bungling, where the impression is given that “the taxpayer is supporting a collection of bumbling, broken-down lay-abouts.” Dismissing these images as false, Bingham refers readers to factual accounts such as (revealingly) The Penkovsky Papers, and, in an explicit endorsement of authority, to official reports, “where the size and complexity of the struggle involved” can be more properly assessed. The reader is thus, from the outset, primed to resist the kind of representations evident in both le Carré and in the popular press, and to be receptive to a “more balanced” portrayal of intelligence (Bingham 1970: 5). In a famous passage in the novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the spymaster Control muses on the ethics of modern espionage. “I would say that since the war, our methods - ours and those of the opposition - have become much the same” he asserts. “I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now? ” (le Carré 1964a: 24). This is seemingly sufficient justification for sending the agent Leamas on a dangerous mission into East Germany, erroneously briefed, likely to face hard interrogation, perhaps torture and even death. The aim of the mission, the precise opposite of what Leamas believes, is the saving of Mundt, the head of counter-intelligence in the Abteilung, a vicious former Nazi, Jew-hater, but crucially London’s man. In a high stakes game, Leamas is expendable. All of this is anathema to Bingham, indeed a gross slur on the integrity of a hard-pressed service. Accordingly, he constructs an entirely different agent-handler relationship, more humane and socially responsible. Ducane, the spymaster in The Double Agent, endures sleepless nights agonising over the “deceit and ruthlessness” of the whole game, accepting that the “conflict between ethics and professionalism … was one which every officer of the service had Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 92 to face from time to time,” and acknowledging that “you had to cling to some spar of integrity or you were a lost soul” 16 (1970: 72-73). Accordingly, all efforts are made to ex-filtrate his fallen agent. Musing on his hard knocks profession, Ducane is prepared to face the “public sneers and jeers,” aware that all the security advantages lay with the police state, prepared to balance the triumphs and the defeats “with a hard scaly-eyed philosophy,” and gratefully taking what might be learned from them (1970: 116). 5. Conclusion In the post-war decades, the British intelligence and security services were subject to unprecedented strains and stresses after coming under public scrutiny to a degree previously uncontemplated. Former secret warriors eager to cash in on their war-winning intrigues troubled the guardians of secrecy, and such pressure, coupled with widespread reporting of scandals in the press and awkward questions in parliament, all led to accusations of paranoia, inefficiency, ineptitude, even corruption, and greatly tainted the image of the intelligence community. For a secretive service, the writer is an ambivalent figure. Intensely useful for their bold thinking and flair in putting operations together and conceiving of deception strategies; a problem when they wish to write up their adventures or draw on them in an uncomplimentary form of spy fiction. In terms of the former, Air Marshall Sir Lawrance Darvall praised the “uninstructed imagination, vision, and ability to write attractively” of Dennis Wheatley as a great asset when harnessed for wartime intelligence (1959: 13). Of the latter, John le Carré has recalled several occasions when he had been button-holed by irate serving intelligence officers referring to him as an “utter bastard” for insulting the honour of the service and for perpetuating what was felt to be a grossly unflattering image of the intelligence community (Burton n.d.). Historians of security and intelligence have begun to appreciate the significance of spy fiction in shaping the public image of the secret services and hence the politics of intelligence. “As a result of secrecy, popular culture found itself in a unique and privileged position,” Christopher Moran has asserted. Against a backdrop of official silence, “culture had the opportunity to fill a vacuum” (2013b: 121). Because of the official suppression of information and internal perspectives, press coverage of security scandals, coupled with the stories offered by novelists and filmmakers, supplied the dominant images of intelligence and national security for public consumption. Spies-turned-writers such as John le Carré became credible figures with the reading public, and therefore worrying for the authorities. After all, as Mark David Kaufman has argued, “those responsible for the 16 The latter phrase is repeated throughout the novel. Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two 93 nation’s security were also those most likely to compromise it - not out of any treasonous intent, but simply out of an impulse to write” (2017). In the aftermath of World War Two, as we have argued, fiction in particular seems to have emerged as a form in whose pages disclosures of British intelligence operations were tolerated, which would have been vigorously suppressed if presented as ‘fact.’ Following Compton Mackenzie’s example, Dennis Wheatley and J.C. Masterman were allowed to publish unhindered when portraying wartime intelligence activities and deceptions in their stories. In contrast, both faced full-blooded official intransigence when they attempted to publish factual accounts of their intelligence contributions. In the case of John le Carré, while there was no overt sense of the stories revealing sensitive secrets, 17 the novels’ vastly more critical portrayal of the intelligence community was profoundly unwelcome, helping to impel the authorities into unprecedented actions to improve their public image. As we have shown, spy-author John Bingham felt so strongly on this matter that he rushed to the aid of his service with his own fiction, penning The Double Agent specifically to counter the negative image of intelligence created by le Carré, which was fast gaining traction with the British public. In this period, as we have argued, fiction provided one of the primary frames for public understanding of intelligence. Some of this fiction, such as Fleming’s James Bond novels, peddled compensatory fantasies that made little claim to realism. Other novels, such as le Carré’s, were received as highly authentic and helped to entrench a culture of public distrust. More work is required to understand the function of these and other writers as intermediaries between intelligence and the public sphere. Authors have sometimes been discussed by intelligence scholars, and some spy fiction criticism touches on the history of espionage. However, the historic place of writers in the evolution of British intelligence remains little understood. The spy-turned-writer, in particular, has been a prominent figure in British intelligence, as both participant (valued) and commentator (unwelcome so far as the service was concerned). The close integration of writers with intelligence is therefore something that also warrants further investigation. Thus far, there have only been selective overviews of writers who undertook secret service (Masters 1987). Future research, as begun here, should deal more carefully with the writer’s relationship to, and influence on, the internal culture of intelligence: their precise value and contribution to operational strategy; the peculiar overlap of aptitudes and insights shared by the author and the spy; the author’s subsequent constructions of the ideology, image and culture of secret service; and the effects of their portrayals on the public image of intelligence. 17 For a pioneering investigation of authenticity in the spy novels of le Carr é , see the forthcoming Huw Dylan and Alan Burton, ‘‘An Anarchy of Treason’: public history, insider knowledge and the early spy novels of John le Carré’. Jago Morrison and Alan Burton 94 References Aldrich, Richard (2004). Policing the past: Official history, secrecy and British intelligence since 1945. English Historical Review 119 (483): 922-53. Andrew, Christopher M. ([Updated ed.] 2010). The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. 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The last assignment: David Atlee Phillips and the birth of CIA public relations. The International History Review 35 (2): 337-355. Moran, Christopher R. (2013b). Ian Fleming and the public profile of the CIA. Journal of Cold War Studies 15 (1): 119-146. Moran, Christopher R. (2013c). Classified. Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain. Cambridge: CUP. Morgan, Ted (1980). Maugham. New York: Simon and Schuster. Norwich, John Julius (ed.) (2005). The Duff Cooper Diaries, 1915-1951. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Purdy, Anthony and Douglas Sutherland (1963). Burgess and Maclean. London: Secker & Warburg. Report of the Tribunal appointed to Inquire into the Vassall Case and Related Matters (1963). London: HMSO. Seaman, Donald & John S. Mather (1955). The Great Spy Scandal. Inside Story of Burgess and Maclean. London: Daily Express Publication. Sisman, Adam (2015). John le Carr é . The Biography. London: Bloomsbury. West, Nigel (ed.) (1993). The Faber Book of Espionage. London: Faber and Faber. West, Rebecca (1964). The New Meaning of Treason. New York: Viking Press. Wheatley, Dennis ([1958] 1961). Traitor's Gate. London: Arrow Books. Wheatley, Dennis (1976). Deception in World War II. The RUSI Journal 121 (3): 87- 88. Willmetts, Simon (2015a). The CIA and the invention of tradition. Journal of Intelligence History 14 (2): 112-128. Willmetts, Simon (2015b). The burgeoning fissures of dissent: Allen Dulles and the selling of the CIA in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. History. The Journal of the Historical Association 100 (340): 167 - 188. Willmetts, Simon (2022). The many realisms of John le Carr é . Intelligence and National Security: 1 - 14. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1080/ 02684527.2022.2151755 Acknowledgement: This research was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Grant AH/ V001000/ 1) Jago Morrison and Alan Burton Brunel University London Part 3: Language Education Authors of everyday life Towards learning with literary learner texts in English language education Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz In the digital realm of the 21 st century, the production and distribution of literature has changed drastically; writing literary texts is no longer a privilege of professional authors and publishers but has transformed into a participatory practice, with non-professional writers sharing their own literary narratives via social media platforms. This digital practice has become particularly relevant among teenagers and young adults as they increasingly use the opportunity of producing and sharing their own literary texts as a means of negotiating their identities and the social environments around them. Literature, thus, enables teenagers to participate in society by voicing their own personal and social concerns. Given their value in the context of engaging in these meaning-making processes on the one hand, and the role and importance of English as one of the lingua francas in digital realms on the other, these digital literary practices also need to be reflected in contemporary English language education (ELE). However, this hardly seems to be the case so far. Although literary texts still play a very prominent role, particularly in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms in Germany, current approaches to learning with literature still appear to perceive learners as recipients of professional literary texts, while production-oriented perspectives on teenagers as authors of their everyday lives, which go beyond post-reading creative tasks, seem to hold a most marginal position. Thus, digital texts written by learners (i.e., literary learner texts) are hardly considered as source texts. This theoretical contribution argues that contemporary practices of learning with literature need to be complemented by also focusing on literary works created by learners on multiple levels of classroom action. Drawing on interdisciplinary concepts, it explores the relevance of this focus in detail and makes first suggestions for framing literature classrooms based on literary learner texts. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0005 Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 100 1. Introduction “Is literature dying in the digital age? ” (Hammond 2016: 2) In light of recent cultural developments and current media reports, Hammond’s question about the potential demise of literary texts and their social relevance becomes a valid concern. Over the past few years, the international book market has lamented a significant decline in sales (Wolters 2018). Moreover, the willingness to engage with literature seems steadily decreasing, especially among adolescent readers (see, e.g., Paran & Wallace 2016; Matz & Rumlich 2020; Mpfs 2021); A development that is supported by the fact that many teenagers might lack the necessary reading competences (both in the L1 and the L2) to understand complex literary texts (Reiss et al. 2018). Finally, at times even authors of contemporary fiction describe the current literary scene as “fucking boring. It really is” (Lennon 2013: n. p.), so that, indeed, the social standing of literature appears to have entered a crisis of legitimacy. Yet, this notion of crisis can only be maintained on the surface level because, upon a closer look, literature is not dying but merely shifting its forms of expression and means of production in the digital age (Hammond 2016). While the relevance of analogue texts and a more traditional understanding of literature might be challenged to a certain extent, new and innovative types of literary aesthetics continuously appear on digital media outlets. The process of digitalisation, therefore, coincides with a process of redefining what constitutes literature and, as formats such as instapoetry, twitterature, flashfiction, text talk fiction, kinesthetic poetry or BookTok show, the supposedly dying is most alive today. This is particularly the case in adolescent realms where these digital forms of literary expression have become an integral part of teenage participatory culture: Due to the rise of digital communication technologies, the production and distribution of literature, particularly in the English language, is no longer limited to professional authors but opened towards ‘ordinary’ young adults who can share their own experiences, thoughts, and artistic and aesthetic visions in literary form via social media channels. Consequently, the lines between author and reader blur and the literary world in the digital age witnesses the advent of more adolescent everyday authors who prominently use literature as an important medium to create, narrate, and negotiate their own identities and the world they imagine. Writing literature, in other words, has become a prominent means of teenage self-expression and meaningmaking. Considering this importance of literary self-expression among teenagers today, it appears reasonable to assume that digital literary forms ought to also find their place in school education to prepare adolescents for identity formation and successful participation in a digital society (see, e.g., Becker Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 101 & Matz 2020; Lütge et al. 2019; KMK 2021). In this context, English language education might play a very significant role, for English is not only one of the global and digital lingua francas, but EFL classrooms are also tasked with supporting learners in reflecting on language in the field of literatures and cultures (see, e.g., KMK 2012). As such they provide a pedagogical platform for educating young everyday authors and fostering their literary abilities. However, to date, this potential of language education to focus on learners’ own literary output appears to have been hardly researched and implemented in the German educational context (see, e.g., Gerlach & Götz 2021), which will serve as a focus point for this contribution. While contemporary studies on teaching literature in the EFL classroom mostly focus on working with literary texts by professional authors as source texts - from classics such as Shakespeare (see, e.g., Eisenmann & Lütge 2014; Eisenmann 2019) to fictions of migration (see e.g., Freitag- Hild 2010) and contemporary young adult dystopian and fantasy fiction (see e.g., Matz 2020; Wehrmann & Surkamp 2022) just to name a few, - literary texts written by the learners themselves appear to obtain a rather marginal status in language education research. Hence, based on notions of Reader Response Criticism (RRC), learners in the EFL context are still predominantly perceived as mere recipients of literature whereas their role as producers of literary texts is still to be conceptualised. The present paper aims at (1) addressing this research gap by theoretically exploring how current concepts and approaches to learning with literature in English language education, which are mainly reception-oriented in focus, can be complemented with a production-oriented perspective, which goes beyond creative writing and action-oriented tasks and in which literary learner texts 1 find a more prominent position. As such, this contribution (2) makes a case for viewing learners as both recipients and producers of literature and participants in literary discourse. In doing so, it (3) contributes to reconsidering and adapting contemporary literary teaching practices in light of changing paradigms of literature in a digital participatory culture. It seeks to reframe literary teaching practices from reader response to ‘wreader’ (Landow 1997) participation to prepare and support learners for the literary landscape of the 21 st century. 2. Changing paradigms of literature in the 21 st century Over the past two decades, literature has witnessed a continuous process of transformation. Recent political, cultural, and global developments have 1 In this context, the term literary learner texts relates to all literary texts which are written by learners in the EFL classroom, including not only analogue, but also digital texts of different modes and designs. Thus, it is important to note that it is based on a wide understanding of what literary texts are (i.e., it is based on the concept of erweiterter Textbegriff). Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 102 been “rocking the literary boat” tremendously, as they have led to “adapting traditional literary genres, spawning new text types and modifying demands put on contemporary readers” (Thaler 2019: 7). One such societal development that has become particularly influential is the digital turn of recent years; according to Lauer (2020), digital devices and applications have fundamentally changed adolescents’ and adults’ reading (and writing) practices. The global success of platforms such as wattpad.com could be a major sign of “the death of the literary institution as we know it” (125; trans. D.B.). In a similar vein, Lütge (2018) as well as Surkamp (2020) refer to digitalization as the catalyst for the emergence of utterly new literary genres as well as the remixing, reconsideration, and redefinition of already existing ones. Thus, the digital turn and its technological innovations enable a diversification of literary productions on both new and old grounds so that, according to Baum (2017), “at the beginning of the 21 st century, the history of literature is inevitably a history of digital transformation” (316; trans. D.B. & F.M.). At closer inspection, this digital transformation becomes visible in two major changes that shape literature and its production in the new millennium. First, literary texts shift from being perceived as stable entities to becoming more open and dynamic phenomena. Second, the modes of literary production change from the single author and a hierarchical relationship between author and reader to more collaborative practices in which the line between author and reader is increasingly blurred. To begin with, in the digital age public and academic perceptions of text as material practice and a cultural artefact have drastically changed. In pre-digital times, once a literary text was published (e.g., in the form of a paper-based book), its material shape and textual properties were relatively stable. As Hautzinger (1999) points out, “the physical constitution of a book as a haptic object represents authority and stability. Its clear beginning and end give weight to the message of a text since there appears nothing to be added. It forms a unit of its own” (25; trans. D.B. & F.M.). In the context of print culture and analogue production, text was prominently viewed as a closed-off and rather static system. Its sheer materiality signalled stability as printed words on the page evoked a sense of permanence. In this vein, Kergel and Heidkamp (2018) refer to analogue texts as “immutable once written” (20) and define them as an autarkic unit which merely “waits for its readers” to be consumed (ibid.). Yet, in recent times, this absolute view on literary texts as immutable artefacts has been increasingly challenged. According to Beavis (2013), the changed perception of literature originates from emerging practices of digital text production: Due to easy-to-use editing tools, digital technologies, and innovative venues for publishing literature online, “the capacity to copy, mash, change, [and] spoof” (246) has become central to composing literary texts in the digital realm. As Simanowski (2017) claims, these altered composition practices result in a redefinition of textuality itself. Thus, Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 103 amidst the popularity of textual remixing and resampling (see, e.g., the phenomenon of Memes), in the digital realm “the traditional form of coherent text is lost” (2017: 95; trans. D.B. & F.M.). Instead, texts can be reconsidered as a more open “collection of text […] fragments” that can be used and re-purposed in different contexts by individual writers (2017: 95; trans. D.B. & F.M.). Thus, as literary texts turn into digits, the once stable boundaries of the printed artifact dissolve into fluidity, or in the words of Kuhlen (2004) “works turn into networks” that can be extended and/ or re-arranged continuously (221; trans. D.B. & F.M.). Hence, as exemplified in the context of online fanfiction in which literary source texts are frequently altered, commented on, complemented, or re-composed, literary texts turn to open spaces of semiotic negotiation and the authority of a stable unit of text is replaced by the notion of textual dynamicity. Secondly, this more open understanding of literary texts coincides with a reconsideration of literary authorship in the 21 st century. More precisely, the digital transformation of literature leads to a redefinition of the relationship between author and reader. As Eick (2014) points out, in analogue times, “storytelling in novels or films was limited to professional authors who could reach a larger audience via connections to publishing companies [or] broadcasters” (27; trans. D.B. & F. M.). In other words, being a published author was an exclusive privilege which positioned authors and readers in a strictly hierarchical relationship to each other. Since the 18 th century and the advent of mass printing, the author was perceived as a solitary figure possessing the means of literary expression and production (Poster 1999: 263), while readers were deemed as mere recipients of literature who could not as easily address a larger audience in print culture. In the digital age, however, this traditional sender-receiver-structure of literary communication is being exceedingly challenged. Thus, as Kergel and Heidkamp (2018) argue, instead of reinforcing hierarchy, “[t]he new possibility of producing and remixing a text digitally” (21) transforms the privilege of the few into an equal chance of participation for the many, since by now everyone with a basic knowledge of text editing and online publication can potentially become an author. Because authors can selfpublish their literary works on social media platforms, literary production has shifted beyond the exclusive realm of publishing companies (Lauer 2020). In this context, with more people having the opportunity to participate in literary production and to reach larger audiences via the internet, the former hierarchy between author and reader, sender and receiver, dissolves and the clear distinction between the two is renegotiated. As Pleimfeldner and Antony (2018) point out, in today’s participatory culture the “principle of the receiver based on passivity” is replaced by ordinary individuals “taking over the role of the producer and the recipient” (4; trans. D.B. & F.M.). Rather than making a distinction between reader and writer, contemporary production of literature is marked by the wreader Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 104 figure, meaning that participation in online communities relies on the simultaneous production and reception of literary texts. 2 Thus, as Nantke (2018) states, readers are perceived as active “commentators and collaborateurs” (12; trans. D.B. & F.M.), establishing an environment in which authors become readers and readers inevitably also turn into authors. This shift towards the wreader in literary production is finally supported by a shift from the paradigm of the single author, often to be found in the realm of analogue literary texts, towards the notion of shared authorship (Nantke 2018: 1). Since texts can be easily edited, altered, or completely rewritten online, they do no longer ‘belong’ to one author exclusively. Rather, they are continuously negotiated by many different individuals who are (temporarily or constantly) involved in the production and distribution process. Hence, literary texts in the digital realm often rest upon collaborative and interactive efforts and text production resembles a polyphonic amalgam of different authorial voices (Zimmermann 2015). Closely linked to the convergence of the reader and writer roles in literary communication, the digital transformation of literature also brings forth a move towards increasingly perceiving literary expression as a participatory act in which individuals are empowered to become authors themselves. This, however, is only possible if teenagers learn what it means to be an author so that the changed understanding of literature and literary production needs to also find its way into (language) education. 3. Current approaches to learning with literature in English language education: Literary learning as response Over the past decade, digital texts and communication practices have increasingly become part of the ELE discourse, recognising that the impact of the digitality of culture (Stalder 2016) not only affects how the English language is taught, but also what (digital) language is, how texts and communication change, and what is meant by the notion of (digital) foreign language discourse competence (see, e.g., Hallet 2020; Matz 2023). In this context, Hallet (2020) emphasises that the educational mandate to develop a digital discourse competence relates to [...] the ability to orientate oneself in the enormously diverse cultural choices and multiplied social contexts, to position oneself there, and to communicate appropriately and in a goal-oriented manner. Teaching text production and communication in a foreign language must be prepared for this: to orient oneself in discourses, to cope with a quantity of texts and images, to 2 In the EFL context, a similar, yet more prominent concept is that of the ‘produser’, deriving from the term ‘produsage’ (production and usage) coined by Bruns (2008), thereby drawing attention to the fact that in the digital realm, the boundaries between text reception and production are blurred. Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 105 recognize positions in discourse and determine one’s own position in it, to develop a discourse-related ability to express oneself [...]. (n.p., emphasis in the original) This notion does not explicitly entail digital literary texts in general or literary learner texts in particular. However, as illustrated in the previous section, the impact of digitality on literary texts and their production processes is immense, and this, in turn, has consequences on notions of (digital) literary competences (see, e.g., Becker & Matz 2020; Lütge et al. 2019) in the educational context. In spite of this, German EFL classrooms currently appear to pay little attention to literary learner texts (see, e.g., Gerlach & Götz 2021) and thus are ill-equipped to prepare learners for the contemporary literary world they encounter in their everyday lives. This might be explained by the predominant and traditional framing of literary learning as a response, which, on its own, is not able to grasp new developments in the literary world. Even though it might not always be stated explicitly, present conceptualisations of learning with literature are largely based on Reader Response Criticism (RRC), because “it places at its centre the dialogue between the text and the reader” (Delanoy 2018: 142). As RRC “is a broad church with varied and conflicting positions” (ibid., Delanoy 2015: 22), it is important to clarify that within the context of this contribution, we base our understanding on Delanoy’s dialogical 3 , hermeneutical and humanistic approach, which - in turn - “is rooted in the concepts of literature teaching and learning as suggested by Michael Benton (1992), Lothar Bredella (2002), and Louise Rosenblatt (1994)” (Delanoy 2018: 142): For this ‘interactive paradigm’ (Bredella 2002: 43), reading is a process of textguided meaning creation with literary texts challenging their readers’ cognitive and affective faculties. At the heart of the interactive paradigm lies a certain understanding of aesthetic experience. Such experience presupposes challenging literary texts that offer a critical perspective on sociocultural issues. Moreover, the reader adopts an aesthetically motivated stance. In this context, it is important to note that RRC “is a continuously developing approach” (ibid.: 143) that is both constructive and fruitful, as it also allows for the learning with multimodal texts and thus enables learners to engage in both deep and wide reading. However, at the heart of RRC is the notion that the “teaching of literature has to highlight the readers’ personal and emotional involvement with the [existing] text and how they relate the world of literary texts to their own” (Bredella 2008: 14). In other 3 He stresses that “this understanding of dialogue rests on the assumption that viewpoints are always limited, but can be questioned, widened and transformed through ongoing, open-ended and (self-)critical engagement with other positions. Such a concept aims for respectful encounters between equal partners” (ibid.). Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 106 words, RRC promotes the notion of learners as mere recipients reacting to and negotiating with a given text, while the relevance of literary text production by learners is hardly considered. This strict focus on text reception becomes most noticeable in EFL classrooms on three distinct levels, which will be considered more closely in the following paragraphs: the curricular guidelines, in which literature (even in the broader sense) only plays a marginal role; current methodological approaches which are mostly embedded in concepts that focus on the reception of literary texts and the literary canon that most focuses on professional literature to be received by learners in EFL classrooms. Curricular constraints: Responding to literary texts According to the federal educational standards in Germany (KMK 2003; 2012), learners are required to read literary texts to ensure their comprehension, analyse their stylistic dimensions and evaluate them in their contexts. Thus, although not stated explicitly, the focus is directed exclusively at reader reception and (a rather functional understanding of) response. Literary text production, which is not part of a prior reception process, is hardly taken into account. Learning with literature is subsumed as a means-to-an-end under different descriptors for individual communicative competences as well as text and media competences. As such, there is also no notion of a progression when comparing, for example, the educational standards for lower and middle secondary school (years 5-10; Sekundarstufe I) to the higher secondary level (years 11-13; Sekundarstufe II). The former mention literary texts in the sense that students should “experience the literary or aesthetic/ creative quality of topics and fields of activity with explicit reference to active participation in social and cultural life” (KMK 2003: 7; trans. D.B. & F.M.) to become competent learners of English, but only explicitly refer to their use in terms of being able to “grasp the essential statements in shorter literary texts (e.g., short stories) and compile them to solve a specific task” and to “understand the statements of simple literary texts” (ibid.: 12, trans. D.B. & F.M.). The latter recognises that “[w]orks of literature, films, thematically relevant works of the performing arts open up specific approaches to different individual, universal and culturally specific perspectives”, but do not expand on which works of literature are meant (KMK 2012: 12; trans. D.B. & F.M.). Instead, literary texts are from thereon referred to in connection with non-literary texts and at no point discussed separately. 4 Hence, teaching literature solely focusses on the learners’ response and is subsumed under competence descriptors for reading, writing 4 Furthermore, there is no definition or explanation in either of the educational standards of what is meant by ‘literary’ texts, nor do the documents refer to any form of digital (literary) texts. Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 107 (i.e., analytical essays, respectively transforming existing texts), and dialogical speaking about their content (see KMK 2012: 17-20). In the context of textand media competence(s), students are thus expected to understand, summarise, analyse and interpret literary (and, again, non-literary) texts (KMK 2012: 20), but not to engage in literary text-production in a creative way, particularly when it comes to literary learner texts. Furthermore, at the time of writing, all current German national educational standards for EFL make no explicit mention of literary learning or literary competences, nor do they suggest theoretical foundations and methodological approaches of learning with literature (KMK 2003; 2012). 5 In the field of literature didactics, though, conceptualising frameworks for literary learning (see. e.g., Bredella 2008; Delanoy 2002; Hallet 2002), literary literacy (see. e.g., Lütge 2012; Volkmann 2015) and literature-related competences (see. e.g., Diehr & Surkamp 2015) are manifold. These current frameworks, however, which will be considered in more detail below, also envisage learners as recipients of the literary texts they engage with and respond to in critically-reflected ways. This raises the question if such concepts of literary learning, literary literacy or literature-related competences were to find their way into curricular guidelines, they would be helpful in supporting learners in creating their own texts beyond post-reading activities. After all, they too centre around RRC informed approaches. It becomes evident that the educational standards follow (if at all) a rather limited understanding of reader response, as learners are not enabled to adopt either “an aesthetically motivated stance” (Delanoy 2018: 142) or production-oriented perspectives which go beyond the transformation of existing texts. Thus, young adults in EFL classrooms are neither envisaged as authors of their everyday lives, nor do the educational standards anticipate a need learners might have to constructively engage in meaning-making processes. Methodological constraints: Text production as part of the reception process This predominant focus on text reception is also noticeable in current methodological approaches. While it is true that RRC has incorporated the dimension of creative writing in ELE (see, ibid.), the focus largely remains on learners as readers of (predominantly analogue and professional) literary texts, who are then invited to respond either creatively or as part of a critical evaluation to these texts. Thus, although current conceptualisations 5 The same also goes for the work with any form of digital texts. On a more general level, the notion of digitality has only been recognised very recently by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Culture (KMK 2021). The publication for the educational standards for lower and middle secondary school are expected to be released in the summer of 2024 (see https: / / www.iqb.hu-berlin.de/ bista/ teach/ ). Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 108 of RRC pay “equal attention to texts and their respective readers, that is to say to the communicative acts performed by both” (Delanoy et al. 2015: 8), learners’ communicative acts appear to be mostly envisaged in response to a literary text written by professional authors. Thus, especially in the German context of EFL literature didactics text production is often envisaged as being embedded in the process model of pre-, whileand post-reading activities and viewed as a means for deepening the reception process (see, e.g., Nünning & Surkamp 2010: 71ff.). This, in turn, means that learner texts are largely conceptualised as part of a post-reading communication and response (“Anschlusskommunikation”, Diehr & Surkamp 2015: 25) about literary texts by professional authors. Implicit approaches of text production entail aspects such as the enjoyment of aesthetic features (ibid.), the performative dimensions of reading (see, e.g., Bredella 2008) as well as the productive dimension of students’ narrative competence (see, e.g., Nünning & Nünning 2007). In spite of this, they are also envisaged mostly as part of post-reading phases or as part of creative writing activities. Although methodological conceptualisations which distinguish between analytical and creative approaches to working with literary texts (see Nünning & Surkamp 2010: 62 ff.) might at first glance support the production of literary learner texts, they too relate back to source texts which are distinctively not learner texts. Moreover, student text production runs the risk of “losing sight of the texts themselves and their particular form” and that active engagement with literature and the creation of texts about texts become an end in themselves when literary texts serve only as triggers for subjective reading experiences or as springboards for creative-productive work. (ibid.: 65, trans. D.B. & F.M.) Considering the fact that, particularly in the German educational context, both the discourses about and the educational practice of teaching and learning with literary texts in EFL classrooms have a comparatively long and rich tradition (see, e.g., Bredella 1979; 1980; Delanoy 2002; Hallet 2002), it is striking that both digital literary texts and the conceptualisation of learners as wreaders in literary production have only been considered on a small scale (see, e.g., Lütge et al. 2019). 6 In the context of this contribution, “literature is seen as a potentially empowering discourse which can help learners develop creative abilities, critical thinking and empathy for 6 In the German educational context, one of the first large-scale research projects appears to be DigitaLiterature (see Lütge et. al 2019). Drawing on a larger international and interdisciplinary context, one of the most prominent approaches to learning with multimodal and digital texts with a special focus on students’ text production is the Multiliteracies Pedagogy, as first conceptualised by the New London Group (1996) and continued by Kalantzis and Cope (see, e.g., 2012). Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 109 other people” (Delanoy et. al 2015: 8), but as in the case of concepts of literature, concepts of literature didactics might need to also undergo significant revision. For literary texts to remain ‘pleasurable and educationally significant’ (Bredella 2008), the learner’s role “as a co-creator” might have to be reframed as a creator “of meanings” (Delanoy et. al 2015: 7). The (hidden) canon: Responding to professional authors Finally, the influence of RRC and its reception-oriented perspective on learners become visible in the choice of literary texts that are selected for teaching literature in the EFL classroom. In other words, RRC impacts the literary canon of language education. In general terms, the canon describes a collection of literary works that are conventionally considered to be particularly valuable in a given social context (see, e.g., Kolbas 2018: 38). As such, the canon is a dynamic construct since the canonical inclusion and exclusion of literary texts depend on a continuous and context-sensitive negotiation of value and non-value that changes over time. This dynamicity can also be observed in the context of ELE: Here, the canon refers to all literary texts that are deemed valuable and appropriate for the development of communicative, cultural, and literary competences. Yet, which texts are considered valuable for language education is an on-going debate. Thus, Meyer (2005) claims that “the canon discussion is as old as foreign language teaching itself. In this context, phases of contentment and consistency seem to alternate with phases of distress and calls for change” (17; translation D.B. & F.M.). The EFL canon regularly shifts between embracing the classics of literature and “the very summit of cultural achievement” on the one hand (Kolbas 2018: 38), and the inclusion of young adult and popular literature on the other. As a result, the EFL canon also continuously adapts its shape, since its attributions of literary value change alongside changing curricular expectations, new learning theories, or emerging cultural discourses (Surkamp 2017: 257). It is in this attribution of value that the influence of reader response theory becomes most apparent. Since the question of which texts are included and excluded is strictly a matter of negotiation and evaluation, the canon always reflects a specific image of what is (and what is not) considered ‘literature’ at a given point in time. With this in mind, the current EFL canon, as discussed in research or proposed by textbook publishers, reveals a rather traditional image of literature: Despite recent developments in the literary field, the discussions of which texts are to be selected for the EFL classroom so far exclusively centre around popular, young adult, and classic works by professional authors publishing via professional publishers; by contrast, new text types by everyday individuals who, for example, selfpublish their work on social media, are hardly considered and therefore excluded from the canon. Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 110 It can be argued that, at its core, this canonical imbalance between texts by professional and everyday authors is fuelled by RRC. More precisely, the current canon merely reflects the reception-oriented perspective of contemporary literature teaching which perceives learners as mere recipients of literature who aim at developing reception-oriented literary competences. Therefore, learners become readers, not wreaders. Thus, the selection and evaluation of texts mirror a traditional sender-receiver-structure that casts learners into the role of those reading but not writing literature. As such, it reinforces the traditional hierarchy between author and reader since, by only considering texts by professional authors as ‘valuable’, the current canon debate highlights the notion of the single author with the sole means of literary expression. In this setting, RRC also influences discourses of power in the EFL classroom. Since learners only make sense in interaction with the text, they are supposed to engage with texts containing valuable perspectives and voices that help them to shape their identities in the reception process. While this engagement with other voices is undoubtedly important, their own voices are often missing, leading to a rather onesided perspective on identity formation through literature. Their contribution to the literary text is merely a relational one, namely in the form of relating their everyday experiences to the text, yet they do not necessarily express these experiences themselves in form of a literary text. Therefore, influences and models for learners’ identities are merely found in the reception of existing literary texts, but not through the production of literary learner texts. As an interim conclusion, this section raises the question whether the current predominant reception-oriented perspectives can prepare and enable learners for literary communication and expressing themselves through literature in participatory digital cultures. With its focus on reception, as the three levels above show, RRC displays some limitations in dealing with more recent (and more production-oriented) developments in the literary field. More precisely, by mostly conceptualising learners as recipients of professional literary texts, contemporary literature teaching practices can hardly grasp the importance of self-written literary texts in digital identity formation, which necessitates a reconsideration of the current theoretical basis described above. But how can learners be supported in developing a literature-related ability to express oneself? 4. Literary learner texts in English language education: Literary learning as participation The culture of digitality is a participatory culture, meaning a cultural realm “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some form of infor- Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 111 mal mentorship” (Jenkins et al. 2006: 52). Their literary forms of expression include aspects of multimodal sense-making processes (see Lütge et al. 2018), practices of remixing (see Beavis 2013) and multiple authorship (see Nantke 2018: 3), as pointed out in section 2. In the educational context, this means that learners’ roles also need to change from being “recipients of literature” (Delanoy 2015: 30) to “experienced participants” (Jenkins et al. 2006: 52). Thus, approaches to literature didactics might need to reframe and rethink learners’ roles from readers as recipients to viewing learners as wreaders, actively participating as authors of their everyday lives who constitute an inherent part of the “endless web of meaning” (Zimmermann 2015: 15; trans. D.B. & F. M.). Ultimately, this means that the current understanding of literary learning based on RRC needs to be complemented and enhanced by a more production-oriented approach that allows the more prominent integration of literary learner texts. In the following section, a brief suggestion is made as to which dimensions and learning objectives such an approach might include. In order to adapt literature teaching to the changing literary field of the 21 st century, five different dimensions need to be considered. These five dimensions are mutually dependent and form the foundation and prerequisite upon which any practice of focusing on literary learner texts in the EFL classroom rests. Based on disciplines such as literary studies, teaching writing, and current concepts of teaching literature in the EFL context, the dimensions can be described as follows: Illustration 1: Dimensions and objectives of learning with literary learner texts. Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 112 Curricular Dimension First, if literary learner texts are to find a prominent and long-term place in the EFL literature classroom, they need to be embedded more visibly in the curricular guidelines. More precisely, this act of curricular integration encompasses three components: First, literary learner texts need to be mentioned as a text type of their own in the context of text and media competence; this might be a rather easy task to accomplish, since the educational standards use a broad understanding of text and regional guidelines such as the core curriculum in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) already include “the production of one’s own texts” as one of the objectives (MSB 2021: 16). This, however, does not specifically refer to literary texts, and thus a production-oriented literary type of text has to be added to the current list of reception-oriented examples. Second, the importance of literary text production also needs to be reflected in the area of communicative competences, especially in the realm of writing. When describing writing competences, the NRW curricular guidelines, for instance, mention the production of short everyday texts (Alltagstexte) as a goal for lower secondary education (Realschule, see MSB 2021: 16). This provides a potential gateway into production-oriented literary learning scenarios, starting in grade 5, in which easy to access literary short formats such as flashfiction or elements of BookTok can be implemented and learners can already start perceiving themselves as producers and authors of their own thoughts and ideas. Communicative competences, therefore, also need to be enhanced by a literary dimension so that literary practices are recognized as acts of communication in children’s and teenagers’ lives. Third, literary learner texts need to become a topic in their own right in the context of cultural learning. Again, this addition seems most feasible since the current curricular guidelines in NRW already refer to everyday topics such as hobbies, music, or teenage culture (MSB 2021: 19). In this context, producing one’s own literary texts and creative writing can be added as a prominent example of contemporary identity formation and teenage pastime activities. By analysing the topic from a cultural learning perspective, learners can thus be supported in becoming aware of the manifold literary formats that surround them every day and the extent to which these texts become meaningful points of departure for their own identity formation. While these changes in the national educational standards and, consequently, in the regional curricular guidelines have yet to be realised, there is reason to hope for their implementation in the near future. For example, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Culture (KMK 2021: 6) has recently published a recommendation in the context of digitality, explicitly stating that in the “culture of digitality, educational processes must also Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 113 take into account the challenges that arise from this culture itself, as well as from the media environments of the learners”, thereby furthering the competences needed to “enable active participation in the digitalised everyday life world” (ibid.; trans. D.B. & F.M.). This might lead curriculum designers to consider integrating long overdue perspectives on digital literary learning also in the context of ELE and, more specifically, in the three competence areas mentioned above. This could also even be envisaged to extend to more future-oriented perspectives on forms of assessment, as the KMK deems it necessary to also “establish examination formats that adequately test competences in the digital world, make use of the expanded digital possibilities, require more metacognitive skills in the examinations and include reflection” (ibid.: 14; trans. D.B. & F.M.). In this context, literary learner texts could serve as source texts, inviting learners to reflect on their design, aesthetic features as well as their contribution in the context of their respective web of significance. Genre Dimension Secondly, and closely related to the curricular dimension, teaching with literary learner texts requires an understanding of the types of literary products by learners that can be used in the classroom. This is because the notion of literary learner texts merely represents an umbrella term for many different genres of self-written literature, with each showcasing its own features and learning potentials. These different genres can best be classified and categorised alongside a horizontal and vertical scale: Illustration 2: Literary learner texts. Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 114 On the horizontal level, literary learner texts are situated on a continuum between being mere adaptions and/ or reactions to already existing texts (e.g., by professional authors) and being genuinely free productions and creations of learners’ own ideas in literary form. Thus, on the one hand, literary learner texts might enter the EFL classroom as a short text in which learners, for example, write an alternative ending to an already existing story that they read before or that they react to characters of a story by writing an interior monologue. These types of learner texts are already used in the classroom and can often be found in a creative post-reading phase of literature teaching (see Nünning & Surkamp 2010, also see section 3). On the other hand, learners might write something which is not directly influenced by an existing literary design source text such as their own poetry, (short) fiction, or drama. On the vertical scale, literary learner texts can be categorised according to their means of production. Thus, they can appear in an analogue form (e.g., a handwritten poem learners created during a lesson) or they represent digital forms of literature (e.g., flashfiction) which are often characterised by multimodal designs and meaningmaking. As pointed out above, each of these forms that can be located somewhere along the two scales, thereby illustrating their own potentials and features. Thus, the selection of genre and learners’ genre knowledge is an essential prerequisite for teaching and learning in a participation-oriented classroom. Pedagogical Dimension In this context of selecting suitable genres of literary learner texts, one furthermore needs to negotiate how these texts can be practically implemented in lesson activities. In other words teaching literary learner texts also needs to be based on pedagogical and methodological decisions about their concrete use in the classroom. A highly suitable approach in this regard is the Multiliteracies pedagogy. This approach “has long been concerned with the changes brought about by multimodal, -medial and digital forms of communication and the necessary consequences for school teaching” (Becker & Matz forthcoming: n.p.) and thus provides an ideal foundation for guiding learners through their own literature production in class. More precisely, working with literary learner texts in the EFL context becomes a sequence of four interrelated knowledge processes, which can be labeled as follows:  experiencing already existing literary learner texts such as literary texts that learners have shared via social media, or texts other learners have created before,  conceptualising literary learner texts, that is, gaining a first understanding of their designs and genre features,  analysing these designs critically so that learners understand how meaning is made in different genres of learner texts, and finally, Learning with literary learner texts in English language education 115  applying the knowledge they have gained by creating their own literary learner texts, which in turn can be re-used as part of the experiencing process. Hence, methodologically speaking, working with literary learner texts in the EFL classroom becomes a cyclical motion in which processes of receiving existing texts and producing new texts are in constant interaction so that the notion of the wreader is ultimately put to practice. Discursive Dimension In addition, and to prepare learners for their wreader participation, working with literary learner texts needs to also include an analysis of the discourses surrounding and informing these texts on a social and cultural level. Therefore, construing a participation-oriented literature classroom is both a textual and contextual task in which not only the production of learners’ own text but also a text’s embeddedness in other text and media formats as well as in larger discursive frameworks is examined. As such, working with literary learner texts is inevitably linked to the development of (digital) discourse competence (see Hallet 2020): Learners need to become aware of the negotiation processes between text and context and the ways in which their own production always shapes and is shaped by the discursive network in which their writing takes place. In doing so, learners can comprehend existing discourses and become authors and participants of discourses at the same time. Personal Dimension The different dimensions discussed so far converge in empowering the individual learner on a personal level, which is at the heart of working with literary learner texts. Supporting learners in the process of text production and in gaining an understanding of its surrounding discourses leads to constructive, creative, and critical engagement in meaning-making processes so that learners are enabled to become active wreader participants in digital (literary) culture. Literary learner texts thus need to become an invitation to participate, which, in turn, facilitates and even promotes the occurrence of shared literary practices. In the sense of Hallet (2002), EFL classrooms thus transform into spaces which allow for learners to experiment with and engage in the interplay of texts. This can best be illustrated in the context of storytelling: The ways in which stories are told and are shaped in the digital age can be defined as a truly intertextual way; whereas analogue texts rely on the integrity of the individual story as an individual text, digital storytelling often occurs in the transgression of boundaries between different stories. Learners play an active role in converging stories in the digital sphere and, as such, teaching with learner Daniel Becker and Frauke Matz 116 texts ultimately aims at empowering learners to productively fill this role in their personal, everyday lives. Both educators and curriculum designers need to consider this personal dimension in the sense that learners can use these digital literary practices to negotiate their identities and their place within the social environments and networks around them. 5. Conclusion In his seminal essay “Die welterzeugende und die welterschließende Kraft literarischer Texte: Gegen einen verengten Begriff von literarischer Kompetenz und Bildung”, 7 Bredella (2007) reminds us that “according to the insights of hermeneutics, RRC and cognitive approaches to reading theory, understanding without preconception is not possible. To understand anything at all, one needs concepts, schemata and certain expectations” (ibid.: 73). Since the publication of this essay, forms of literary expressions have continued to evolve and new digital, participatory genres have emerged, which can be viewed as “part of fundamental shifts in the perception and the presentation of literary production processes [...], which require an expansion of literary studies perspectives on author and work in the field of tension between analogue and digital paradigms” (Nantke 2018: 22). Thus, these forms of literary expression require a shift in literature didactics too, one moving from literary reception processes to literary production processes and from asking learners to write texts as a response to using literary learner texts as a source, thereby illustrating their ‘worldcreating and world-opening power’. This contribution seeks to conceptualise teaching and learning with literary learner texts in literature classrooms, thereby recognising learners in their role as authors as an inherent part of the culture of digitality (Stalder 2016). Literary learning in ELE, therefore, necessitates a shift from reader response to wreader participation since literary learner texts are a vital part of identity formation and also offer a motivating, true-to-life occasion to contribute their own ideas to a changing literary landscape. Works Cited Baum, Constanze (2017). ‘Digital gap‘ oder ‘Digital turn’: Literaturwissenschaft und das digitale Zeitalter. Zeitschrift für Germanistik 27 (2): 316-328. Beavis, Catherine (2013). Literary English and the challenge of multimodality. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 20 (3): 241-252. Becker, Daniel & Frauke Matz (2020). Narrative Design - Digitale Formen des Erzählens. In: Maria Eisenmann & Janine Steinbock (eds.). 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This paper looks at the historical development of educational technology, mainly the role of AI in ELT and argues for a creative engineering approach to language learning that leverages the best of the analogue and digital world. Taking the example of the Midjourney bot, this article outlines how AI-powered tools can be used as an assistive catalyst for teaching, such as providing linear remedial drills, grading cloze exercises, analyzing texts, but also generating fully coherent, grammatically, and lexically sound texts. It also identifies key competencies, such as interdependency, required to effectively use AI-powered tools. These skills include being able to use language chunks produced by the AI to adapt and remix texts for new activities and contexts, a skill referred to as “creative engineering”. Drawing on examples from specific EFL teaching scenarios, this paper emphasizes the need for teachers to understand and use AI-powered tools in their teaching, pointing to their potential to elevate language learning in the 21 st century ELT classroom. 1. Fatboy Slim and the history of technology-enhanced learning. A superfast remix “You have come a long way, baby”. This is the title of Fatboy Slim’s hit album, which was released in the late 1990s. Critics praised his second album as a piece of art that combines dynamic dance music with electronic characteristics (cf. 909 Originals 2018: online). Norman Cook, the artist who took on the pseudonym Fatboy Slim, knew very well how to use the potential of his DJ equalizer and remixed famous rock music songs that fit the zeitgeist of the 90s. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0006 Thomas Strasser 122 The attention-grabbing album title and Cook’s DJ skills have an interesting correlation with the development of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) - an approach, which was also founded and coined in the 1990s (cf. Schmidt and Strasser 2018: 220). Norman Cook’s remixing of various tunes and his musical exploration of different classical and electronic music styles during his career compares broadly to English Language Teaching (ELT) practitioners and their efforts to exploit digital technologies methodologically for their own teaching (cf. Grimm, Meyer, and Volkmann 2015; Hockly and Dudeney 2018). Indeed, technology-enhanced language learning and teaching (TELL) has come a long way. Starting in the 1990s, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers used Skype, email and eTwinning to design interactive projects that connected language learners around the world (cf. Kettemann 1995). At that time, the internet was not as fast as it is today, but still language learners and teachers tried their best to interact and communicate mainly in their second language (L2), which was predominantly English at that time. At the beginning of the new millennium, the internet became more collaborative and constantly increased its social appeal. More and more social media platforms like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter became widely used, and they also started to make inroads into the work of many ELT professionals. Facebook and Twitter groups were established with the help of which learners were able to interact with their peers about language-relevant topics. However, it turned out that on these social networks, learners did not want to discuss school-related topics, they wanted to have their “safe” space among themselves, free from educational content conducted by their teachers (cf. Saylag 2013). In the mid-2000s, digital technologies became more app-based and mobile responsive (cf. Bachmair & Pachler 2014; Pachler & Turvey 2016), so an increasing number of digital language learning scenarios started to be conducted with a smartphone or tablet. Vocabulary learning apps grew in popularity. However, soon numerous ELT professionals discovered that focussing on the apps per se slowed the dynamics of the lessons since students and teachers simply needed an excessive amount of time to install the apps on different mobile phones and operating systems. Therefore, more and more educational companies developed browser-based, mobileresponsive Educational Apps (cf. Hirsh- Park 2011; Pasek et al. 2015; Strasser 2023) that can be accessed and operated without an actual installation. These tools have become ubiquitous, which means they are accessible and operable from any device at any time and any place. This temporal and spatial de-limitation of mobile technologies (Cohen 2010: 66) lead to a conceptual, performative, and paradigmatic change in the design of Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) lessons since learners acquired full access to curricular knowledge and their learning artefacts. Learners were therefore given the chance to exploit digital technologies in a far more interactive, collaborative, constructivist and co-creational way, ELT in the digital age 123 for example, using Google Docs for participatory text writing or Padlet 1 for mind mapping such as collecting topic-related word fields from the course book as a part of an exercise benefiting group dynamics. However, not all the EFL practitioners were excited about these new technologies. Now students had access to many knowledge repositories and were able to theoretically check everything the teachers said and taught, a scenario that has not been extremely popular among language teachers so far. A phenomenon called the “Laempel vs. LTE paradox” (Strasser in: Anders 2020: online) means that there is a constant paradigmatic struggle between instructivist knowledge brokers, i.e. a group of teachers that believe they are supposed to know everything, thus referencing “Lehrer Laempel”, an omniscient, strict teacher from Wilhelm Busch’s “Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks” (Busch & Schmidt, 1992), and the non-linear, almost subversive nature of the internet represented by the mobile Long Term Evolution (LTE)-technology of that time. Therefore, one might assume that technology has come a long way, constantly evolving, and improving, whereas the mindsets of certain foreign language teachers have not. At the same time, technology keeps on developing, and especially in the mid-2020s increasingly adaptive AI-powered technologies have appeared. Artificial intelligence is the latest development in ELT which will definitely shape and modify the idea of how foreign language teaching and learning should be designed within the next years and decades. The following sections will try to explore and explain AI’s transformative impact. 2. What is digital transformation anyway? Digital transformation as the process of digitisation is a rather confusing term because of its different meanings ranging from a somewhat technocratic term which mainly focuses on technology per se, to how digital technologies work in the light of a concept that implies a certain co-creative, collaborative mindset of stakeholders within their institutions, up to a complete reset of societal structures using digital technologies in an agile way (cf. Margaryan, Littlejohn, and Vojt 2011; Verina and Titko 2019) . Experts agree that the term is generic and needs to be specified for ELT. Semantically speaking, transformation implies the process of entirely changing a phenomenon. In terms of ELT, however, it can be seen that from the times of Computer-Assisted-Language-Learning (CALL) in the 1990s, the era’s cutting-edge technologies did not fully transform the process of teaching and learning a language but rather enriched or adapted these processes (cf. Schmidt and Strasser 2018) with positive effects on language learning (cf. Kettemann 1995; Meurers 2020). Digital or blended (i.e. analogue and dig- 1 http: / / www.padlet.com; an interactive brainstorming application Thomas Strasser 124 ital combined) language learning often consists of project-based, collaborative, constructivist and game-based or role-play-based scenarios (e.g. using mind mapping applications like Padlet or TaskCards) (cf. Raffone 2022), which support the work skills of the 21 st century (cf. van Laar et al. 2017). The pedagogical and conceptual similarities to the communicative language teaching approach (a methodological gold standard in ELT, so to speak) are evident here. Therefore, the impact of digital technologies on ELT should be considered as additive, rather than transformative. 3. What is the impact of digital technologies on ELT? As mentioned above, digital technologies have not fully transformed the teaching of English, but they have had a substantial impact on how EFL lessons are planned. There are various approaches to elaborate on the impact of digital tools on ELT. One can discuss such impact from technical or pedagogical perspectives, such as learning theories or the multiliteracies movement (Da Lio, 2020; Keller, 2016). In this paper, I shall provide an overview of how digital tools, so-called Edu-Apps, have impacted the four central components of ELT (cf. Martín 2015: 22; Cunningham, Rashid, and Le 2019: 43) in a blended language learning world: To start with reading, there are plenty of applications that support EFL learners with their reading skills. Most of the websites have so-called immersive readers, a technology that scans the digital text and reads it aloud in the chosen language. Furthermore, these readers can label various word forms and syllables, helping the learner to better understand a certain text. To make the reading experience even more contextualized, multimodal and visualized, immersive readers suggest images to the corresponding lexical chunk and can also translate the text into a chosen language. This multichannel digital approach can be considered a useful and versatile knowledge broker in addition to classic analogue reading. Wakelet 2 or Quizlet 3 are tools that use this technology. 2 http: / / www.wakelet.com; an interactive brainstorming and curation tool. 3 http: / / www.quizlet.com; an interactive flashcard tool. ELT in the digital age 125 Figure 1: Immersive reader Wakelet. For listening, particularly from a communicative language teaching viewpoint, using authentic materials in the EFL classroom has certain potentials and advantages, especially for intermediate to advanced learners. Digital technologies nowadays provide almost infinite access to authentic videos and audio if we think of the streaming culture of Netflix and YouTube, etc. However, this myriad of information and data needs to be methodologically curated. Tools like YouGlish 4 help learners contextualize language. The users type in a word they want to learn (either what the word means or how it is pronounced) and then the system suggests YouTube videos that include this word or phrase. The learner can then listen to the videos and learn the word in context along with a transcript. Furthermore, the user can click ‘next’ to see another video containing the searched word. Additionally, the transcript consists of a built-in dictionary and thesaurus, including pronunciation practice. Here, the learner has ubiquitous and multichannel access to a huge lexical database. Speaking skills are usually given the least practice time in the EFL classroom, often because of the high number of learners in a class. Here, the impact of digital technologies is quite noticeable. AI-powered tools (cf. chapter 4) like Otter.ai 5 automatically transcribes the learner’s speech in real time even if the learner struggles with pronunciation and accent. 4 http: / / www.youglish.com; An interactive pronunciation tool. 5 http: / / www.otter.ai; an AI-powered transcription tool. Thomas Strasser 126 Figure 2: Words in context with YouGlish. The system is designed for live-speech, which means that all the conversational gap-fillers like pauses or “erms” are identified and omitted to make the text more fluent and readable. Even if the speakers autocorrect themselves during the speech, the tool identifies that and goes for the “correct” version. Furthermore, this tool allows collaboration which means that after speaking, learners and teachers can annotate, provide feedback or highlight certain passages. Here, digital technologies offer a useful way to support learners with their presentations. It immediately provides insights into the context and lexico-grammatical features of their spoken texts (with the help of a built-in spell and grammar checker). It can also be a beneficial way for learners to speak aloud alone, as it offers a less intimidating environment to practice speaking. When it comes to supporting the writing process in a creative way, cartoon or book-creator tools are a multimodal catalyst (Bateman & Schmidt- Borcherding, 2018; Da Lio, 2020). The learner can use relevant prompts for certain text types and contextualize them in a visually creative storytelling mode. By using storytelling apps like Makebeliefscomix 6 or Book 6 http: / / www.makebeliefcomix.com; an interactive cartoon application . ELT in the digital age 127 Creator, 7 they can also practice textual coherence mechanisms in an entertaining, yet methodologically versatile way. Figure 3: Creating interactive books with book creator. All these tools provide useful means to hone specific language skills, and they can also be applied to render contents in line with curricular topics. Therefore, they can be considered as Educational Applications, so-called Edu-Apps. 4. Educational apps reloaded: When AI comes into play Educational Applications have been discussed controversially since the 2000s. These digital tools, mainly used for educational purposes, have evolved sophisticatedly. In the field of ELT, there are mind mapping and brainstorming tools that support the collaborative text production process, or co-creative graphic applications that let learners and teachers collaboratively design an infographic about classroom rules or climate change, for example. Furthermore, an increasing selection of simple and intuitive video tools can help learners produce interactive vlogs or presentations. 8 Experts agree that such digital tools should not only tackle the didactic domain which consists of the four skills, but also the pedagogic domain, which focuses on learning modes and group-dynamics, e.g. how students can selfdirect and language educators can foster learning processes (cf. Schmidt 7 http: / / www.bookcreator.com; create interactive books. 8 For a detailed list of educational applications, see Strasser (2023). Thomas Strasser 128 and Strasser 2018; Strasser 2023). Moreover, the learners should collaborate and communicate with their peers by using certain tools in the classroom. They should be given reflective feedback by their teachers so that they can modify their created digital artefacts and easily share them afterwards. The nature of digital tools is a transient one, which means certain applications come and go; however, the basic didactic and pedagogic principles (collaboration and co-creation) remain. Educational applications have been used in the EFL classroom for decades mainly for remedial drill scenarios (vocabulary quizzes, etc.), but there needs to be more to create intelligent adaptive environments that address learner heterogeneity. This is where Artificial Intelligence comes into play. In the last couple of years, an increasing number of AI-powered tools have appeared on the ELT market. A thorough review of the multifaceted implications of Artificial Intelligence would go beyond the scope of this paper. Therefore, I shall concentrate on the implications of AI in ELT contexts. As regards ELT, AI-powered tools generally share certain features. There are a number of different levels of complexity in AI, ranging from so-called “narrow AI” (less complex algorithms that are good at solving one particular goal, e.g. AI-based vocabulary learning with Quizlet or automatic explainer-video generation with Simpleshow 9 ) to algorithms reading the processed data on learners’ interactions with technology to therefore create adaptive, intelligent tutoring systems (Pandarova et al. 2019: 350). The digital age and AI provide interesting opportunities for personalized learning, and it seems like these new technologies will continue to change the way we learn and teach, now and in the future (cf. Dodigovic 2005; Berendt, Littlejohn, and Blakemore 2020). Prominent examples for foreign language learning and teaching are AI-powered translation services like DeepL 10 or writing companions like Grammarly 11 that automatically correct written texts by providing suggestions for tone, register, syntax, grammar, and spelling. Since these technologies and learning concepts have evolved within the ELT community, also because of Artificial Intelligence, there is evident need to adapt the original Edu-App approach as it does not consider such emerging technologies like AI that have the potential to replace certain typical teacher tasks (cf. Heckmann and Strasser 2012; Eisenmann 2022: 210). More and more algorithms and sophisticated applications can now create linguistic artefacts automatically. Therefore, learners and teachers need to consider creative engineering, a concept that focuses on AI’s creative power to automatically generate images, texts, audio, and video based on certain algorithms. 9 https: / / simpleshow.com; AI-powered explainer video generator. 10 http: / / www.deepl.com; AI-powered translation website. 11 http: / / www.grammarly.com; AI-powered style checker. ELT in the digital age 129 5. Visual facilitation with AI: The next big thing in ELT? Visual facilitation is a proven strategy for language educators. For example, the use of images for language-based explanation helps learners negotiate the meanings of words more easily (cf. Orav 2021). Visual facilitation provides imagery which is organized to help learners better understand new material and collaborate with others during learning experiences. It is important to remember that visual facilitation is not just about picture drawing or using PowerPoint. As mentioned above, AI-powered tools can now produce fully coherent language artefacts. Since 2017, a stream of AI-powered language learning facilitation has been applied: visual facilitation tools like Simpleshow or Midjourney 12 . Within the language-learning context, such visual facilitation tools work like this: the learner types a sentence into the app that somehow reflects the curricular needs of his/ her learning process (e.g. similar phrases from the course book) and the AI-powered tools automatically synthesize an image that represents the input sentence. This textual-inputvisual-output approach is called prompt engineering and refers to the autoregressive language model GPT-3 (Da Lio, 2020; Oppenlaender 2022), a model that “requires context to produce relevant text as output” (Oppenlaender 2022: 5). As for text-to-image generation, Oppenlaender (ibid.: 7) developed a general taxonomy of so-called prompt modifiers, which can be applied to the field of ELT as follows: 1. Subject terms: If you want to generate an image, you type in the subject you wish to describe. For example, “a girl playing football on a sunny autumn afternoon” or “a white cat sitting on a roof in New York”. Here the subject is the lexical or curricular leitmotif, the language artefact that is at the centre of the meaning, so to say. 2. Style modifiers (quality boosters): Style modifiers can be added to a prompt to create images in a certain style. For example, the modifier in “Pop Art style” will always generate digital images resembling the work of Andy Warhol et al. Other examples of this type of modifier include the use of adjectives expressing a certain situation or setting (e.g. colourful garden, enthusiastic crowd). 3. Repetition: Entering a certain word a couple of times in a semantically appropriate way will help the system to produce more reliable results based on the “neural network’s latent space that [is] associated with the subject terms” (ibid.). Furthermore, it can be seen that “the prompt of, “a very very very very very beautiful landscape” will, for instance, produce a better image than a prompt without repetitions. Technically, this is due to likelihood-maximizing language models becoming stuck in positive feedback loops from repeated phrases” (ibid.). 12 http: / / www.midjourney.com; AI-powered visualizer tool. Thomas Strasser 130 4. Magic terms: By entering abstract lexical utterances, the AI-powered application can produce “surprising results” (ibid: 7). In language learning, the input of such magic words may introduce “an element of unpredictability and surprise to the resulting images” (ibid: 7), which to some extent may boost the creative and semantic versatility of language production. Magic terms can refer to subjects that are only distantly related to the main subject of the prompt, or they can refer to non-visual qualities, such as the sense of touch (somatosensory), sense of hearing (auditory), sense of smell (olfactory), and sense of taste (gustatory) (e.g., “feed the soul”) (ibid). The next section provides an example of how this taxonomy can be implemented in the classroom. 6. Using AI-powered visual facilitation tools in the EFLclassroom As discussed above, such visual facilitation tools help learners contextualize language using a highly creative visual framework of reference. One scenario of how such technologies can be used in the EFL classroom would be the following: students are required to write an adventure story. In the subsequent lessons, they learn and practice topic-related prompts and lexical items (time forms, conjunctions, etc.). Before they write their story as an assignment, the teacher discusses the stylistic features of an adventure story, considering the taxonomy discussed before. Students have to think about the subject term (e.g. the protagonist, antagonist, etc.), the quality boosters/ style modifiers (e.g. the description of the setting, use of adjectives to describe a climax) and also magic words (e.g. students have to think of adjectives emotionally representing their story or words that create a visual twist). By using repetition words, students think of certain scenes they want to stylistically emphasize. After the students draft their first version of their adventure stories, they type selected phrases they think can be best represented visually into the apps. By doing so, students develop a skill of writing in an expressive language. In addition, Midjourney provides a visual representation of the students’ typed phrases, therefore, providing a picture dictionary which helps them with the vocabulary learning process. If students are not satisfied with certain AI-generated images (e.g. the text does not fully meet the demands of the author, the protagonist is not represented in a way the students like, the climax scenes need to be represented in a more visually detailed way, etc.), they can adapt and re-render the images so that they will meet their creative and linguistic expectations. This retains the students’ agency over their own creative work. In terms of the AI’s creative ELT in the digital age 131 potential, the visualizer application draws its data from an extended linguistic corpus combined with almost infinite visual layers so that the chances are quite high that the produced image represents the lexical item correctly. This incentivizes the students to construct a highly creative media product with the texts they produce. In the following lesson, students can read their adventure story to their peers and the teacher. After listening to the story, the teacher can ask everyone what pictures they have in mind, focusing on aspects like setting, characters, key scenes, and expressions to recapitulate the actual curricular intention (writing an adventure story using proper words, phrases, grammar, and styles). Figure 4: AI-powered prompt engineering applications visualizing an adventure story. 7. Educational apps reloaded: The domain of creative engineering As mentioned earlier, Educational Applications cover essential skills and literacies for the modern language learning classroom in the digital age. However, due to the highly automatized power of AI-tools, the six domains (creation, collaboration, communication, reflection, multiplication, modification) need to be extended with the domain of creative engineering - a domain that discusses the role of the learner and teacher and how they will Thomas Strasser 132 pedagogically and methodologically deal with the fact that more and more AI tools create language artefacts almost autonomously. In the case of AI-powered visualizer tools, we can see that these devices do not fully replace the creative skills of the learners. Instead, they act to some extent as a creative catalyst or scaffolding device. In our scenario mentioned above, the teacher has to apply the proper methodological and curricular skills to design a coherent lesson scenario that makes use of the tool. Without the appropriate methodological implementation, these tools would not be of any sustainable use for the learners. Based on the lesson plan framework and the teacher’s curricular input, the learners can then use an AI-visualizer application like Midjourney as a tool that visually and semantically supports them with their required language outcome (in this case writing an adventure story). However, the teachers and learners still need to decide to what extent AI-tools should support their teaching and learning processes. The domain of creative engineering is thus not only a creative catalyst supporting language production, but it also highlights that AI-powered technologies have enormous potential in supporting learners and teachers in their way of experiencing and teaching a language in the digital age. The domain of creative engineering does not focus on a “computer does the human work” narrative but rather captures the fact that the computer can be a creative partner in co-constructing a text and provide stimuli that aid the language acquisition process. AI-powered visual tools have a big community now, which means that learnerproduced images (based on provided input written by themselves) will be shared, discussed and remixed in so-called Jam-Sessions (Oppenlaender 2022: 7). AI tools are not likely to replace EFL-teachers, at least in distinct teaching scenarios. Since AI-powered visualizer tools generate images from various corpora, layers and datasets, chances are high that the production of a visual artefact will end in a machine bias, which means that the algorithm produces images that are highly stereotypical, culturally inappropriate or politically incorrect (Strasser 2021: 99). Therefore, the persona of a competent and interculturally-aware language teacher is necessary in order to discuss potentially biased images with their learners. This enriches language learning as it goes beyond vocabulary and grammar learning and creates a place for controversial discourse which focusses on the fluency and cultural competence of the learners. AI-powered tools have undergone drastic technological and methodological development. However, the role of the teacher in language teaching contexts is still pivotal, particularly with regard to his or her role as an interculturally-aware language professional who considers language as a dynamic vehicle that cannot be plainly learned or acquired with linear algorithms. Yet, AI-powered tools have an assistive function as they help teachers with certain forms of teaching such as linear remedial drills. AItools do all the automated tasks like grading cloze exercises or even analysing and improving texts written by students. Of course, there are many ELT in the digital age 133 AI-powered tools on the market that generate fully coherent, grammatically and lexically sound texts. This is why teachers should be inspired to go beyond and look for new text genres, exercises and assessment formats when applying creative engineering in order to allow for a sustainable interaction between technology, the learners and the teaching context. It is about time that the ELT world understands that we should use “AI as a tool, and consciously deal with data” (Olari & Romeike 2021: 1). When I talk about AI in a language learning context, I predominantly refer to narrow AIs, i.e. an AI “that is intelligent within a particular domain” (Long and Magerko 2020: 5) such as the Midjourney bot as a visualizer tool. Following Long and Magerko (ibid.), as regards these literacies, the following competencies are of relevance for the creative engineering domain: Competency Description Relevance for the EFLclassroom Explainability Use graphic visalizations, simulations of “agent decision-making processes” (Long and Magerko 2020: 5) to support learning. Use AI-visualizer tools (like Midjourney) to support lexical contextualizations and creative story writing. Detecting/ analysing the human role in AI Humans should interact with AIs and fine-tune the outcome. Language learners and teachers use AI features to produce digital artefacts that meet their learning/ teaching needs (render function AIvisualizer tools) Critically interpreting data/ Critical thinking The production of digital artefacts produced by AI “cannot be taken at facevalue and requires interpretation” (ibid.) Language learners and teachers should critically reflect on AI results using their intercultural skills. Table 1: AI-literacies. A selection for the EFL-classroom. The skill of interdependency within the domain of creative engineering should be added here. This term means that teachers create task and assessment formats that cannot be plainly copied or replaced by AI but are a methodologically-interdependent addendum to the textual products generated by AI. A practical example would be that learners use Grammarly and Copymatic to prepare a complaint as a text type (as a base text by omitting the most evident linguistic infelicities). Then the teacher designs a role play where students have to remix and rephrase the machine’s produced phrases in a conversational context showing turn-taking and ad hoc negotiation skills. In this case, the written complaint automatically generated by the Thomas Strasser 134 AI just serves as discursive base (use of prompts, linkers and discursive fragments). This base needs to be adapted and coherently applied to the new activity (role play) in ways that cannot be anticipated by the machine. In order to do that, the language learner has to synchronously use and remix the AI-generated language chunks or texts. 8. A long way to go? It is not a matter of whether AI-powered tools will be an omnipresent part of the ELT-world, but rather a question of how teachers and learners deal with it methodologically and ethically. The competencies discussed above offer at least a generic starting point in which new literacies within the domain of creative engineering could be developed and trained. What started decades ago with the controversial discussion on whether spell and grammar checks in text-processing software should be allowed in the EFL-classroom, which then elevated to the dispute in the mid-2010s on whether to use translation (DeepL/ DeepL Write) and proofreading tools (like Grammarly) in order to write curriculum-based text types, like a blog entry, CV or a letter to the editor during an exam or revision, has now found its latest controversial peak, namely whether teachers will be replaced by AI-powered tools like Jasper.ai or copymatic.ai - AI-technologies that generate flawless texts in a foreign language. In the spirit of the communicative language teaching approach of fluency before accuracy, a range of key elements are crucial such as conversational strategies like turn-taking, intercultural negotiation, and contextualization of humour and pragmatic skills like using language in a proper context. We can consider AI-powered tools as a digital catalyst for personalized learning that requires the interculturallycompetent language teacher, who is not a linear knowledge broker of grammar rules and language prompts, to develop new skills in times of digital technologies. When a learner uses AI technology as a creative scaffolding tool that provides solid language fragments which he or she can process, remix and adapt to the interdependent task designed by the teacher, then this does not translate into a simple copy and paste procedure but into sophisticated use of assistive technologies that elevate the language-learning process. In the same way Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, used his remixing skills to continuously develop or produce his traditional playlist by adding some new and emerging beats, teachers have to understand that AI-powered tools can be their DJ equalizer to adapt their teaching to the needs of the 21 st century ELT classroom. They do not have to give up their traditional playlists (their curricula or methods), they can just reap the benefits of the emerging trends such as creative engineering. Just like Norman Cook understood the ways to elevate his music, teachers will hopefully recognize the positive potential that AI will have on their teaching. ELT in the digital age 135 References Bateman, John A. & Florian Schmidt-Borcherding (2018). The communicative effectiveness of education videos: Towards an empirically-motivated multimodal account. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2 (3). 59: 1-27. https: / / doi. org/ 10.3390/ mti2030059 Berendt, Bettina, Allison Littlejohn & Mike Blakemore (2020). AI in education: Learner choice and fundamental rights. Learning, Media and Technology 45 (3), AI in Education: critical perspectives and alternative futures: 312-324. https: / / doi. org/ 10.1080/ 17439884.2020.1786399 Busch, Wilhelm & Karl Schmidt (transl.) (1992). 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London: Routledge. pp. NN. van Laar, Ester, Alexander van Deursen, Jan van Dijk & Jos de Haan (2017). The relation between 21 st -century skills and digital skills: A systematic literature review. Computers in Human Behavior 72: 577-588. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.chb.2017.03.010 Verina, Natalja & Jelena Titko (2019). Digital transformation: Conceptual framework. Proceedings of 6 th international scientific conference Contemporary issues in business, management and economics engineering 2019. Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. 1-9. https: / / doi.org/ 10.3846/ cibmee.2019.073 Thomas Strasser University College of Teacher Education Vienna Reviews Heinz Tschachler, Washington Irving and the fantasy of masculinity. Escaping the woman within. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022. Walter Grünzweig Washington Irving seems not so “in” these days. This is only the second booklength study dealing with his person and oeuvre in this century, the first being Andrew Burstein’s biography The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving published in 2007. But then again, Irving is always present, if only because he is the only “early” American writer prominent in American literary history. With the exception of Irving, the foreground of the American Romantics from Emerson to Whitman is fairly empty. There are indeed some interesting authors born before the end of the Revolutionary War, such as James Kirke Pauling (1778), Timothy Flint (1780), or, a decade later, such as Fritz-Green Halleck (1790) or even William Cullen Bryant (1794), but they are hardly discussed, let alone taught. So Washington Irving, born a few months before the end of the War, in April 1783, is the actual beginning of the literary history of the young nation. Studying in the 1970s, as I did, the scholarly bias was on the “American Renaissance,” but at least in teaching, the early period required Washington Irving to make American literary history ‘whole.’ Heinz Tschachler’s new comprehensive study proves Washington Irving’s oeuvre deserves a full and renewed consideration. The importance of his book, however, does not become immediately accessible from the title. Washington Irving and “the Fantasy of Masculinity,” alongside the subtitle “Escaping the Woman Within” at first sounds like another biographical study. And, indeed, Tschachler, taking up C.G. Jung’s anima/ animus theory, seems to want to prove that Irving was uncertain of his gender identity. The most frequent motif of the book, often repeated in precisely these words, is Irving’s “imperfectly realized masculinity” (8). The first chapter of the book makes the claim that Irving, the human being, is characterized by “effeminacy, his unmanly softness and delicacy,” the reasons for which “[w]e can only speculate about” (25). Both biographical information as well as literary texts are used in order to AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0007 Reviews 138 prove a claim which, in my view, does not need to be made. Every once in a while, the argument even delves into classical biographical fallacy: “Irving himself, we have seen, often felt that he had to flee from his own ‘woman within.’ What, then, is Rip’s position in Irving’s quest for his own imperfectly realized masculinity? (81) The book’s subtitle suggests that the author managed to escape from his anima. That would be too bad but, thankfully, title beats subtitle, and masculinity remains a “fantasy.” Jung himself, basing his work on Freud’s thesis of human inherent bi-sexuality, saw those notions bound together. In fact, one would not even have to go to the psycho-analysts of modernism for such an understanding. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Power,” one of his finest later essays, stated: “In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of the mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class” (Emerson 59). Thus, Emerson disassociates active and passive from men and women - what we are talking about here is a “sex of the mind” or, in Tschachler-via-Jung’s words, a fantasy. What we are getting in this book then, and why this study is so important, is a re-reading of Irving’s oeuvre through the perspective of gender. The animae in the protagonists, Rip van Winkle’s “troubled masculinity,” Ichabod Crane’s failure as a (male) capitalist, Irving’s personae traveling to and explaining Europe, mostly England and Spain, subversively disrupt the dominant heterosexual male patterns connected to the then emerging American capitalism. Through the category of gender, Tschachler turns a traditionalist mentality like Irving’s towards social and cultural criticism. A prime example of this transformation comes in the book’s second chapter, the subtitle of which is “Whimsicality, Gentility, and the Loss of Communal Manhood.” Aggressive American capitalism is best exemplified through the country’s first two major financial crises (“panics”) of 1819 and 1837, where an ideology of ruthless individualism contrasts with an earlier “communal” mode of existence. But Irving does not only present nostalgia for a vanished (pre-revolutionary) existence. His specifically gendered characters also become instruments for a critique of the inhumanity of this new economic system. Obviously, the values of gentility and patriarchy of the previous era were no more human and just than the present one, but as they are less aggressively gendered than the capitalist operator, they can serve as an ideological counter-image. Here Tschachler uses Raymond Williams’ notion of “residual beliefs,” which continue to survive in a new era and can gain a new, unexpected political and cultural effectiveness. In Tschachler’s hands, Irving even has new and surprising messages for our own time. For decades, fans of the American Romantics have been forced to live with these authors’ contradictory attitudes towards Jacksonianism. Systemic racism, openly genocidal tendencies with regard to Native Americanism, and an uncomfortable expansionism had to be stomached if one approved of the (populist) celebration of the new rule of the democratic individual. But when a portrait of Jackson entered the Oval Office with President Trump (through the kind offices of historian Walter Russell Mead), many Americanists Reviews 139 had to reconsider the wide-spread, albeit often ambivalent, fascination for the man on the 20$ bill. Maybe one would have done well listening to a “Federalist” like Irving and his warnings of a mobocracy. This is one of the insights of a gendered reading of Irving’s works. This perspective introduces Irving as a revisionist chronicler not just of America, but the world (travelling to Europe, a sign of effeminacy). Irving’s preferred version of Spain is its multicultural, formerly Arab part, countering the Catholic story of Spanish liberation we have been served up to the present. Irving rather is ready to “identify with the defeated in history,” an attitude he also develops in the American West, when he criticizes the injustice towards the Native Americans. If Irving is a conservative “Federalist” in his politics, a gendered reading of his work tells a different story culturally. Heinz Tschachler has written a number of remarkable studies in the past few years. His book on George Washington as a National Myth has a direct bearing on this interpretation of Irving, whose final work - and in Tschachler’s view magnum opus - is a long biography on the founding figure of the United States. His three books on the cultural significance of American money, the Dollar as text, so to say, serve him well to explain a creator as well as a questioner of national myth like Irving who, as literatus and businessman, has, as emphasized in the magnificent epilogue of Tschachler’s book, himself become an American myth. We - as well as Irving - are lucky to see such cultural expertise applied to a literary oeuvre. Having read Tschachler’s well-written book, I can now not wait to get back to my fairly complete edition of Irving’s works - and start looking at them with a fresh look. Because this is what Tschachler has done: he has re-read Irving for our time. Much to the dismay of feminists, Marxists too often downgraded gender to a Nebenwiderspruch (side contradiction) to be solved after the central Hauptwiderspruch of class would have been taken care of. Tschachler has shown how productive side contradictions can be - which was to be expected as much important insight comes from the margins. Tschachler’s study uses a fine example like Washington Irving to demonstrate it. Works Cited Ralph Waldo Emerson (1893). Power. Emerson’s Complete Works, Riverside Edition, Vol. VI, Conduct of Life. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 53-81. Walter Grünzweig TU Dortmund University Franz Karl Stanzel, Gratwanderung zwischen Facta und Ficta. Ziele, Zufälle und Umwege in meiner Karriere als anglistischer Literaturwissenschafter. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022. Heinz Tschachler Das von Franz Karl Stanzel, dem, wie er sich selbst bezeichnet, „Praecentenarier“ (14), vorgelegte Buch stellt sich als „Fach-Autobiographie“ (14) dar, als Rekonstruktion einer „durchaus befriedigend verlaufene[n] Berufskarriere“ (35). Das legt auch der Untertitel, Ziele, Zufälle und Umwege in meiner Karriere als anglistischer Literaturwissenschafter, nahe. Autobiographisch sind die ersten vier Kapitel, teilweise das 7. Kapitel, sowie das abschließende 8. Kapitel. Dazwischen finden sich zwei längere Abschnitte zur Erzähltheorie, die insgesamt knapp zwei Drittel des Buchumfangs beanspruchen. Und das mit Recht, denn, wie T. Leech bzw. Susan Onega und Garcia Landa bemerkten, F. K. Stanzel ist „one of the earliest and most outstanding narratologists,“ dessen klare, systematische und flexible Erzähltheorie auch für den anglo-amerikanischen Raum „seminal“ wurde (169). Immerhin wurden die Typischen Erzählsituationen (1955) schon 1971 ins Englische übersetzt, die Theorie des Erzählens (1979) dann 1984 (Übersetzungen in andere Sprachen finden sich im Schriftenverzeichnis am Ende des Buches). Abgesehen von den drei bahnbrechenden Werken zur Erzählforschung (dazu gehören auch die Typischen Formen des Romans; erstmals 1964 erschienen, kamen sie 1993, im Jahr der Emeritierung Stanzels, in 12. Auflage heraus, Teilabdrucke finden sich in Hand- und Lehrbüchern) zählen wir an die vierzig wichtige Aufsätze zur Erzählforschung. Angesichts dieser Fülle ist es verständlich, dass andere Interessens- und Themengebiete - literarische Imagologie und Nationalstereotypie, vergleichende Darstellung des Ersten Weltkrieges in deutscher und englischer Literatur, Kriegsautobiografie, Telegonie oder imaginative Fernzeugung u.a.m. - im vorliegenden Buch nicht oder nur ansatzweise abgebildet sind (siehe Schriftenverzeichnis). F. K. Stanzel, 1923 geboren, zählt sich selbst zur „Generation der ‚Davongekommenen‘“ (144). Wenig überraschend beginnt Kap. 1 mit dem Satz, „Alles begann 1940“ (9). Damals meldete sich der Gymnasiast der 7. Klasse zur deutschen Kriegsmarine. Zu den U-Booten abkommandiert, überlebte er im November 1942 als einer der wenigen Besatzungsmitglieder der U 331 die Torpedierung des Bootes (17f.). In britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft, zunächst AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0008 Reviews 142 ausgerechnet im Lake District, machte er erstmals mit englischer Geschichte Bekanntschaft, und mit William Wordsworth (18), was er in der Rückschau als den Beginn seiner „Karriere als Anglist“ interpretiert. Zu Weihnachten 1946 aus der Kriegsgefangenschaft (in Kanada) entlassen, begann er 1947 sein Studium an der Universität Graz (25). Nach dem Doktorat folgte ein Fulbright- Jahr in Harvard, seine „intellektuelle Wiedergeburt“ (29). Auf die Habilitation 1955 folgten Stationen in Göttingen, das Ordinariat in Erlangen-Nürnberg, und schließlich, 1962, der Ruf an die „Heimatuniversität Graz“ (245). In den folgenden drei Kapiteln erinnert sich F. K. Stanzel an seine „Erkundung des United Kingdom,“ dabei liebevoll seine Faszination für Schottland und Wales bekennend (43f.), an sein wachsendes Interesse an Kanada oder, wie es offiziell hieß, ‚Canadian Culture,‘ an die 1980 erfolgte Gründung der Gesellschaft für Kanadastudien / Association of Canadian Studies, sowie an die große österreichische Kanadakonferenz, die 1984 in einem Ausflugshotel im Wienerwald abgehalten wurde, mit illustrere Beteiligung (anwesend waren u.a. Margaret Atwood, Rudy Wiebe, Jack Hodgins und Robertson Davies, dessen Beitrag zur Frage „What is Canadian About Canadian Literature? “ hier abgedruckt ist, 50-55). Den Abschluss bilden persönliche Erinnerungen an zahlreiche der seit 1966 alljährlich stattfindenden „Anglistentage,“ bis hin zu dem „unrühmlichen Ende“ seines Engagements, als 2018 der von ihm gestiftete Helene Richter-Preis wieder einmal nicht vergeben werden konnte (67). Mit dem 5. Kapitel beginnen rückblickend und zusammenschauend F. K. Stanzels Ausführungen zur Narratologie. Die großen Kontroversen der 1950er Jahre aufgreifend, setzte Stanzel kühn den dualistischen Ansätzen von Käte Hamburger oder Robert Kayser ein triadisches Modell entgegen. Was damals, 1955, geradezu revolutionär war, ist heute in der Erzählforschung allgemeines Gedankengut: In der Auktorialen Erzählsituation wird das als vergangen erscheinende Geschehen von einem unbeteiligten, oft kommentierenden Erzähler erzählt. In der Personalen Erzählsituation ist die Vermittlung der als gegenwärtig vorzustellenden Geschichte einem Reflektor-Charakter überlassen, als dessen Bewusstseinsinhalt sie erscheint. Dazwischen fügt sich die Ich-Erzählsituation, in der sowohl auktoriales als auch personales Erzählen, somit als vergangenes oder gegenwärtiges Geschehen Vorzustellendes möglich ist (71- 72). 1 In einem weiteren Abschnitt streut F. K. Stanzel der 1938 von Wien in die USA emigrierten Germanistin Dorrit Cohn Blumen, vor allem für ihre Vermittlerrolle in Sachen Erzähltheorie. Dorrit Cohn organisierte 1971 die englische Übersetzung der Typischen Erzählsituationen, und sie war es auch, die die Kommunikation mit dem französischen Erzählforscher Gérard Genette vermittelte (92-95). Es folgt - in englischer Sprache - ein Auszug aus der Theorie des Erzählens zur Diskussion der teller-characters und reflector-characters in der Erzähl- 1 Monika Fludernik, eine ehemalige Doktorandin Stanzels und jetzt Professorin in Freiburg, hat in ihren Arbeiten zur Erzähltheorie die Triade um die Erzählung in der Du-Form ergänzt. Siehe “Second Person Fiction” und The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (beide 1993, hier 84). Reviews 143 forschung (96-111). Dabei geht es einerseits um einen Überblick über die Begrifflichkeit und andererseits um eine fundamentale Erkenntnis: „The fact that the narrative modes are connected with the linguistic structure of the narrative text“ (102). In einem bereits 1977 veröffentlichten Beitrag definiert Stanzel die „Komplementärgeschichte“ als „die Antwort des Lesers auf die in der Erzählung immer nur schematisch, da heißt unvollständig dargestellte Welt der Charaktere“ (121), eine Antwort, die sich aus „Konkretisationen und Ergänzungen der Unbestimmtheits- und Leerstellen“ konstituiert und keinesfalls „unkritisch und banal“ ist, sondern vielmehr die kreative Fantasie der Leser und Leserinnen anspricht (123, 115). Im nächsten Abschnitt setzt sich F. K. Stanzel mit den autobiographischen Schriften von Günter Grass, Joachim Fest u.a. aus der „Generation der ‚Davongekommenen‘“ (144) auseinander, mit der Verschmelzung von „facta“ und „ficta“ in denselben wie auch mit den Kontroversen um diese Schriften. Um die Kollision von „facta“ und „ficta“ geht es in einem Beitrag, in dem der Mord an John Lennon in einen Zusammenhang mit der Lektüre von J. D. Salingers Catcher in the Rye gestellt wird. Den Abschluss des Kapitels bilden „Found Poems,“ die F. K. Stanzel genussvoll aus Rezensionen seiner Typischen Erzählsituationen konstruiert. Kapitel 6 ist zur Gänze dem Thema „Erlebte Rede“ gewidmet, jener oft verstörenden Konstruktion aus Präteritum und Zukunftsadverb, in der noch dazu das Präteritum seine Vergangenheitsbedeutung verliert. Freilich nicht immer, wie Käte Hamburger dichtungslogisch behauptete, sondern, wie F. K. Stanzel schon 1959 erkannte, es „einmal gegenwärtig Vorgestelltes, dann aber auch Vergangenes zu bezeichnen“ in der Lage ist, je nach der spezifischen Erzählsituation der betreffenden Textstelle (196-97). Stanzels Sicht ist von Anfang an komparatistisch, wenn er etwa 1979 darauf hinweist, dass „der Begriff erlebte Rede [...] zwar eine vollinhaltliche Entsprechung im französischen style indirect libre, im Englischen jedoch bis vor kurzem überhaupt kein Äquivalent hatte“ (178), wiewohl diese Erscheinung von Jane Austen bis Joyce und Hemingway durchaus beliebt war (erst 1977 wird Roy Pascal mit seinem Buch The Dual Voice den Begriff verbindlich definieren). Der verzögerten Wahrnehmung von erlebter Rede in England und Amerika sind auch die nachfolgenden Abschnitte gewidmet (207-14). Kapitel 7, „Nemesis auf hoher See,“ geschrieben 2014 im Anschluss an das Buch Verlust einer Jugend, interpretiert als literarisch gestimmter Essay die Geschichte der spektakulären und höchst verlustreichen Versenkung der mächtigsten deutschen und englischen Schlachtschiffe des Zweiten Weltkriegs als ein umfassendes Narrativ und stellt die Frage (228f.), ob hier nicht eine Art ausgleichende Nemesis am Werk war (im Gegensatz zu historischen Darstellungen, die nicht nach Sinnhaftigkeit, sondern - oft genug vergebens - nach nachweisbaren Kausalitäten suchen). Das 8. Kapitel, „Memorabilia,“ betitelt nach einem Werk Levin L. Schückings, dem „letzten Universalanglist[en] deutscher Sprache“ und F. K. Stanzels für immer „ - unerreichte[s] - Vorbild“ (245, 33f.), führt an den Anfang des vorliegenden Buches zurück, konzentriert sich aber auf die Zeit am Grazer Institut, das Stanzel gleichsam aus dem Nichts aufbaute und dessen Führung Reviews 144 ihm alle Kraft abverlangte. Hier lässt sich auch beinahe Bitterkeit oder zumindest Enttäuschung verspüren, etwa wenn Stanzel die „familiär-gesellige Art“ der Anglistenfeste am Ende eines Studienjahres den Hörsaaldiskussionen mit den vom „Rebellenbazillus der Post-1968er Generation infiziert[en] [...] Studentenvertretern“ gegenüberstellt (247-49). Der Rezensent, der im Wintersemester 1971 sein Anglistikstudium in Graz begann, erinnert sich. Einige Jahrzehnte danach, zum sechzigjährigen Jubiläum der Typischen Erzählsituationen erscheint das Buch Die Typischen Erzählsituationen 1955-2015. Erfolgsgeschichte einer Triade. Darin greift F. K. Stanzel zwei, wie er sagt, „für die deutschsprachige Anglistik heikle Themen“ auf: die „auffällige asymmetrische Rezeption von Begriffen wie Erlebte Rede im deutschsprachigen und anglophonen Bereich,“ und die "Totalanglisierung des literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskurses“ (254). Auf beide Themen wird bereits im 6. Kapitel eingegangen. Hier beklagt F. K. Stanzel, dass sich bisher „die anglistischen Zeitschriften einer eingehenderen Diskussion über diese Problemkreise verweigert“ hätten (254). Die Diskussion über Erlebte Rede überlässt der Rezensent gerne kompetenteren Kollegen und Kolleginnen. Aber wie gerechtfertigt sind seine Bedenken über die „unnötig große Bereitschaft zur Totalanglisierung der Fach-Kommunikation“ (223)? Für F. K. Stanzel liegt die Zukunft der deutschsprachigen Anglistik nicht im weiteren „Wettbewerb mit der anglophonen Anglistik und English Studies,” sondern in einem „mehr komparatistischen Zugang [...], wobei jeweils die mit der deutschen Sprache vorgegebene Besonderheit der Vorstellungen und die mit ihr vorgegebenen Denkschemata den Schwerpunkt der Betrachtung und Auslegung englischer Literatur auf Deutsch bilden sollen” (223). Das sind gewichtige Argumente; dennoch sollte auf mögliche Konsequenzen einer ausschließlich muttersprachlichen Fach-Kommunikation hingewiesen werden. Dem Rezensenten sind Einwände, es müsse in jedem Fall auf Deutsch kommuniziert werden, also auch in Lehrveranstaltungen, weil sonst die 'Wissenschaftlichkeit' auf der Strecke bliebe, nur zu bekannt. Nur scheinen diese nicht selten ein Vorwand zu sein, weil für manche die fremdsprachlichen „Kosten“ zu hoch sind (was auf F. K. Stanzel expressis verbis nicht zutrifft). Erst heuer ist ein ehemaliger Doktorand von mir auf eine Professur an der Universität Oslo berufen worden. Ja, seine Fach-Kommunikation ist „totalanglisiert,“ aber ich kann mir beim besten Willen nicht vorstellen, dass der Ruf erging, weil seine Wissenschaft „zweitklassig“ (225) wäre. Ähnliches gilt wohl auch für jene - zumeist jüngeren - Kollegen und Kolleginnen, deren Fach-Kommunikation zumindest als near native anzusehen ist. Für sie ist die englische Sprache tatsächlich nicht „eine Magd, also Dienstleisterin,“ sondern (frei nach Karl Kraus) „die Mutter, also die Erzeugerin von Gedanken und metaphorischen Vorstellungen“ (225). Nicht-muttersprachliche Fach-Kommunikation ist auch beileibe kein neues Phänomen. Was heute die englische Sprache ist, war im Zeitalter des Humanismus die lateinische Sprache, die fraglos für keinen der großen Humanisten die „Muttersprache“ war. Waren demnach ihre Leistungen bloß „zweitklassig? “ Freilich: Nicht-muttersprachliche Fach-Kommunikation kann nicht von hegemonialen Machtverhältnissen getrennt werden, so wenig wie die deutschsprachige Fach-Kommunikation. Zumal sich letztere in Reviews 145 Österreich mit einer anscheinen unausrottbaren Germanophilie verschwisterte, deren Ergebnisse von Universitätsleitungen oft als ‚Internationalisierung‘ verkauft werden. Es mag sein, dass die „Totalanglisierung des anglistischen literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskurses“ erst im Gefolge der Durchführung der Bologna-Reform in Fahrt kam (224). Allerdings sei auch daran erinnert, dass die Deutschen Anglistiktage die längste Zeit nur für Habilitierte offen waren. Gut möglich, dass sich wegen dieser Politik der Abschottung gerade jüngere Kollegen und Kolleginnen von der Anglistik ab- und sich den egalitäreren und breiter aufgestellten American oder English Studies zuwandten. Überdies lässt F. K. Stanzels Klage über „Fehlübersetzungen“ einiger von ihm eingeführten Begriffe sowie seine Erklärung der verzögerten Wahrnehmung von Erlebter Rede in England und Amerika auch andere Schlussfolgerungen zu: Es stimmt schon, dass an anglophonen Universitäten Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft im Gegensatz zu Anglistikinstituten im deutschen Sprachgebiet organisatorisch und studienplanmäßig separiert waren (210f.). Dazu kommt aber auch, dass im anglophonen Sprachraum kaum jemand in der Lage war bzw. ist, deutschsprachige Fachzeitschriften zu lesen. Das gilt erst recht für deutschsprachige Fachbücher, was die Dissemination der Forschungsergebnisse mitsamt ihrem „Mehrgewinn an Sinnhaftigkeit“ (225) noch mehr einschränkt. Die Kleinheit des deutschsprachigen Marktes hat außerdem dazu geführt, dass für Fachpublikationen hohe Druckkostenzuschüsse gefordert werden. Im Klartext: Die mit öffentlichen Geldern geförderte Forschung muss für die Publikation noch einmal mit öffentliche Gelder alimentiert werden. Bruno Latour bemerkte einmal, die Wissenschaft bringe ihr Wirkungsfeld immer selbst hervor. F. K. Stanzels Wirkungsfeld - charakterisiert durch seine „strukturalistische Grundposition“ (40) - bedient sich bei Roman Jakobsons Funktionen der Sprache, namentlich der poetischen Funktion, der synchronen Linguistik de Saussures, den binären Oppositionen des - auf René Wellek zurückgehenden - literaturwissenschaftlichen Strukturalismus, Roman Ingardens Philosophie, dem amerikanischen New Criticism als Paradigma werkimmanenter Literaturauslegung, Max Webers Konzept der Idealtypen, sowie der von Goethe inspirierten Kreisanordnung (22, 30f., 40, 251). Käte Hamburger war mit ihrer Logik der Dichtung (1957) für ihn „eine gedankliche Begleiterin und zugleich Herausforderung,“ an die er sich noch 2015 rückschauend erinnert (32). In einem Abschnitt des 5. Kapitels zitiert Stanzel aus der Autobiografie Joachim Fests: „Im Ganzen hält man weniger fest, wie es eigentlich gewesen, sondern wie man wurde, wer man ist“ (161). Wie wurde also F. K. Stanzel zum Erzählforscher - zufällig, auf Umwegen, oder doch zielgerichtet? Der Text liefert einige Hinweise, denen nachzugehen dem Rezensenten durchaus lohnend erschien. Bekanntlich hat Stanzel zur Darstellung seiner Theorie die Kreisform gewählt, den „‘berühmt-berüchtigten‘ narratologischen Typenkreis“ (22, 40). Dieser, so schreibt Vf. an anderer Stelle, „versinnbildlicht [...] als Ort aller denkbaren Erzählformen das Universum des Epischen ganz allgemein [...] die grenzenlose Kontinuität oder Liminalität des Nebeneinanders aller denkbaren Erzählformen“ (76). Es geht noch deutlicher: Im Typenkreis kommt zweierlei Reviews 146 zum Ausdruck, „das Kontinuum der Formen in ihren mannigfachen Abwandlungen und der Anspruch, die Darstellungspotenz der ganzen narrativen Gattung in ihrer Totalität zu erfassen“ (89). Darum geht es also: Ordnung in ein theoretisch unendliches Universum zu bringen, „das Unüberschaubare [...] zu ordnen“ (87). Der Typenkreis bietet F. K. Stanzel zufolge auch „eine Möglichkeit für eine historische Betrachtung der Gattung Erzählung,“ allerdings bloß „als Draufgabe“ (78). So dominieren in frühen Romanen eher die auktoriale Erzählung und die Ich-Erzählung, während personales Erzählen erst ab 1900 auftaucht und experimentelles Erzählen (beispielsweise in der Du-Form) erst ab der Mitte des vergangenen Jahrhunderts (78, 98f., 201f.). Das ist keineswegs zufällig passiert. In der personalen Romanform, so lesen wir an anderer Stelle, erlangen „Daseinsangst und Existenznot des Menschen [...] am überzeugendsten Ausdruck“ (126). Hier endet allerdings das Wirkungsfeld des Literaturwissenschafters und es bedürfte wohl fachübergreifender kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansätze, um Kafkas Romane (wir bleiben bei Stanzels Beispielen) in einem breiteren Kontext zu erklären. Das Typenkreismodell blieb, erwartungsgemäß, nicht unwidersprochen. Seymour Chatman bezeichnete F. K. Stanzel 1987 (A Theory of Narrative war 1984 in englischer Übersetzung erschienen) eher abfällig als „‘taxonomist,‘ einen (verspäteten) Linné der Erzähltheorie“ (89). Andere Kritiker wiederum hielten ihm vor, mit Typentriade und Typenkreis bloß „der Faszination der Dreizahl und der Magie des Kreises erlegen zu sein“ (89). Stanzel selbst räumt ein, ihm hätten beide eine gewisse „ästhetische Befriedigung gewährt“ (89). Das sah auch eine Kritikerin so, die im Jahr 2000 den Typenkreis als „wunderbare Rosette“ bezeichnet (89). Besonders aufschlussreich scheint mir eine Bemerkung Stanzels selbst, der den Typenkreis als „Reaktion sowohl auf die Widerborstigkeit der individuellen Texte wie auch auf den ungebremsten Drang der Theorie zur Abstraktion“ sieht. „Für mich,“ schreibt er in Unterwegs. Erzähltheorie für Leser (2002), „liegt ein nicht unerheblicher Reiz in diesem Widerspruch zwischen dieser Don-Juanesken Liebe zur Geometrie der Theoretiker und der Shandyschen Ungebärdigkeit des einzelnen Romans für den Interpreten“ (91). Widerborstigkeit und Ungebärdigkeit scheinen F. K. Stanzel schon im zarten Alter von zehn Jahren irritiert zu haben. In einem Volksschulheft des Vf. aus 1933 (er ging damals in die vierte Klasse) heißt es zu „Ich wusch“: „MITVERGANGENHEIT / ERZÄHLVORM (sic)“ (189). Wie schrieb doch Wordsworth 1802 in dem Gedicht „My Heart Leaps Up”: “The child is father of the man.” F. K. Stanzels Gratwanderung beginnt mit einer captatio benevolentiae: An Jakobsons Gedanken zu altersbedingten „Fehlleistungen“ („Selektions- und Kontiguitäts-Aphasie,“ 15) anknüpfend, bittet er um Nachsicht für Wiederholungen, „Mängel im Aufbau und Stringenz,“ sein unzuverlässiges Langzeitgedächtnis, sowie die „auktorialen Zwischenrufe eines Literaten“ (16, 18), mögen diese auch durch Verfremdung und eine kristalline Intelligenz kompensiert sein (21). Dieses Maß an Reflexion des eigenen Tuns hebt das Buch weit über eine bloß unbedarfte Lebensgeschichte hinaus. Diese selbst ist ungemein spannend und bewegend erzählt, wie auch die ausgewählten Kapitel zur Narratologie Reviews 147 nicht nur leicht zugänglich und auch für Nicht-Erzählforscher und -forscherinnen keineswegs „dull theory“ (83), sondern von großem Interesse, ja geradezu appetizer sind, die zu weiterer, auch rückblickender, Lektüre anregen. In diesen Schriften offenbart sich der Vf. als Mittler, nicht als konfrontativer und rechthaberischer Literaturwissenschafter, sondern als einer, der sich stets um das Sowohl-als-auch bemüht (74). Dem kann auch der Rezensent nur beipflichten, der, als Doktorand bei Professor Stanzel, sich einvernehmlich von der Erzählforschung fernhielt und stattdessen überaus theoriebeladen über - die ebenfalls zwischen Facta und Ficta changierende - Reiseliteratur promovierte. Für ihn war Franz Karl Stanzel ein wahrer praeceptor singularis, der jetzt in aller Bescheidenheit seine beeindruckende Gratwanderung zu seinem „Opus Ultimum“ erklärt (24). Der Rezensent, und wohl nicht nur dieser, kann nur hoffen, dass dem nicht so sein wird. Bibliographie Chatman, Seymour (1987). The circle of narrative. Comparative Literature 39: 162- 68. Fludernik, Monika (1993). Second person fiction: Narrative you as addressee and/ or protagonist. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18 (2): 217-47. Fludernik, Monika (1993). The fictions of language and the languages of fiction. London/ New York: Routledge. Leech, Thomas Hale (1985). Approaches to Narrative in German: The Critical Theories of Ernst Hirt, Robert Petsch, Eberhart Lämmert, and Franz Stanzel. Dissertation: University of Texas at Austin. Onega, Susan & Garcia Landa (eds.) (1996). Narratology: An introduction. London: Longman. Heinz Tschachler University of Klagenfurt BUCHTIPP In one of the contributions to this edited volume an interviewee argues that “English is power”. For researchers in the field of English Studies this raises the questions of where the power of English resides and which types and practices of power are implied in the uses of English. Linguists, scholars of literature and culture, and language educators address aspects of these questions in a wide range of contributions. The book shows that the power of English can oscillate between empowerment and subjection, on the one hand enabling humans to develop manifold capabilities and on the other constraining their scope of action and reflection. In this edited volume, a case is made for self-critical English Studies to be dialogic, empowering and power-critical in approach. Marta Degani, Werner Delanoy (eds.) Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education Perspectives of English Studies AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 1. Auflage 2023, 398 Seiten €[D] 78,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-8604-9 eISBN 978-3-8233-9604-8 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97 0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97 11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de narr.digital ISBN 978-3-381-10751-3 ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Christian Mair Marcus Callies Christoph Singer Jago Morrison Alan Burton Daniel Becker Frauke Matz Thomas Strasser