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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Volume 50 · Issue 2 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies 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 Author Guidelines All submissions undergo double-blind peer review. 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Volume / Band 50 Issue / He� 2 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2026 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen 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. Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. Fehler können dennoch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. Weder Verlag noch Autor: innen oder Herausgeber: innen übernehmen deshalb eine Gewährleistung für die Korrektheit des Inhaltes und haften nicht für fehlerhafte Angaben und deren Folgen. Diese Publikation enthält gegebenenfalls Links zu externen Inhalten Dritter, auf die weder Verlag noch Autor: innen oder Herausgeber: innen Einfluss haben. Für die Inhalte der verlinkten Seiten sind stets die jeweiligen Anbieter oder Betreibenden der Seiten verantwortlich. Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 0171-5410 ISBN 978-3-381-13981-1 (Print) ISBN 978-3-381-13982-8 (ePDF) Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Table of Contents Editors’ introduction: AAA: 50 years and more to come ................................ 121 AAA is 50! Some questions on the possible futures of Anglophone Studies and publishing in the field Interviews with Laurenz Volkmann, Peter Siemund and Cornelia Klecker .........123 Articles Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom: a conceptual framework and design principles for evidence-based assessment policy and practice Philipp Siepmann ..................................................................................................137 Text types in the Austrian Standardized National School-Leaving Exam for English: an empirical study into the stability of text type constructs in assessment Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner .............................................167 Short stories on domestic violence: towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood Ines Gstrein ..........................................................................................................187 Amending the “breaking of charity”, affirming “brother-love”: the Miller-Kazan controversy reconsidered in The Crucible and On the Waterfront Junghyun Hwang..................................................................................................205 Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: a prelude to the Second World War Ezgi İlimen ...........................................................................................................225 Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Reviews Hurth, Elisabeth, Das Leben genießen: Zur Erfolgstheologie der amerikanischen Bibellehrerin Joyce Meyer. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2023. Eva Triebl ............................................................................................................247 Murata, Kumiko (Ed.), ELF and Applied Linguistics: Reconsidering Applied Linguistics Research from ELF Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2024. Li Xin...................................................................................................................253 AAA: 50 years and more to come Alexander Onysko, Ulla Ratheiser and Werner Delanoy The journal Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik/ Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Founded by Bernhard Kettemann at the University of Graz, the journal has been continuously devoted to publishing quality research in the field of Anglophone Studies at large, straddling the fields of literature, linguistics, language education and culture. Guided and developed by Bernhard Kettemann’s editorship for 47 years, he was followed by the current team of editors three years ago. Since then the division of labour has been spread across the different section editors: Alexander Onysko (linguistics), Ulla Ratheiser (literature/ culture) and Werner Delanoy (language education/ culture). The editorial change also came with an expansion of the advisory board adding to the constant support of long-standing board members of the journal and to the continued excellent editorial support by Dr. Eva Triebl. In the comparatively short period of the current editorship, AAA has continued its breadth of coverage and publishes issues that feature contributions across the different disciplines as in the current publication. At the same time, AAA also promotes focussed collections that are devoted to specific topics. Recent special issues on the topics of Mental Health in Language Education (Vol. 48/ 2), and on Social Reading: Configurations in Eighteenth-Century and Contemporary Literary Cultures (Vol. 50/ 1) are examples of that development. The prospects for the next years of AAA include more promising special issues which are already in the making: Lexical and Phraseological Neologisms in Contemporary English; Luxury in the 21 st Century: Linguistic, Medial and Artistic Perspectives; and Learning with Literature in Language Education: Current Approaches and Emerging Perspectives. From the publisher’s side, AAA will also see a major change, which involves a transition to the new format of “subscribe to open”. From Vol. 51, every issue of AAA will be freely accessible from the date of publication. This open access policy is dependent on the continued support of AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0008 Editors’ introduction 122 current subscribers, who will co-finance the open access production and distribution of the journal. While AAA is thus already set on its path towards the future, 50 years is also a notable point in time to stop for a moment and more generally reflect on the future(s) of Anglophone Studies and how that relates to publishing in the field and to the journal. For that purpose, we invited three experts from the journal’s editorial board who represent the areas of linguistics, language education, and literature/ culture to reflect on a set of questions geared towards possible developments. The current issue opens with these perspectives that not only lay out possible future scenarios and developments to be mindful of but will hopefully also inspire more thoughts and debates on big questions faced by Anglophone Studies and academic research in general. After that, we invite the readers to engage with five inspiring contributions from the fields of language education, linguistics, literature and culture. Two book reviews will round off the cross-disciplinary taste of the current issue. The editors, Alexander Onysko, Ulla Ratheiser and Werner Delanoy AAA is 50! Some questions on the possible futures of Anglophone Studies and publishing in the field On the occasion of AAA’s 50 th anniversary, the editors invited experts from the main fields of Anglophone Studies to reflect on future developments in the discipline. Five questions were designed to prompt reflection on challenges, research dynamics, and future academic publishing: 1. What do you see as important challenges for Anglophone Studies in the years to come? 2. Which topics and questions do you see as very relevant for the future of research in your field? 3. How do you envision the future of academic publishing in your field? 4. What would you see as advantages and disadvantages of journals with a wider focus in English studies such as AAA compared to more specialized journals? 5. Is there anything else you would like to add that is relevant for the possible futures of Anglophone Studies and the development of publishing in the field? Cornelia Klecker (literature/ culture), Laurenz Volkmann (language education), and Peter Siemund (linguistics) shared their perspectives on these questions. Below, readers are invited to tap into their different perspectives, which will hopefully spark more reflection and action contributing to shaping the possible futures of Anglophone Studies. Interviews with Laurenz Volkmann and Peter Siemund were held in writing while Cornelia Klecker engaged in an oral exchange with the editor responsible for the area of literature. We, the editors, would like to wish you a stimulating read and engaging research in the years ahead! Alexander Onysko (linguistics), Ulla Ratheiser (literature/ culture), and Werner Delanoy (language education/ culture) AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0009 AAA is 50! 124 Laurenz Volkmann (English Language Education) What do you see as important challenges for Anglophone Studies in the years to come? The most pressing and pivotal challenge for Anglophone Studies, the Humanities and any field of enquiry that values critical thinking, creativity and productive approaches, as well as the development of students’ or practitioners’ own views and voice, is one key issue. The writing isn’t just on the wall; it’s virtually “in your face”. The use of generative artificial intelligence and its various tools, such as chatbots, virtual reality goggles, avatars and direct oral translation devices, is revolutionising Anglophone Studies, and specifically my professional field of academic engagement with teaching and learning English (or any other foreign language). Politicians, parents and students are already asking why learners should spend valuable time cramming for vocabulary or grammar tests when they could be learning how to use a direct translation tool. Why read a complete novel when you can easily create a personalised summary with interpretative questions and answers with the help of ChatGPT? Why read Wayne C. Booth’s seminal book on “unreliable narration” when discussing The Great Gatsby in class? Or why read an academic article when ChatGPT can offer a brief, concise definition of unreliable narration, including quotes from the novel that illustrate Nick Carraway’s unreliability according to Booth’s criteria? Why engage in the cumbersome task of reading secondary literature when AI can offer a succinct summary with bullet points and answer questions about how the article can be related to specific learning and teaching contexts? These few examples merely scratch the surface of what the academic field will be like in general. I won’t even mention the issue of PowerPoint presentations, written term papers and theses, and how the use of AI will radically change both practices and formats. All other issues will have to take a back seat, so to speak, including the deepening and enhancement of the international profile of Anglophone Studies. My PhD supervisor once half-jokingly quoted a saying he had heard about German/ Austrian scholarship in English literature being considered unworthy of quotation in English-speaking countries: “Germanica sunt, non leguntur.” This maxim - “It’s German, so it’s not read or quoted” - held true for decades in Anglophone Studies. This was partly due to Germany’s pariah status after World War II and the perception that German is a difficult language, but also due to the lack of quality literary scholarship as perceived by status-conscious Oxbridge and Ivy League academics. However, with the shift towards English-language publication and an international outlook - enhanced by AI-supported language proficiency in publishing - Anglophone Studies in Germany and Austria must increase their efforts to become internationally visible and Interviews: possible futures of (publishing in) Anglophone Studies 125 accepted. The international acceptance of Anglophone studies from German-speaking countries may be aided by the USA and the UK losing their status as the “target cultures” of English as a foreign language and by the increasing use of English as a lingua franca (see Kachru’s three-circle model). Using English as a foreign language (EFL) as an example, there are now numerous publication outlets outside the USA and the UK. The formerly uncommon opportunity to publish articles on EFL topics in Indonesian or Japanese journals, for example, opens up new perspectives. The loss of a privileged selection of target cultures, coupled with the broadening of literary studies to include media and area studies, has created an ever-expanding field of interest for Anglophone Studies and EFL. This presents an opportunity as well as a problem of demarcation: What, after all, is/ are Anglophone Studies? This is a question that has been around for at least a generation and will continue to be relevant. Moreover, in light of the call for committed scholarship in the face of morally and ethically problematic sociopolitical developments, another pressing issue has emerged: How activist or committed should scholars and educators be when it comes to issues of gender, ecology, ethnicity, and so on? What will the future hold for committed perspectives such as transhumanism, posthumanism, LGBTQ+ studies and critical whiteness studies, particularly in the face of right-wing, anti-emancipatory forces? Which topics and questions do you see as very relevant for the future of research in your field? As already partly discussed above, I consider the following issues to be the most relevant: (1) Addressing the topic of AI-enhanced and supported teaching and learning. Since AI is here to stay and will improve rapidly, the question of how to integrate AI into all aspects of EFL will require continuous adaptation. (2) The specific challenge of integrating AI into testing formats will revolutionise testing formats. The traditional term paper is obsolete - new hybrid (oral/ written) formats will need to be explored. (3) The empirical turn in EFL is also here to stay. However, in media education and critical reflection and literary studies specifically, time-honoured protocols of interpretation and new forms of critical reflection should still find their place. (4) There must still be a place for learning about and applying critical theories, from close reading to applying “race, class and gender” perspectives, as well as new and evolving angles such as “posthumanism”, in order to avoid the proliferation and prominence of blinkered, undertheorised empirical micro-studies. (5) In the field of EFL, the issue of how the basics of foreign language learning are taught and learnt should remain key: how do the development of the four skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening), mediation and intercultural AAA is 50! 126 learning change in the “post-digital age”, where the virtual and real worlds intersect and AI will increasingly support and perhaps replace communication formats as we have known them for centuries? (6) As an antidote to virtual encounters, there may be a revival of hands-on, faceto-face teaching and learning methods in the real world, such as placebased learning, excursions and drama techniques (“the workshop approach”). How do you envision the future of academic publishing in your field? Personally, I wonder whether a monograph will remain the gold standard for academic publishing in the field of EFL. Monographs tend to be published theses, introductions, or standard studies of a particular topic or field. We may find that publishing is increasingly defined by specialisation, with new trends emerging and attracting the interest of young scholars trying to establish themselves in the field. Publishing in international, peer-reviewed journals, which are proliferating worldwide, is increasingly becoming the norm. I do not foresee this changing, and the “Hirsch factor” or the number of entries on Google Scholar or other platforms will be the digital mark of distinction, which does not necessarily define the innovative or pioneering quality of a publication. What would you see as advantages and disadvantages of journals with a wider focus in English Studies such as AAA compared to more specialized journals? Publishing with a quality journal such as AAA should be linked to its reputation and blind peer-review processes, as well as the number of ground-breaking, field-defining articles it offers its international audience. In the case of AAA, it should also be associated with the expectation that each issue will contain one or two articles that will stimulate discussion or provide an overview of important debates, rather than dealing with minor issues of specialist interest. Is there anything else you would like to add that is relevant for the possible futures of Anglophone Studies and the development of publishing in the field? The issue of how to deal with the influence of AI tools on students’ work and publishing practices is enormous and requires open discussion, perhaps in a special issue of AAA. One way to counter the overuse of AI would be for published articles to feature a more personal touch or voice. The weaknesses of relying on AI for academic publishing are becoming particularly evident in several key areas, which may be apparent to experienced critical reviewers or readers. Firstly, AI-enhanced or AI-produced articles (as well as students’ theses) often contain monotonous, redundant Interviews: possible futures of (publishing in) Anglophone Studies 127 and descriptive passages. These fail to establish strong argumentative connections between sections, both within and between subsections. Similar ideas are sometimes repeated within a single page, and theories, concepts or models discussed or used are not always perceived as conceptually similar, differing only in terminology or small detail. Overall, there is a lack of critical synthesis and/ or evaluation. Rather than offering nuanced analyses, discussions remain superficial and additive, merely listing points without deeper engagement. Another issue is the overuse of vague, clichéd critical statements that lack a meaningful connection to the specific issue being discussed. While more personal or subjective statements may appear plausible in isolation, in accumulation they result in tiresome and ultimately hollow argumentation. Furthermore, analyses rarely address the specific needs and contextual constraints of the target group in the area under discussion (e.g. English language learning in Germany), instead working with more generic pedagogical, didactic and critical approaches that neglect true critical engagement. Specifically, the use of these “international” sources is intended to create an impression of scholarly breadth and global relevance. However, upon closer inspection, such writing lacks critical depth, thorough evaluation of sources and consistent argumentative precision. What is needed, then, is an ongoing discussion about the use of AI tools, new rigorous reviewing guidelines, and possibly new formats of scholarly articles. Peter Siemund (Linguistics) What do you see as important challenges for Anglophone Studies in the years to come? As English is currently the most widely used language in the world, I do not foresee a decreasing interest in learning it. The opposite will probably be the case, as English is firmly engraved in school curricula all over the world. However, Anglophone Studies goes considerably beyond teaching and learning English. Researchers critically engage with the Anglophone world, examining cultural and linguistic patterns and differences. This research interest needs to be stimulated and disseminated into upcoming generations of academics. The humanities in general appear to be suffering from a decreasing interest among the younger generations at the moment, as the hard sciences are viewed as the more useful and viable economic options in the long run. Anglophone Studies needs to make a case for the field’s relevance, both to students and broader society. The origin of the field lies in British and US American studies. It is obvious, however, that the Anglophone world is much bigger. Not only does it include Australia, New Zealand, and French-English bilingual Canada, but also a multitude of postcolonial countries where English has re- AAA is 50! 128 mained as an official and second (additional) language after independence. In the latter countries, quite often, English further serves as the main (or sole) medium of instruction in secondary and tertiary education. Typically, the Englishes found there are different from standard British or American English. The field of English linguistics has dedicated substantial resources into the study of emerging varieties of English, such as Singaporean, Indian, and Philippine English, as well as the numerous African Englishes. However, there has also been a nearly exclusive focus on English to the neglect of the many other languages in the local, typically multilingual ecologies. The challenge here lies in the formulation of more inclusive approaches that consider the local multilingual ecologies in their entirety as well as the positions English occupies in it - including across generations. This way English linguistics can actively contribute to current concerns regarding decolonization and diversity, and integrate the often hybridized voices from postcolonial Anglophone regions. Localized forms of English need to be understood as part of the local language mixtures where they serve specific purposes in tandem with the indigenous languages. For example, and as of today, it appears reasonable to consider English an Asian as much as an African language. English fulfils specific functions there, and recognizing these functions may even help to protect the indigenous languages in their own functions, thus working against language endangerment and loss. Globalization and transnationalism are forces that propel English to new spaces. A salient example is the Gulf Region where the discovery of oil and extensive infrastructure projects have attracted people from many world regions. The unofficial official language of the Gulf Region is English - in spite of Arabic being the official language. English has developed into a quasi mandatory language without which countries like Bahrein, Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates cannot be navigated successfully. English speakers hail from English-speaking countries like the US, the UK, or Australia. However, in far greater numbers they originate in postcolonial Anglophone countries, especially India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, and bring with them their requisite varieties of English. Levels of ‘foreigners’ in the Gulf countries can easily reach ninety per cent in certain locales (e.g., Dubai or Doha). To complicate matters further, there are large numbers of speakers in the region for whom English is a foreign language. The result is a complex dialect laboratory where different forms of English interact and possibly merge into something new in the long run. In addition, there are spaces in Western Europe where English has developed into an additional language (the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries, major cities), and some of these spaces effectively require English if one wishes to succeed there. The challenge for Anglophone Interviews: possible futures of (publishing in) Anglophone Studies 129 studies is to understand and model the internal dynamics of these new English spaces. Another global space where English plays a crucial role is digital media. English here is an important carrier of texts, ideas, cultural conventions, and linguistic norms. Anglophone studies is there to understand how English circulates globally, including its manifold national varieties. Further, there is the question of how large language models (LLMs) interfere with and influence current language norms, as people become increasingly dependent on their output. This may concern language structure as much as discourse conventions. What is more, LLMs offer new research methodologies allowing the comparison of established textual sources of English against the language knowledge behind these models. Speech to text as well as text to speech conversion are largely automatic processes these days, and typically based on artificial intelligence. Interdisciplinarity has always been a challenge and will remain to be one. Interdisciplinarity requires disciplinarity, and Anglophone Studies can only reach out to other disciplines from a firm self-conception. There is an increasing recognition that Anglophone Studies can benefit from closer connections to disciplines such as regional studies, ethnology, history, sociology, political science, and media studies. The development of innovative, interdisciplinary methodologies will be crucial in addressing intricate questions pertaining to language usage and its underlying meanings. Navigating interdisciplinary work while preserving disciplinary rigor will be a continuing challenge. Which topics and questions do you see as very relevant for the future of research in your field? The study of World Englishes has firmly established itself in the canon of English linguistics. World Englishes is a cover term for the various localized forms of English (e.g., Australian English, Nigerian English, Malaysian English, etc.), but - of course - also includes the (still) norm-providing standard varieties of British and American English. The label may further subsume lingua franca Englishes, learner varieties, hybridized forms of English, and perhaps even English-based pidgins and creoles. English has developed into a pluricentric language in different senses. This broader conception of World Englishes can be seen as an important research outcome, since there is substantial overlap in terms of linguistic features across these varieties. The future study of World Englishes is likely to intersect more strongly with sociolinguistics, regional studies, and ethnology, so as to examine forms, functions, and use of English in specific speech communities worldwide. Largely for methodological reasons, there has been a historical research focus on the more educated speaker groups. Broadening speaker groups and their language backgrounds, social backgrounds, milieus, and educational levels is likely to uncover AAA is 50! 130 more variation and new features, but perhaps also important similarities between different world regions. On the whole, I foresee less occupation with the established post-colonial national varieties, but an increasing interest to investigate the internal dynamics of speech communities for whom English is among the central languages. This shift in focus easily carries over to the classic inner circle countries where numerous and diverse immigrant communities substantially increase variation in the use of English. It may well be the case that globalization and transnationalism are among the most important forces that lead to a blurring of the boundaries between varieties of English. When I talk to students from different countries in the world, both postcolonial and non-postcolonial, I am noticing substantial differences, especially regarding their accents, but at the same time many similarities that are indicative of global convergence processes. One could hypothesize that the global English of the younger, mobile, and highly educated, generation is converging on some particular norm. This convergence is likely driven by the preeminent position of English in their language repertoires in combination with a strongly developed written register. These global convergence processes need attention. At the same time, one can also attest to the exploitation of localized, sometimes hybridized, features for the creation and expression of local and other identities around the world. However, these are more strongly bound to the spoken registers, and it is less clear what kinds of speaker groups these are indicative of. It can be assumed that the more educated speaker groups are able to exploit such localized features quite deliberately. The local processes of identity formation require more research. Studying and documenting them is an important prerequisite for their recognition and valorisation in education and language policy. Studying the position of English in different multilingual ecologies around the world is a major current research concern. Here, many pressing issues arise. For example, researchers are interested in how multilingual speakers in Anglophone societies navigate between English and the other languages in their respective ecologies. They currently study negotiation processes of identity through language mixing, code-switching, translanguaging, and other multilingual practices. The indexing of identities and orientations is a hot topic. In general, researchers ask what the long-term effects are of intense language contact, especially in urban areas with high densities of diasporic communities, and what the impact of English is in these processes of language change. There is further the question about the extent English is impacted on in such multilingual ecologies. Interviews: possible futures of (publishing in) Anglophone Studies 131 How do you envision the future of academic publishing in your field? I believe that digital media and Open Access publishing will dominate the field in the future. Digital media and platforms are cheaper and can reach more researchers. They can also be produced more quickly than print media and allow the integration of multimedia content. Open Access offers maximally inclusive publishing and is invaluable especially for researchers from the Global South and those without institutional embedding. Open Access publishing helps to democratize knowledge. I further expect the appearance of alternative formats of reviewing. Double blind reviewing is the currently accepted community standard, but one can already see the emergence of more open formats where the reviewers are known to the authors or are made public after the publication process has been completed. Data transparency serves as a fundamental pillar in the realm of publishing. It is essential to foster platforms that emphasize transparency, particularly in areas such as methodological clarity, data accessibility, and the replicability of research findings. What would you see as advantages and disadvantages of journals with a wider focus in English Studies such as AAA compared to more specialized journals? Journals with a broader focus, such as AAA, provide platforms for dialogue across subdisciplines (linguistics, literature, cultural studies, etc.), thus fostering cross-fertilization of ideas and methodologies. They can potentially harness a wider readership than specialized journals and, accordingly, produce more impact. AAA can offer a platform for publications that do not fit specialized journals, as, for example, overview articles or state-of-the-field pieces that summarize or synthesize insights from across English Studies. There may also be opportunities for interdisciplinary projects or for scholars whose work does not fit tightly defined categories. AAA could be an apt platform for early career researchers. Regarding potential disadvantages relative to more specialized journals, there is a risk of failing to attract key research, as such research is likely to go into focused journals. There, both reviewers and readers possess the requisite expertise to appreciate the relevant research. Articles can delve more deeply into technical details, theoretical debates, or methodological issues without over-explaining for a general audience. Peer reviewers of specialized journals can provide more targeted, detailed, and constructive feedback. Broad journals such as AAA further present challenges for the editors who need to possess skills and expertise in interdisciplinary work. AAA is 50! 132 Cornelia Klecker (CK) and Interviewer Ulla Ratheiser (UR) (Literature/ Culture) UR: Thank you very much, Cornelia, for agreeing to answer my questions. My first question is: what do you see as important challenges for Anglophone Studies in the years to come? CK: A few aspects come to mind. One ongoing challenge, which will likely become even more significant in the future, is AI. That is a major challenge for research in general but particularly for fields like ours that are very much based on producing texts. That is what we do: we are not in the lab conducting experiments, we are producing texts. So, of course, there will be challenges if AI becomes increasingly better in this area: how do we position ourselves? How do we ensure quality control? Also, how do we as editors of journals avoid receiving AI-generated article submissions, and so on? That is another issue that looms large over everything. I think something broader is the ongoing hostility towards the humanities - ongoing and perhaps even intensifying. That is not helpful, particularly these days. It is more important than ever with everything that is happening in the world politically and culturally. That, of course, is also part of the reason why we have seen, at least in Austria, a decline in student numbers. I find that very troubling, also in terms of the next generation of scholars. That is a really important issue because, traditionally, you study the subject first and then you move into it - with very few exceptions, anyway. So that is a broader issue. More specifically regarding Anglophone Studies, I think one of the beautiful aspects of the field is that, because it is so broad, it can be very inclusive and can promote a sense of equality. You don’t have to prioritise the literature of one country over another. For instance, you don’t necessarily have to focus on the UK; you can study South Africa or other regions. However, there is a pitfall here: we have to be careful that different cultures are not subsumed too much under a broad umbrella. Do you know what I mean? UR: Absolutely. CK: In the same vein, we must be careful not to believe that we are experts in everything. Just because I know about the British novel, or American television in my case, does not mean I know anything about Australian literature, media, or culture. So, I think this inclusivity is a really good thing in one way, but we also need to be cautious. UR: Also so that we teach and are aware of certain basic qualities, or basic skills and tools. Yet, building on those tools, you still have to get your expertise, of course. Interviews: possible futures of (publishing in) Anglophone Studies 133 CK: That’s right, and consider the specific context. UR: Yes, I agree. Can I follow up on the points about AI you brought up? Since you’re a journal editor yourself, do you check the articles that are submitted to your journal on whether AI has been used? CK: I don’t have a programme for that because, although it’s interesting to upload the articles and see, these tools are not reliable. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I think, right now, AI is not good enough to actually produce the kinds of academic articles that we publish. I still believe I could tell when a submission is not written by a human. Of course, it’s perfect English, with no grammatical mistakes and so on, but there is a lot of repetition, a lot of empty phrases, and phrases that sound good but don’t mean much. UR: Extremely shallow, right? CK: Yes, submissions like that, of course, we would not publish. So, right now, I’m not that worried, but we’ll see if AI gets better. I mean, I’m sure that some scholars are already working with it, maybe even just “quote unquote” to improve their English. I’ve heard that in terms of grant applications, there are noticeable differences in language quality already. It is striking that academic writing from certain countries, where language levels used to vary, is now written in perfect English. But I think that is fair because, ultimately, it’s still your own ideas. This is especially true in fields such as the natural sciences, where the emphasis is not on beautiful prose and how well you argue something but rather on conveying your research clearly and accurately. UR: My second question - my actual second question - is: which topics and questions do you see as very relevant for the future of research in your field? CK: So, in my field, which I would define specifically as American Studies, I think a lot of it is ongoing and obvious: climate change, Indigenous Studies, Border Studies, Inter-American Studies, and similar areas. However, one thing that is currently really important to me is US politics. No surprise there. Generally, that has been an interest of mine for quite some time. Obviously, it’s a personal interest, but I also find it important that US politics is discussed from a humanities and Cultural Studies perspective. It should not be the case that, whenever something happens in the US, journalists, for instance, only consult somebody from Political Science or Sociology. Scholars in American Studies also have expertise about the country and can provide explanations. This is very important because it is a different perspective that we bring to the discussion. Regarding current AAA is 50! 134 US politics, we will really have to be strongly engaged with questions of democracy and its erosion. You can see that very clearly in the US right now but, of course, not only there. They are just louder. So that is something that I’m really grappling with: how to approach this in my work, in my research, in my teaching; how to explain what is going on, even when you don’t fully understand it yourself; also, how to channel this notion that it is not just political but cultural polarisation that is really problematic. Moreover, a more general issue of ours is: how can we reach people, and how can we talk to people outside of academia? Particularly, if we are dealing with these big issues - democracy, climate change, and so on. I think we need to engage even more, do more public-facing publications or organise events where we can reach a broader audience. UR: Yes, and I think particularly in the case of the US, which has such a strong influence on so many parts of the Western world in particular, whatever happens there has an impact in Europe and other parts of the world. I think that’s really, really essential. CK: I only half-joke sometimes: who becomes president in the US is more important to an Austrian than who the Austrian president is. UR: Very often it is, unfortunately. CK: Because of how dependent and connected we are. UR: Yes, and you also see the rollback on citizens’ rights in the US, and how that also influences European discussions. So, I think that is really essential. CK: They become an excuse, right? If the US can do it, then so can we. Obviously, criticism of the US in those terms has been around in America for a long time, but I think now we have reached a point where this criticism needs to be done even more forcefully. UR: Of course, if they get away with it, then why shouldn’t we? That’s the kind of trend I feel. Indeed, I very much agree. What would you say: how do you envision the future of academic publishing in your field, or in our field, in this case? CK: I think, eventually, there won’t be any hard copies at all. I think the trend is there. UR: So, you believe that we will only have online publications? Interviews: possible futures of (publishing in) Anglophone Studies 135 CK: Online publications, yes. I haven’t researched that, so please don’t quote me on it, but I think there are only few left that don’t have an online version. Ongoing trends suggest there will be more and more open-access publications. I think so far those are mostly new journals, like the one I’m editor-in-chief of. It’s not a journal that changed from one way to open access but was founded as open access, and I know this is true of other journals as well. I wonder whether more established journals will also try to do this eventually. It’s difficult, of course. I think we as scholars generally agree that we love the notion of open access, of everybody having access to our work. Yet I wonder how long this could be sustained because it is only possible if institutions or governments - whoever it may be - are willing to finance that, invest in that. Openaccess journals and online publications in general are no less work than a printed version. Somebody needs to do this work. Not just the scholarly part, but editing, which is part of our job as academics, the layout and all those kinds of tasks - somebody needs to do that, and those people need to be paid. UR: Also, the technical infrastructure. CK: That’s right, all of that as well. It’s going to be interesting to see how that develops. UR: There are environmental issues, too, right? I think we always pretend as if anything that’s online does not impact the environment but, actually, a lot of energy and resources go into that. CK: That’s exactly what I sometimes say to students: how sure are you that 30 laptops running for 90 minutes are better for the environment than distributing hard copies of a text, for instance? I haven’t seen studies, but I wonder whether the laptops are really more sustainable. UR: I don’t think so. I read somewhere - I can’t remember what it was, but it was a good source - that every email has the ecological footprint of a plastic bag. Just think about how much energy is used by the many emails we send that just say “yes, thank you,” or emails with photos attached automatically as part of signatures. To wrap this question up, I would agree: I think that is clearly one of the central questions. Now, I have a question that is more concerned with journals that have a relatively broad focus, like AAA. What would you see as advantages and disadvantages of journals with a wider focus in English Studies, such as AAA, compared to more specialised journals? CK: I think a big disadvantage is that it’s more difficult for the editors because you cannot possibly be an expert in such a broad field. Even the AAA is 50! 136 first decision of whether to do a desk rejection or actually pass an article on to reviewers can already be tricky because it might be a field that is further away from your specific expertise. That is hard and, of course, one reason why external peer reviewers are so important. I usually try to find reviewers who work very specifically in that area to make sure that nothing slips through. However, that can also be a challenge since, usually, we are better connected with scholars in our own specific field. That often makes it more difficult to find external reviewers because you have to, well, blind email them, right? Although more often than not they actually say yes, it is still a big challenge for editors of journals with a wide focus. In my opinion, the big advantage of a journal with a broad scope is that it gives room to topics, methodologies, and articles that wouldn’t find room in a niche journal. So, I think that opens up opportunities, opportunities for innovation, original approaches, interdisciplinary approaches, and so on. I think that is a beautiful thing. Some may say that an article about a really niche topic would not be published in such a journal, but that is up to the editors, so it’s not necessarily the case. They can choose, for whatever reason, to publish a niche article or not. I don’t know how many people read an entire issue - I’m not necessarily a person who does that except if it’s very specific to my research -, but if you pick up an issue of a journal with a broader scope, an advantage is that you might find articles, topics, and approaches that you wouldn’t easily find otherwise because you’re not actively looking for them. UR: AAA not only includes English and American Studies but also linguistics, culture, and related studies. So, could one advantage also be that, even if people don’t read the entire issue, they still get an idea of what’s going on in terms of research? CK: Yes, definitely. I think that’s especially relevant if we consider the context of our own teaching. These fields are all part of the study programme we teach in. Although we don’t cover all aspects ourselves, it is always interesting to find out what is going on in those other research areas that are related to and an integral part of this study programme. And a journal like AAA allows you to get an overview. UR: Yes, that was all. Thank you so much for taking the time! Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom A conceptual framework and design principles for evidence-based assessment policy and practice Philipp Siepmann Oral communication exams (OCEs) have become an integral part of classroom-based summative assessment in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom in many federal states of Germany. However, the official guidelines issued by the Ministries of Education invariably lack a theoretical and empirical foundation and are limited to formal and practical aspects of administering oral examinations. Arguing strongly in favour of an evidence-based assessment practice, this article develops a conceptual framework of the OCE which extends several existing models of oral language performance assessment while considering the (limiting) conditions of local, classroom-based assessment. It includes elements relevant to the development of an OCE such as test construct, assessment tasks, criteria, and procedures. For each of these elements, an in-depth literature review is conducted and the implications from empirical research are discussed. The key points are summarised in four preliminary design principles (DP) to provide guidance to teachers and school policymakers in developing an OCE. The design principles relate to constructive alignment (DP1), assessment tasks (DP2), assessment criteria (DP3), and optimising examination conditions and procedures (DP4). The conceptual framework as well as the design principles formed the theoretical basis of a design-based research study on OCEs, which has been conducted in close collaboration with teachers at a partner school in North Rhine-Westphalia (see Siepmann 2024a, 2025, forthc.). 1. Introduction Over the past decade, many German federal states have introduced new mandatory oral examinations for classroom-based and high-stakes summative assessment in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0010 Philipp Siepmann 138 Although these assessments are known by different names, including Mündliche Prüfung (oral exam), Kommunikationsprüfung (communication exam) or Sprechprüfung (speaking exam), they have in common the fact that they are intended to test students’ oral communicative and interactional competences in the target language. This article will refer to these new assessments collectively as oral communication exams (German: Mündliche Kommunikationsprüfung; hereafter: OCEs) to distinguish them clearly from more content-based oral examinations in EFL classrooms, such as oral Abitur examinations. The introduction of OCEs is part of a wider assessment reform in the wake of outcomes orientation and standardisation, as reflected in the National Educational Standards for Modern Languages (Bildungsstandards), which provide for speaking tests as part of the written Abitur examination or as a substitute for a written examination during the qualifying period (KMK 2012: 25). OCEs were formally enacted through amendments to examination regulations and curriculum guidelines. In order to facilitate practical implementation, some states have issued handouts with recommendations on the design and administration of examinations as well as sample tasks or entire examination designs (e.g. Hessisches Kultusministerium 2020; MSW NRW 2014; Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2014). However, it is striking that none of these official documents is (explicitly) based on empirical evidence. This article takes a critical stance towards such a practice and argues for a theoretically grounded and evidence-based OCE policy and practice. Therefore, it proposes evidence-based design principles for OCEs to support policy makers and teachers based on a review of the empirical research literature and textbooks on classroom-based language assessment. The article is divided into three parts: First, it outlines a conceptual framework for an OCE and its main design elements. Second, it discusses the implications of relevant empirical studies for the design of the elements of an OCE. Third, the article derives four theory-based design principles (DP) from the theoretical discussion. 2. Conceptual framework for the oral communication exam The conceptual framework for an OCE proposed in this article emerged from a design-based research project (Siepmann 2024a, forthc.; Siepmann & Bruns forthc.). It was carried out between 2019 and 2023 in close collaboration with teachers and students from a partner school in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The term conceptual framework is used according to a definition by Miles et al. (2018: 15): Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 139 A conceptual framework explains, graphically and/ or in narrative form, the main things to be studied - for example, the key factors, variables, phenomena, concepts, participants - and the presumed interrelationships among them - as a network. The decision to use a visual framework was made at an early stage of the project to focus the attention of participating teachers on the key factors influencing the quality of an OCE and their interrelationship. In the collaborative research process, this framework helped to identify key issues with the current examination practice and set priorities for the design process while maintaining a focus on theory development. The present design of the conceptual framework for an OCE (Fig. 1) encompasses four levels, which are arranged to reflect the hierarchical structure of the German education system 1 : 1. the ‘outer frames’, which encompass the target language use (TLU) domain (i.e. the real-world language use modelled both in the classroom and the OCE; Bachman & Palmer 1996); several levels of legal frameworks, examination regulations, as well as curriculum guidelines; 2. the ‘inner frames’ or ‘jurisdiction of change’ (as demarcated by the dashed line), indicating the levels within a local school context where teachers can actively design instruction and assessment. This is the domain is pivotal for local curriculum and classroom development (see Siepmann 2024b, forthc. for illustration). local conditions which may impose limits on the preparation and conduction of an OCE such as the available time, staff, materials, as well as the support from the school community; the level of teaching and learning in the foreign language classroom, which, ideally, is closely connected to 3. the level of assessment and evaluation (centre), which comprises: the assessment task (see Sect. 4.2), assessment criteria/ scales (see Sect. 4.3), and the assessment procedures (‘scoring & grading’, see Sect. 4.3). the ‘human factor’, that is, teachers/ raters and students/ testtakers as the main stakeholders of the OCE (not discussed in detail in this article). 4. The test construct, which spans all levels of the framework. It ensures that all elements of the OCE fit together (see Sect. 4.1). 1 While the framework is modelled on the German education system it should, with minor adjustments, be applicable to most education systems and local contexts. Philipp Siepmann 140 Fig. 1: Design of the conceptual framework for an OCE. Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 141 The framework integrates the key components of previous theoretical models of oral language performance assessment (Fulcher 2003; McNamara 1996; Milanovic & Saville 1996; Skehan 1998; see also Zhao 2013 for a detailed comparison of these models): test construct, raters, test-takers, assessment tasks, assessment criteria/ scales, and procedures. Since these models were not primarily designed with classroom-based assessment in mind, elements were borrowed from other models: Ishii & Baba’s (2003) model of locally developed oral skills evaluation foregrounds the alignment of teaching, learning, and assessment (see ‘teaching and learning in the classroom’, Fig. 1). Another notable extension found in the present version is the emphasis on the societal and institutional embeddedness of classroom-based assessment (see ‘outer frames’ in Fig. 1). The outer frames symbolise different levels of school policy and administration, which determine the legal and formal guidelines for educational assessments. McNamara (2001: 340f.) defines two sets of external demands that often compete with the needs of teachers and students in classroom-based assessment: validity demands (e.g., aspects of reliability and validity, as well as the consequences of assessment) and managerial demands (e.g., reporting and accountability). These demands concern different levels, from the school itself to local/ national school authorities, depending on the structure of the respective educational system. The outer frames are also a reminder that educational assessment always reflects social and cultural values (McNamara 2001; Messick 1994). Finally, the ‘jurisdiction of change’, encompassing the inner circles, is an original aspect of the framework at hand. It delineates the area where individual teachers or a school’s collective staff can take effective action. Within the jurisdiction of change, some practical and logistical aspects of planning and conducting OCEs are included which became salient through the exchange with teachers in the empirical study, such as the availability of staff, rooms, and time for providing the assessment, as well as the support from the wider school community, including parents. These external conditions may impose tight restrictions on the assessment and may be detrimental to its quality, for instance, if not enough teachers are available to provide for a second examiner or if there is not enough time allocated for the examination. This part of the framework draws on O’Sullivan’s (2021) concept of a Comprehensive Learning System (CLS), which considers the stakeholders and local conditions in what the author calls the delivery system, that is the “process by which the formal curriculum is operationalised in specific learning contexts or domains” (10). It encompasses not only the teacher and classroom instruction but several other factors that shape the implementation of a classroom-based assessment: the physical environment of the school, the school staff, the available materials and (technical) equipment. The extent to which the elements described in section 4 can be actively shaped by educators ultimately depends on the conditions provided in the local school context. Philipp Siepmann 142 3. Defining ‘quality of assessment’ The conceptual framework of the OCE is intended to help policymakers and teachers make informed decisions about how to improve the quality of assessment. Therefore, the notion of assessment quality will be discussed before elaborating further on the design elements constituting the OCE. The first question which naturally arises is why quality matters in assessment. As Shohamy (1993: 2), who has written extensively on the impact of tests, emphasises, [t]he power and authority of tests enable policymakers to use them as effective tools for controlling educational systems and prescribing the behavior of those who are affected by their results administrators, teachers, and students. It is therefore imperative for educators to use this power responsibly and to pursue a high-quality standard of quality in classroom-based assessment in EFL, which includes a clear view of the potential impact of test on the individual learner. The second question relates to what constitutes a quality standard for a classroom-based OCE. Most empirical research on (large-scale) language assessment revolves around psychometric criteria such as reliability and validity. When it comes to classroom-based OCEs, however, quality is more difficult to grasp. The complex statistical operations required to determine, for example, interrater reliability, are hardly practicable for most language teachers, who lack both the time and the expertise. However, some of these criteria can be adapted for use in the classroom and provide guidance in approaching a concept of assessment quality. A wellestablished concept which is still cited in many recent textbooks is Bachman & Palmer’s (1996) notion of test usefulness. It consists of six interrelated qualities, namely reliability, validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact/ washback, and practicality. Reliability refers to the dependability and consistency of test scores, i.e. a test should produce the same results when administered repeatedly (re-test reliability) or when scored several times by the same rater (intrarater reliability) or once by different raters (interrater reliability). Reliability, therefore, depends, among other things, on clearly communicated expectations that are communicated to test-takers and co-raters through transparent assessment criteria/ scales. Construct validity in classroom-based assessment means that the test covers the very skills or competences it claims to test. Authenticity emphasises that the assessment should reflect real-world language use rather than artificial ‘exam talk’, in order to be a useful measure of a learner’s ability to deal with everyday communicative tasks. Interactiveness describes the demand a test makes on the test-taker’s Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 143 communicative/ interactional competences as well as cognitive, critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. Test impact (or washback) is the extent to which the test influences learning and teaching in the classroom. Ideally, the learner is provided with useful feedback on how to improve on the competences covered in the test. Practicality means that the test can be administered economically under the given personal, spatial, temporal, and material conditions. Because the qualities subsumed under the umbrella of test usefulness are interdependent, the design of a classroom-based language assessment such as the OCE must take into account the complex interplay of all its components. One way of approaching the complexity of assessment design is through the concept of constructive alignment (Biggs 1996), which forms the backbone of the conceptual framework for an OCE: From this perspective, a classroom-based assessment is of high quality if it is closely aligned with the learning objectives as well as instruction/ learning activities in the classroom. While this may seem simplistic, it provides a lens through which the quality of an assessment design can be quickly and easily evaluated, as well as a solid starting point for the design process of an OCE. 4. Design elements of the OCE framework Having arrived at a broad understanding of assessment quality in the development of OCEs, this section will review popular textbooks and empirical studies on oral language performance assessment and discuss their specific implications for designing quality tests and providing optimal conditions to test-takers. 2 It will approach the design elements of the OCE as depicted in the conceptual framework (Fig. 1) from the outer frames to the inner frames, starting with the definition of the test construct and specifications, before moving on to the assessment tasks, assessment criteria/ scales, and the assessment procedure. 4.1. Test construct To establish constructive alignment, the competences tested in an OCE must reflect the learning objectives and learning activities in the classroom. The first step in designing an OCE is to define the test construct (see DP 1.2, Sect. 5). As indicated by the bold arrow (see Fig. 1), the test 2 This section builds upon the extensive literature review carried out during the phase of initial problem analysis in the design-based research project (i.e. the first cycle of analysis & exploration as part of the generic model of educational design research; McKenney & Reeves 2019). Philipp Siepmann 144 construct is influenced by a) the target language use domain (Bachman & Palmer 1996), b) by guidelines and regulations at different levels, c) by what is taught and learnt in the classroom, and d) the specific test purpose. The test construct can be thought of as the fabric that weaves together all the elements of the test. Thus, construct definition, “is the process of defining what it is we intend to measure” (Cheng & Fox 2017: 104). The test construct will guide the development of both the assessment task and the assessment criteria. Before delving deeper into the process of construct definition, it should be noted that the term ‘test construct’ has a different meaning in classroom-based assessment than in psychometric language proficiency testing. As Baird et al. (2017: 15) explain, educational attainment constructs set out what students should learn. Unlike psychological constructs, they are goals. Within an education system, they help to generate the very attributes that they assess by making transparent what students should know and be able to do. Applied to the test construct of an OCE, this means that it must conform to the curriculum guidelines, examination regulations, and the learning objectives laid out in the school curriculum (see outer frames in Fig. 1). Defining the test construct starts with a reflection on the target language use domain, that is, real-world language use in a particular social and cultural context (Bachman & Palmer 1996). This helps to specify the language skills needed to cope with this communicative situation and to devise assessment criteria. Construct definition takes some theoretical knowledge about the nature of spoken discourse and how it differs from written discourse (see Bygate 1987; Goh & Burns 2012; Luoma 2004 for elaboration). In very broad terms, the complex processing conditions of oral communication (Kormos 2006; Levelt 1989; Vandergrift & Goh 2021) are characterised by time pressure and reciprocity. This explains some of the linguistic features specific to spoken discourse, such as the use of deictic expressions (‘you’/ ’me’; ‘here’/ ’there’) and the high proportion of formulaic expressions (Bygate 1987; Goh & Burns 2012). Language teachers may argue that they lack both the time and the expertise to deal in detail with the theoretical test construct of an OCE. However, there are some accessible concepts of oral communication that can form the basis of an educational test construct. As many curricula and standards in the countries of the European Union (and far beyond) are based on the scales of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference; CoE 2001), the subscales provided in the companion volume (CoE 2020) can facilitate the process of construct definition as well as the development of corresponding assessment scales. The CEFR provides specific scales for different task types, such as ‘informal discussion (with friends)’ Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 145 or ‘goal-oriented collaboration’. As the language of curricula or the CEFR may be too general and abstract for students, the test construct should be described in simpler terms. In the main study mentioned in Sect. 2.1, the Oracy Skills Framework (OSF) introduced by Mercer et al. (2019) and adapted for English language education by Siepmann (2024b) was used as the basis and proved to be very practicable and accessible to students. It encompasses the various resources that students can draw on in oral communication, including physical (e.g., voice and body language), linguistic (e.g., lexis, grammar, genre), cognitive (e.g., organisation of talk, strategies), and social-emotional (e.g., confidence in speaking, interaction, active listening) aspects. The OSF covers elements of communicative and interactional competence but, unlike the CEFR scales, also puts a strong emphasis on non-verbal (e.g. use of voice and body language) and affective (e.g., emotions, motivation, anxiety) components of oral communication. In classroom-based assessments, the test construct often covers non-linguistic elements which are an integral part of the EFL curriculum but usually not covered in oral proficiency tests. In the German context, for example, these include intercultural communicative competence (KMK 2012; 2023) and discourse competence as an overarching goal of foreign language education (Legutke 2010). Discourse competence implies that language learning is an essential prerequisite for students’ social and cultural participation in a globalising world. A controversial aspect of the test construct is whether an oral assessment can be used to measure an individual’s language skills. This question has been raised by proponents of interactional competence (IC). IC has received increasing attention in the language testing community in recent years (Plough et al. 2018) and is worth considering in the development of classroom-based OCEs. Since meaning is largely co-constructed in oral interaction, and communicative success depends on all participants of a conversation, it is argued that a paired or group oral should be regarded as a collective performance and therefore be assessed as such. This idea is expressed in the term ‘confluence’, which denotes “the act of making spoken language fluent together with another speaker” (Walsh 2012: 3). Thereby arguing against a ‘monological bias’ of speaking constructs (McCarthy 2005), IC “is concerned with the ways in which interactants construct meanings together, as opposed to looking at features of individual performance which lie at the heart of communicative competence” (Walsh 2012: 3). An important implication of IC is that more attention is given to (active) listening both in language teaching and assessment (Lam 2021, 2024). A shift from communicative competence, which has shaped communicative language teaching and assessment for decades, to IC could go as far as to include a collective component in the overall grade for a learner’s performance in oral assessments (May 2009). Philipp Siepmann 146 A potential positive washback of such a feature could be that it encourages collaboration in interaction inside and outside the classroom. 3 Whatever aspects the test construct includes, if carefully defined, it can help strengthen the links between teaching and learning in the classroom and the OCE. Moreover, it also makes it easier to communicate expectations to students. To further enhance transparency and constructive alignment, textbooks on classroom-based language assessment (e.g., Bachman & Damböck 2018; Bachman & Palmer 1996; Cheng & Fox 2017; Luoma 2004) recommend writing detailed test specifications, for example, in form of a table (see DP 1.3). Test specifications state which competences are tested (test construct) and for which purpose, how the competences are tested (e.g., number of items, test duration, test/ task format, etc.), and how the test will be graded (e.g., criteria, scale). In this way, detailed specifications “will help the developers create a coherent system whose parts fit together” (Luoma 2004: 115). Writing test specifications for an OCE is important not only to meet external accountability demands (compliance with educational standards, examination regulations, curriculum guidelines, etc.), but also to make the goals and subject matter of assessment transparent to students. Ideally, these test specifications are formally agreed by the EFL teaching staff and formalised in the school curriculum (see DP 1.1). 4.2. Assessment task In language assessment, tasks are “the means by which we can elicit a sample of language that can be scored”, and thus “strengthen the inference we can make from scores to construct” (Fulcher 2003: 50). In terms of the overall quality of an OCE, tasks play a crucial role in the type and complexity of communication and interaction they elicit from test-takers. This section will outline key aspects of a ‘genuine’ speaking task, that is, one that is based on authentic genres of oral communication, as opposed to tasks adapted from written assessments. The following factors relevant to task design will be addressed: • task format • task complexity • participant structure • topic • planning time • authenticity • quality assurance. 3 Exemplary assessment scales for IC at various proficiency levels are provided by Galaczi (2014) and Barth-Weingarten & Freitag-Hild (2021). Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 147 Task format Tasks operationalise the test construct. A crucial step in task design is therefore to decide which general task format best reflects the test construct, that is, elicits the desired type of communication from the testtakers. According to Fulcher’s (2003) typology, tasks may have an open, guided or closed orientation which determine the range of options that test-takers have in responding to a task. Tasks may be non-interactional (monologic) or interactional (dialogic, multilogic), they can be goaloriented, they can present interactants with convergent (e.g. goaloriented collaboration/ planning) or divergent (e.g. pro/ contra debate) goals, and they relate to specific topics and situations. Goh and Burns (2012) distinguish between monologic, communication-gap, and discussion tasks. Communication-gap tasks are further divided into informationgap tasks where students have different sets of information that they share to achieve a common goal, and context-gap tasks, in which students have the same set of information and are asked to create new content for their audience (e.g., present their opinions). Ultimately, the assessment task should confront students with a communicative problem which they are asked to solve through collaboration or by negotiating diverging viewpoints (see DP 2.4). The choice of monologic or dialogic tasks has implications for the nature and quality of test-takers’ discourse in the examination. Monologic tasks include narrative/ descriptive tasks (e.g., picture description, telling a story based on an image sequence), instruction (e.g., giving directions), retelling (e.g., of a story read during preparation time), explanation/ prediction (e.g., interpreting a diagram) or a prepared speech (Luoma 2004). There are some limitations as to the discourse elicited by monologic tasks: Test-takers tend to respond to monologic tasks in a more structured and predictable way than to dialogic tasks (Fulcher 2003). As they produce less variability in test-takers’ responses, they are more suitable for testing specific linguistic forms or language functions. Another limitation of monologic speaking tests is that they provide less information about a test-taker’s real-world interactional competence than do dialogic formats (Roever & Ikeda 2022). Dialogic or interactive speaking tasks include planning or decision-making (e.g., choosing between different options) and role-plays or simulations (e.g. resolving a conflict with an exchange student) (Luoma 2004). A combination of monologic and dialogic tasks and different degrees of openness allows the students to demonstrate a wide range of their communicative abilities in an OCE (see DP 2.5). Philipp Siepmann 148 Task complexity The assessment task largely determines the interactiveness of an OCE, which is an aspect of test usefulness (see Sect. 2). As Bachman & Palmer (1996: 39) put it, interactiveness refers to “the extent and type of involvement of the test-taker’s language ability [...], topical knowledge, and affective schemata, in accomplishing a test task”. In other words, interactiveness is a function of the cognitive and linguistic complexity of an assessment task; balancing these features is crucial in task design (see DP 2.5). In general, the focus of an OCE task should be on communication rather than content (see DP 4.1). Grabowski (2007) demonstrated a ‘writing superiority effect’ in a series of experiments, which means that written assessments have higher content validity than oral examinations in the verbal recall of declarative/ factual knowledge due to the higher cognitive load of speaking compared to writing. As a rule, therefore, the cognitive demand of an oral assessment task should be lower than that of a written assessment task. In order to match the cognitive and linguistic demand to the overall level of the students, Robinson (2001) proposes three dimensions of complexity: (cognitive) task complexity, (interactional) task conditions, and (relative) task difficulty. For example, open tasks involving cognitively demanding processes such as logical reasoning require more complex linguistic forms (such as causal or chronological sequencing) and are therefore more complex than closed-ended question-answer tasks or guided narrative tasks. Cognitively complex task formats that require argumentation and problem-solving such as decision tasks tend to produce more syntactically complex communication but may be detrimental to fluency and may even lead to communication breakdown. Guided, more structured tasks such as descriptive or narrative tasks benefit fluency and accuracy, but tend to result in shorter, less complex responses (Skehan & Foster 1997). The findings on the correlation between task structure and accuracy were confirmed by a study by Tavakoli & Skehan (2005), although it did not confirm a consistent effect of task structure on complexity. At the interactional level, various factors such as the participant structure (see paragraph below), their personality or gender, or their familiarity with the interlocutor affect the overall complexity of a task. Finally, individual learner differences in motivation, anxiety, ability, etc. influence the relative difficulty of a task. Participant structure If the task requires interaction, the question of who the students will be talking to - the teacher or another student/ a group of students - is central. Leaving aside the practical problems that arise when the teacher acts Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 149 as both interlocutor and examiner, there is evidence that the students’ performance on an OCE improves when they interact with their peers (see DP 4.1). In Nakatsuhara’s (2013) study, test-takers not only performed better in paired peer-to-peer oral examinations than in interview examinations, but also showed more complex patterns of interaction and negotiation of meaning. Such paired assessment formats also tend to elicit more spontaneous, richer speech (Brooks 2009) and “provide opportunities for students to demonstrate ‘real-life’ interactional abilities to relate to each other in spoken interaction” (Gan et al. 2009). Paired assessment tasks should allow test-takers to demonstrate collaborative skills and use communication strategies (Galaczi 2008). Mutuality and equality are key qualities of such a task design: Mutuality means that test-takers coconstruct meaning and build up on each other’s ideas, while equality refers to balanced opportunities for participation (ibid.). Group size has tangible implications for the interaction between the group members. Comparing different group sizes (three versus four participants), Nakatsuhara (2011) found that a group size of three provided a more collaborative atmosphere than a group size of four (see DP 4.3), which she attributed to a higher degree of equality and mutuality, suggesting that the test-takers collaborated more successfully in smaller groups. The larger group size also encouraged avoidance behaviour from the more introverted members. Another finding of the study was that larger groups were more prone to mechanical turn-taking, where students make their contributions in a fixed order rather than in a dynamic way as in naturally occurring conversation. Although research suggests that pair and group assessment formats tend to benefit the quality of examination discourse, there is still a risk of asymmetric conversation caused by dominant behaviour by one partner (May 2009). May’s study also revealed that when a collaborative grade (or part grade) is awarded, different interaction styles of test-takers can pose a considerable challenge to the raters. Davis (2009) provides evidence that student proficiency is an obvious criterion when assembling groups of test-takers for an OCE; differences in ability tend to benefit lower-proficiency test-takers while the higher-proficiency test-takers were not disadvantaged if the differences were moderate. Topic Another important variable in task design is the topic of the task and the test-takers’ familiarity with it. In a study by Khabbazbashi (2021) a general topic effect - a significant influence of the topic of an assessment task on the test-taker’s score in the assessment - could not be verified. However, it provides evidence that topic familiarity and the level of abstraction influence the quality of discourse elicited by a task. In a previ- Philipp Siepmann 150 ous study, the author found that the test-taker’s individual background knowledge influences the cognitive demand of an assessment task and thus the linguistic complexity and fluency of the performance (Khabbazbashi 2017). As Jennings et al. (1999: 451) show, giving testtakers a choice of topics to talk about does not have a statistically significant effect on test scores, but qualitative data collected from test-takers suggests that it has favourable psychological effects as it helps “shift the balance of power from the tester to the test-taker” (see DP 2.3). In classroom-based OCEs, care should be taken to ensure that the topics covered in the test reflect the contents of the previous teaching unit in a balanced way (content/ curricular validity). Giving students some choice of topic - for instance, when giving a prepared speech in the OCE - is one way to ensure that the topics discussed in the OCE are meaningful and relevant from the students’ perspective (Rogge 2012, see DP 2.3). This aspect should be considered when beginning to define the target language use domain the test refers to: Where and how - through which media, and in which genres - would the students (or their peers) discuss the topic(s) covered in the OCE? What aspects would matter most to them? If the teacher is not familiar with these discourses, students could be actively involved in this process and thus take part in designing the task. Planning time Depending on the type and complexity of the assessment task, teachers must decide whether to allow the students planning time to prepare for the task. While several studies have found no significant impact on overall test scores (Elder & Wigglesworth 2006; Inoue & Lam 2021; Lampropoulou 2023), there is evidence that planning benefits the quality of the language output by increasing fluency, leading to more coherent and persuasive discourse, greater lexical variety, and syntactic complexity (O’Grady 2019; Yuan & Ellis 2003). In Bamanger & Gashan’s (2015) experimental study of pre-task planning conducted on high school students, planners outperformed non-planners in fluency, accuracy, and complexity measures, and, in contrast to the studies cited above, scored higher overall. The authors stress that to make effective use of planning time, teachers should prepare students to use it purposefully. Inoue & Lam (2021: 1) demonstrated that extended planning time in a listening-to-speaking test led to greater cognitive and metacognitive engagement on the part of test-takers, that is, “enhanced cognitive validity of the task”. Pre-task planning time, however, may negatively impact some aspects of performance, for instance, collaboration in interaction (Nitta & Nakatsuhara 2014). It should be emphasised that, in addition to aspects of performance, task complexity and authenticity should be considered when deciding about (the amount of) pre-task planning time. O’Grady (2019), who found in his study that planning time has little influence on test Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 151 scores, recommends that it should only be provided where it reflects realworld language use and should not be offered where spontaneous speech is desired (see DP 4.4). In any case, it should be avoided that students make lengthy notes that they may be tempted to read out instead of speaking freely. Task authenticity Authenticity is a highly contested concept in language assessment. Task authenticity refers to how closely an assessment task resembles realworld communicative tasks in the target language use (TLU) domain, see Sect. 2.1) and whether it allows students to use language in a meaningful, contextualised way (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The authors acknowledge that authenticity is a subjective category, “as different test takers may have different perceptions about their TLU domains” (ibid., 24). Therefore, what a test developer may consider an authentic assessment may not necessarily be accepted as such by the test-taker. Moreover, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to precisely define the characteristics of a realworld communicative task and to transfer them to the assessment context (Lewkowicz 2000). It may be added that in classroom-based assessment, the question arises as to whether an ‘authentic’ task will automatically lead to greater student engagement and motivation - after all, the degree of authenticity of speaking tasks in test settings is always limited by the fact that they take place in a test context (Bo 2007). As Stokoe’s (2013) analysis reveals, speakers’ actions in simulated role-plays tend to be more elaborate, interactionally visible and thus more easily ‘assessible’ than in their real-world counterparts. In other words, test-takers tend to give the raters what they are looking for rather than satisfying their own communicative needs, as they would in naturally occurring conversation. Thus, even if the task is (perceived to be) authentic, the communication in the examination need not be. For these and other reasons, the concept of authenticity is highly contested in the academic discussion and there is very little guidance on how to practically achieve authenticity in assessment. It might be sufficient for language teachers developing an OCE task to look for inspiration in real-world communication rather than to adapt speaking tasks from their written counterparts (see DP 2.1). Quality assurance in task design As with every element of the OCE framework, quality assurance is key to task design. In order to establish a constructive alignment between instruction and assessment, writing a blueprint of the task is recommended (see DP 1.4). Bachman & Damböck (2017) point out that a blueprint “provides a link between the objectives of the language classroom and the content to be assessed, and between the contents of the instructional task and the assessment task” (139). This is essential to ensuring the as- Philipp Siepmann 152 sessment covers the instructional content and that meaningful and generalisable interpretations can be made (cf. ibid.). The process of assessment task design does not end with the first administration of an OCE. As Biggs (1996: 356) points out, the crucial point in designing assessment tasks is “to judge the extent to which they embody the target performances of understanding, and how well they lend themselves to evaluating individual student performances”. This implies that any task should be carefully piloted, evaluated by teachers and students, and refined to ensure that it allows students to demonstrate the full range of their abilities in spoken communication and allows valid assessment. A final step in task design before implementing a new task is to carefully (peer-)review the task. It should clearly communicate the communicative context, situation, purpose and goals of communication, speaker roles and addressee(s) (see DP 2.5). 4.3. Assessment criteria/ scales Like assessment tasks, assessment criteria and scales have a strong influence on the overall quality of an OCE. If no mandatory assessment scales are provided, teachers can adapt existing scales or develop their own from scratch. This is a challenging task which requires expert knowledge of test constructs and test development. Insights from empirical studies on the assessment scales may provide orientation to policymakers and teachers. Another important decision concerns the assessment procedure, that is, how the test is scored and graded, especially if there is more than one rater involved. Scale types The term assessment scale or, as often used synonymously, rubrics (see Kuiken & Vedder 2020) refers broadly to “any tool that allows raters to distinguish among a number of levels of language performance” (Baker & Turner 2022: 1). Assessment scales can be divided into two main categories, holistic and analytic. Holistic scales integrate all aspects of assessment in one scale, which allows a quick and intuitive assessment, but they lack reliability and validity (Fulcher 2003). Moreover, they are of limited use to students to make inferences about their individual strengths and weaknesses e.g. in fluency or accuracy. Analytic scales allow different aspects of performance (such as fluency, coherence, pronunciation, etc.) to be scored separately. They thus allow for a more differentiated assessment with balanced reference to different criteria and provide for individual feedback on the individual criteria to the students (Knoch 2009). Although the use of analytic scales is more cognitively demanding for raters, as it requires them to attend to different aspects of Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 153 the test construct while observing and evaluating the test performance, analytic scales permit a more reliable and valid assessment (Hamp-Lyons, 1991); they are thus recommended for use in an OCE (see DP 3.1) A third category, the part-marking model, is mentioned by Khabbazbashi & Galaczi (2020), where individual scores are assigned to different parts (e.g., interview, monologue, dialogue) of a test. Their study found that part marking models provide greater differentiation and precision in assessments of speaking abilities (see DP 3.1). Part-marking analytic scales which differentiate between monologic and dialogic (interview/ peerpeer) parts are recommended in the official guidelines for OCEs of most federal states of Germany, with some exceptions such as Lower Saxony where a combination of holistic and analytic scales is suggested (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2014: 124 ff.). For all three models, a further distinction can be made between task-independent scales (which can be used for similar tasks) and task-dependent scales (which only apply to one specific task) (Kuiken & Vedder 2020). In classroom-based OCEs, it may help students to describe fulfilment criteria in relation to the specific demands of a task. Defining assessment criteria Assessment criteria should reflect the learning objectives of classroom instruction to ensure constructive alignment and content validity. In particular, assessment criteria for an OCE should consider the characteristics of spoken discourse (see DP 3.2). As (synchronous, face-to-face) oral communication occurs under time pressure, speakers have very little opportunities to plan or edit what is said. This may partly be compensated for by the co-constructed, reciprocal nature of oral communication, as meaning is negotiated in discourse (Bygate 1987). These characteristics need to be reflected in the assessment criteria devised for an OCE, which is not always the case in practice: Matz et al. (2018), for example, criticise the separation of content and language, as well as of grammar and lexis in the assessment scales for OCEs issued by the Ministry of Education of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (MSW NRW 2014). The separation of content and language, they argue, ignores the fact that the quality of content in oral communication depends largely on whether it is communicated coherently and appropriately to a particular audience. As for the separation of grammar and lexis, they point out that oral discourse relies heavily on the use of lexical chunks. In practice, it may be difficult to distinguish between lexical and grammatical errors when these chunks are used incorrectly. The authors add that an individual scale for grammar focuses the examiners’ attention on grammatical accuracy and thus on the students’ deficits than their communicative success. Philipp Siepmann 154 Transparency of assessment criteria Assessment criteria should be communicated transparently to the students so they can draw conclusions about their learning from their scores in each category. This means that rather than using generic criteria and descriptors to assess students’ performance, task-specific criteria should be developed as they “increase discussion about the different components of a specific assignment” (Rosenow 2014). To further increase their usability for students, criteria and level descriptors should therefore be written in a student-friendly, non-technical way to help students set learning goals and monitor their progress (Andrade et al. 2021; see DP 3.3). Students can even be actively involved in the development of assessment criteria and scales (see DP 3.4). While teachers may be reluctant to give up control, this is a crucial step towards democratic assessment as well as shared power and responsibility (Shohamy 2001). The co-construction (or co-creation) of assessment criteria has been found to increase learner autonomy as it improves self-regulation, strategy use, and overall performance (Carless 2009; Fraile et al. 2017; Panadero & Romero 2014). Moreover, it benefits their capability of evaluative judgment as well as the overall quality of peer feedback (Yan 2024). A study by Zhao & Zhao (2020) on co-constructing writing assessment criteria established that coconstruction not only strengthens constructive alignment of learning objectives (or educational standards), learning, and assessment, but also promotes students’ metacognitive competences. In their case study, criteria based on the CEFR scales were provided by the instructor and refined by the students. This approach of guided co-construction seems more promising in school contexts than developing criteria from scratch. One way to establish and refine assessment criteria is to work with exemplars, that is, “carefully chosen samples of student work used to illustrate dimensions of quality” (Carless et al. 2018: 108). It should be noted that most studies cited above were conducted in higher education and on writing tasks. However, it is reasonable to assume that co-construction of criteria has similar benefits in secondary education and in the context of preparing for an OCE. Rogge (2018), for example, outlines a method for co-constructing assessment criteria for OCEs in the EFL classroom which further strengthens the constructive alignment between teaching and testing. Establishing agreement between raters The grading process is a potential source of variability in test scores, and particularly so in oral assessments. In an ‘ideal’ setting - with fully objective examiners and optimal conditions for examinees - it would be possible to identify a learner’s ‘true score’ in an OCE. While complete objectivity is rarely achieved in language assessments - except, maybe, in Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 155 multiple-choice tests where an answer is either right or wrong -, oral assessment is particularly prone to subjectivity (e.g., harshness) and rater bias (Lumley & McNamara 1995). This can lead to low reliability of test scores. There are steps that can be taken to improve the quality of assessment procedures. The presence of a second (or even third) rater, ideally someone unfamiliar with the students and their previous performance, is recommended where practically feasible. If two or more raters are available, there seems to be a broad consensus in the research literature that scores assigned by the raters should at least be adjacent (e.g., ‘3’ and ‘4’ on the German six-point grading scale; see Penny & Johnson, 2011 for an overview). Penny and Johnson (2011) list five models to resolve non-adjacent scores (in writing assessments), two of which seem practical for classroom-based oral assessments such as OCEs. The first model is based on the rater mean, i.e. the test score is calculated by combining (summing up or averaging) the scores awarded by the individual raters. The second model, discussion, requires raters to review their ratings and agree on a consensus score. Since the rater mean model is much less time-consuming than the discussion model, it should be preferred for reasons of efficiency (see DP 4.4). The discussion model is also vulnerable to power imbalances, especially if the raters have different professional status or experience. However, discussion of divergent scores can help to calibrate raters’ standards and can be used when two raters consistently disagree. 5. Preliminary design principles for OCEs Based on the research findings on the design elements of the OCE, this section will sum up the implications of the available evidence for classroom-based oral assessments in the EFL classroom in four design principles (DP). In design-based research, which typically pursues a dual goal of solving practical pedagogical problems while deepening theoretical understanding about these problems, design principles act as a “bridge between scientific knowledge production and practice design” (Euler 2017: 1). They often take the form of “prescriptive statements [which form the] the basis for designing practical action concepts to achieve the defined practice goals”. (ibid.: 2). The DP presented in this article are preliminary or ‘alpha’ versions. That is, they have not yet been fieldtested, evaluated, and further refined to empirically based and more advanced ‘beta’ and ‘gamma’ versions 4 (see McKenney & Reeves 2019: Ch. 6). Each of the four principles focuses on improving different aspects of 4 To learn more about their evolution over the course of the collaborative design-based research project, see Siepmann (2024a; forthc.; Siepmann & Bruns forthc.). Philipp Siepmann 156 the quality of an OCE, such as validity or authenticity. The first design principle concentrates on the steps to be taken in the early planning stages to achieve constructive alignment (DP1). The second and third design principle provide guidelines for the development of assessment tasks (DP2) and assessment criteria/ scales (DP3). The fourth principle (DP4) focuses on enhancing conditions and procedures to improve the practicality of the OCE. Preliminary design principle 1 (DP1; alpha): constructive alignment Quality focus: constructive alignment, validity To systematically foster students’ oral competences, learning objectives, learning activities in the classroom, and assessment tasks and criteria of the oral communication exam (OCE) should be constructively aligned. 1.1. When introducing a new OCE, the school curriculum should be thoroughly revisited and re-designed to focus on oral communication and oral competences. 1.2. The test construct should be defined and described in detail before planning the teaching unit and the OCE. It should be reflected in the learning objectives, the learning tasks as well as in the assessment tasks and criteria for the OCE. 1.3. Writing test specifications ensures compliance with curriculum guidelines and examination regulations and helps to operationalise the test construct. Moreover, test specifications facilitate documentation and reporting (e.g., to students, parents, school principal, and school authorities) to meet external demands to accountability. 1.4. Design features of assessment tasks should be laid out in a blueprint which makes transparent the operationalisation of the test construct in the task. Preliminary design principle 2 (DP2; alpha): assessment task Quality focus: constructive alignment, interactiveness, validity, authenticity, washback To enable the students to demonstrate a range of their oral communicative competences in the oral communication exam, the assessment task should be conceptualised as a genuine speaking task. 2.1. The task should generate an authentic communicative context modelled on authentic language use and genres of oral communication. 2.2. The task should refer to real-world topics/ discourses that are relevant and meaningful from the students’ perspective. The test-taker’s individual perception of relevance and meaningfulness of the task topic may be enhanced by providing (limited) choice of topic. 2.3. The task should require solving a communicative problem, e.g., bridge a communication/ information gap, by collaborating to reach a common goal or by presenting and negotiating diverging viewpoints. Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 157 2.4. The cognitive and linguistic complexity of the task should allow students to demonstrate a range of their (monologic and interactional) competences in oral communication at different levels of cognitive processing. 2.5. Task instructions should describe in sufficient detail the communicative context (situation, genre, speaker roles) and clearly state the communicative goals. Preliminary design principle 3 (DP3; alpha): assessment criteria/ scales Quality focus: constructive alignment, reliability, validity, impact/ washback, practicality/ economy The assessment criteria/ scale for an oral communication exam should allow for a reliable and valid assessment of the students’ competences in oral communication/ interaction. 3.1. When designing an assessment scale, an analytic scale type is to be preferred to a holistic scale to allow for a differentiated evaluation of a learner’s performance and diagnostic use of the scores for individual feedback to students. If the OCE consists of more than one part (e.g., monologic and dialogic), a part-marking model is recommended, where each part is scored individually. 3.2. The assessment criteria should consider the linguistic features of oral communication, for example by combining vocabulary and grammar into one category and specifying a higher degree of tolerance for deviations from linguistic correctness. 3.3. The criteria should clearly and transparently define the conditions for task fulfilment and are communicated to the students in concrete, comprehensible terms. 3.4. [optional] In order to foster learner autonomy, the assessment criteria may be co-constructed with the students, provided the overall level of the learning group allows it. In most contexts, an approach of guided coconstruction is to be preferred where criteria introduced by the teacher are refined by the students. Preliminary design principle 4 (DP4; alpha): optimising examination conditions and procedures Quality focus: practicality/ economy, validity, reliability To provide optimal test-taking conditions for students in an oral communication exam (OCE) and to enhance test economy and fairness, the following measures are advised: 4.1. An oral communication exam should focus on learners’ communicative abilities in the target language. For any other focus - such as declarative knowledge or the analysis of written texts - written assessments are to be preferred. 4.2. Paired or group assessments with peer-peer interaction should be preferred to interview formats, where the teacher acts as both rater and in- Philipp Siepmann 158 terlocutor. 4.3. When using group assessment, a group size of three has been proven to benefit collaboration and interaction between test-takers. 4.4. (Pre-task) planning time may benefit the learners’ performance. However, it should only not be granted if the test construct requires spontaneous interaction or where planning time would be unusual in the target language use domain. 4.5. When assembling pairs or groups for the OCE, the language proficiency of the students should be considered. Differences in proficiency may benefit lower-proficiency students; however, the difference in proficiency should be moderate to avoid disadvantaging higher-proficiency students. 4.6. To enhance scoring reliability and efficiency, calculating the rater mean (i.e. sum or average of all ratings) is recommended. If the raters’ scores are non-adjacent (i.e. differ by more than one grade/ level), a consensus score should be agreed upon by reviewing and discussing the rating (i.e. raters discuss their reasoning) to help raters align their standards. 4.7. Interrater reliability can be increased through regular, targeted rater training to raise their awareness of potential biases and calibrate rater standards. This should also entail drawing attention to the differences between spoken and written discourse features in assessment. 6. Conclusion This article has introduced a conceptual framework to guide the design of classroom-based oral communication exams (OCEs) in the EFL classroom. The framework integrates elements of previous models of oral performance assessment but also contains some original features. For the individual design elements, including the test construct, assessment tasks, as well as assessment criteria and procedures, evidence-based recommendations were made and summarised in four preliminary/ theory-based design principles. There are, of course, important factors that contribute to the quality of an OCE but were not discussed as they went beyond the scope of this article, such as the ‘human factor’: Differences in, for example, rater personality or harshness are a cause of variation in test-scores (Lumley & McNamara 2015). In addition, test-takers’ performance is affected by factors such as their personality (e.g., extraversion, Nakatsuhara 2011) or anxiety (Horwitz et al. 1986). While these factors are hard to control, it is nevertheless important to raise awareness of their influence and to promote language assessment literacy of teachers in pre-service and in-service teacher training programmes (Inbar-Lourie 2017; Vogt & Tsagari 2014). Another element which was not addressed this article, but which had been emphasised by the teachers participating in the empirical study (see Sect. 2) are the limiting external conditions, such as the lack of Oral communication exams in the EFL classroom 159 examination rooms, time, or staff. There is currently very little empirical research done on such aspects of local, classroom-based assessments and hence deserve further investigation. In addition, the current version of the conceptual framework needs elaboration regarding aspects of digitality (e.g. using digital media and artificial intelligence in learning and for assessment) and learner diversity (e.g. special needs education/ inclusive education). Finally, it should be mentioned that it may not be applicable to some national education systems or specific educational contexts. 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International Education Studies 6 (3): 66-75. https: / / doi.org/ 10.5539/ ies.v6n3p66 Philipp Siepmann Leibnitz University Hannover The Pragmatics of Negative Self- Identification: I Am What I'm Not A corpus-based study of UK web forums . � This book explores how a seemingly simple phrase variants of ·.• , � ''I'm not a/ n..." can be analyzed linguistically to understand • how web forum users negotiate identity while engaging in ' • discussions on shared interests. Throug h a corpus-based , study of instances where users define themselves by what • � • they are not, the book highlights how identity is strategi- 1, .-1 � H weiter ... b Text types in the Austrian Standardized National School-Leaving Exam for English An empirical study into the stability of text type constructs in assessment 1 Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner At secondary level of the Austrian school system, great importance is put in the teaching and assessment of the ability to write texts that meet the conventions of specific text types. For the Austrian school system, descriptions of text types for German, English, French, Italian and Spanish are available. This study focuses on English. It builds on a study that investigated the nature of text type constructs which teachers hold when they are not looking at authentic writing performances from L2 learners of English in Austria (Sigott et al., 2024). The present study investigates the stability of teachers’ text type constructs under two different conditions. It compares teachers’ evaluations of authentic writing performances which were awarded top grades in the Austrian Matura Exam with the same teachers’ responses to a questionnaire that probed into the text type constructs which they held without looking at concrete writing performances. To do so, this study uses the questionnaire consisting of the 23 statements from Sigott et al. (2024). The teachers’ responses under the two conditions are compared for the text types essay, article, report, blog post, and blog comment. The results show that there is considerable stability in the teachers’ text type constructs under the two conditions. However, it also becomes evident that individual prompt formulations impact the nature of performances, and this is mirrored in the teachers’ evaluations. Overall, the results speak to the validity of the assessment of the Writing section of the Austrian Matura Exam. 1 This research was funded by Klagenfurt University, Austria. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0011 Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 168 1. Introduction At secondary level in the Austrian school system, but also in the school systems of other countries, it is considered important for students to be able to write texts that conform to the requirements of so-called text types. To a certain extent, this focus on text production integrates facets of genre-based language teaching (Hyland, 2018; Swales, 1990; Tardy, 2006, 2023; Yasuda, 2011) and text-based language teaching (Richards & Rodgers, 2022) into upper secondary language education. In the teaching of writing skills required in the Austrian school-leaving exam for English (Standardisierte Reife- und Diplomprüfung (SRDP)), students are exposed to definitions of text types for German and English. Students who choose a second foreign language are also exposed to such definitions for French, Italian or Spanish. However, the text types required for German are not aligned neatly with those which are required for the foreign languages English, French, Italian or Spanish. This is due to differences in teaching traditions for German versus those for the other languages. To some extent, this lack of correspondence is also brought about by differences in discourse conventions among the languages involved. The origins of text types for the SRDP are described in Struger (2018, p. 163) and Spöttl et al. (2018, p. 234). As a result, the students encounter different ways of defining text types for their language of instruction, which is German for the vast majority, and for their second and third languages. While the teaching supports them in understanding the salient features of individual text types within each individual language, the differences between the German text types on the one hand, and those for English, French, Italian or Spanish on the other, are rarely addressed explicitly, and students have to develop an understanding of these differences on their own. This challenge is heightened by the fact that the descriptions of text types provided by the Austrian Ministry of Education in the Text Type Characteristics (TTCs) (BMBWF, 2019) are often open to interpretation. In fact, due to the tension between the requirement of reliability of assessment and text authenticity this seems almost inevitable while it does make for uncertainty in the practice of teaching and for a lack of transparency in the practice of assessment. Thus, both teachers and students are faced with the challenge of forming their own understanding of how text types differ within and across the languages involved. In fact, attempts to study these understandings empirically have not been made until recently. The stability of these understandings is, however, an important factor in the validity of the assessment procedure for the writing part of the Austrian Matura exam. If assessors hold stable text type constructs regardless of the conditions under which they put them to use, this consti- Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 169 tutes an important contributory factor for the validity of the assessment procedure. Before teachers assess Matura writing performances, they must have formed a conceptualisation of each text type. This conceptualisation will function as the point of reference when they assess writing performances for these text types. These conceptualisations will also be the basis of writing instruction that prepares pupils for the Matura exam. In fact, one would hope that teachers’ conceptualisations of prototypical text types will be stable no matter whether teachers are asked about them directly, as happened in Sigott et al. (2024), or whether they use them to evaluate authentic writing performances. The actual text type constructs held by practicing teachers were empirically investigated and described in Phase 1 (Sigott et al. 2024), and recommendations for the practice of teaching and assessment were derived from the results. In that study, the text type constructs held by teachers were examined without teachers having access to concrete student performances. However, it cannot be taken for granted that teachers will react in the same way when they are asked about their intuitions concerning text types as they would when they look at actual text types. For instance, if teachers gave the text type ‘essay’ a rating of 2.9 on questionnaire item (statement) 10 “The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade”. in Phase 1, we would expect a similar value in Phase 2 (this study) for an essay performance which was awarded the top rating in the Matura exam. If this is the case, this would constitute support for the validity of the assessment procedure. Therefore, in Phase 2, the same data collection instruments were used, but this time teachers were required to answer with reference to authentic student performances from the Austrian national school leaving exam. In contrast to Sigott et al. (2024), where the teachers answered questionnaire items without access to writing performances in the current study, the teachers answered with reference to perceived properties of authentic performances. All of the performances had received top grades in the school leaving exam and can thus be considered prototypical examples of texts that fulfil the text type requirements for Matura. If the teachers maintain their text type constructs when evaluating authentic performances, the profile resulting from the questionnaire data in Phase 1 should be similar to the profile resulting from the analogous data in the present investigation. This study therefore addresses the following research questions: 1. In which aspects, if any, are there significant differences between the teachers’ conceptualisations of text type properties based on their intuition (Sigott et al. 2024) and their perception of text type properties of actual writing performances that received top ratings in the Austrian school leaving exam? Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 170 2. In the case of significant differences, what are possible reasons for these differences? 3. What do the results mean for the validity of the writing part of the Austrian school leaving exam? 2. Text types in the Austrian Standardised National School- Leaving Exam for English The Austrian curriculum for foreign languages in academic secondary schools (Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schulen (AHS)) as well as in colleges for higher vocational education (Berufsbildende Höhere Schulen (BHS)) is based on the CEFR. The target level for English, the first foreign language for the vast majority of students, is stipulated as B2. The SRDP - based on the curriculum and hence the CEFR - is a skills-based exam, consisting of three (BHS) or four (AHS) independent exam papers: listening, reading, language in use (AHS only), and writing. This study focuses only on the requirements for the writing part. Academic secondary schools generally focus on broad general education, whereas vocational schools offer a tailored professional education in a certain field. In the SRDP, the specific educational objectives of general and vocational schools are taken into consideration when it comes to assessing writing. Separate writing papers for AHS and BHS with differentiated concepts, and a particular focus on work-related topics in BHS, respond to the demands of the different school types. To be able to cover a range of functions, writing purposes and contexts, various text types are used in the examination. The current text types used in the SRDP are essay (for AHS only), article, e-mail, blog post, blog comment, report, and leaflet (for BHS only). The leaflet lends itself to testing action-oriented language use in work-related contexts and therefore enhances the face validity of the exam for BHS. The essay, on the other hand, requires the candidates to reflect on, and discuss, topics of general knowledge in a longer piece of writing as the set word length for essays is 400. Essay writing is thought to have more face validity in AHS with its focus on general education. Test-takers are required to write either two or three texts; one of 250 words and one of 400 words at AHS or three texts of 250 words each at BHS (see Table 1). Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 171 School types and text length Text type AHS BHS essay 400 N/ A article 250 / 400 250 blog post, blog comment 250 / 400 250 report 250 / 400 250 e-mail 250 250 leaflet N/ A 250 Table 1: Text types, school types and text length. Each test task consists of a prompt and instructions. The prompt defines the text type, sets the situational context, including an authentic situation, the role of the text-taker, the purpose of writing, the readership/ addressee and a stimulus (text-based or visual input). Three content points specifying required speech functions guide the test-takers through the writing task, as can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Fig. 1: Article for AHS, © BMBWF. The SRDP test papers are marked by the class teachers. A standardised analytic assessment scale was developed, consisting of four criteria (task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical and structural range, lexical and structural accuracy) and 10 bands, band 6 corresponding to the threshold for B2. The individual text type characteristics (TTCs) are outlined in the document „Übersicht Charakteristika Textsorten lebende Fremdsprachen (SRDP)“, which is available for students and teachers (BMBWF 2019). Detail on the individual text types is also provided in Sigott et al. (2024). Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 172 Fig. 2: Article for HLFS (Colleges of Agriculture and Forestry), © BMBWF. 3. Research design This study is the second phase of a two-phase project on text types. In the first phase, the focus was on practicing teachers’ text type knowledge (Sigott et al. 2024). In this second phase, the focus is on teachers’ perception of text type characteristics in authentic written student performances. The first study (Sigott et al., 2024) will henceforth be referred to as Phase 1, the present study as Phase 2. 3.1. Data collection method To tap into teachers’ perceptions of the text type characteristics embodied in the writing performances, the questionnaire from Phase 1 was used without alterations. This time the teachers were asked to characterise each concrete writing performance, rather than each text type in abstracto, from the Austrian SRDP for English by means of a 5-point Likert scale for each of the questionnaire items. The questionnaire, which is formulated in German, comprises 23 items (see Appendix, Table 4). In order to make the results comparable with a previous study on German (Sigott et al. 2020) and possible future studies for different languages in the school-leaving exam (French, Italian and Spanish), we decided to use the same statements in the same language, namely German. Translating could change the meaning of the items slightly, thus making Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 173 comparisons more difficult. However, after carrying out a content analysis of the TTCs, we added four statements (20 to 23) to ensure complete coverage of the TTCs in the questionnaire. The statements in their German version as well as their English translation can be found in the Appendix, Table 4. Respondents specified their level of consent to each statement on a symmetric agree-disagree scale, in analogy to the German study. Symmetry means that there is an equal number of positions around the ‘neutral’ value. The 5-point Likert scale ranges from ‘disagree’ (0), ‘partly disagree’ (1), ‘neutral’ (2), ‘partly agree’ (3) to ‘agree’ (4). The number of text types differs from the official number as described in the official text type characteristics, which specify 6 text types, namely essay, leaflet, article, report, blog, and e-mail. Due to the different discourse functions (statement/ question - reply), the blog post and the blog comment have come to be considered to be two separate text types in the practice of the SRDP, thus increasing the number of text types to choose from to 9. The present study is based on data for essay, article, report, blog post and blog comment. Data for leaflet and email, which would have fulfilled the criteria for inclusion, were not available. For performances from each of the 5 text types, namely essay (only AHS), article, report, blog post and blog comment, the teachers participating in the study were asked to respond to each of the 23 statements. 3.2. Participants In the present study, 25 of the 75 teachers who participated in Phase 1 were commissioned to assess two performances from each of five text types - ten performances per teacher - using the same questionnaire as in Phase 1 (see Appendix). The time required for this task was estimated at a total of 12 working hours, which constituted the basis for calculating the remuneration. All 75 teachers from Phase 1 were informed of the remuneration prior to recruitment. Ultimately, 25 practicing teachers (15 from AHS, 10 from BHS), based in the federal states of Salzburg (n = 9) and Carinthia (n = 16), chose to participate. As in Phase 1, the evaluations were conducted via an online survey. All 25 teachers completed the questionnaire in both phases, thereby allowing for a repeated measures design. Since only a subset of the original sample was involved in the present phase, the Phase 1 means reported here differ slightly from those in Sigott et al. (2024), which are based on the full cohort of 75 teachers. 3.3. Analysis The primary statistical measures used in this study are the sample mean and standard deviation (SD), which form the basis for paired-samples Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 174 t-tests. As in Phase 1, the mean is used to represent raters’ average agreement with the characterising statements. For each text type and each statement, the difference between the mean in Phase 1 (Mean (P1)) and the mean in the present study (Mean (P2)) is calculated (Δ Mean). All Δ Means were tested for statistical significance using paired-samples ttests. In addition, the p-value and effect size (Cohen’s d) are reported. Δ Means with an absolute smaller than 1 were not considered relevant for practical purposes, while a Δ Mean with an absolute of at least 1 was considered to be of practical relevance. All Δ Means that meet this requirement are also significant at p ≤ 0.00 (see Table 5 in the Appendix). 4. Results and discussion In Phase 1, all 23 statements were categorised on the basis of how well teachers agreed in their evaluations for each statement. The amount of agreement was used as a measure of the definingness of each statement. This yielded the categories of highly defining, defining and non-defining statements. 2 In the present study, those statements which turned out to be non-defining for all or individual text types in Phase 1 were no longer considered. Table 2 shows the mean for Phase 1 (Mean (P1)), the mean for Phase 2 (Mean (P2)) and those differences between the two means (Δ Mean) which are equal to or greater than 1 in absolute terms. The detailed statistics for all statements are given in the Appendix in Table 5. Text Type Statement Mean (P1) Mean (P2) Δ Mean Essay 20 The text makes comparisons. 3.00 1.47 1.53 Article 2 The text contains technical terms. 2.88 1.36 1.52 5 The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed. 2.20 1.20 1.00 11 The text is meant to entertain. 2.84 1.10 1.74 12 The text is narrative. 2.28 1.06 1.22 2 In Sigott et al. (2024: 51) this categorisation is described in detail: “The 23 statements in the questionnaire were put into three categories according to the amount of agreement reached by the teachers in indicating their consent. This agreement is here referred to as definingness. The definingness of statements is defined with regard to the values of the standard deviations. Statements with an SD smaller than 0.7 (SD < 0.7) are termed highly defining, those with an SD between 0.7 and 1.3 (0.7 ≤ SD ≤ 1.3) are referred to as defining, and those with an SD greater than 1.3 (SD > 1.3) are considered non-defining”. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 175 19 The text summarizes / recapitulates. 2.72 1.12 1.60 Report 2 The text contains technical terms. 3.64 2.20 1.44 9 The text expresses an opinion. 1.16 2.18 -1.02 16 The text is appellative. 1.36 2.36 -1.00 20 The text makes comparisons. 2.80 1.18 1.62 Blog Post 2 The text contains technical terms. 1.16 2.26 -1.10 3 The text contains expressive or emotional expressions. 3.64 2.56 1.08 6 The text has a clear structure. 2.04 3.04 -1.00 11 The text is meant to entertain. 3.40 2.06 1.34 20 The text makes comparisons. 1.92 0.74 1.18 Blog Comment 3 The text contains expressive or emotional expressions. 3.68 1.90 1.78 6 The text has a clear structure. 1.88 3.50 -1.62 7 The text follows a common text pattern. 2.04 3.14 -1.10 11 The text is meant to entertain. 2.88 0.96 1.92 Table 2: Overview of Statements used for interpretation, grouped by text type. 3 4.1. Interpretation In a set of five text types - essay, article, report, blog post, and blog comment - a series of statements were rated first by teachers on the basis of their general expectations (Phase 1) and then by observing specific learner performances (Phase 2). Below is an overview of the key patterns and explanations for these discrepancies. All statements included here show differences of at least one full scale point (positive or negative) of 3 • The higher the mean, the higher the agreement to the statement. • Δ Mean represents the difference (Mean (P1) - Mean (P2)). Negative values indicate Phase 2 was higher than Phase 1. • Only statements whose absolute is equal to or greater than 1 are included. (|Δ Mean| = |Mean (P1) - Mean (P2)| ≥ 1). Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 176 the mean rating value. To compare the results of Phase 1 and Phase 2 visually, refer to Figure 3 in the Appendix. 4.2. Observations by text type A recurring reason for the observed divergences is the nature of the specific prompts. While teachers initially rated statements based on a “prototypical” conception of each text type (Phase 1), actual prompts often required different communicative functions (Phase 2). This created scenarios in which certain features (e.g., comparisons, narrative, entertainment) were either discouraged or outright irrelevant to the text’s intended purpose, leading to lower Phase 2 ratings than teachers had initially anticipated. Conversely, other prompts included requirements (such as explicit suggestions or technical vocabulary) that boosted certain features beyond prior expectations. 4.2.1. Essay The task requires a 400-word essay that argues for or against making a First Aid course compulsory for 14-year-olds. It should explain whether 14-year-olds would find this idea appealing, argue whether the state should fund the courses, and speculate on public reactions to 14-year-old first-aiders. Statement 20: the text makes comparisons (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt appears to discourage candidates from engaging in explicit comparative analysis, as they are instructed to either support or oppose compulsory First Aid Courses. Moreover, the required communicative functions - namely, explanation, argumentation, and speculation - do not inherently promote comparative evaluation. Consequently, it is unsurprising that few comparative elements are evident in the performances. In fact, neither performance incorporates explicit comparisons. It appears that while teachers might expect a “good” or prototypical essay to make comparisons, not every essay prompt asks for them, and highly rated essays do not necessarily need to focus on comparing if the prompt does not call for it. 4.2.2. Article The task is to compose a 250-word article for an international online magazine aimed at helping students decide whether to spend a year abroad. The article must give reasons why practical experience is often more valuable than academic grades, describe the disadvantages of taking a gap year abroad, and suggest ways students can spend a year abroad. Statement 2: the text contains technical terms (Phase 1 > Phase 2) Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 177 The prompt is free of terminology that could be considered technical. It refers to school-related issues and matters closely tied to that context. The communicative functions required - giving reasons, describing, and suggesting - do not encourage, let alone necessitate, the use of technical language. It is therefore not surprising that the teachers rated the amount of technical language as relatively low in Phase 2. Statement 5: the text makes it clear to whom it is addressed (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt places the focus on the argumentative content of the article rather than on the readership. The readership is broadly defined as “students”. This does not encourage candidates to define and address an audience more explicitly. Instead, the audience is construed as “students” or “young people”, and the magazine title, Working Teens, already defines the prospective readership beforehand, making it sufficiently clear to whom the article is addressed. Consequently, neither performance goes beyond addressing the readership with generic pronouns such as “you”, which leads to a rating in Phase 2 that is lower than anticipated by the teachers in Phase 1. Most likely, the need to make the readership of the article explicit is subdued by the formulation of the prompt, which explains the lower rating. Statement 11: the text is meant to entertain (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt calls for a serious and argumentatively balanced text. The topic, spending a year abroad, addressed serious matters in the lives of young people, and while doubtless interesting for many, have little potential for being entertaining. As a result, the rating for whether the text is meant to entertain is considerably lower in Phase 2 than teachers’ initial expectations. Statement 12: the text is narrative (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt clearly calls for an argumentative text that helps the readership, i.e., students to take a decision. This does not provide much room for narrative elements. If at all, then such elements could be supporting detail for arguments, but it would hardly be possible to accommodate them in a text of this length, particularly considering the three communicative functions that the text has to fulfil. Consequently, the rating in Phase 2 is noticeably lower than the Phase 1 rating. Statement 19: the text summarizes / recapitulates (Phase 1 > Phase 2) Because the prompt demands arguments (reasons, disadvantages, and suggestions) within a word limit of around 250 words, it is unlikely that candidates would add a separate summary or recapitulation. Integrating Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 178 elements of summarisation or recapitulation into the last section of the text would, given the shortness of the text, sound repetitive. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the performances contain few, if any, elements of summarisation or recapitulation, explaining why the rating is much lower in Phase 2 than the relatively higher expectation from Phase 1. 4.2.3. Report The task involves writing a 250-word report for the headquarters of an international supermarket chain based on a customer survey conducted in the Austrian branch. The report should explain the reasons behind current issues, summarise the survey findings, and suggest measures to increase customer satisfaction. Statement 2: the text contains technical terms (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt calls for a report from a supermarket chain’s customer service department to headquarters. Even though this is a business context, the needed terminology (e.g., staff, products, competitors) remains within common vocabulary, explaining the noticeably lower rating in Phase 2. Statement 9: the text expresses an opinion (Phase 1 < Phase 2) While teachers’ prototypical report focuses on factuality and objectivity and less on opinion, the performances reviewed in Phase 2 were rated higher for this statement. The reason might lie in the prompt since it calls for suggestions as one of the communicative functions. Suggestions inherently express a viewpoint which the performance contain to a certain degree. Statement 16: the text is appellative (Phase 1 < Phase 2) Similarly, requesting measures to increase customer satisfaction introduces an appellative (persuasive) element into the text, which again deviates from the typical notion of a neutral, purely factual report. Hence, the Phase 2 rating surpasses the lower Phase 1 expectation. Statement 20: the text makes comparisons (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt does not specifically require comparing data sets but instead focuses on describing absolute values from the bar chart. Therefore, the potential for comparison never fully emerges, and the rating in Phase 2 is significantly lower than the more “typical” expectation teachers had in Phase 1. 4.2.4. Blog post The task involves writing a 250-word blog post to promote your awardwinning eco-shop as you set up an online shop. It should describe your Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 179 business idea, outline the challenges of setting up an eco-shop, and argue why online eco-shops are essential. Statement 2: the text contains technical terms (Phase 1 < Phase 2) The prompt itself references terms such as “Eco-Shop”, “promote your business”, “business community”, “blog”, “business idea”, and “online”. In both examined performances, additional vocabulary items considered “technical” appear, such as “eco-friendly”, “sustainable sources”, “online sector”, “suppliers”, “cost-efficient”, and “purchase”. which are relatively technical for a blog setting. This exceeds teachers’ initial, lower expectation for a “typical” blog post. Given the wide range of possible topics and communicative functions within any blog-prompt scenario, it is unsurprising that a concrete task focusing on eco-business strategies would yield performances that deviate from a more generic notion of blog writing. In this case, the heavier use of specialized vocabulary has led to a higher rating for this statement in Phase 2 compared to the lower Phase 1 expectation. Statement 3: the text contains expressive or emotional expressions (Phase 1 > Phase 2) Teachers initially expected a more expressive or emotional register, but the prompt’s main goals direct the text toward a factual style. While there are minor expressive cues (“I am happy”) and the use of punctuation (? , ! ) that could be seen as signalling expressiveness or emotionality, the overall emotional or expressive language falls below teachers’ Phase 1 expectations. Statement 6: the text has a clear structure (Phase 1 < Phase 2) The prompt requires attention to three clearly formulated aspects. The three performative verbs describe, outline and argue suggest a relatively stringent sequence of three paragraphs in the text. This structure is more rigorous than what teachers envisioned for an average blog post, so the Phase 2 rating surpasses the lower Phase 1 anticipation. Statement 11: the text is meant to entertain (Phase 1 > Phase 2) Because the prompt focuses on promoting a business and networking with a young business community, there is little need or room for an entertaining approach. Neither performance attempts to entertain per se; They do, however, attempt to attract the reader’s interest. Thus, the Phase 2 rating is significantly lower than the relatively higher Phase 1 expectation. Statement 20: the text makes comparisons (Phase 1 > Phase 2) Prompt does not explicitly, nor implicitly, ask for comparison; the three communicative functions - describing, outlining, arguing - do not call for Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 180 explicit comparisons. Consequently, neither performance presents comparative elements. Thus, the rating in Phase 2 is lower than the teachers’ moderate Phase 1 expectation for a “prototypical” blog post. 4.2.5. Blog comment The task involves writing a 250-word comment on a blog post that supports school security cameras. The text should outline school problems, discuss the impact of cameras, and suggest alternative solutions. Statement 3: the text contains expressive or emotional expressions (Phase 1 > Phase 2) The prompt asks for a discussion of a problem-solution text. This objective fosters a more factual tone with a suggestion of alternatives at the end, which reduces the likelihood of strong emotional or expressive language. Hence, the Phase 2 rating is notably lower than the high Phase 1 expectation. Statement 6: the text has a clear structure (Phase 1 < Phase 2) The prompt requires attention to three clearly formulated aspects. Both performances follow this pattern strictly by devoting a paragraph to each. The paragraphs are also clearly marked by layout. This gives the impression of a clearly structured text also to somebody who has not seen the prompt, as is true for the teachers evaluating the performances. Such systematic organization exceeds teachers’ idea of a “typical” blog comment, resulting in a higher Phase 2 rating compared to the lower Phase 1 rating. Statement 7: the text follows a common text pattern (Phase 1 < Phase 2) Like Statement 6, the text is shaped by the requirement to follow a standard “problem-impact-solution” pattern. Teachers, in Phase 1, expected a more free-form style, so the actual structured approach yields a higher rating in Phase 2 than they anticipated. Statement 11: the text is meant to entertain (Phase 1 > Phase 2) Again, a problem-solution approach centred on serious issues leaves almost no room for entertainment. The performances are factual and solutions-focused, standing in contrast to the more entertaining or anecdotal blog-comment style some teachers might envision, which leads to a much lower Phase 2 rating than predicted in Phase 1. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 181 5. Conclusion This study investigated the extent to which teachers' conceptualisations of text type characteristics align with their evaluations of authentic student performances in the Austrian school-leaving exam for English. Addressing the first research question (In which aspects, if any, are there significant differences between the teachers’ conceptualisations of text type properties based on their intuition (Sigott et al. 2024) and their perception of text type properties of actual writing performances that received top ratings in the Austrian school leaving exam? ), 11 statements showed a significant difference in at least one text type. Some of the 11 statements showed a significant difference in more than one text type. An overview is provided in Table 3. Statement Significant difference in text type 2 The text contains technical terms. Report, Article, Blog Post 11 The text is meant to entertain. Blog Comment, Blog Post, Article 20 The text makes comparisons. Blog Post, Report, Essay 3 The text contains expressive or emotional expressions. Blog Comment, Blog Post 6 The text has a clear structure. Blog Comment, Blog Post 5 The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed. Article 7 The text follows a common pattern. Blog Comment 9 The text expresses an opinion. Report 12 The text is narrative. Article 16 The text is appellative. Report 19 The text summarises / recapitulates. Article Table 3: Statements with significant differences between Phase 1 and Phase 2. Regarding the second research question (In the case of significant differences, what are possible reasons for these differences? ), large discrepancies emerged across all text types whenever the prompt’s formulation prompted or constrained the text away from typical expectations. In some cases, teachers anticipated features that the tasks did not require (e.g., comparisons or entertainment). In other cases, tasks prompted unusual features for that genre (e.g., opinionated and appellative elements in a report). These findings indicate that large discrepancies between teachers’ theoretical expectations (Phase 1) and actual text performances (Phase 2) Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 182 often arise from the specific wording and communicative objectives of the prompts. It needs to be pointed out that there is a wide range of possible topics and communicative macro functions for prompts. Hence it is not surprising that a concrete prompt can give rise to performances which depart in some features from the ‘prototypical’ text type. As for the third research question (What do the results mean for the validity of the writing part of the Austrian school leaving exam? ), the implications for the validity of the writing component of the Austrian Matura exam are encouraging. From a broad perspective, out of 115 (23 x 5) 4 mean differences, 19 (16.5%) are large with an absolute delta mean of equal to or greater than one. Another 14 (12%) have smaller, but significant differences. Despite individual variations in prompt design and the subjectivity inherent in teacher assessment, the overall level of deviation is modest. Moreover, where discrepancies do occur, they are explainable through prompt-induced shifts rather than inconsistencies in construct understanding or assessment reliability. The findings therefore support the construct validity of the Matura writing assessment (or at least the sitting from which the performances were chosen) and highlight the importance of carefully designing prompts that guide learners toward producing text performances that align with the intended text type characteristics. Taken together, these results suggest that teacher conceptions of text types are relatively stable and reliable across abstract and performancebased evaluations, especially when task prompts are well-aligned with prototypical features. Future research could explore whether making prompt-specific communicative goals more explicit to both students and teachers can further reduce variance and support even greater transparency and fairness in assessment. 6. References BMBWF. (2019). Übersicht Charakteristika Textsorten lebende Fremdsprachen (SRDP): Stand August 2019. https: / / www.matura.gv.at/ downloads/ download/ uebersicht-charakteristikatextsorten-lebende-fremdsprachen Hyland, K. (2018). Genre and second language writing. In: J. I. Liontas (Ed.). The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. 2359-2364. Wiley Blackwell. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1002/ 9781118784235.eelt0535 Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2022). Text-based instruction. In: Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. 200-214. Cambridge University Press. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1017/ 9781009024532.013 4 23 statements for each of 5 text types yields 115 mean differences for the entire data set. Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 183 Sigott, G., Krieg-Holz, U., Struger, J., & Cesnik, H. (2020). Was verstehen Lehrende unter Kommentar und Erörterung? Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Textsortenfrage in der österreichischen Standardisierten Reife und Diplomprüfung Deutsch. Der Deutschunterricht (5). 81-86. Sigott, G., Hafner, S., Cesnik, H., Weiler, T., Leitner, K., & Dousset-Ortner, E. (2024). Text types in the Austrian Standardized National School-Leaving Exam for English. Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 49 (1). https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ aaa-2024-0002 Spöttl, C., Eberharter, K., Holzknecht, F., Kremmel, B., & Zehentner, M. (2018). Delivering reform in a high stakes context: from content-based assessment to communicative and competence-based assessment. In: G. Sigott (Ed.). Language Testing in Austria: Taking Stock/ Sprachtesten in Österreich: Eine Bestandsaufnahme. 219-239. Peter Lang. Struger, J. (2018). Deutsch als Unterrichtssprache: das Konzept der schriftlichen Reife- und Diplomprüfung. In: G. Sigott (Ed.). Language Testing in Austria: Taking Stock/ Sprachtesten in Österreich: Eine Bestandsaufnahme. 155-182. Peter Lang. Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (13. Printing). The Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series. Cambridge Univ. Press. Tardy, C. M. (2006). Researching first and second language genre learning: a comparative review and a look ahead. Journal of Second Language Writing 15 (2): 79-101. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.jslw.2006.04.003 Tardy, C. M. (2023). Genre‐based language teaching. In: C. A. Chapelle (Ed.). The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Wiley. https: / / doi-org/ 10.1002/ 9781405198431.wbeal0453.pub2 Yasuda, S. (2011). Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing 20(2): 111-133. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.jslw.2011.03.001 7. Appendix Original statement in German Translated statement (1) Der Text enthält explizite Markierungen von Verknüpfung, die durch Konjunktionen, Adverbien usw. angezeigt werden. (cohesion/ coherence) The text contains explicit markers of cohesion and coherence indicated by conjunctions, adverbs, etc. (2) Der Text enthält fachsprachliche Ausdrücke. The text contains technical terms. (3) Der Text enthält expressive oder emotionale Ausdrücke. The text contains expressive or emotional expressions. (4) Der Text ist für den öffentlichen Kommunikationsbereich bestimmt. The text is intended for public communication. (5) Der Text weist einen Adressatenbezug auf. / Der Text macht es klar, an wen er gerichtet ist. The text makes it clear to whom it is addressed. (6) Der Text weist eine klare Struktur auf. The text has a clear structure. Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 184 (7) Der Text folgt einem gängigen Textmuster. The text follows a common text pattern. (8) Der Text weist eine besondere stilistische Gestaltung und rhetorische Mittel auf. The text is written in a particular style and uses rhetorical devices. (9) Der Text äußert eine Meinung. The text expresses an opinion. (10) Der Text zielt auf Meinungsbildung ab / will von einem Standpunkt überzeugen. The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade. (11) Der Text soll unterhalten. The text is meant to entertain. (12) Der Text erzählt. The text is narrative. (13) Der Text erklärt. The text is explanatory. (14) Der Text argumentiert. The text is argumentative. (15) Der Text bewertet. The text is evaluative. (16) Der Text appelliert. The text is appellative. (17) Der Text beschreibt. The text is descriptive. (18) Der Text informiert. The text serves to inform. (19) Der Text rekapituliert/ resümiert. The text summarises / recapitulates. (20) Der Text vergleicht. The text makes comparisons. (21) Die Leserschaft wird direkt angesprochen. The reader is addressed directly. (22) Der Text soll Aufmerksamkeit erzeugen / auf sich ziehen. The text is meant to attract attention. (23) Der Text wurde geschrieben, um von einer größeren Leserschaft gelesen zu werden. The text is written to be read by a wider audience. Table 4: Questionnaire items (original and translation). Text types in the Austrian School-Leaving Exam for English 185 Fig. 2: Text type profiles. Note that the results for Phase 1 differ slightly from Sigott et al. (2024) since the data is based on the 25 teachers that participated in both studies Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner 186 Notes for Table 5 (abbreviations): • M (P1) and M (P2) for Mean (P1) and Mean (P2) as used in text • Δ M for Δ Mean as used in text • C’s d for Cohen’s d from the paired samples t-test • P for probability value from the paired samples t-Test • SD (P1) and SD (P2) for standard deviations as used in text M (P1) SD (P1) M (P1) SD (P1) M (P1) SD (P1) M (P1) SD (P1) M (P1) SD (P1) M (P2) SD (P2) M (P2) SD (P2) M (P2) SD (P2) M (P2) SD (P2) M (P2) SD (P2) 3.67 0.62 3.60 0.58 3.44 0.87 2.40 1.15 2.32 1.38 3.33 0.77 2.82 0.80 2.72 0.80 2.94 0.87 3.24 0.68 3.00 1.00 2.88 1.09 3.64 0.64 1.16 0.80 1.24 1.01 2.33 0.94 1.36 1.18 2.20 1.17 2.26 0.99 1.28 1.06 1.47 1.06 2.32 1.18 0.64 1.04 3.64 0.49 3.68 0.56 1.60 0.71 1.36 0.80 0.78 0.72 2.56 0.93 1.90 0.66 2.47 1.06 3.88 0.33 1.80 1.35 3.76 0.52 3.68 0.56 2.83 1.16 3.02 1.08 0.70 0.94 3.96 0.14 3.30 0.90 0.87 0.92 2.20 1.08 3.24 1.09 2.80 1.04 3.64 0.57 0.57 1.07 1.20 1.32 3.66 0.62 2.90 1.14 3.94 0.22 3.53 0.64 3.44 0.58 3.96 0.20 2.04 1.21 1.88 1.20 3.10 0.83 3.00 0.82 3.00 0.82 3.04 0.80 3.50 0.41 3.07 0.96 3.00 1.12 3.68 0.85 2.16 1.21 2.04 1.14 3.27 0.88 2.78 0.83 2.78 0.66 2.90 1.04 3.14 0.87 2.93 1.03 2.76 1.05 2.64 1.15 2.16 1.34 2.16 1.18 2.27 1.32 1.90 0.97 1.80 1.07 2.76 0.98 1.88 0.97 2.93 0.80 2.44 1.16 1.16 1.03 3.80 0.41 4.00 0.00 3.33 0.75 2.08 1.15 2.18 0.90 2.92 0.81 3.74 0.48 2.93 1.10 2.60 1.22 1.40 1.22 3.16 1.03 3.60 0.71 2.90 0.60 1.96 0.99 2.30 1.05 2.94 0.89 3.28 0.52 1.47 0.92 2.84 1.11 0.28 0.46 3.40 0.87 2.88 1.01 0.90 1.04 1.10 0.97 0.16 0.31 2.06 1.17 0.96 0.90 0.93 0.80 2.28 1.10 0.60 0.96 3.00 1.12 2.40 0.87 1.20 1.18 1.06 1.07 0.84 0.87 2.78 0.99 2.20 0.98 3.33 0.82 2.72 0.94 3.56 0.65 2.52 0.82 2.64 0.86 3.20 0.68 2.90 0.54 3.32 0.68 3.28 0.58 2.96 0.69 3.93 0.26 2.92 0.95 2.48 1.19 2.28 1.14 3.32 0.80 3.47 0.72 2.86 0.99 2.86 1.06 2.12 1.00 3.10 0.91 2.80 1.15 2.28 0.94 2.08 1.55 2.56 1.00 3.32 0.80 2.33 1.13 1.70 1.11 2.70 1.05 1.52 0.84 2.76 0.83 2.67 1.18 2.56 1.16 1.36 1.11 2.76 0.97 2.76 1.05 2.20 1.08 1.94 1.01 2.36 1.21 2.30 0.75 2.38 0.78 2.87 1.06 3.12 0.67 3.40 0.96 2.84 0.94 2.68 0.95 2.57 0.98 2.66 0.67 3.14 0.65 3.12 0.63 2.90 0.75 3.27 0.70 3.56 0.65 3.76 0.52 2.84 0.75 2.36 0.81 3.00 0.96 3.04 0.69 3.66 0.37 3.46 0.59 2.42 0.66 3.00 1.07 2.72 1.10 3.12 1.09 2.12 0.88 2.44 1.08 2.67 1.03 1.12 1.09 3.00 0.68 1.34 0.81 2.00 0.94 3.00 0.85 2.28 1.17 2.80 1.22 1.92 0.91 2.36 1.04 1.47 1.26 1.40 1.05 1.18 0.89 0.74 0.74 1.40 0.91 0.73 0.46 2.68 1.18 1.20 1.12 3.56 0.77 3.32 0.99 0.67 1.16 2.14 1.09 1.88 1.06 3.88 0.42 3.02 1.08 2.47 1.13 3.56 0.82 1.36 1.15 3.52 0.65 3.40 0.65 2.13 1.11 2.38 1.05 1.54 1.08 3.70 0.72 2.38 1.00 2.27 0.96 3.76 0.44 1.20 1.04 3.68 0.75 3.32 0.90 2.60 1.24 3.16 0.83 0.38 0.53 3.96 0.14 2.80 0.95 C's d p report (n=25) Δ M C's d p blog post (n=25) Δ M C's d p article (n=25) Δ M C's d p 0.00 0.74 0.14 0.00 0.26 0.00 0.11 0.29 0.00 0.12 0.33 0.20 0.01 0.05 0.00 0.32 0.00 0.07 blog comment (n=25) Δ M 0.06 0.01 0.89 0.06 0.23 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.06 0.00 0.41 0.03 0.00 0.00 0.10 0.64 2.33 0.20 -0.33 0.38 -0.46 0.32 0.00 0.00 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.05 0.67 0.00 0.60 0.55 0.00 0.02 0.45 0.00 0.07 0.00 0.04 0.28 0.00 0.34 0.00 0.52 0.00 0.15 0.00 0.84 0.41 1.19 0.31 0.91 0.23 -1.26 -1.03 0.26 0.07 0.59 0.09 0.42 0.00 0.03 0.91 0.07 0.28 0.64 0.03 0.28 0.07 0.01 0.13 0.03 0.51 -0.29 0.12 0.61 0.29 0.33 0.25 -0.54 -0.03 2.21 0.97 0.17 1.37 0.22 0.63 0.54 -0.74 1.07 0.13 0.99 0.56 -0.32 -0.92 -0.04 0.00 0.15 0.00 0.00 0.23 -0.20 -0.07 0.41 -0.25 -0.69 0.39 -0.22 -0.06 0.38 0.20 0.06 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.22 -0.20 -0.10 -0.15 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.10 0.00 0.71 -0.43 -0.58 -0.39 -0.42 -0.09 -0.99 0.20 -0.70 1.34 -0.49 -0.29 -0.39 0.69 1.23 -0.34 0.76 1.14 1.24 -0.11 0.91 -0.65 0.25 1.32 -0.38 -0.78 -0.27 0.39 -0.38 0.69 -0.83 0.42 0.22 0.12 0.00 0.83 0.04 15 The text i s evaluative. 0.47 0.05 0.22 0.24 0.42 1.28 -0.28 0.88 1.07 0.74 0.28 0.65 0.46 0.16 -0.18 0.04 0.48 0.69 0.30 0.23 0.10 0.36 0.36 9 The text expres ses an opinion. -0.40 10 The text aims to shape opinion / wants to persuade. 0.03 13 The text i s expl anatory. 0.13 14 The text i s argumentative. 0.47 11 The text i s meant to entertain. 0.57 12 The text i s narrative. -0.27 0.52 0.30 1.02 0.44 0.96 -0.30 -1.62 1.78 0.38 1.92 0.20 0.26 0.32 -1.10 0.28 -1.10 1.08 0.82 -0.54 0.22 1.34 -0.60 0.88 -1.00 -0.74 0.46 -0.28 0.16 1.04 0.22 -0.76 -0.18 -0.28 1.18 -0.32 -0.62 0.78 0.72 1.44 0.73 -0.30 0.60 -1.02 -0.90 0.90 0.84 -0.42 0.96 -0.62 -1.00 0.24 -0.38 0.12 -0.24 -0.68 -0.18 0.12 1.62 0.26 0.10 1.55 1.10 0.38 1.18 -0.14 1.10 0.88 0.54 0.52 1.60 0.62 0.46 0.03 0.00 0.79 0.74 0.66 0.61 0.35 1.05 0.00 0.18 0.02 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.44 0.45 0.50 0.47 1.52 0.86 0.36 0.44 0.22 0.86 1.00 0.06 0.58 1.22 -0.18 0.64 1.74 0.96 0.21 0.51 -0.14 0.47 -0.45 0.05 0.67 0.18 0.42 23 The text i s written to be read by a wider audience. -0.33 0.78 21 The reader i s addres sed directly. 0.07 22 The text i s meant to attract attention. 0.33 7 The text follows a common text pattern. -0.20 8 The text i s written in a parti cul ar style and uses rhetori cal devi ces . 0.67 5 The text makes it clear to whom it i s addres sed. 0.30 6 The text has a clear structure. 0.43 19 The text summari ses / recapitul ates . 0.33 20 The text makes compari sons . 1.53 17 The text i s des criptive. 0.30 18 The text serves to inform. 0.27 16 The text i s appel ative. Statements 1 The text contains expli cit markers of cohesion and coherence indi cated by conjunctions , adverbs , etc. 0.33 2 The text contains techni cal terms . 0.67 3 The text contains expres sive or emotional expres sions . -0.13 4 The text i s intended for publi c communi cation. -0.37 essay (n=15) Δ M C's d p 0.32 0.55 -0.11 -0.36 0.24 Table 5: Statistics for statements per text type. Since the essay is only used in AHS, only AHS teachers (n=15) evaluated the essay. Short stories on domestic violence Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 1 Ines Gstrein This article adopts an approach to the literary representation of domestic violence through a focus on gendered spaces, voices, and perspectives in two short stories of Janice Galloway’s debut short story collection Blood (1991). Situating itself within the context of feminist narratology, it assumes that all aspects of narrative reality - elements of the story world and of the narrative discourse alike - are informed by sex, gender, and sexuality. By comparing and contrasting the short stories “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”, the article investigates two different narrativisations of domestic violence. While tensions in the private home are just beginning to develop in the former text, in the latter text, a femicide has taken place. Using “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” as examples, the article examines gendered narrative voices and perspectives on the discourse level as well as the control that male characters exert over the public and private space. The (looming) domestic violence that Galloway’s characters are exposed to is effectively conveyed by intrusions into the private home and the averted eyes of strangers alike. The careful choice of narrative mode and gendered descriptions of space make entrenched gender hierarchies and their injustices glaringly obvious. In short, the literary form of the short story collection enables Galloway to place different settings, voices, and perspectives alongside each other so as to consider domestic violence from various angles. 1 An earlier version of this article was submitted in partial fulfilment of the credit mark for the course module “Text and Context: Scottish Literature” held at the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School in 2022. The author thanks the instructor, Dr Fiona Paterson, and the anonymous external reviewer for their constructive feedback on the initial submission. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0012 Ines Gstrein 188 1. Aim and scope of the article This article sets out to assess Janice Galloway’s literary engagement with gender, specifically the depiction of domestic violence in two short stories, by using concepts and the terminology of feminist narratology. Generally speaking, the analysis of gender is not new to the study of the topics, characters, and literary genres employed by Galloway. For instance, Ali Smith concludes that “[c]learly Galloway is driven by the question of gender; her writing unwraps huge social dilemmas, shows you the state of things without offering any notion of what to do about it” (1993: 179). Jorge Sacido-Romero notes that Galloway’s short fiction “functions as an enduring channel for a woman to speak in a different voice against a contemporary social system that considers women” (2018: 192) to be unimportant. According to Cristie Leigh March, the author “reiterates a problem she notes not only in Scottish literature but also in many literatures - the validity of women’s writing and its critical reception” (2002: 109). Moira Burgess maintains that Galloway’s “characters explore what is to them very definitely a man’s world, and question its assumptions” (1996: n.pag.). As these examples illustrate, many discussions of gender in Galloway’s work focus on how gendered experiences are depicted in characterisations. By contrast, the present article shifts focus: it examines the representation of domestic violence in Galloway’s short story collection Blood through a focus on gendered narrative structures. While gendered narrative structures appear in Galloway’s longer and shorter fiction alike, it is worth singling out Galloway’s short stories for a gender-based narratological reading. Dorothy McMillan observes that “Galloway often suggests that women’s lives are best represented as a series of short stories or vignettes with repeated epiphanies or clarifications, rather than as plot-driven toward definite closure” (2010: n.pag.). McMillan’s line of argument touches upon the question of whether short stories are particularly apt to describe women’s gender-specific experiences. The study of the interconnections between gender and the short story form has gained momentum ever since the late 1980s. As Emma Young and James Bailey note, the last forty years of short story criticism saw a “move from solely focusing on definitions and aesthetics to a broader consideration of these issues in tandem with wider socio-cultural and historical dynamics” (2017: 2). Early examples are Mary Eagleton’s contribution “Genre and gender”, published in the 1989 edited volume Re-reading the Short Story, and Julie Brown’s 1995 edited collection American Women Short Story Writers. Taking my cue from McMillan, I argue that the literary form of the short story collection is particularly suited to make gendered experiences intelligible because it offers a panorama of gendered settings and gendered narrative voices. In the case at hand, Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 189 these then shape the readers’ understanding of the domestic violence that Galloway’s characters are exposed to. This article explores the ways in which two short stories from Galloway’s debut collection Blood (1991) are informed and connected by their treatment of gendered spaces, voices, and perspectives. The short stories “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” can be seen as mirror images of each other. In both texts, the ever-present danger of domestic violence is brought out sharply by the effective use of gendered narrative structures. Thus, the article begins by an introduction to feminist narratology and a delineation of how the terms sex, gender, and sexuality are understood. Then, it examines how spaces and voices are gendered in “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”. The two aspects are brought together when considering gendered multiperspective narration across the two short stories. As will be demonstrated, the representation of domestic violence in Galloway’s short stories not only relies on the depiction of gendered human characters, but also on gendered spaces, voices, and perspectives. In fact, gender informs all aspects of narrative reality, so it is important to not only take characterisation into account. 2. Feminist narratology The present article adopts ideas and concepts of feminist narratology. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the conception of gender as a distinct narrative category proved to be a watershed moment for literary studies. It brought about reconsiderations, modifications, and creations of narratological tools, terms, and concepts. Early examples of research into feminist narratology include studies by Susan Sniader Lanser and Robyn Warhol. Both critics carried out analyses of the discourse level of literary texts and focused on female narrative voices (Allrath & Surkamp 2004: 143). Their works reveal that narrative techniques and the sociocultural context are intertwined: narrative forms are shaped by and reflect the material and practical circumstances surrounding literary production (Nünning & Nünning 2004: 17-19). Marion Gymnich highlights that feminist narratology aims to “reveal the pitfalls of supposedly gender-neutral approaches to the structural analysis of narratives, demonstrating that gender neutrality, which is more or less taken for granted by classical narratology, usually turns out to be an illusion” (2013: 707). Classical narratologists favour “supposedly ‘objective’ description[s] of narrative structures” (Gymnich 2013: 707). Feminist narratology modifies and develops an array of narratological tools, terms, and concepts to grasp the role of gender in narrative texts and their contexts. Inter alia, gender pertains to “the relationship between story and plot, narrator and author, and the text and its analysis” (Young 2018: 917). The present article sin- Ines Gstrein 190 gles out three aspects for analysis: gendered spaces, gendered voices, and gendered multiperspectivity in Galloway’s Blood. In spite of a steadily growing body of literature on the subject, feminist narratology has not developed into a distinct branch of narratology. As Tory Young notes, “[t]here are very few monographs that openly identify with something called feminist narratology [...] and many more feminist works that attend to the relationship between narrative structure and sexuality more generally” (2018: 913, original emphasis). Feminist narratology is subject to constant change. Tory Young emphasises that “[t]heories of narrative, like forms of narrative themselves, are permanently in flux, and accordingly, the formulation of feminist narratology by its named practitioners has dissembled into diverse queer and feminist theories of narrative” (2018: 914). Although feminism has left its mark on narratology, a clear-cut new field of feminist narratology has not emerged. Rather, feminism’s “influence and relevance is more diffuse” (Young 2018: 913) in narrative theory. Sex, gender, and sexuality are keywords in feminist narratology. The present article employs Lanser’s basic distinction because it convincingly connects the concepts with the principal aim of feminist narratology, which Lanser defines as follows in The Living Handbook of Narratology: In most academic pursuits today, “sex” stands for the biological designations of male and female (with some scholars including “intersex” as a designation), while “gender” marks social identities, roles, and behaviors as well as qualities of masculinity and femininity that have been associated with a specific sex, and “sexuality” refers to the orientation of desire toward a particular sexed or gendered object. The distinction between “sex” and “gender” has been challenged, however, by postmodern theorists and by biological confirmation that “sex” itself is not a singular entity. The term “gender” is now the most common anchor term, since it avoids binary assumptions about bodily identities and recognizes transgender and “gender-queer” possibilities. The field of gender and narrative stakes its diverse approaches on the shared belief that sex, gender, and sexuality are significant not only to textual interpretation and reader reception but to textual poetics itself and thus to the shapes, structures, representational practices, and communicative contexts of narrative texts. In claiming that these key vectors of social positioning carry narratological weight, feminist narratology marked a significant departure of value from classical narrative theory. (Lanser 2013: n.p.) Lanser presents the core argument of feminist narratology in conjunction with the terms sex, gender, and sexuality. According to Lanser, these are not only important for grasping the readers’ responses to text, but also for understanding the very elements that narrative texts are made of. The passage quoted above makes the transition from delineating the basic Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 191 assumptions of feminist narratology (as opposed to classical narrative theory) to the description of the object of feminist narrative analyses, namely textual poetics. In a similar vein, the present article now moves on from the more general discussion of feminist narratology to the examination of a gendered structure in Galloway’s Blood: space. 3. Space Scholars in feminist narratology and short story criticism have developed various criteria to analyse gendered settings. Natascha Würzbach groups the interrelations of gender and space in narrative texts into three categories: the accessibility of places, the position and movement of characters, and gendered narrative styles used to describe places (2004: 57). A conventional yet contested distinction is drawn between private and public space. Whereas the former has traditionally been conceived as the realm of women, the latter has been regarded as a predominantly male space (Würzbach 2004: 52-57). However, ascribing gender to a place is not as straightforward as it might seem. Kate Krueger highlights the varying interpretations of gendered spaces which are subject to “time, location, and the acts that occur within them” (2014: 1) and calls attention to liminal spaces such as thresholds and streets (2014: 2). The artificial separation of male and female areas highlights how significant it is for female characters to transgress spatial boundaries in their struggle for participation in the political, social, and cultural sphere (Würzbach 2004: 52). Depending on their gender, characters have different perceptions of places. As Würzbach (2004: 53) shows, the private home (“das Haus”) is a prime example for the ways in which setting can mirror gender hierarchies. Up until the 20th century, women characters were confined to the house while their male counterparts primarily used the house only for short periods of time to rest and recover. For women protagonists, the house can be both the source of happiness and of fear. Often, the private home is associated with family life and romantic relationships. Whether the private home really is a place of safety, however, crucially depends - in stories that feature heterosexual relationships - on the main male character. Although the house may initially promise comfort and security, it may also turn into a scene of domestic violence. Accordingly, contradictory connotations are attached to the house and tension is created (Würzbach 2004: 53). Gender also influences the ways in which space is presented on the discourse level. In narrative texts, space is mediated through the narrative act. As Ina Schabert notes, “[t]he I who narrates cannot avoid adopting viewpoints, modes of thought, styles of speech, shades of voice which Ines Gstrein 192 are more or less firmly associated with either femininity or masculinity” (1992: 313). Literary descriptions of space carry gendered connotations. On the one hand, the attribution of value to a place, attention to detail, and the use of rhetoric strategies such as metonymy and comparison are often identified as typically feminine and are associated with a woman narrator. Internal focalisation facilitates such descriptions. On the other hand, panoramic views of space, objective classifications, and the character’s ability to maintain emotional distance from the surroundings carry male connotations. Fact-based descriptions demonstrate the character’s in-depth understanding of place and their ability to maintain control over the place they find themselves in. These, too, are commonly associated with male narrators (Würzbach 2004: 62-66). It is important to note that these categories refer to how space is described in the narrative text rather than to the gendered nature of space itself or the gender identity of the narrator. Readers may use gendered descriptions of space to make assumptions about the narrator’s gender identity, but this undertaking may lead them astray: a woman narrator can adopt a way of narrating that carries male connotations, and vice versa. Not all descriptions of space in narrative texts fit the stereotypes of the emotional, feminine narrative discourse and the distanced, masculine narrative discourse. As the title of Galloway’s “Love in a changing environment” already indicates, the setting plays a crucial role in this text. Due to their length, short stories usually present only a small range of spaces. This adds even more value to spaces “because they accrue symbolic significance” (Krueger 2014: 2). “Love in a changing environment” is told by an unnamed and ungendered narrator who is also the protagonist of the short story. Readers obtain only sketchy information on the narrator-protagonist. The major part of the short story is set in the one-room flat that the narratorprotagonist shares with their romantic partner, a man. The text revolves around the domestic life of the two characters. The development of the couple’s relationship is aligned with the ongoings in the shop underneath their flat. At the beginning of the short story, the business premises are occupied by a bakery; later on, they are taken over by a butcher’s. It is the enmeshment of and the changes within two spaces - the flat and the shop - that heavily influence the actions of the short story’s characters. “Love in a changing environment” shows intersections of private and public spaces. As Ellen-Raïssa Jackson emphasises, “the bakery is more than a background to their [the couple’s] lives, it is a living context which plays an active role in them, pervading and defining even their thoughts” (2004: 9). The couple’s private space cannot be clearly separated from the shop underneath it. A window marks the permeable boundary between the couple’s flat and the bakery. Windows are liminal spaces as they overlook the outside world. In feminist narratology, they may be Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 193 read as a symbol for a (female) character’s longing to leave the home (Würzbach 2004: 53). In Galloway’s short story, the window of the couple’s flat connects the private space of the couple to the bakery on the ground floor, a public place. Yet this boundary crossing between inside and outside differs considerably from Würzbach’s reading of windows in narrative texts. The private space is not seen as a confinement in “Love in a changing environment”: instead, both partners - one of them male, the other one ungendered - voluntarily stay in for most of the time while the scents and sounds of the bakery enter the flat by the window. Not only do the scents and sounds transgress the boundary between two places, but they completely dissolve it. As soon as the couple move in, they adapt their daily routines to the business activities of the bakery: “[c]rumpets, and fruit scones, the crackling echo of cellophane, the sulphur stink of egg mayonnaise led us through lunchtime and an hour with coffee at three was signalled by the moist, animal vapour of cream meringues” (Galloway 1999: 17). The couple do not own a clock; instead, they navigate through the day by the smell and sound of the bakery’s various goods. Private and public space are intertwined. While the shared private space is not clearly gendered, the description of the settings bears strong similarities to the stereotypically feminine narrative discourse as outlined by Würzbach. Würzbach argues that attention to detail and mood (“Sensibilität für Stimmungen in der Raumdarstellung”) is a common feature of the stereotypically feminine narrative discourse (2004: 65). “Love in a changing environment” is interspersed with descriptions of the sounds and smells of numerous pastries. Phrases like “[w]e slept well, waiting for the early-morning drift of wholemeal” (Galloway 1999: 18) show the couple’s emotional involvement in their surroundings and point to the “interlocking patterns of experience and the reactive basis of everyday life” (Jackson 2004: 10). The narratorprotagonist and their partner perceive the blend of the bakery and the flat as delightful; it is a setting in which they prosper. As long as the bakery is in working order, all is well with the couple’s love life. The narrative discourse conveys the couple’s feelings towards their surroundings in great detail, thus boasting characteristic features of the stereotypically feminine narrative discourse. Towards the end of the short story, however, the domestic space acquires more and more threatening aspects which eventually drive the narrator-protagonist away. After the bakery has closed down, the premises are adapted for a butcher’s shop. Like the scents and sounds of the bakery, the noises and smells from the butcher’s enter the flat, haunt the couple’s imagination, and ultimately destroy the relationship (Sacido- Romero 2019: 141). March notes that “Galloway’s landscapes become hostile and dangerous for men and women on a domestic, city-scape, and Ines Gstrein 194 even a national level” (2002: 127). The couple have no control over the place they live in because they cannot step back from their emotional and physical entanglement with space. Their attempts to create a distance between themselves and the butcher’s by thoroughly washing themselves every morning fail. Consequently, the narrator-protagonist has no option but to leave. They transgress a boundary and seek refuge in a neutral, private space, “a new flat on the ground floor smelling only of damp” (Galloway 1999: 19). While the narrator-protagonist of “Love in a changing environment” is able to escape the ever-present danger of the butcher and the “bone grinder” (Galloway 1999: 19), the butcher’s wife in “The meat” is the victim of “homicidal domestic violence” (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137). The latter short story revolves around a murderous butcher who puts up a part of his dead wife’s body for sale in his shop. Since nobody wants to buy the carcass, he throws it out on the street and only keeps what stray animals cannot digest. Surprisingly, domestic violence is not hidden behind closed doors here but exposed in a public place: the corpse is displayed in the shop for everybody to see. This does not lead to a public outcry or an intervention from the outside, though. None of the “unnamed/ ungendered shoppers” (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137) addresses the elephant in the room. The embarrassed silence on a glaringly obvious act of domestic violence resulting in murder aggravates women’s precarious situation in the private home as the public deliberately overlooks the matter (Galloway 1999: 108). A reason for this could be that the carcass serves as a warning to the customers. In marriages, it is mainly women who do grocery shopping (Sobal 2005: 144). Hence, Gina Lyle assumes that also in Galloway’s short story, the majority of customers is probably female. She points out that the shoppers do not speak up because they interpret the corpse as a threat to their own safety: “the presentation of the body offers a warning to other wives of the consequences of failing to conform and submit to the demands of patriarchy” (2021: 88). Keeping quiet about domestic violence in the presence of both the murderer and his victim is a means of selfprotection for the female members of the public. The ensuing silence aggravates the perilous situation that all women characters potentially face at home. Again, the distinction between private and public is blurred as domestic violence is publicly and deliberately exposed yet not deplored. As this passage already shows, the butcher knows how to handle the different demands of private and public space. He is able to perform transitions from the public to the private sphere because he is in control and apparently emotionally distant. Like in “Love in a changing environment”, elements from the public space invade the private space and ren- Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 195 der the present circumstances unbearable (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137): “he [the butcher] could detect its [the smell’s] unmistakeable seep under the door to his living room when he was alone in the evening” (Galloway 1999: 109). In her analysis of “The meat”, Lyle finds that “[b]utchery refuses to stay confined within a finite space, as the spatial boundaries of the home are crossed, collapsing notions of the workspace and the domestic space as discrete and separate” (2021: 88). Everything that is close to the corpse acquires negative qualities. “Something about the meat was infecting” (1999: 108), writes Galloway. Since the male protagonist is in control of both the private and the public space, he is capable of responding to the situation and can reduce the danger caused by the dead body. He disposes of the corpse and successfully reintegrates its remains into his flat. The “wee minding” (Galloway 1999: 109) is hidden under the marital bed where it cannot do emotional harm to the butcher and even acquires the status of “a sort of macabre trophy” (Sacido-Romero 2019: 137). Men exert power over the house and its female inhabitants and shoppers: in “The meat”, all spaces - be they private or public - are maledominated. 4. Narrative voice and authority The interrelations of voice, gender, and narrative authority have been an object of feminist narratological research since the late 1980s. Lanser identifies “three narrative modes”: “authorial, personal, and communal voice” (1992: 15). The authorial voice belongs to a heterodiegeticextradiegetic narrator who addresses an extradiegetic narratee. As its name already suggests, issues of authority are key to this type of narrative voice. Since authorial narrators are not part of the diegesis, they “appear[] to control the story in all respects” (Gymnich 2013: 709) - similar to the author of the text. Even though the narrator’s gender is not necessarily mentioned in a text, for a long time, authorial voice has been attributed only to male narrators. Identifying an authorial voice as female may even destroy its credibility (Lanser 1992: 18). However, a female authorial voice can also be used to subvert readers’ stereotypical assumptions of gender attributions and may be regarded as an attempt to “claim narrative authority for a female voice” (Gymnich 2013: 709). “The meat” complicates the gender issues of authorial narration. The short story is told by a heterodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator whose gender identity is not marked. This is common in authorial narration (Allrath & Surkamp 2004: 149). While the authorial narrator of “The meat” remains ungendered, the butchered body in the story world is gendered. It is important to think about sex, gender, and narrative voice in relation to Ines Gstrein 196 the female body in this short story, especially as “notions of the body [are] hidden within the text” (Lyle 2021: 86). In an interview, Galloway relates that “I’m obviously fascinated by physicality, partly to do with my own obsession with [...] death. Death is the most bizarre idea. Being then nothing” (Galloway cit. in March 1999: n.p.). The butchered female body is at the centre of “The meat” yet neither the narrator, the male protagonist nor the customers ever designate it as a human corpse. Thus, it is rendered invisible on the discourse level. Lyle emphasises the absence of both the narrator-as-character and the butchered body from the text: The narrative voice is a disembodied third person, and the story has no direct speech, removing any effect of mimesis in the text. No clear interiority is offered for the perspectives of the butcher or his customers, and the choices of focus suggest an emotional removal from the scene. The narrative avoids visual confrontation with the body and attention skirts around the nearby items in the store, listing items that have been purchased [...] (Lyle 2021: 86) “The meat” abstracts from the woman’s body in order to tell the story of femicide. Lanser argues that “the authorial mode has allowed women access to ‘male’ authority by separating the narrating ‘I’ from the female body; it is of course in the exploitation of this possibility that women writers have used male narrators” (1992: 18). Even though Galloway’s bodiless narrator remains ungendered, they assume power over the way in which a femicide is represented. Gaby Allrath and Carola Surkamp consider the use of authorial voice in women writers’ texts as rather questionable because it may suggest an alliance with male-centred positions (2004: 145). However, I argue that it is precisely the point of Galloway’s short story to expose a stereotypically male-gendered perspective on domestic violence, to show it in all its appalling atrocity, and to draw attention to the general public’s acceptance of it. Authorial narrators “conventionally carry an authority superior to that conferred on characters” (Lanser 1992: 16). The butcher serves, in some parts of “The meat”, as reflector figure and exerts physical power, but he is subordinate to the ungendered narrator’s rendering of the story. The authorial voice is adopted to highlight and sharply criticise entrenched gender hierarchies. The most important woman character of “The meat” is silenced in more than one sense of the word. Throughout the short story, the murdered wife remains an object encountered by male subjectivity. Her voice is completely eradicated from the discourse level. Sacido-Romero points out that for Galloway, “to give voice to women, or, more precisely, to write as a woman entails an engagement with what is silenced, dispossessed, ignored, considered not normal” (2018: 195, original emphasis). Lyle notes that “[t]he butcher’s wife is rendered incapable of contributing Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 197 to the narrative, silenced both literally in death, and metaphorically by a culture that neither looks nor listens to those who experience domestic abuse” (2021: 86). The dead woman’s status as an object of discourse is mirrored in the use of the pronoun “it” which relegates the body to the status of something edible - “the carcass” or “the meat” (Galloway 1999: 108). With the loss of her personal pronoun and her gender identity, the butcher’s wife is bereaved not only of her womanhood, but of her humanity.Moving on now to consider communal voice, the present article examines only one of the many different narrative stances that communal voice comprises: the “singular form in which one narrator speaks for a collective” (Lanser 1992: 21, original emphasis) rather than only for themselves. As Lanser notes in her analysis of communal voice in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), “the narrator begins to adopt a collective vision, a focalizing consciousness that represents itself in a plural ‘we’” (1992: 249, original emphasis). Singular communal voice finds expression in the use of the first-person plural pronoun and reveals insights into other characters’ thoughts. There are inextricable links between the narrator’s identity and the group (Lanser 1992: 241; 251). “Love in a changing environment” is a “we-narrative” that obscures the gender identity of its narrator-protagonist. The personal pronoun “we” refers to a male character and his ungendered partner, the unnamed narrator-protagonist. It is a fallacy to impose the “heterosexual default structure (if A loves B, and A is a man, then B must be a woman)” (Fludernik 1999: n.p.) to the text. While the gender-specific narrative strategies outlined in the previous section contribute to the construction of a female gender identity for the narrator-protagonist, they are by no means sufficient to determine the narrator-protagonist as female. Narrators of all genders may adopt stereotypically gendered descriptions of space. For this reason, it is dubitable whether “Love in a changing environment” actually “articulates women’s voices mainly in relation to the conflicts that affect female experience” (Sacido-Romero 2018: 192) in the same way that many other texts in the short story collection Blood do. Although quarrels with male partners and threatening domestic spaces are recurrent elements in heterosexual female experiences, the text does not give enough useful hints about the narrator-protagonist’s gender identity. The obscurity of the narrator-protagonist’s gender identity has left its trace in scholarly work on “Love in a changing environment”. The “linguistic marking of sex is in no way inevitable” (Culler 2011: 60) yet it is a key feature of the English language. In order to choose the right pronoun for narrators, their gender identity must be known to readers (Lanser Ines Gstrein 198 1999: 172). As a result of the uncertainty in Galloway’s short story, scholars have avoided to refer to the narrator-protagonist’s gender identity: in their respective articles on “Love in a changing environment”, Jackson and Sacido-Romero either address both characters together as the “couple” and “they” (Jackson 2004: 9, Sacido-Romero 2019: 141) or abstain from using a personal pronoun in place of the noun “narrator” (Jackson 2004: 10). In a similar vein, I use the pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she” to emphasise that the gender identity of the narratorprotagonist is not marked. The alteration of communal narration and personal narration shows the (lack of) cohesion of the couple in “Love in a changing environment”. Communal narration is used at the beginning of the text but begins to dissolve upon the couple’s first quarrel. From this point onwards, the first-person singular pronoun is more frequently used: The afternoon there was hammering non-stop from eleven till three, we had a mild disagreement. I said something unkind and went downstairs for two cheese rolls and an apple pie for later - we seldom cooked. It wasn’t till the door refused I saw the sign. The bakery were selling up. We had toastless beans and cheddar at teatime and I blamed myself. Now I look back, there had been something different the whole morning. I looked up but he said nothing. He didn’t think it his place to talk about relationships. (Galloway 1999: 18, emphasis added) As can be taken from this passage, communal narration is adopted whenever reference is made to the couple as unity. The text shifts back and forth between communal and personal narration. Two opponents get involved in a quarrel - this makes it impossible to have communal narration in those passages in which the couple have different opinions. Now, the “collective vision” (Lanser 1992: 249, original emphasis) breaks apart in two distinct perceptions. In the immediate aftermath of the quarrel, the partners keep to themselves and go out on their own. With the arrival of the butcher, communal narration largely replaces personal narration again in a joint effort to fight off the danger that the butcher’s shop represents. Yet this effort fails: the final break-up puts an end to communal narration. The shift in narrative voice from communal to personal is very effective in conveying the ups and downs of the sexual relationship. The end of the relationship is already foreshadowed in the above-cited passage: it is only the first-person narrator, not both partners who can share a memory from the past. Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 199 5. Multiperspectivity Like space and voice, multiperspectivity is a gendered narrative structure. Multiperspective texts present different versions of a story’s events. This can be achieved, for instance, by using several narrators, adopting different types of focalisation, or composing the text like a collage. For scholars in feminist narratology, exploring multiperspective narration allows for insights into the relation between the sexes as it highlights the differences in lived experiences and alerts to conflicts. Moreover, this narrative technique points to the hierarchisation of voices and draws attention to questions of whether different narrations are compatible with each other and whether women’s narratives have a place in the dominant patriarchal discourse. Lastly, with some multiperspective narrations, readers have considerable difficulty in identifying the gender identity of characters and narrators because of the ambiguous use of pronouns and ungendered given names (Allrath & Surkamp 2004: 160-169). Multiperspectivity is a concept that affords analysing the similarities and differences between “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” as regards the depiction of domestic violence. In the previous two sections, the article has examined the two texts separately. However, it can also be useful to read them together because both short stories shed light on the same issue: the two texts illuminate each other in respect to the ever-present danger of domestic violence. In order to examine the connections between “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”, the article zooms out to the literary work in which the two component texts are placed, namely the short story collection Blood. I suggest adapting Allrath and Surkamp’s feminist narratological findings on multiperspectivity to volumes of short fiction, specifically to short story collections such as Blood. Plurality and narrative openness are not only characteristics of the multiperspective novel the two scholars investigate, but also of the short story collection. Short story collections contain several stand-alone texts that may employ different narrative situations, focalisations, and spaces. In spite of the differences between the component texts, short story collections nevertheless display a number of connecting elements: A short story collection almost always possesses a measure of unity. The author carefully makes a selection and creates a specific order or structure among the stories; the selection is often made on the basis of similarities in theme. Stories may also share a resemblance in setting, tone, and style. (Lundén 1999: 43) There are strong thematic and stylistic links between many of Blood’s individual texts, among them “Love in a changing environment” and “The Ines Gstrein 200 meat”. Mary McGlynn notes that the collection’s short stories “explore the dark side of human relationships and the limitations of trust” (2001: 15). McMillan highlights that “Galloway’s short stories in both Blood and [her second collection of short stories] Where You Find It are often disturbing, even weird [...] The narrating voice is unsettling, usually but not always female” (2021: 355, emphasis added). McGlynn’s and McMillan’s descriptions hold true for “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”. Both texts are told by ungendered narrators and form part of the strand in Blood that is dedicated to the deeply disturbing topic of domestic violence. Connecting “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” allows to get a broader picture on domestic violence in Blood. “The meat” reads like the gruesome continuation of “Love in a changing environment”. The latter’s ungendered and unnamed narrator-protagonist moves out just in time before the murderous butcher opens his business. “Love in a changing environment” finishes on the following lines: “[t]hinner and wiser, I eat no meat and avoid cakes. The very sight of them makes me sick” (Galloway 1999: 19). The narrator-protagonist has disturbing memories of the goods from the bakery and the butcher’s shop alike. Ever since the narrator-protagonist has heard the sound of the butcher’s tools from downstairs and has felt threatened by the clatter of knives, eating meat is out of the question. In a similar vein, the customers in “The meat” buy neither the corpse nor foodstuffs that are placed too close to the dead woman’s body (Galloway 1999: 108). While it has been remarked that butchers, butcher’s shops, and meat are recurrent textual elements in Galloway’s fiction (Sacido-Romero 2019: 138), no direct connection has been established between the two short stories of Blood yet. Multiperspective narration throws the traditional power hierarchy between the sexes into even sharper relief. I understand “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” as instalments of the same story, one of them taking place before a murder can be committed, the other one after the fact. The arrangement of short stories in Galloway’s collection can be used as a guide to align the different perspectives in “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”. Allan Weiss’s brief survey suggests that the majority “read the stories [of a short story collection] in order from beginning to end” (2021: 31). When reading Blood from cover to cover, readers will first encounter “Love in a changing environment”, short story number 3 out of 22, and only much later reach “The meat”, short story number 17 out of 22. As explained above, the two texts differ from each other regarding narrative mode. Authorial, communal, and personal narration are employed. The distinctive voices do not exclude each other but approach the subject of domestic violence from different angles: from the interior perspective of the frightened narrator-protagonist in “Love in a Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 201 changing environment” and from the exterior perspective of the authorial narrator, which is distanced from the matter, in “The meat”. When they discover the authorial narrator’s detached rendering in “The meat”, readers will already have been introduced to the narrator-protagonist’s anxiety in “Love in a changing environment”. First and foremost, Blood presents a look from the inside - through the eyes of the narrator-protagonist in danger - before it moves on to a look from the outside on the victim. The victim is key for orienting the perspectives in Galloway’s two texts. “Love in a changing environment” adopts the perspective of a narrator-protagonist who almost becomes a victim; in “The meat”, the general public averts its eyes from the corpse but the authorial narration closely examines the gradual decay of the corpse and the butcher’s handling of the corpse. The perspective of the frightened narrator-protagonist comes closest to that of a victim. Even though they are not physically injured, the narrator-protagonist and their partner feel threatened upon the arrival of the butcher’s van: “[o]ur arms touched as we both turned away, not sure what to say. I think we were afraid” (Galloway 1999: 19). Turning away, being silent and leaving the crime scene is also precisely what the shoppers do in “The meat”. Readers are offered a double perspective: making a lucky escape from the victim’s position in “Love in a changing environment”, then, being offered the position of an onlooker who could fall victim to an aggressor in “The meat”. This creates a highly uncomfortable, tense situation. Taken together, both short stories outline the discursive field in which the discussion of domestic violence is situated. “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat” complicate the power issues at stake in the perspective structure. The hierarchy between the perspectives of Galloway’s two ungendered narrators can be grasped with the concept of perspective structure. Perspectives can be ordered in two ways: “[i]n traditional narrative the viewpoint (or point of view) of the narrator is often a privileged, closed perspective. The perspective structure remains open if the text provides no clear and obvious guidelines for the readers to decide between the narrator’s views and those of the characters” (Fludernik 2009: 39, original emphasis). In order to determine the hierarchy between various perspectives, they are considered “in relation to the meaning of the text overall” (Fludernik 2009: 39). Galloway’s short stories expose the violent turn that romantic relationships might take and condemn it. At first sight, it might seem that the perspective of the narrator-protagonist (“Love in a changing environment”) is less important than the authorial narrator’s (“The meat”). This misleading impression is reinforced by the breakdown of the narrator-protagonist’s relationship. At this point in the short story, communal voice - which represents the viewpoint of several characters - no longer exists and the narrator- Ines Gstrein 202 protagonist only speaks for themselves, using personal narration. Yet Gymnich’s evaluation of personal narration is twofold: In comparison to the authorial voice, the personal voice can only claim a substantially lower degree of narrative authority, since it is by definition bound to a subjective and limited perspective […] Still, the personal voice may be seen as a particularly apt instrument for highlighting the impact the cultural context may have on the life of an individual. In other words, this type of voice may for instance lend itself to emphasising problems and concerns from a feminine perspective. (Gymnich 2013: 710) The “problems and concerns” (2013: 710) that Gymnich alludes to are, in the case of “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”, domestic violence and the narrator-protagonist’s fear thereof. The “cultural context” (Gymnich 2013: 710) in which the ungendered narrator-protagonist in “Love in a changing environment” finds themselves in is subject to change. Only when the conditions are favourable, they can feel safe in the private home. The wellbeing of the individual crucially depends on the surroundings in which they are placed: the closing down of the bakery and the subsequent renovation for the purposes of opening a butcher’s shop are a threat to the narrator-protagonist. Both short stories play off the individual against the general public. The “cultural context” (Gymnich 2013: 710) in the late twentieth century is, as “The meat” shows, one that prefers not to openly address domestic violence even when it takes on its extreme form, femicide. The perspectives adopted in Galloway’s short stories mirror patriarchal frameworks in order to lay bare their injustices. 6. Conclusion Feminist narratology offers useful concepts to build and expand on the existing gender-focused research on Galloway’s work. Looking beyond characterisation opens up routes that have been less frequently explored: gender informs elements of the story world, such as space, and elements of the narrative discourse, such as voice and perspective, alike. The particular value of the short story collection to a feminist narratological reading is that it lends itself to diversity: different perspectives, voices, and settings can be placed next to each other without the need for a final resolution. This article has revealed that giving voice to women, seeing through the eyes of women, and describing spaces inhabited by women are highly complex matters in Galloway’s short stories. Galloway makes clever use of narrative techniques to play common notions of sex and gender off Towards a feminist narratological approach to Janice Galloway’s Blood 203 against each other: the narrator’s gender is obscured while the narrative style is explicitly gendered. The “gender disorientation” (Jones 2009: 63) that the heroines of Galloway’s novels face when trying to escape a patriarchal system is, I argue, also an apt description of the narrative structures of the short stories “Love in a changing environment” and “The meat”: they destabilise notions of gender and require readers to pay close attention to the ways in which the texts are narrated. In her multiperspective short story collection Blood, Galloway approaches domestic violence from different perspectives, thus exposing how domestic violence is ignored in the public sphere. Women characters are often in the public eye yet the public is rarely sympathetic to them; this discrepancy shapes narrative voice, perspective, and space in Galloway’s short stories. References Allrath, Gaby & Carola Surkamp (2004). Erzählerische Vermittlung, unzuverlässiges Erzählen, Multiperspektivität und Bewusstseinsdarstellung. In: Vera Nünning & Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies. 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Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies. Stuttgart: Metzler. 49-71. Young, Emma & James Bailey (2017). Introduction. In: Emma Young & James Bailey (Eds.). British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1-14. Young, Tory (2018). Futures for feminist and queer narratology. Textual Practice 32 (6): 913-921. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1080/ 0950236X.2018.1486538 Ines Gstrein Universität Innsbruck Amending the “breaking of charity”, affirming “brother-love” The Miller-Kazan controversy reconsidered in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 1 Junghyun Hwang Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible and Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront are generally regarded as the respective authors’ opposing commentaries on the ethics of testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) - the former for refusing and the latter for consenting to “confess” and “name”. Miller and Kazan, however, stand more on the same side of critical standpoints than opposite each other, tackling from the liberal progressive points of view the problematics of Cold War America as a fundamental conflict between individual and society and proposing an anti-ideological critique of the American political system. Comparing and connecting both works with the autobiographical writings of the two authors, this paper aims to explore how their personal lives were inextricably woven into their critical positions on the ideologically charged milieu of early 1950s America. In effect, the two texts showcase similar positions and visions espoused by their respective authors: they both advocate alike speaking up and voicing dissent against authoritarian oppression, and in the process, they wrestle with the fundamental question of the arts - the complexities of envisioning humanity in relation to society. 1. “The liberal duelists”: facing the same direction Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible and Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront are generally regarded as the respective authors’ opposing commentaries on the ethics of testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) - the former for refusing and the latter for 1 This research was financially supported by Hansung University (Seoul, Korea). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0013 Junghyun Hwang 206 consenting to “confess” and “name”. Although Miller posits as his object of criticism both ideological extremes of the far right and far left under the comprehensive theme of “tyranny” (1987: 348), The Crucible is frequently read as the playwright’s condemnation of the HUAC along with its “friendly” witnesses, including most notably Kazan. In turn, On the Waterfront, Kazan’s highly acclaimed film on the issue of labor, is often castigated as the director’s blatant response to Miller’s play with an explicit justification of informing. Miller and Kazan, however, stand more on the same side of critical standpoints than opposite each other. They share liberal progressive critiques of authoritarianism, both aiming at the ideological extremes of McCarthyite anti-Communist and Stalinist- Communist regimes. They produced their respective artistic works as the crucible of their personal and political crises by weaving each of their stories around the central conflict between individual and community. The Crucible is the crucible of Miller’s personal guilt for the crisis of his marital life as well as the left’s collective guilt for “being unable to speak simply and accurately of the very recent past” (Miller 2008: 89). Likewise, On the Waterfront is the crucible of Kazan’s private guilt for his betrayal of former colleagues in the process, the director himself becomes the crucible of Hollywood’s “institutional guilt over the McCarthy era” (Steyn 2003: 38). Miller and Kazan were, as Kenneth Hey observes, “the liberal duelists”, “firing at each other by firing in opposite directions”, Kazan firing at the political left while Miller at the right (2016: 234). Both The Crucible and On the Waterfront draw as much on the contemporary political conditions as on the personal life stories of the respective authors. Inspired by the parallels between 1692 Salem and 1952 Washington upon reading Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), Miller took Charles W. Upham’s nineteenth-century book, Salem Witchcraft, as “the hard evidence” of his play’s center: “the breakdown of the Proctor marriage and Abigail Williams’s determination to get Elizabeth murdered so that she could have John” (1987: 337). In The Crucible, he thus reconstructs the history of Salem-McCarthyism as the protagonist John Proctor’s journey through a moral crisis, caused mainly by his extramarital liaison with Abigail Williams, presented as seducing Eve, toward a reclaming of his individual conscience, largely thanks to the wise mentoring of his wife Elizabeth, portrayed as saving Mary. With an implicit reference to his own failing marriage at the time, the playwright admits that he was “not only writing myself into the wilderness politically but personally as well” because in this tripartite story, “I knew that my own life was speaking here in many disguises, not merely my time” (1987: 332, 338). Likewise, On the Waterfront was brought into being in the mixed cauldron of political and personal elements. Despite its social theme about the labor union, the film was severely criticized by the left for its thinly The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 207 veiled pro-informer motif. Based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prizewinning articles on union corruption, the screenplay recasts the story as a moral crisis of the central character, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), whose ethical maturation is premised upon his decision to testify against the mob murder of a dockworker Joey Doyle. Terry’s inner journey is spurred by Edie (Eva Marie Saint), Joey’s upright and outspoken sister who is a trainee teacher at a Catholic convent school, and Father Barry (Karl Maldon), a Catholic priest and a voice of ideological persuasion to testify. 2 In particular, Terry was modeled on Tony Mike deVincenzo, a renegade ex-gangster who was being threatened by the mob for having testified against them. Kazan expresses a strong sense of identification with his story: “I did see Tony Mike’s story as my own”, even flaunting a defiant self-defense of his own HUAC testimony: “When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, ‘I’m glad what I done - you hear me? - glad what I done! ’ that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had” (1988: 498-500). As such, for both Miller and Kazan, the central concern revolves around not so much an ideological problem of right or left as a question of individual conscience and human dignity faced with an oppressive system. Although Miller was more explicitly critical of the McCarthyite right, he was less outspoken about his stance towards Communism, having publicly neither condemned nor advocated for the Communist Party. Nevertheless, he counts himself as one of “fellow travellers”, standing “somewhere within the conventions of the political left of centre” (2008: 86). Thus in The Crucible, he lumps “Communists and capitalists” together as equally authoritarian and responsible for creating the divided world - “still gripped”, since 1692, “between two diametrically opposed absolutes” - as opposed to a liberal worldview, in which “good and evil are relative” to specific contexts and “always joined to the same phenomenon” with each particularity constituting the whole (2003: 31). 3 In comparison, Kazan readily professes himself a staunch anti-Communist, but he simultaneously underscores his political orientation as “left of center” and sympathetic to “socialism” (1988: 217). Although he depicts the workers’ union as corrupt in On the Waterfront, he never makes a clear analogy between mobsters and Communists, nor does he identify the 2 Just as Terry’s testimony was maneuvered by Edie and Father Barry, Kazan’s decision to testify was also allegedly influenced by Molly Thacher, “my Puritan wife” (1988: 298). Kazan married her in 1932, and his wife remained a powerful influence until her death in 1963. Although Molly Kazan was part of the Group Theatre during the thirties, by the early fifties she had become an outspoken anti- Communist that arguably influenced her husband’s decision to testify (Neve 2003: 23). 3 Hereafter, all quotations from The Crucible will be cited only with page numbers in parentheses. Junghyun Hwang 208 Crime Commission, possibly a democratic civil institution, with the HUAC. Rather, notoriously ending the film by having Mr. Upstairs, a capitalist shipowner, continue to assume control of the laborers, Kazan even seems to insinuate a homology between mobster-capitalist exploitation and the HUAC-capitalist American system. In this vein, this paper aims to revisit The Crucible and On the Waterfront, focusing on the similar ways in which both works weave liberal-left critiques into the ideologically charged milieu of early 1950s America. It explores how the respective authors attempt to come to terms with their private guilt over failing to uphold their political convictions and abide by their personal commitments. 2. The personal is political: passion, patriotism, and the American Dream The similar critical standpoints in The Crucible and On the Waterfront can be noted above all in the two authors’ political visions and personal ambitions - specifically, in their complex and often contradictory stances towards the American Dream. The turbulent relationship between Miller and Kazan began in the late 1940s and lasted well into the 1960s. They launched their respective careers jointly in the late 1940s with reciprocal collaborations: Kazan as director of Miller’s Broadway plays, All My Sons in 1947 and Death of a Salesman in 1949. The seeds of their break-up were sown under the strained political circumstances of the second HUAC hearings on Hollywood in 1951-1952, 4 while they were still working together on The Hook, Miller’s newly written, but never-to-be-produced, screenplay about the corrupt longshoremen’s union on the Brooklyn docks. In 1951, Miller accompanied Kazan to Hollywood in order to run the script by Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, who then forwarded it to Roy Brewer, “the right-wing head” of the Hollywood unions and “a close ally” of the mob-dominated International Longshoreman’s Union (Shulman 2003: 29). Cohn and Brewer allegedly suggested to change the waterfront mobsters into Communists, which eventually led Miller to withdraw the script (Hey 2016: 233; Miller 1987: 308; Shulman 2003: 29). 4 The HUAC had hearings on Hollywood in 1947 and 1951, contending that Communists had inserted pro-Soviet messages in films. In the first hearings in 1947, forty-one witnesses were subpoenaed and nineteen of them refused to answer questions concerning their political beliefs. Ten of those “unfriendlies,” or “the Hollywood Ten,” were charged with contempt of Congress and sent to prison for up to a year (Roffman & Purdy 2016: 212-213). In the hearings of 1951, both Kazan and the screenwriter Budd Schulberg were among “friendly” witnesses (Neve 2003: 27). The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 209 Besides, the trip to Hollywood was to be of crucial significance to both authors not only politically but also personally. It was at this time that Kazan introduced Marilyn Monroe, with whom he was having an affair, to Miller, who immediately fell in love with her. As the meetings with film studios ran aground, Miller left Hollywood rather abruptly and informed Kazan of his decision to withdraw The Hook from production. Then came the estrangement of the two auteurs in 1952 with Kazan’s friendly testimony before HUAC, where he eventually named eight of his former associates from the Group Theater, including Clifford Odets and Paula Strasberg. Miller came up in 1953 with The Crucible, loaded with mixed emotions of condemnation, sympathy, and guilt. Kazan followed in the next year with On the Waterfront, a self-claimed defense of his informing, yet filled with ambivalence, moral quandary, and guilt. Miller was to come forth again with a much more complex and empathic rumination on the morality of informing with his next play, A View from the Bridge (1955-1956), while Kazan was to present a more comprehensive vindication of himself as an immigrant-outsider in American society in his autobiographical film, America America (1963). The two were to collaborate one last time on Miller’s 1964 After the Fall, a self-critical scrutiny of his marriage to Monroe. With respect to contemporary American society, the two friends seem to share not only their critical stands but also their complicated personal stakes. Miller locates at the problematic core of McCarthyism the contemporary disintegration of American democratic idealism. Caught in the contradiction between America’s claim to be the leader of the free world and its actual conditions of unfreedom - clutching “corruption to its breast” at home while sending “its sons to cleanse the earth” abroad in Korea, Miller says that he could not bring himself to jump on the national bandwagon of the celebrated “American Century” (1987: 309-10). And it was this “unacknowledged contempt” for the American system that he finds at the root of the left’s collective guilt: “What the Left were not saying was that they were in truth dedicated to replacing capitalism with a society based on Marxist principles” (2008: 97). Besides, the playwright’s passionate involvement with Monroe in his private American Dream further complicates his stakes in the collective malaise. Stuart Marlow, for one, criticizes Miller’s fascination with the movie star, “the icon of the American Dream and Hollywood glamour”, as an illustration of his desire for success - for “a prominent place within the hierarchical registers of cultural relevance” - and thus a betrayal of his integrity as a writer of the liberal left (2008: 148, 152). It seems, however, that Monroe represented for him a lot more than just the luminous dream of success. He was undergoing a personal crisis at the time - “a painful time of rebirth”, even “a second adolescence” - and Monroe symbolized for him, more than Junghyun Hwang 210 anything, “the vitality of a force” - a promise of life and a potential spring of his creative energy (1987: 325, 327). Interestingly, Kazan similarly characterizes his former friend’s ordeal as “that old quagmire of ambivalence, the natural home for an artist”, even lauding it as a testament to “his humanity” (1988: 366, 371). Kazan’s relationship with America seems as much, if not more, ambivalent and contradictory as Miller’s. It seems that his patriotic desire to affirm America’s ideals was overdetermined by his “Anatolian” contempt for its limitations while his personal desire for success was compromised by his insecurity as an immigrant. 5 If the collective guilt of the left was, as Miller has diagnosed it, due to the deprivation of voice, Kazan suffered more than a fair share of the burden. He seemed to be guilty not only for his inability to speak his part of the left’s contempt for America’s cherished norms due to his status as an outsider, but also for speaking about his political convictions about Communism. Kazan was a member in a Communist Party section within the Group Theatre for eighteen months from 1934 to 1936, but he resigned when the Party attempted to take complete control of the Group, disallowing any dissenting views (Georgakas 2011: 7). As a disgusted former member turned anti-Communist, Kazan was convinced that the Communist Party was “a thoroughly organized, worldwide conspiracy” (1988: 449). He eventually decided to name, although he agonized over testifying, pleading with Miller that he was prepared to give up for a while “no movie work or money”, but unwilling to sacrifice his career for a cause he did not believe in (1988: 460). 6 Complicating his anguish between personal ambitions and political convictions, moreover, was his intrenched sense of insecurity as an immigrant. Kazan, an Anatolian Greek who had come to the United States as a child, was a perennial outsider and boasted his natural bond with the marginalized in American society such as James Baldwin, who once told 5 Kazan analogizes his sense of outsider insecurity to his “Anatolian smile” that covers “resentment,” “fear,” and “cunning” (1988: 4). His Anatolian smile is a defensive mechanism, but it is also based on, according to Dan Georgakas, “a sense of cultural superiority that borders on contempt rather than fear” (2011: 9). Behind his smile, “a masquerade of equanimity,” he may have also developed “an appetite for revenge and its corollary, vindictive triumph” (Lahr 2010: online), as he insists, for instance, that On the Waterfront was motivated by “a desire for revenge” for “the beating I’d taken” (1988: 488). 6 Despite his initial objection to naming, Kazan seems to have succumbed to his ambition for a film career, especially to the pressure from Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, who informed him that he would not be able to work in Hollywood if he did not name names. Kazan did not “sell out,” as Victor S. Navasky says, in the sense that he did it for money or against his political convictions, but his testimony ended up lending “legitimacy” to “an anti-democratic institution,” leading to an ironic, self-contradictory effect of undercutting the very democratic values he so passionately fought for (2011: 54). The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 211 him, “Gadg, baby, you’re a nigger too”, and Tennessee Williams, whose “gayness”, he claims, along with his own “foreignness”, made them both “freaks”, “outsiders”, and “quirky rebels” (1988: 43, 334, 336). Underlying the nebula of his doubts, regrets, and guilts was then his contradictory relation to the American Dream - his intense desire for the inside dope complicated by his outsider complex and his convictions compromised by his ambitions. 7 In this sense, just as Kazan admired Miller for his humanity, the director might deserve the same tribute for the acknowledgment of his own human limitation. As a matter of fact, Miller and Kazan never criticized each other publicly despite the oft-cited dissent between the two. Rather, on several later occasions, they would express mutual sympathy and ongoing fellow feeling. Miller would be merely “sorrowing” over Kazan’s testimony, just as the latter remained “protective” of the former by keeping silent about his friend’s suspected Communist allegiance (Schickel 2005: 233-234). Miller insists that he was compelled to write The Crucible not to condemn Kazan but to castigate “the whole hateful procedure” itself; that he was “not filling up with hatred or contempt for him” because “his suffering was too palpable for that” (2008: 104). Regarding Kazan’s HUAC testimony, Miller admits that he did feel betrayed because he thought his name could have been included as well if circumstances had required it. Nevertheless, he asserts his unceasing camaraderie for his friend, even insinuating a sense of guilt for his own inability to accept Kazan’s weaknesses as limitations of common humanity. Upon meeting Kazan on his research trip to Salem and learning about the latter’s decision to testify, Miller writes: [As] usual I was carrying several contradictions at the same time, my brotherlove as painfully alive in me as it had ever been, alongside the undeniable fact that Kazan might have sacrificed me had it been necessary. In a sense I went naked to Salem, still unable to accept the most common experience of humanity, the shifts of interests that turned loving husbands and wives into stony enemies. [emphasis added] (1987: 335) And it was this betrayal of humanity, his guilt for not living up to his brotherly love for Kazan, that he posits as the primary tale of The Crucible: “that was the real story of ancient Salem Village, what they called then the breaking of charity with one another” [emphasis added] (1987: 335). 7 That this uncertainty of status influenced Kazan’s decision to inform is also recounted in his depiction of Greek immigrants like Skouras and himself. Always anxious to “certify their good hearts” and ready to “reaffirm their civic and national loyalty,” they would, especially in times of crisis, “defend themselves by flaunting their patriotism” (Kazan 1988: 451). Junghyun Hwang 212 Like Miller did with The Crucible, On the Waterfront represents Kazan’s struggle with his own guilt for “breaking charity’’ - his betrayal of “brother-love” for his former fellow-travelers, including Miller, for whom Kazan professed a deep friendship, describing themselves as “consanguineous” “blood brothers” in “our tastes, our convictions, our pleasures, or our politics” (1988: 365). Kazan not only refused to offer any resolute apology for his naming, but he also compounded the incense of his critics by insistently justifying his decisions: “The ‘horrible, immoral thing’ I would do, I did out of my true self. Everything before was seventeen years of posturing” (1988: 460). Nevertheless, he does express his “regret” and “shame”, especially in relation to Clifford Odets, himself a friendly witness and one of the eight people Kazan had named. Unable to recover from his guilt for having named, Odets died tragically young, and Kazan ruefully laments him: “I saw the awful damage HUAC had done to a man I loved, and I regretted my influence on what had happened”; and in what seems to come closest to a confession, he even says: I still believed what I’d done was correct, but no matter that my reasons had been sincerely founded and carefully thought out, there was something indecent - that’s how I felt it, as shame - in what I’d done and something murky in my motivations. What I’d done was correct, but was it right? [emphasis added] (1988: 463, 465) In other words, he was convinced of the political correctness of his actions but felt guilty nevertheless because he was unsure of their moral uprightness. In their later writings, the two estranged friends seem to gesture towards making amends with each other. In his 1988 memoir, Kazan expresses a sense of disappointment he had felt following his testimony with Miller’s failure to acknowledge “some past friendship”, even with “a few words, however condemnatory” (1988: 471). And Miller seems to offer his belated concession in a 2008 lecture, revealing in no uncertain terms where his sympathy lies. Referring to the 1999 honorary Oscar awarded to Kazan and the still vindictive reaction by some in the audience, 8 the playwright deplores the unjust burden his former friend had to bear for half a century: “Kazan now bore very nearly the whole onus of the era, quite as though he had manufactured its horrors all by himself, when in fact he was surely its victim” (2008: 105). With such complex 8 The 1999 honorary Oscar bestowed to Kazan was controversial due to his 1952 HUAC testimony. Some in the audience applauded the filmmaker and others such as Nick Nolte and Ed Harris sat on their hands while hundreds of both antiand pro-Kazan protesters gathered outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Smith 2015: 90). The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 213 emotional baggage of suppressed anger, unarticulated sympathy, and above all, repressed guilt, which they felt verboten to express in plain language at the time, Miller and Kazan turned instead to their respective artistic venues, offering metaphoric mea culpas for the “breaking of charity” - “betrayal, of the self no less than of others” (Bigsby 2003: xi). 3. “A boy becomes a citizen! ”: Naming, masculinity, and human dignity In this context, both The Crucible and On the Waterfront can be read as the attempts of the two estranged friends to come to terms with their guilt about failing to speak up for their political convictions and personal commitments. Woven around the central conflict about testifying, both works are often criticized for similar reasons: each allegedly has an ulterior political motive of either condemning or defending informing; and each reenacts its respective agenda as a symbolic re-masculinization, displacing in the process its claim for subjectivity along the axes of gender and/ or race. However, the intended recuperation of masculine agency remains no less than ambivalent in both works, thereby complicating the two auteurs’ presumed stances towards (not)testifying. In effect, the two texts showcase, I would argue, similar positions and visions espoused by their respective authors: they both advocate alike for speaking up and voicing dissent against authoritarian oppression, and in the process, they wrestle with the fundamental question of the arts - the complexities of envisioning humanity in relation to society. Taken as Miller’s political commentary on informing, The Crucible is often paired up with Kazan’s film as expressions of their “private” Cold War: one as the playwright’s determined subversion of “the mixed motives of informers like Kazan” and the other as the director’s “retaliation” in response (Shulman 2003: 30). Critical debates on the possible political stances of Miller’s play, in particular, seem to range across the entire ideological spectrum. It has been criticized, on the one hand, for being too “liberal”, taking flight into the evasive metaphor of “the soul”, rather than unequivocally condemning Communism (Warshow 1969: 2). On the other hand, it is also denounced for not being politically left or social realist enough but compromised by the playwright’s personal interest - his “biographical urgency of expression” (Marlow 2008: 142). Interestingly, however, the play is simultaneously upheld as an example of “Miller’s Marxist ideals in practice” - a synthesis of the “bourgeois realist” dramatic theatre and Brechtian epic theatre (Polster 2012: 43-61) - as well as a work of social realism which effectively illustrates not just “the relativity and subjectivity of moral justice”, but more importantly, “the abso- Junghyun Hwang 214 lute moral principles of charity and humility and forgiveness” [emphasis original] (Budick 2008: 35). Also, The Crucible is frequently criticized for its narrative reliance on gendered and racialized displacements. Wendy Schissel has famously brought to critical attention that Miller’s play reinforces the androcentric female stereotypes of “femme fatales” and cold “unforgiving wives”, echoing the “gynecophobia” of the 1950s (1994: 461-462). 9 Other critics have followed suit, agreeing that the play ultimately reproduces “the very same patriarchal attitudes” it appears to be criticizing (Adler 2008: 78), or even branding this tendency as “reactionary” and a waste of its critical potential (Marlow 2008: 139-140). Still others have problematized the play’s handling of race in reducing Tituba, the enslaved woman from the Caribbean, into the one-dimensional “mammy” figure (Roszak 2014: 115), or associating “evil” with “the color of her skin” (D. Miller 2007: 442). As such, Miller does seem to utilize sexual/ racial stereotypes in order to draw the schematic moral division between treacherous Abigail/ Tituba and nurturing Elizabeth. However, the contradictory model of female treason and nurture embodies for him a much more complex artistic vision that ultimately taps into the fundamental human condition - the paradox of Eros and Thanatos - complicating the simple equation of Proctor’s claim of subjectivity with his re-masculinization. As observed by critics, Miller construes the protagonist by displacing his guilt mostly on the two female types. As a man “in his prime”, wellbuilt, rational, and morally upright, Proctor embodies a virile frontiersman, “seeding” his farm as large as “a continent”, and simultaneously, he is a man of liberal sensitivity, “seasoning” the stew to his taste and admiring the beauty of spring flowers (19-20, 47-49). As he journeys through soul-searching self-examinations on the question of morality, he further develops into a man of psychological depth and moral complexity. In contrast, female characters remain generally one-dimensional. Abigail is the conniving seductress, a “strikingly beautiful” girl of seventeen, but a chronic liar with “an endless capacity for dissembling” (8), so she is condemned by Proctor as “a whore” and “a lump of vanity”, trying to destroy 9 As Elaine Tyler May has amply illustrated, the Cold War politics of national security and containment often spilled into the private sphere of individual sexuality and domestic life. National “security” was translated into secure jobs, secure homes, secure marriages, as well as the secure country, and “containment” meant not only the atom bomb “harnessed for peace” but also the domestic policing of the home as the “sphere of influence.” Momism and homophobia, in particular, were manifest social phenomena of sexual containment outside the boundaries of heteronormative marriage. Red-baiting was synonymous with gay-baiting, while Philip Wylie’s “momism” vilified women, or “sexually frustrated” and “domineering” mothers, as the breeding ground for weak, effeminate, “deviant” men (1999: 80- 99). The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 215 his “good name” and his “dear good wife” (102). Elizabeth is the frigid wife, reproved by Proctor as “sad”, “suspicious”, and unforgiving (49-53) and even corroborated by her own admission: “I have sins of my own to count. It needs a cold wife to prompt lechery” (126). In this way, “the Fall of a good man” is blamed on the “complicity” of Elizabeth in her husband’s adultery and the seduction of “evil and/ or mad” Abigail (Schissel 1994: 465-469). For Miller, however, the “feminine legacy” of “betrayal” and “blessedness”, as Iska Alter argues, ultimately represents the inherited paradox of human existence - “the unavoidable rifts and cracks of selfhood” that “as such must be acknowledged and accepted” (1989: 118). Interestingly, moreover, it is the female characters that not only epitomize this higher understanding but also facilitate the hero’s attainment of it. Abigail’s “knowledge”, the fruit of passion, is her recognition of the amoral nature of sexuality as the human condition: “I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was” (22). Elizabeth’s “understanding” of the contradictory human impulse eventually guides Proctor to see the complexity of the human heart and to accept the subjectivity of moral judgment: “John, it come to naught that I should forgive you, if you’ll not forgive yourself” (127). Significantly also, as Thomas P. Adler points out, Elizabeth’s “lie” to protect Proctor is itself “an act of love” in refusing to specify “the guilt of others”, or “to name names” (2008: 79). Thus, proclaiming “I have given you my soul; leave me my name! ” (133), Proctor can “choose” to die a martyr with his righteousness reaffirmed by his “honest” wife: “He have his goodness now” (134). In the final analysis, Abigail’s “betrayal” necessarily connotes “blessedness” because it saves Proctor from retreating into the prelapsarian oneness of being, or “murderous innocence” (Alter 1989: 118); and in the end, Elizabeth’s redemptive femininity enables Proctor, having refused to judge others and name names, to accept humanity and die “whole”. 10 In this way, Miller would have his protagonist redeemed, re-masculinized, and reclaimed as the legitimate subject of history. Yet Proctor’s reclaimed name/ masculinity remains less than unambiguous. For one thing, his assertion of masculinity is premised upon his affirmation of a feminine quality because his refusal to name the accused women such as Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey evinces his determination to protect “the female principle”, thus attesting the dependence of his masculinity upon the preservation of “female authority” (Alter 1989: 10 Tituba is also an interesting example of both racial stereotyping and critical empowering. Although depicted as a one-dimensional black “mammy,” she is simultaneously “oddly liberated” as a subtle critic of the Puritans (Alter 1989: 122). Junghyun Hwang 216 124). Moreover, I would argue, “not-naming” - the premise of Proctor’s name/ masculinity - is not so much “silence” - a gesture of consenting to institutional mandates - but rather “speaking up”, an active expression of dissent against the imposed norms of society. Proctor’s anguished struggle with the morality of naming proceeds from a confession of his personal guilt to an affirmation of his ethical principle - what Miller posits as the tragic hero’s fateful journey from human fallibility to the attainment of self-understanding. Proctor refuses to name primarily out of his own sense of guilt because he believes it “a pretense”, “a fraud”, for a sinner like him to not name and thus die “like a saint” (126); he is willing to admit his own guilt but determined to reserve judgment about others: “I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it” (131); and eventually, “weeping in fury, but erect”, he tears up the written testimonial as both an act of protest and a gesture to protect his “name” from “such dogs” (133). As such, Proctor’s heroic journey towards higher understanding is essentially mediated by the supposedly female principle of nurture and treason, symbolizing the paradox of the human condition; and his insistent “silence” about others is virtually synonymous with raising his “voice” about the ethical principle, which for Miller comes down to claiming his “rightful” place in society (Miller 1996a: 4-7). Thus, Proctor’s outspoken disobedience against the unjust legal imperatives turns out commensurate with Terry Malloy’s speaking up against the mob violence. And here is Miller’s ambivalence, I would argue, towards Kazan’s HUAC testimony. In having Proctor attain a higher understanding of the complexity of the human heart and speak up against judging others, it seems that Miller himself is refusing to name the names of friendly witnesses, including Kazan. Apparently, The Crucible was a product of the playwright’s engagements with the political as well as personal crises of the time. It was his literary project to rectify the deprived voice of the left, “the sense of impotence” (2008: 89), by symbolically recuperating Proctor’s name/ masculinity. Also, as he admits it, he found in the Salem story not just his “time” but also his “own life” - his own crisis of sexuality and marriage (1987: 338). Relating how Miller took a hasty flight from Hollywood after he had fallen in love with Monroe and reconciled immediately afterwards with his wife, Kazan notes that he understood Proctor’s confession of himself to be “a sinner” for his act of infidelity as Miller’s public apology to his wife (1988: 366). In this sense, it is not surprising that Miller would resort to the female authority of Elizabeth not only to exonerate Proctor but ultimately to facilitate his enlightenment: “Do what you will. But let none be your judge. There be no higher judge under Heaven than Proctor is! Forgive me, forgive me, John - I never knew such goodness in the world! ” (127). In other words, hav- The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 217 ing Proctor reserve judgment by proclaiming that the individual is the only judge of one’s morality, Miller seems to be doing vicariously through his art what he could not do in real life: admitting his own guilt about failing to accept Kazan’s betrayal and more precisely, his own complicity with the common experience of humanity - “the breaking of charity”. 11 On the Waterfront is likewise a Cold War political film overdetermined by the director’s personal agenda, and the hero’s journey to selfunderstanding is similarly dramatized as a symbolic process of remasculinization, although also ridden with ambiguities. Praised highly, on the one hand, as “the greatest labor film ever made in America” (Schwartz 2004: 380), it was severely criticized, on the other hand, as a Cold War propaganda film with its labor theme dismissed as only a “façade” (Wertheim 1997: 111), even as “Fascist” for allegedly being “contemptuous” of unionism (Anderson 1955: 128). And of course, the film is most famously condemned for its undisguised defense of “informing”, making Kazan “the celebrity informer” (Schickel 2005: 272). Considering that in addition to Kazan himself, the screenwriter Budd Schulberg as well as co-stars such as Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger had all testified as friendly witnesses (Shulman 2003: 32), such a political reading might have been inevitable, but conversely, it would be just as hard to see the film as a defense of HUAC testimony if you did not know about the background history. Paradoxically, the script was initially rejected by most of the major studios, because, as Joanna Rapf says, in 1953 at the height of McCarthy hysteria, it was seen by the studios as “‘pink’, prolabor, prounion, maybe even ‘red’” (2003: 10). The conflict surrounding Terry’s decision to testify certainly constitutes the narrative core of the film, but the motif of speaking out needs to be addressed in relation to the larger thematic issues such as manhood, subjectivity, and ethical responsibility. Moreover, the social drama about testifying is inextricably interwoven with Kazan’s personal drama of his guilt about informing, his sense of insecurity as an immigrant, and his contradictory stance to his adoptive state of America. As he has claimed in no uncertain terms how personally he was invested with the film, Kazan draws a parallel between himself and Terry: “On the Waterfront was my own story” (1988: 488), and the primary story for him is about “a bum” becoming “a man”: “That is the personal story. A bum becomes a man. That’s it” (Kazan, qtd. in Rapf 2003: 12). Specifically, Kazan approaches Terry’s manhood as his right to civic subjectivity and ultimately, 11 Leo Braudy also seems to see Proctor’s refusal to testify as Miller’s confession of his personal guilt. Taking Miller’s abrupt departure from Hollywood as “a flight” from guilt for his failing marriage as well as his love for Monroe, he says: “No wonder perhaps that John Proctor in The Crucible assuages his sexual guilt by his political refusal to incriminate others” (2005: 13). Junghyun Hwang 218 to human dignity, and central to the reclamation of his masculine subjectivity is his decision to testify. Thus, the director writes in his Production Notebook: “This is about Terry! A Boy becomes a citizen! A man finds his DIGNITY AGAIN”; “He wants his dignity back. … He testifies! ” (Kazan, qtd. in Rapf 2003: 12, 13), making Terry equate his manhood with his civic subjectivity: “I ain’t a bum. I’m just gonna go down there and get my right”. 12 In short, Terry’s testimony as the symbolic enactment of manhood is of central significance to Kazan because he saw it as an enabling condition for citizenship and a prerequisite for dignified human existence. In the film, Kazan thus utilizes the trope of speaking out to portray Terry’s claim to masculine subjectivity, but in doing so, he seems to construe the protagonist in gendered terms by having Terry progress from feminized silence to masculine speech. Terry introduces the metaphor for testifying as “ratting” and not-speaking as manly, as he defensively denies his involvement in the murder of Joey: “I don’t know nothing, I ain’t seen nothing, and I’m not saying nothing”, while dismissing the two men from Waterfront Crime Commission as “feminine”: “so you and your girlfriend take off”. The rest of the film is a process of inverting the tropes, as Michael Schuyler explains it in detail, where telling does not “sissify” but “masculinizes” him (2011: 111), turning Terry’s testifying into the condition of his masculinity. The metaphoric inversion, or Terry’s conversion into manhood, is enabled mainly by Father Barry and Edie Doyle. Father Barry, a voice of rhetorical persuasion, provides a rationalization for the inversion of the argument, differentiating “testifying” from “ratting” and re-aligning the former with “telling the truth”. In his famous funeral oration, he spells out the political and moral significations of testifying as “a crucifixion”, equating it with the “duty of a citizen”, thus pushing Terry further to overcome “[his] silence” and to “speak[ing] up without fear against every evil”. Edie in particular functions as the central prop against whom Terry’s masculinization is enacted. According to Schuyler, Marlon Brando, “a bastion of masculinity” and “the quintessential ‘man’s man’”, is methodically feminized in contrast to Edie (2011: 98). The initial portrayal of Terry as feminine is visually emphasized by Brando’s almost drag-like heavy eye makeup in marked contrast to Edie’s unmade-up, genderneutral, almost boyish face; and once Terry testifies and eventually stands up in his final test of masculinity, his feminine makeup is practically replaced by the manly prosthetic paint of “cuts, bruises, blood” (Schuyler 2011: 106-107). Unlike Terry, portrayed as trapped, confused, and inar- 12 Hereafter, the quotations from On the Waterfront will be given without parenthetical citations. The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 219 ticulate, “Edie opens her mouth”: outspoken and fearless, standing up against the male authority figures such as her father and the local priest, as well as initiating the courtship with Terry, Edie is masculinized via “her physical stature, her sexual aggression, even her name”; as Terry gains voice, however, Edie recedes into silence, returning to “a docile female” (Schuyler 2011: 109), even suggesting to him to compromise and run away with her to a “farm” “out west someplace”. In this sense, On the Waterfront does read like another male story by Kazan, a director of male actors and himself a self-claimed womanizer. However, Terry’s reclaimed masculinity remains not so much fully reassuring as imbued with characteristic Kazanian moral ambiguity. Kazan himself seems ambivalent towards masculinity, expressing more readily his affinity for feminine qualities. He writes that he values women’s “loving loyalties” over “the male world and its concerns”, and that those men he has liked best, including Brando, Odets, and Williams, have had “strong ‘feminine’ characteristics”, “those same sympathetic yielding qualities” (1988: 27). Maybe it is his penchant for exploring emotional complexities and feminine vulnerabilities in male characters that makes possible even a homoerotic reading of his movies, identifying in them “a parallel ghost narrative” that presents the male hero as the object of potential gay desire (Harris 2011: 103). 13 Or Kazan the director of male actors can even be recast as “a director of women in epic female stories”, where he “speaks through” the female character doing a kind of “gender mimicry” (Lee 2011: 116, 121). 14 Kazan’s heroes, such as Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), James Dean in East of Eden (1955), Montgomery Clift in Wild River (1960), and Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass (1961), are not so much ironclad with John Wayne-like warrior masculinity as representative of Gregory Peck-type Cold War liberal manliness (Moeller 1989: 315). Similar to Proctor’s frontier masculinity redefined by his sensitivity and inner complexity, Kazan’s heroes resonate 13 According to Mark Harris, Kazan identifies the camera with the female character’s point of view, thus placing the male hero as the object of her desire and inviting the potential gay viewer to gaze at the male body through her “frank lust” (2011: 103). Despite the homosexual subtext, Harris also argues, the director’s view on sexuality was prototypical of the 1950s. In Kazan’s view, homosexuals were “not men, but lost boys,” emotionally arrested and inadequately manly, or “a way station on the road to heteronormativity”; nevertheless, Harris pays tribute to Kazan for “the generosity of spirit and complicated empathy,” which he finds “modern” and “unique” in the context of 1950s Hollywood (2011: 106-14). 14 According to Savannah Lee, specifically in Pinky (1949), a film about racial passing, Kazan speaks “his outsider experience” through the heroine, doing “crossidentification” through the character of Pinky. She also argues that Kazan is interested in “discovering the inner life of a woman” and that “he liked women to have inner lives that were ‘masculine’ in depth, difficulty, and toughness” (2011: 116, 120- 121). Junghyun Hwang 220 with the contemporary Cold War liberal reconfiguration of manliness. Emotionally sensitive, feminine in sensibility, and ambivalent about their place in relation to the world, they are “confused by [their] world” and “tortured by self-doubt”, yet still “heroic” in their journey toward “selfawareness” (Basinger 2011: 8). 15 Like Kazan’s other male heroes, Terry is a sensitive man concerned with his “feelings” and “intimate life” (Kazan 1988: 27). Terry’s ambivalent masculinity, in particular, is a dramatization of Kazanian ambiguity, where the individual, faced with absolute moral choices between right and wrong, remains unconvinced, unable or unwilling to pass judgment. As encapsulated in the iconic “I coulda been a contender” speech and the “glove” sequence, Terry struggles with moral uncertainties, wavering between “the tough-guy front” and “the extreme delicacy and gentle cast of his behavior” (Kazan 1988: 517) while trying on Edie’s white glove as “an awkward experimentation with a different view of life” (Neve 2003: 35). Like Proctor agonizing in a moral quandary, Terry struggles in order to decide for himself, be the only judge of his morality, and take responsibility for his decisions. As a personal parallel drama, moreover, it may as well be Kazan himself that is admitting his own guilt for the betrayal of the self no less than of others, when Terry mutters: “Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts”, or “I was ratting on myself all those years”. Kazanian ambiguity, in other words, like Miller’s ambivalence, comes down to reserving judgment about others and understanding the complexity of the human heart. Terry’s testifying concerns not so much naming names and passing judgment on others as accepting ethical responsibility and asserting human dignity, ultimately replacing this “psychological anatomy” of “shame and guilt” with “self-reliance and dignity” (Kazan, qtd. in Rapf 2003: 13). On the Waterfront ends in characteristically Kazanian ambiguity, where Terry’s final walk of defiance across the pier can seal anything but his unproblematic masculinization. Bruised and bloody, Terry reels his way to his crucifixion and leads the workers into a dark shipbuilding, upon whom the heavy iron door lowers to the ominous rather than triumphant film score. The controversial last sequence seems to draw widely varying, 15 Descending from, but repudiating, the politics of the Popular Front in the 1930s, the Cold War liberal left of the 1950s realigned themselves as anti-Communist liberals under the umbrella of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in 1948. Cold War liberals were recast, à la Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as “tough-minded” political “realists” and the bastion of restored American masculinity, distinguished from their political antecedents, who were dismissed as “soft,” “sentimental,” and “effeminate” idealists (Cuordileone 2005: 2-36). The Cold War anxieties about the emasculation of American men and the feminization of the entire nation - the “softening” of American “moral fiber” - ironically mirror the inner-directed, complex, or “feminine” characteristics of contemporary liberal manliness. The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 221 even mutually contradicting, interpretations as either a cynical pessimism, only “pretending to idealism” (Anderson 1955: 128), or a Hollywood triumphalism complete with the superhero anointed by “sudden mass conversion” (Wertheim 1997: 111). As for Kazan himself, he reasserts his progressive idealism as the consistent undercurrent of the film, but simultaneously insists on acknowledging the persistence of ambiguity in reality: I think democracy progresses […] We’re in a constant state of tension. I believe in Marxism, you know - I believe that one thing affects the other, I believe in interplay, in the dialectic. But I never meant that when they go back to work at the end of the film, there isn’t going to be that same corruption starting up a month later (qtd. in Briley 2016: 48). Kazanian ambiguity, then, may be inherent in his liberal worldview, in which the individual, fundamentally in conflict with the environment, can “come home in the world” only theoretically as a constant process without definitively arriving at any ideal place. Terry’s ideal, be it masculinity, ethical maturity, or even citizenship, is asserted as an individual practice of morality in speaking up against encompassing systemic violence; yet as the unjust system persists, so does ambivalence. Kazanian ambiguity, in other words, illustrates the director’s artistic visions and political convictions that combine Marx - “art should be a force for social change” - with Stanislavski - “psychology could be turned into behavior through the art of performance” (Basinger 2011: 5). In the final analysis, it is Terry’s individual act of defiance that carries democracy a little forward; and it is this note of hope inscribed throughout the film, like Miller’s insistence on the absolute moral values concerning humanity, that upholds Kazan’s essential faith in individual conscience and human dignity. Thus, Miller and Kazan, both from the liberal progressive points of view, tackle the problematics of the Cold War in early 1950s’ America as a fundamental conflict between individual and society, proposing an antiideological critique of the Cold War political and American capitalist system. The intertwining of the personal and the political makes their works artistically complex and their public appeal universal. As Miller’s abiding artistic concern was the essential human condition where the individual is in a constant struggle with society in search of his “rightful” place in it, or the “ethical” way of coming home in the world (1996a: 4- 7; 1996b: 9-11), so was Kazan’s lifelong striving fundamentally for “human dignity” as a “universal value”: “Again here we’re approaching a universal value. A man has a right to regain the human dignity that he has unwittingly let slip! ” (Kazan, qtd. in Rapf 2003: 17). Proctor’s elo- Junghyun Hwang 222 quent “silence” in his refusal to judge others is in fact an act of raising his “voice” for a rightful place in the world, just as Terry’s decision to testify is his vocal assumption of ethical responsibility for a dignified state in society. So, Proctor walks into his death as his last act of defiance against the oppressive environment, just as Terry staggers his way through the hostile world, bearing the burden of moral decisions. In the end, both The Crucible and On the Waterfront are “social drama[s]” that take their critical aims at the “essence of our system, the capitalist system”, not by “rhetoric” but “by that unchallengeable vocabulary, action between people” (Kazan 1988: 359). The two works are the outcomes of the unfortunate friends’ artistic actions, through which Miller and Kazan grappled with their personal dramas of guilt and betrayal, eventually sublimating them into meditations on the human condition and the universal value of human dignity. Miller and Kazan collaborated one last time in 1963 in After the Fall. The play caused quite an uproar, with critical outrage over “Miller’s lack of taste” (Murphy 2006: 51) for drawing on his marriage to Monroe as subject matter. However, Kazan defends the play, standing by his former friend. Unlike the popular reaction that Miller was “unfair to Marilyn” and “self-serving” in “using her to make himself look good”, Kazan says that he was “sympathetic to Art, not to her”, because he finds the Miller- Quentin character “un-self-favoring”, “so unflattering to himself”, in contrast to “Marilyn-Maggie”, whom he considers “true”, “pitiable”, and “tragic” (1988: 673, 690). As for Miller, he also comes close to defending his ex-friend, speaking out against passing moral judgment on him, “how many who knew by now that they had been supporting a paranoid and murderous Stalinist regime had really confronted their abetting of it? ” (1987: 529), while portraying the Mickey-Kazan character in a more sympathetic light and even emphasizing “Quentin’s failure” to respond to Mickey’s call for help (Murphy 2006: 56). Throughout the production process, the two collaborators were quite respectful of each other: Miller expressed his gratitude to the director for creating “a production of great control and truthful feeling, surely one of the best things he had ever done” (1987: 536); and Kazan reciprocated by saying, “I was one hell of a good boy, compliant and respectful, with Art Miller”, and “I worked on Art’s play as best I could - that is, ‘professionally’. I did my job” (1988: 660, 683). Nevertheless, the burden of history proved too heavy to bear as Kazan admits, “I would never really feel toward him quite what a friend should. Nor, I imagine, he toward me” (1988: 471). The two friends remained personally and professionally sympathetic towards each other, but the breach caused by the political storm was not to be fully mended, preventing the complete restoration of their once-brotherly friendship. The Miller-Kazan controversy in The Crucible and On the Waterfront 223 References Adler, T. P. 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Junghyun Hwang Hansung University Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber A prelude to the Second World War 1 Ezgi İlimen Dorothy Canfield’s interwar social novel Seasoned Timber (1939) portrays the pre-WWII years through her warning about rising European totalitarianism and antisemitism. Canfield points out American nativism, anti-immigration policies, working class resentment, and the post-WWI illusionary isolationism from the European conflict. Set in the turbulent 1930s, the Clifford community serves as a microcosm of postwar materialism and progressivism with references to anti-communist hysteria, rising nationalism, and white supremacist tendencies. The principal of the Clifford Academy, T. C. Hulme, thus expresses Canfield’s concerns about another world war after the failure of the post-WWI peace settlements. In the novel, the emergence of antisemitic, elitist, and sexist totalitarianism results in a struggle between the supporters of conformity and those who resist un-American defiance of freedom, equal opportunity, and democratic principles. Depicting cultural and religious intolerance, ideological attacks, and discrimination, Canfield’s novel exemplifies her interwar progressive agenda through a shift from personal politics to public consciousness about American interwar society and global affairs in the 1930s. 1. Introduction Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958) was a renowned bestselling American writer, dedicated educational reformer, and social activist during the first half of the twentieth century. Her novels and short stories reflect her concerns about race, class, and gender prejudices, and their resulting injustices, through her insightful interpretation of interwar American society and Europe. Canfield, whose married name was Fisher, was com- 1 With further research, this article is derived from the author’s PhD dissertation. The author is grateful to Professor Tanfer Emin Tunç as the dissertation advisor. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0014 Ezgi İlimen 226 mitted to relief initiatives and producing wartime narratives, which cemented her role as a humanitarian figure, social critic, and prolific author. 2 According to Mark J. Madigan, she started her writing career through apprenticeships at newspapers and magazines, followed by the publication of her first novel Gunhild (1907), through which she cultivated her voice and interest in the relationship between men and women. This was followed by her novels The Squirrel Cage (1912) and The Bent Twig (1915) (xi). Canfield was highly influenced by Maria Montessori and published A Montessori Mother (1912) and later a children’s novel, Understood Betsy (1916), on her educational theories (Madigan xi). Canfield’s Home Fires in France (1918) and The Day of Glory (1919) portrayed wartime France. 3 The Brimming Cup (1921) achieved great commercial success as a counternarrative to Sinclair Lewis’s satire of small-town life in Main Street. It claimed second place on the bestseller list, after Lewis’s work, and emerged as “the first modern best-seller” that critically addressed racial bias against African Americans (xi). Dorothy Canfield emerged as one of the most acclaimed American writers due to the versatility of her works and sociopolitical agenda. The Home-Maker (1924) was another well-received bestseller that portrays “role-reversal” in married life, as it redefines the traditional homemakernurturer and breadwinner roles for mutual happiness (Madigan xi). Her translation of Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ was “the most purchased” book in 1923, while renowned critic William L. Phelps praised her novel Her Son’s Wife (1926) for being worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. The financial success of her novel Bonfire, published in serialized form by the Woman’s Home Companion in 1933, her honorary degrees from several institutions, and her interest in writing children’s books also added to her fame (xii). Furthermore, she was devoted to humanitarian work through her efforts to establish a Braille Press and a children’s hospital in France during WWI, her services to the Vermont State Board of Education and the Adult Education Association, her organization of the Children’s Crusade during WWII, and her lifelong contributions to charity projects, leading Eleanor Roosevelt to compliment her as “the most influential woman of her time” (xii). Janis P. Stout views Canfield’s social and humanitarian novels as political fiction, thus providing a renewed perspective on her work beyond the 2 The writer signed her works of fiction as Dorothy Canfield, whereas she signed her works of nonfiction as Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Throughout the article, she will remain as Dorothy Canfield. 3 With her wartime relief work in France, Canfield used her writing as a way to earn monetary support for relief projects, creating war sketches, such as “The Little Soldier of France” and “In the Brussels Jail” that appealed to the home front audiences (Washington 89). Thus, she raised humanitarian consciousness about the war. Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 227 cycle of middlebrow writers and, in the process, reconceptualizing the political novel (“Writing Politically” 252). Stout relates the longestablished gap or interpretive difference between political and middlebrow writers to a traditional view of gender that asserted that political writing was an embodiment of masculine interests in public issues, whereas women were concerned with “local, domestic, or nurturing” subject matters (“Writing Politically” 252). Canfield’s fiction shares the characteristics of middlebrow and political literature as a transition from the domestic sphere to the community (Stout, “Writing Politically” 252). Thus, her novels exhibit cross-genre elements and multiple affiliations with progressive writers and bestselling interwar authors. Stout notes that her main characters are committed to ethical behavior and principles, and are unafraid to confront social customs and standards. Canfield’s writing thus “serve[s] society through the quiet and ultimately educational pressure of modelling an alternative in one’s individual life” (“Writing Politically” 256). The individual’s political stance in their personal life proves that indeed, “the personal is political” (256). As a bestselling author, Dorothy Canfield integrates humanitarian drive, sociocultural concerns, and a progressive agenda into her political fiction that reflects elaborate storytelling, realistic portrayals of American life and society, and critical perspectives on historical periods. This article thus analyzes Canfield’s interwar social novel Seasoned Timber (1939) with its emphasis on the rise of antisemitism and fascism and the inevitable path to a second world war. Seasoned Timber emerges as a testimony to the postwar failure to secure world peace. Canfield challenges interwar American isolationism with the rising tension, antisemitic atrocities, aggressive territorial expansion, and totalitarian regimes of Europe. She asserts that American values, virtues, and sense of unity are under threat by delusional materialism, the corruptive desire for power and influence, discriminatory attacks on American citizens, and the elitist class struggle against immigrants and the working class in the postwar era. Canfield speaks through T. C. Hulme, the principal of the Clifford Academy, whose loyalty to American, that is humanitarian, principles functions as a revelation of American ignorance about the national sociocultural crisis and the possibility of impending war. Canfield uses her social novel as a vehicle to reflect on her interwar concerns about peace, education, racial discrimination, class resentments, gender prejudice, and injustice. Her characters’ various encounters with these issues reveal a consciousnessraising agenda that promotes personal commitment to human dignity in the private lives and public selves of people. With democratic principles and humanitarian progressivism, her works address forms of discrimination, the detrimental effects of war, and even socialist ideas that under- Ezgi İlimen 228 line the “fairness of distribution and pacifism”, thereby engaging in a unique form of literary activism (Stout, “Dorothy Canfield” 46). 2. The post-WWI years and American literature In between the armistice on November 11, 1918, and the Paris Peace Conference on January 18, 1919, the Allied powers undertook the timepressing job of assigning delegates and completing conference preparations, including reports on complex problems, grievances, and demands (“Germany and the Peace Treaty” 381). The Peace Conference was to provide ultimate relief and definite solutions regarding a “permanent peace” through the establishment of a League of Nations, the settlement of territorial expansion and border conflicts, the founding of new nation states with “liberty and unimpaired integrity” out of collapsed European empires, and the designation of mandates for millions of people in Africa and Asia (381). In the meantime, the peace treaty and the League of Nations represented Wilsonian idealism and his commitment to the principles of world peace, justice, and democracy. John Maynard Keynes harshly criticized the peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (published in 1919 in London and in New York in 1920) (Rothermund 841). Keynes noted that peacetime financial and political pressure on Germany would have serious repercussions, claiming another war could be on the horizon in just two decades. His critique of peace settlements and predictions supported Americans seeking non-involvement in the League, Britons siding with Germany for a revision of the treaty terms, and acceptance of appeasement policies (841). Prior to the US Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles on March 19, 1920, President Wilson ran a cross-country campaign for its ratification with his open criticism of the Senate’s “reservations” about the peace treaty, particularly the terms of the League of Nations (“Senate’s Rejection” 27). On March 8, President Wilson’s letter to Senator Hitchcock, who conducted the administration’s campaign for the treaty, emphasized his uncompromising stance about modifications to Article X of the treaty: “Any League of Nations which does not guarantee as a matter of incontestable right the political independence and integrity of each of its members might be hardly more than a futile scrap of paper, as ineffective in operation as the agreement between Belgium and Germany which the Germans violated in 1914” (qtd. in “Senate’s Rejection” 27-28). In his letter, Wilson justifies Article X of the treaty as the guarantor of postwar stability and security when it comes to the pressing issues of shared political interests, territorial rivalries, the possibility of future aggression, global peace and justice, and unremitting threats of militarism and impe- Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 229 rialism. Wilson concludes that people either defend democratic principles for the freedom of nations, or support imperial power and oppression (28). Nevertheless, he was unable to conquer opposition to the treaty and the League of Nations. The US Congress never ratified the Treaty of Versailles choosing, instead, to sign separate peace treaties with the aggressors in 1921. The postwar politics of the Allied powers (i.e., their peacemaking efforts, manipulation of war debt, and disarmament policy) and hyperinflation in Germany and other parts of Europe triggered the resentment that would ultimately culminate in another war by the end of the turbulent 1930s. In this regard, antisemitism in Europe was instrumentalized to catalyze the postwar backlash against a socioeconomic and political imbalance. The rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy promoted the scapegoating of Jews through antisemitic propaganda and policymaking. In Nazi Germany, antisemitism resulted in a “race” based redefinition of Jewish identity, severe limitations on rights and civil liberties that eventually became the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and violent attacks on Jewish communities and businesses. The experience of the Great War dominated modern American literature of the 1920s, until the Great Depression. In the postwar era, a generation of writers - the Lost Generation - influenced American fiction through their observations of WWI as servicemen, pacifists, noncombatant participants, or critics. John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and Edmund Wilson took part in the war effort as ambulance drivers (Bradbury 75). F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected the expatriate American perspective, postwar disillusionment, and European civilization. William Faulkner portrayed the returning veteran’s homecoming story and dilemma, without setting foot on European battlefields. In Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine represents the coming-of-age of a new postwar generation who seemed to be “dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success” (76). John Dos Passos’s One Man’s Initiation - 1917 (1920) tells the story of a hero’s growth amid European turmoil. As Hemingway’s story “A Soldier’s Home” implies, prewar hopes, dreams, and social expectations seem meaningless to a returning soldier like Krebs. The rise of a new postwar individualism necessitated “new perceptions and modes of speech, new kinds of existential self-awareness - to survive” (76). The war literature reflects a new literary style and way of seeing the relationship between man, nature, machinery, and history. Postwar literature, however, concentrates on physical, psychological, and existential suffering through metaphors and images of “waste, decline, and sterility, of a downward historical curve”, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ezra Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Ezgi İlimen 230 (1922), and the “Valley of Ashes” from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) (77). Concerning women’s writing and their contributions to critical debates about WWI and the interwar period, Elizabeth Nolan underlines the role of American women as notable writers and individuals whose wartime narratives convey “the position of the woman in a changing society” and the view on gender during WWI. In addition to Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, Nolan indicates Mary Borden’s “fragmentary, experimental nurse’s narrative” in The Forbidden Zone (1929), Mildred Aldrich’s testimonial narrative from the Marne in four volumes, wartime writing of Gertrude Atherton, 4 Marie Van Vorst and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and those women engaged in wartime charity and relief services (528). Through the power of literary imagination or direct observations, they depicted wartime Europe in various genres (Nolan 529). With pacifist or propagandist views, they stepped into the traditional masculine realm by addressing warfare as writers, providing medical support as nurses, and assisting relief efforts (529). Besides critically acclaimed Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, other interwar women writers explored the disillusionment with war, modernity, industrialization, urbanization, and discrimination. Dorothy Canfield was one of these neglected American women writers who have remained understudied. Tracing the link between interwar social history and social novels, Warren French regards the post-WWI decades as an era of irrational irresponsibility (6). French argues that the grand imprudence of the 1920s is best depicted in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which portrays the nonchalance of the “self-ordained aristocrats” and the disillusionment of “dreamers” who would wake up to European totalitarianism and expansionism in 1939 (6). William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway published The Hamlet (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), respectively, as social novels at the end of the interwar era. They address historical events in a way that necessitates historical knowledge for their interpretation, while providing the writers’ unique perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, the Okie crisis, strikes and labor unions, race politics and lynching, and social problems (French 7). The advent of WWII also signaled the decline of the social novel and the reform and activism it represented. According to French, “1939 and 1940 marked not only the end of an era in social and political history, but the 4 In “Gertrude Atherton’s WWI Propaganda to the Home Front”, I provide an analysis of Atherton’s WWI narratives Mrs. Balfame (1916), The Living Present (1917), and The White Morning (1918) that portray women’s home front services and direct engagement with the European conflict. In this respect, I discuss American women’s rising wartime awareness and sense of duty as nurses, relief organizers, and staunch allies of their European sisters (İlimen 40). Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 231 end of a literary generation, especially in the creation of the social novel” (17). 3. Seasoned Timber: The post-WWI crisis culminating in WWII The Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal years coincided with the Nazi rise to power in Germany, which resulted in “an explosion of unprecedented antisemitic fervor” (Dinnerstein 105). Protestant and Catholic agitators, and the hostile statements of social and religious leaders, provoked anti-Jewish aggression, violence in urban centers, and conspiracy theories that allegedly threatened Christian America (105). The 1930s was a decade of extreme political and ideological factions with the emergence of Nazism and fascism on the conservative right and communism on the radical left. Therefore, as Alex Goodall states, the FDR administration sought ways to avoid offending political sensibilities, considering the US diplomatic relations with Europe and its domestic and international repercussions with the rise of antisemitic practices, the expansion of fascist regimes, and the threat of communism. Referring to the Cabinet of FDR, particularly the Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s attempts to avoid direct criticism of fascism, Goodall points out the growing tendency to use totalitarianism as a term rather than fascism (50). The political correctness strategy reflects a safeguarding response to the sudden shift from “the threat to national stability from the left (and primarily from within)” to “coming to terms with a new enemy on the right (and without)” and a judgment of “modern regimes of extreme right and left” as “two faces of the same evil” (50). In the United States, Jews did not encounter segregation laws, deportations, or forced internment, as they did elsewhere, which permitted them to build lives and businesses in their own communities until antisemitism began to seep in from Europe (Dinnerstein 106). European antisemitism was gaining popular support and a violent edge with the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, leading to pogroms and attacks on Jews in many eastern and central European countries during the 1920s, particularly at universities (106-107). Concerning the roots of anti-revolutionary, anti-alien, and antisemitic movements in the United States, Donald S. Strong points out a passage in the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the emergence of nativist societies in the 1850s, such as the Know-Nothings (the American Party) in opposition to the Irish Catholic immigrants, and the arrival of Jews from eastern and southern Europe (14-15). The reactionary views of the newcomers resulted in the immigration restriction laws of 1921 and 1924 (the Johnson- Reed Act), and arguments supporting the superiority of the Nordic race as promoted by eugenicists (Strong 15). After WWI, antisemitism gained Ezgi İlimen 232 political currency beyond a form of social discrimination. Approximately two million Jewish immigrants had arrived since the late 1880s, and some were targeted by the Red Scare, the wide circulation of antisemitic media, and the Ku Klux Klan (15). The postwar economic downturn aggravated the clash between radicals and conservative groups with hypernationalist ideas and Jew-baiting on both sides of the Atlantic. In Seasoned Timber, Dorothy Canfield places the intense political atmosphere of 1930s Europe in the background of her American setting, Clifford, Vermont, in the period right before WWII. 5 Canfield begins the novel with the Principal of Clifford Academy, Timothy Coulton (T.C.) Hulme, who reads “an account of recent anti-Semitic brutalities under Hitler” from the Manchester Guardian, before he puts it aside with “a humanitarian familiar feeling of guilt over the passively accepted safety of his own life” (5). Canfield’s first glance at Mr. Hulme not only depicts his responsiveness to the humanitarian crisis and the serious offenses committed against Jews, but it also underlines the ironic American sense of security and isolationism from the raging unrest in Europe. Afterward, Canfield describes the geographical and symbolic situatedness of the Academy, which is literally set on a hill, “a slightly spot, set above the town on a shelf of rocky ground jutting out from the mountain” (6). The Academy overlooks the town and represents American ideals, including exceptionalism, which will be tested by the encroaching threat: a paradigm shift from democratic foundations to an unwelcoming American society. Canfield portrays the small town as the microcosm of the nation in her premonition of future conflict. Canfield questions to what extent American idealism and values provide a safe shelter from the culminating political disarray in Europe, and how far Americans are prepared to go to defend their founding principles and democracy against authoritarianism and persecution. During the hundred and seventeenth year of the Academy, the opening ceremony brings out bittersweet memories of bygone school days for the WASP townspeople, who regard the institution with pride and respect. However, 5 Tanfer Emin Tunc points out a white supremacist tradition in Vermont, “the Kake Walk”, which was an outgrowth of minstrel shows performed by white men in blackface makeup during the Winter Carnival at the University of Vermont from 1893 to 1969 (47). Tunc states that the racist public spectacle signified an overwhelming nostalgia for the antebellum South, plantation slavery, and the servitude and submissiveness of African Americans that it represented, during a time of massive social change (47). Dorothy Canfield’s choice of the fictional Clifford, Vermont, is not a coincidence in this sense, as the state, with all its whiteness, had a troubled racial history. Canfield portrays an interwar community of people who struggle with issues of discrimination, social integration, and the class mobility of immigrants. In their defense of “true” American identity and values, antisemites and nativists clash with liberals. Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 233 immigrant and working-class citizens listen to “the bell and the bugle” from the Academy Hill with disbelief, questioning the illusionary American promises of equal opportunity and class mobility: “Polish and French- Canadian workmen in the woolen mills and chair factory down at Clifford Depot renewed their resentment against the American pretence [sic] that all young people have the same opportunities for success [...] although everybody knows that in the modern world nobody can succeed who has not also money and influence” (Canfield 33). Through the disillusionment of immigrants, one can infer that the intrusive power of materialism, elitism, and nativist sentiments jeopardized American ideals and promises long before the outbreak of WWII, during the turbulent 1930s. The nostalgic narrative style of Seasoned Timber sustains a traditional sense of American security and indifference through occasional references to European affairs, at first without specific associations or historical parallels. On one such occasion, during his business trip to New York, Mr. Hulme is distracted by alarming headlines concerning the “Fascist bombing of civilians in Spain” and “more Nazi savagery in Germany” (Canfield 141). His initial reaction is to ward off such unpleasant news while running errands, which symbolizes the Americans’ failure to interpret European affairs. Still, he implicitly juxtaposes the violence and rising conflict in Europe with scenes of civilized modern cityscapes and amenities in New York, distancing himself from the tension and aggression between European nations and small-town life in Clifford. Associating civilization with urban life, security, and progress, he has a meeting with a Jewish woman, Mrs. Bernstein, who attempts to transfer her son to Clifford Academy due to financial problems resulting from the economic crisis. Mr. Hulme decides to give a chance to the Jewish student, considering his potential and dire circumstances. Subsequently, Mr. Hulme’s observations of the exhausted working class, the ungracious response of an elderly woman towards his empathy and decency, and the suffocating air in the subway cast a dim light on the city with its fast-paced lifestyle, perils, and insensitivity to human suffering. In this way, Mr. Hulme’s stay in New York challenges his belief that American cities are beacons of modern civilization in contrast to European nations, which signifies the fallacy of glorifying American values, institutions, progress and life style in the interwar years. His meeting with Mr. Wheaton, one of the wealthy trustees of the school, proves that antisemitism, ideological frictions, and discriminatory policies have already reached American cities. His encounter with the trustee puts Mr. Hulme’s traditional American mindset to the test, implying that his firm belief in American values might be further challenged by the highly esteemed people of the Academy and the town. The novel’s political undertone reveals Canfield’s warnings about impending social conflicts, specifically race relations, discrimination against Ezgi İlimen 234 immigrants, and concerns about social mobility. A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elitist, Mr. Wheaton harshly criticizes the acceptance of Jewish students to the school and the arrival of (Jewish) immigrants: “‘[Y]ou don’t realize that the only way to handle that problem is ab-so-lute exclusion [...] Let in Jews, and they’d make one mouthful of you. Admit just one - and the ghetto pushes in after him. We old-Americans must stand solidly against the flood of them that’s pouring in from Europe! ’” (Canfield 147). Mr. Wheaton’s antisemitic comments are the culmination of prejudice against Jews and immigrants in the United States that had materialized during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Hasia Diner indicates the Joseph Seligman incident in 1877, when a Jewish millionaire was denied entry to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, as the first anti-Jewish response (4-5). The nativism of the 1920s enacted anti-immigration sentiments into law, such as the 1924 National Origins (Johnson-Reed) Act, which targeted European Jews, among many other groups (Diner 5). By the mid-1920s, “many private colleges and universities, clubs, resorts and hotels, hospitals, law firms, and other employers” had either established quotas against Jews or directly denied their admission (5). Furthermore, anti-Jewish narratives and stereotypical images circulated widely during the lynching of Leo Frank in 1916 and Woodrow Wilson’s initial veto (later overridden) of Louis Brandeis’s nomination to the Supreme Court, which disseminated the idea of a “Jewish problem” in the United States (5). Through Mr. Hulme, Canfield severely criticizes the modern individual, who lacks commitment to democratic principles and the power to resist violence, manipulation, and fear - common control mechanisms over the masses. With his share of self-blame, Mr. Hulme observes the alarming rise of fascism around the world: “‘[D]o you see anybody seriously trying to invent new and decent ways to keep order in crowds? You do not. They accept indecent ones’” (Canfield 222). He notes that people maintain the progressive vision of modernity through innovative ideas, change, and proper solutions to problems; however, they remain silent to totalitarianism and violent repression of human rights without an act of meaningful defiance. He relates the crisis in Europe to the resurgence of an oppressive pattern that acquires power over people through public indifference to injustices. Thus, he comments on the current situation in Europe as a type of mob mentality, “‘[k]nocking down enough people and kicking them when they’re down, to scare the rest into letting you get away with murder - the minute Mussolini began to stick out his jaw, I knew what he was up to. When Hitler knocked down the Jews and began to kick them, I recognized the gesture’” (Canfield 222). As Mr. Hulme’s argument suggests, the rise of totalitarian regimes silences the multitudes Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 235 through ideological, psychological, and economic control. 6 Concerned about the political turmoil in Europe, Mr. Hulme alludes to the justification of tyranny and antisemitic policies in the interwar world. In the 1930s, the fascist regime in Italy targeted Jews as the “new internal enemy” who assumingly collaborated with foreigners in violation of national interests, which was a reflection of the international political trend on the Italian domestic policy and rationalized antisemitism (Ialongo 334). Through the attack on Italian Jews, Italian Fascism had found an ideological means of regaining public support for the totalitarian remodeling of society and the emergence of the “Fascist new man” who blamed corruption and materialism for the descent of the Italian bourgeoisie. Italian Jews were villainized with the growth of antisemitism in the circles of the Fascist Party (334). With the use of biological racism to create national unity around chauvinistic identity and consciousness, the persecution of Italian Jews resulted in a massive scale of oppression and extermination (345). Parallel to the totalitarianism and strategic use of antisemitism in interwar Italy, Adolf Hitler engaged in systematic propaganda in order to secure his totalitarian rule and expansionist policies in Europe, concentrating on the German people’s “frustration, displacement and anxiety” in the post-WWI era and the global economic depression (Miller i). Hitler offered Christian Germans a way to channel their war-related resentment and insecurities, in this case towards the victimization of Jews through collective hostility and action (i). He appealed to the fears of the middle and upper classes, particularly “bankers, industrialists, the Protestant and Catholic churchmen, the statesmen, and the newspaper owners” through the alleged conspiratorial connection between Jews and communism, and the devaluation of democracy (Miller ii). Thus, he transformed selfdestructive anger into public support through Nazism’s anti-communist stance (ii). The Great Depression was equally alarming to American industrialists, clergy, politicians, and agitators who viewed the economic crisis, organized labor, unemployment, and the New Deal as pathways to communist and socialist revolutions, favoring Hitler’s anticommunist and antisemitic autocracy to preserve big business, class distinctions, and white Anglo-Saxon Christianity (iii). 6 In reference to social Darwinist ideas about survival of the fittest and false ethnological doctrines of the time, Hitler claimed to defend the interests of German society against the influences of Jews, democratic principles and Marxist class struggle (Turner 34). After he established his totalitarian regime, his plan was to expand the borders of Germany and dominate Europe; however, he remained silent about his agenda in the early 1930s. Instead, he used civil and political liberties, democracy, and the constitution in order to gain the confidence and support of German voters. He attacked the republicans whom he blamed for the impacts of Marxism and the Treaty of Versailles (35). Ezgi İlimen 236 In the same way, Richard Frankel argues for historical and ideological parallelisms between the rise of Nazism in Germany and the conservative radical movements in the United States in terms of both states’ adherence to racist and antisemitic agendas, public support of and manipulative resort to nationalist discourse (235). Frankel views European antisemitism that brought the Nazis to power as a result of “long-term historical trends” and economic and political upheavals in Germany, asking if it might have happened in the United States too (235). He challenges the Americans’ sense of security from European totalitarianism with their faith in democratic principles, freedom and equality, and selfrighteousness in race and class politics. Likewise, Dorothy Canfield highlights these concerns in Seasoned Timber through her portrayal of Clifford in the pre-WWII era. Canfield’s novel depicts antisemitism and totalitarian threat, eclipsed by racism, class concerns and materialism. The Clifford Academy serves as a testing ground for defending American ideals and virtues of equal opportunity, class mobility, and success drive against the rising tide of discrimination and the persecution of Jews in particular. In line with this, Frankel indicates “strikingly similar rhetoric” and language of radical antisemites in Germany and the United States (236). In that, the administration of FDR allegedly associated with the secret Jewish international organization, and was blamed for helping the Soviet cause with the New Deal and plotting another world war for the Jewish cause (236). In the novel, the portrayal of the Clifford community is a commentary on American interwar society and the world in general, with Canfield’s apprehension about the European conflict on the horizon. Mr. Hulme is challenged by the racist, sexist, and classist preconditions of Mr. Wheaton’s bequest upon his death. He leaves more than one million dollars to the school, provided that it is named after him as a preparatory school for all-American (WASP) boys. This also involves the exclusion of Jewish students and raising the tuition to keep out the non-elite: “‘George Clarence Wheaton found dead - apoplexy - will leaves Academy one million dollars for endowment - two hundred thousand for buildings - on condition name be changed - Wheaton Preparatory School - also exclusion of all Jewish students - Jewish defined as person with any relative of Hebrew blood - codicil prescribes also that tuition be […]’”. (Canfield 315). In response to Mr. Wheaton’s will, Mr. Dewey, another trustee, and Mr. Hulme take a silent oath, believing that the time has come “for all good men to stand up for their country” (316). Their resistance to un- American dictates champions the principle of human dignity above capitalism, intolerance, and enmity. Their defense of American principles amounts to the defense of the nation in a war against tyranny, which alludes to the colonial struggle against British rule for independence and Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 237 the abolition of slavery through the Civil War. Many prominent prep schools, colleges, and universities were committed to such antisemitic admission policies during the interwar years, and Canfield draws attention to this practice in her novel. The discrimination of Jews in higher education facilities introduced the quota system in colleges and medical schools with precedents in private schools and campus life (Higham, “Social Discrimination” 21). The post-WWI antisemitic policies targeted rising opportunities of postwar youth and college enrolments with the democratization of education. Columbia University implemented an anti- Jewish bar in its admission policy, which set a precedent for Harvard College in the early 1920s, through implicit changes in application and entrance procedures (21-22). Other colleges established questionnaires and demanded a photograph of the candidate among other requirements (22). Likewise, Rutgers University acted in accordance with prevalent anti-Jewish admission policies, resulting in the Jewish community’s reaction to discriminatory quotas in higher education institutions receiving public funds (Greenberg and Zenchelsky 295). Elite colleges opposed applicants considered “socially undesirable” and attempted to preserve their “exclusive” WASP student profile through restrictive policies (296). 4. Conflicted American promises and antisemitism The post-WWI era involved a deep sense of insecurity and the drive to seek “normalcy” after the internationalist war years, the October Revolution of 1917, and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in Russia, which triggered anti-immigration policies that were designed to preserve white Anglo- Saxon Protestant American identity (Dinnerstein 78). During the 1920s, the children of Jewish immigrants would “enter the elite Protestant world” in search of education, employment, and housing; however, they encountered antisemitic discrimination, regardless of their acculturation (78-79). Postwar antisemitism was prevalent, supported by the popularity of pseudoscientific, eugenic arguments about the white Christian race, the alleged threat of communist and socialist revolutions, and the fear of the “Protestant elite” losing their dominant position in prominent American institutions (79). As a result, Jews became the target of ideological, class-based, racist, and religious concerns of different groups. Furthermore, the Red Scare and labor unrest gave rise to the communist hysteria that scapegoated foreigners, particularly Jews (79). In reaction to their rising numbers among European immigrants and public visibility, many WASPs began associating Jews with materialism and radicalism. The eugenics movement benefited from the publicity of eugenic writing and social Darwinism; however, it owed its development to socioeconomic and cultural transformations taking place in Britain and the United Ezgi İlimen 238 States in the twentieth century: industrialization, expansion of cities and slums, migration from rural to urban centers, and the rise of immigration (Kevles 72). The accumulating statistical data about urban vices, such as prostitution, crime rates, alcoholism, and disease, called for urgent measures in both countries. The United States had had an upsurge in immigration since the late 1880s, which raised concerns about foreignborn population growth, cultural domination of native-born Anglo- Americans, and urban life (72). The prominent figures of the American eugenics movement were professors and members of research institutes with their agenda about immigration, public health and sterilization laws in the 1920s. 7 As the director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, Harry H. Laughlin was an eminent promoter of eugenics, the forced sterilization of people considered “unfit”, and immigration restriction laws. Laughlin prepared a “model sterilization law” that would be well-received by many states and the Nazi regime in Germany, and also provided his services as the scientific advisor to the Immigration and Naturalization Committee of the House of Representatives (McDonald 381). However, American eugenicists could not maintain their influence in the 1930s despite organizations such as the Eugenics Research Association and the Human Betterment Foundation in California (Kühl 79). The interwar years reflected the rise and notoriety of eugenics, seeing their popularity and the consequences of anti-Semitic race policy in the Nazi Germany. The extremist antisemitism of Nazi Germany resulted in American eugenicists’ disaffiliation with German racial hygienists after the passing of the Nuremberg laws in 1935, underlining the redefinition of German citizenship and the prohibition of marriages between Jews and Germans (Kühl 96-97). Beginning in November 1938 with the statesanctioned pogrom, restrictions targeted Jews in Germany along with 7 Laura L. Lovett writes about the emergence of “fitter family contests” with the legacy of better baby contests in Iowa and eugenic concerns about heredity, which shifted the primary focus from public health to the ideal family in the 1920s (70). Organized by Dr. Florence Sherbon and Mary T. Watts, the contests took place during the agricultural fairs, which reflected a longing for the traditional rural family threatened by urban life and the Roaring Twenties cultural transformation (Lovett 70-71). Thus, “human livestock competition[s]” offered “a modernist promise of scientific control” of the American family (71). Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics Record Office (ERO) held its national campaign around state fairs, which aimed to make a distinction between normality and abnormality to be pursued by positive and negative eugenics (Emin 2). The fitter family contests advocated by the ERO promoted white Anglo-American characteristics and racial purity while eugenic films were portraying genetic abnormalities of “unchecked breeding” (2). Eugenicists visited freak shows to gather scientific proof about “degenerate heredity”, including the sideshow performers of Coney Island, believing that cases of abnormality or disability would legitimize their agenda of racial and cultural homogenization (3). Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 239 segregation and forced labor, which disgraced the Nazi race politics in mainstream American media; however, Germans alluded to racism and violence in the United States in retaliation (98). In their democracy versus autocracy campaign, Mr. Hulme and Mr. Dewey visit Clifford residents about Mr. Wheaton’s bequest. Mr. Hulme claims that accepting it would mean running the risk of losing the American ideals and democracy, which they fought and died for in the Great War: “[H]ere’s Fascism, right in our lives, trying to buy us into endorsing one of its dirtiest ideas [...] The race-prejudice of that bequest is an open, shameless attempt to knock down and kick to death the principles we were brought up in and still believe in [...] Over in France when our soldiers first began to arrive, everybody on both sides was wondering [...] Well, they did stand up - they went forward under fire [...] Can we stand up under it? ” (Canfield 393) With freedom, dignity, and cultural diversity threatened by the autocratic leaders of Europe, Canfield’s novel signifies a cautionary interwar narrative to the American public through the voice and concerns of Mr. Hulme. In defense of American ideals, he fiercely opposes anti-democratic interests and practices that are becoming prevalent in Europe under totalitarian regimes and in Clifford where these ideas appear in disguise of a wealthy trustee’s bequest. Thus, he runs a campaign to warn against the global threat of fascism with references to the disheartening news from Europe. At the same time, he struggles to convey the imminent local threat to the people of Clifford who are still clueless about the consequences of their own ignorance, passivity, and scapegoating of others. As Canfield’s text indicates, the postwar era reflected a political swing between radicalism and conservative policies that targeted liberalism and immigration. According to John Higham, the antisemitic nationalism that emerged as the embodiment of wartime “100 percent Americanism” and anti-German sentiments also targeted German Jews who held wealth and prominent positions during the Wilson administration (Strangers 278). This continued into the interwar years in the form of a violent backlash against radicalism and immigrants, particularly Jews and Catholics. Historically, race and color politics had been integral to the experience of American Jews who witnessed the Jim Crow years, mob violence, and racist legislations that defined the position, rights, and privileges of people categorized as white or “non-white” with firmly-held cultural assumptions and constructions of American identity (Diner 13). American Jews encountered biological racism that made their whiteness questionable in the late nineteenth century and discrimination in the fields of higher education, housing, and employment through individual or institu- Ezgi İlimen 240 tional initiatives, which differed from the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans of Chinese or Japanese descent, and Native Americans (14). These groups blamed direct governmental orders, court decisions and laws, including the Constitution, for their grievances (Diner 14). Jews arrived in search of equal economic opportunities, having seen pogroms, riots, and instability in Europe. This was why they appreciated the promises of US citizenship; however, acquiring social acceptance was another matter (15). Between 1920 and 1924, Henry Ford’s weekly The Dearborn Independent published a series of antisemitic articles, called “The International Jew”. The articles appealed to a broad audience, who appreciated his antisemitic campaign, sent money, and asked for more material. Supporters included academics, Christian ministers, and leaders of associations, among others (Dinnerstein 82). 8 The popularity of the articles revealed wide acceptance of anti-Jewish views and readiness to adopt discriminatory policies in the postwar period. 9 To name a few, “banks, insurance companies, publishing houses [...] advertising agencies, school districts, major industrial companies [...] hospitals, universities, and law firms” discriminated implicitly or openly in their employment policy (Dinnerstein 89). The 1920s admission policies of leading American institutions resulted in the struggle over meritocracy, and its differing promises to WASPs and Jews. The growing presence of Jews in American economy, professions, and higher education challenged economic interests and cultural domination of white Protestant Americans while Jews viewed anti- 8 Published as a book in Russia in 1905 and later translated into many languages, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion publicized antisemitism with the circulation of “a series of Jewish ‘protocols’ or plans for Jewish world domination” (Corrigan and Neal 162). Later disclosed as a “hoax” narrative, the Protocols still legitimized religious and cultural bias toward Jews, stating their access to “economy machinations, media manipulation, and religious chicanery” (162). Henry Ford gave place to the messages of the Protocols in his weekly and published a multivolume work, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which brought him the recognition of his efforts and the award of the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle by the German Reich in 1938 (164). 9 The program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (1920) strictly defined the ideal German citizen, the Nazi male, as it complemented his “Aryan racial identity” based on German ancestry with his commitment to German family, community and culture (Lorenz 17). Even before the Party Program, quintessential to the future Nazi writing, gained publicity as a propaganda tool, Arthur Dinter’s 1917 novel Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood) depicted the “racial” characteristics of the German Aryan and Jews with antisemitism and arguments on race and heredity, which would provide a new ideological narrative method and an earlier example of the “Nazi racial typology” (17). Within the “racist cosmology” of the novel, Dinter depicts the idealized blond, blue-eyed Germans in mental and physical excellence whereas he stigmatizes “mixed race” and darkcomplexioned characters with negative physical characteristics and morals (18). Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 241 semitic economic and educational policies as a violation of class mobility and equal opportunities (Karabel 132-33). The changing definitions of merit and restrictive policies denoted a multifaceted rivalry between the old-stock Americans and immigrants: “[T]heir admissions offices decided which human qualities to reward and which to penalize” (133). Canfield’s novel alludes to the pervasiveness of prejudice and discriminatory policies targeting certain groups in American society. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hulme’s campaign attracts considerable media attention. A reporter from a New York newspaper asks questions about his family line, claiming that he might be a Jewish man for defending the cause, and even has a “Jewish nose” (Canfield 400). This type of Jew-baiting circulated biases and stereotypical narratives that were then used to discredit individuals fighting to destroy those very same stereotypes. It was a strategy akin to the red-baiting of communists or denigrating white people who sympathized with African Americans. In Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson indicates how the interconnection between social discrimination and racial difference reveals a vicious cycle in the unstable redefinition of whiteness for groups such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews in the United States (174). The whiteness of Jewish immigrants remained unsettled under “the shades of meaning attaching to various racial classifications, given the nuances involved as whiteness slips off toward Semitic or Hebrew and back again toward Caucasian” (176). Thus, Jacobson points out the unstable socioeconomic and cultural dynamics behind the definition of Jewish (American) identity: “[T]he question is not are they white, nor even how white are they, but how have they been both white and Other? ” (176). The color line was used to define the status of Jewish immigrants, which resulted in the “negroization” of Jews in order to fit them into existing racial stratifications and then assimilate them into the mainstream. As Goldstein states, “[i]f they could no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likening them to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, and expose their role [...] in white society” (126). Roughly from the 1850s to the 1950s, Jews, much like African Americans, were subjected to a “physiognomical surveillance” on the basis of physical attributes, namely the shape of the nose, eyes, skin color, and hair, viewed in relation to “an essential, immutable, inner moralintellectual character”, which legitimized their identity with distinctively self-referential characteristics (Jacobson 174). The sociocultural significance of these attributes depended on the historico-political discourse of the specific era, as they defined group identity within, and in relation to, the mainstream, leading to a compromise or the persistence of (racial) difference. The fact that the New York reporter refers to Mr. Hulme’s “Jewish nose” suggests that these discourses were still very much a part Ezgi İlimen 242 of the interwar world, and that as a defender of Jewish rights, Mr. Hulme could also be subjected to antisemitism as a “Jew by association”. This called his own whiteness into question (as many WASP Americans still considered Jews to be non-white), rendering him a race and class traitor, and jeopardizing his safety and security. While discussing the bequest with Mr. Hulme, Mr. Lane, the President of the Windward County National Bank, muses about upper-class white Americans who might settle down and make investments: “‘Substantial men from all over the East would flock here to buy summer homes; they’re looking for such a place [...] It would seem a haven to them’” (Canfield 417). Clifford is meant to be a sheltered place for wealthy Americans, free from racial and class threats posed by minorities and immigrants, particularly Jews. According to the antisemitic narratives of the time, “Jews were set apart by their greedy practices, their filthy bodies, their licentious behavior, and their isolationist tendencies. They were a race of people set apart” (Corrigan and Neal 149). Seasoned Timber similarly illustrates that living with Jews was unthinkable to individuals like Mr. Lane. Consequently, he portrays the arrival of Jews in Clifford as a form of cultural and moral decay, and fears the gradual displacement of Americans by foreigners: ‘If the Jews got in, the way they have in the Catskills’. It was the picture Downer had painted for Timothy, the picture many people had elaborated for his benefit - broad-bottomed women waddling around in shorts and highheeled pumps, flashy men with cold bloodsuckers’ eyes, bedclothes hanging out the windows of fine Colonial houses, noisy, ill-bred young bucks shouldering Clifford people off their own sidewalks. (Canfield 418) Mr. Hulme reacts by underscoring the use of racism as a manipulative tool that threatens modernity: “‘You’re talking exactly like the professional Southerner who used to say, when anybody suggested that maybe something ought to be done about the high tuberculosis rate among Negroes, ‘Oh, I see you want your daughter to marry a nigger’” (418). The analogy between racism and antisemitism reveals the scapegoating of minorities in the name of white supremacy, and the inevitable punishment of nonconformists who point out injustice. David Baumgardt pays tribute to Canfield as a twentieth-century writer and a friend of the Jewish community (246). Baumgardt appreciates Seasoned Timber as Canfield’s “war against the complacency” when the whole world remained silent to Hitler’s persecution of Jews and liberals in the pre-WWII years (246). To this end, Canfield’s novel elevates American principles by rejecting the bequest to the Academy secured by a majority vote. The people of Clifford defend American ideals, primarily equal opportunity and education, through a democratic voting process. In favor of American Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 243 principles, they cast their votes against the trustee’s bequest and demands. With patriotic fervor, they celebrate their victory as if it was another Independence Day in their local history and community. Canfield indicates the interconnection between her characters’ personal and domestic lives and culturally defined concerns, ranging from education, racial prejudice, class dynamics, gender roles, and global conflicts. Seasoned Timber highlights the need for socioeconomic justice through her opposition to racism, antisemitism, sexism, and elitism. Her social and political novel emphasizes the duties and responsibilities of a democratic nation to its citizens who, in the end, are the ultimate guarantors of American values and virtues. The peace settlements failed to prevent, if not trigger, the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Europe. She denounces the insistence on American isolationism from European affairs, seeing the autocratic regimes in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the persecution of Jews. During the economic and ideological crisis of the Great Depression, the world Canfield creates in the Clifford Academy functions as a place to reclaim American principles and human dignity in opposition to the victimization of immigrants and working-class citizens. References Baumgardt, D. (1959). Dorothy Canfield Fisher: friend of Jews in life and work. Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 48 (4): 245-255. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 43059071 [Mar. 2023]. Bradbury, M. (1993). The Modern American Novel. Viking. Internet Archive, archive.org/ details/ modernamericanno00brad [Aug. 2023]. Canfield, D. (1939). Seasoned Timber. Jonathan Cape. Corrigan, J. & Neal, L. S. (Eds.) (2010). Anti-semitism. In: Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History. University of North Carolina Press. 147-180. JSTOR, https: / / doi.org/ 10.5149/ 9780807895955_corrigan.10. [Dec. 2022]. Diner, H. (2012). The encounter between Jews and America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11 (1): 3-25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 23249056 [Apr. 2023]. Dinnerstein, L. (1994). Antisemitism in America. Oxford UP. Emin, T. (2002). Freaks and geeks: Coney Island sideshow performers and Long Island eugenicists, 1910-1935. The Long Island Historical Journal 14 (1-2): 1- 14. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/ publication/ 324862055 [Nov. 2022]. Frankel, R. (2013). One crisis behind? Rethinking antisemitic exceptionalism in the United States and Germany. American Jewish History 97 (3): 235-258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 23887618 [Apr. 2023]. French, W. (1967). The Social Novel at the End of an Era. Southern Illinois UP. Internet Archive, archive.org/ details/ socialnovelatend0000unse_l5d1 [July 2023]. Ezgi İlimen 244 Germany and the peace treaty: historic ceremony of its delivery to the German delegates at Versailles - how it was received. (1919). Current History (1916- 1940) 10 (3): 381-390. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 45324432 [June 2023]. Goldstein, E. L. (2006). The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, And American Identity. Princeton UP. Goodall, A. (2009). Diverging paths: nazism, the National Civic Federation, and American anticommunism, 1933-1939. Journal of Contemporary History 44 (1): 49-69. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 40543073 [Apr. 2023]. Greenberg, M. & Zenchelsky, S. (1993). Private bias and public responsibility: anti-semitism at Rutgers in the 1920s and 1930s. History of Education Quarterly 33 (3): 295-319. JSTOR, https: / / doi.org/ 10.2307/ 368195 [Dec. 2022]. Higham, J. (1957). Social discrimination against Jews in America, 1830-1930. Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 47 (1): 1-33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 43059004 [Dec. 2022]. Higham, J. (2002). Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925. Rutgers UP. Ialongo, E. (2018). Nation-building through antisemitism: fascism and the Jew as the internal enemy. Annali d’Italianistica 36: 327-350. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 26923213 [Apr. 2023]. İlimen, E. (2023). Gertrude Atherton’s WWI propaganda to the home front: Mrs. Balfame, The Living Present and The White Morning. Anglia 141 (1): 35-62. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1515/ ang-2023-0002 [May 2023]. Jacobson, M. F. (2003). Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard UP. Internet Archive, archive.org/ details/ whitenessofdiffe0000jaco [May 2023]. Karabel, J. (2005). The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Houghton Mifflin Company. Internet Archive, archive.org/ details/ chosen00jero [Jan. 2024]. Kevles, D. J. (1985). In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. U of California P. Kühl, S. (2002). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford UP. Lorenz, D. C. G. (2018). Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature. Brill. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 10.1163/ j.ctv2gjwts0.5 [Apr. 2023]. Lovett, L. L. (2007). ‘Fitter families for future firesides’: Florence Sherbon and popular eugenics. The Public Historian 29 (3): 69-85. JSTOR, https: / / doi.org/ 10.1525/ tph.2007.29.3.69 [Nov. 2022]. Madigan, M. J. (1996). Introduction. In: D. Canfield Fisher (1939). Seasoned Timber. UP of New England. Google Books, books.google.com.tr/ books? id=qYv7l6sgPMIC [Oct. 2022]. ix-xxi. McDonald, J. (2013). Making the world safe for eugenics: the eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin’s encounters with American internationalism. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12 (3): 379-411. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 43902964 [Jan. 2023]. Miller, C. R. (1979). Introduction. In D. S. Strong (1941). Organized Anti-Semitism in America: The Rise of Group Prejudice during the Decade 1930-40. Greenwood Press. i-iv. Nolan, E. (2007). American women writers and the First World War. Literature Compass 4 (3): 525-538. Wiley, https: / / doi.org/ 10.1111/ j.1741- 4113.2007.00424.x [Mar. 2025]. Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 245 Rothermund, D. (2014). War-depression-war: the fatal sequence in a global perspective. Diplomatic History 38 (4): 840-851. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 26376608 [July 2023]. Senate’s rejection of the treaty: by a vote of 57 to 37 the United States Senate again refuses to ratify the peace of Versailles. (1920). Current History (1916- 1940) 12 (1): 27-29. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 45325218 [June 2023]. Stout, J. P. (2012). Dorothy Canfield, Willa Cather, and the uncertainties of middlebrow and highbrow. Studies in the Novel 44 (1): 27-48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 23406557 [Apr. 2023]. Stout, J. P. (2014). Writing politically: Dorothy Canfield and the ‘wrongness of the world.’ Modern Fiction Studies 60 (2): 251-275. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 26421720 [Apr. 2023]. Strong, D. S. (1979). Organized anti-semitism in America: the rise of group prejudice during the decade 1930-40. Greenwood Press. Tunc, T. E. (2012). Kake walk on kampus: ritualizing racism or commemorating tradition at the University of Vermont? In J. L. Meriwether & L. M. D’Amore (Eds.). We Are What We Remember: The American Past through Commemoration. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 47-76. Turner, H. A. (2003). Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933. Castle Books. Washington, I. H. (1982). Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. The New England Press. Internet Archive, archive.org/ details/ dorothycanfieldf00wash [May 2023]. Ezgi İlimen Hacettepe University Jan-Erik Leonhardt, Britta Viebrock (eds.) Popular Series in English Language Education English language education that wants tobe relevant for today's learners in a media-influenced social environmen1 needs 10 include series and serials. Our publica1ion enables (future) lan• guage teachers to implement series and serials in lheir English language classrooms purposefully and equip their learners wilh series_serials literacy, i.e. the abilily 10 deal with series and serials in an autonomous and critical manner. Three -l weiter ... b Elisabeth Hurth, Das Leben genießen. Zur Erfolgstheologie der amerikanischen Bibellehrerin Joyce Meyer. Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2023. Eva Triebl This book, written by a theologian with a background in Anglophone and American Studies, analyzes the tenets of Joyce Meyer’s theology - a “theology of success that foregrounds a victorious figure of Jesus” (p. 100, my translation) - and how it exploits and thwarts the biblical message. As its cover - a stylized, three-dimensional cross composed of faceted, pyramidlike prisms that both point toward and mirror the image of the viewer - suggests, this theology is not founded on the idea of a cross through which we encounter Christ, but on one that serves primarily as a projection surface for profane measures of success and enjoyment. Through meticulous comparison between Meyer’s gospel and relevant biblical passages, Hurth shows how Meyer’s vision of a convenient, supportive, and humanized God who can be directly experienced stands in stark contrast to the “abject and lowly nature of Jesus’ death on the cross” (ibid., my translation) - the Christian belief that integrates suffering, failure, and sin and places human destiny in God’s hands, thereby transcending worldly notions of a “victorious life”. By explicating this contradiction - one that lies at the conceptual roots of much contemporary sociopolitical struggle - in such a textually grounded manner, the book could hardly be more relevant. Hurth gets to the core of a belief system that sustains a neoliberal imaginary of post-traditional, self-fashioned success biographies. This imaginary constructs individuals - freed from the ‘corset’ of traditional faith - as “sole interpreters and planners of their lives”, neglecting, as Hurth succinctly puts it, that “one cannot generate everything out of oneself” (p. 12, my translation). This belief system coheres with globally influential paradigms of self-identification that foreground risk minimization and profit maximization, framing belief as a consumable choice promising comfort and worldly success. Hurth aptly draws on Tillich’s AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0015 Reviews 248 notion of a “fortress of securities” (p. 159) to illustrate how such faith practices favor safety and affirmation over transcendence and depth - that is, over anything that resists easy fixes for complex problems. Beyond the individual level, the belief system endorsed by Joyce Meyer - who, as Hurth notes, “explicitly denies the political dimension of her work” (p. 12) - is shown to legitimize forms of political discourse that “elevate secular goals into religion” (p. 164). One need only recall recent instances of religiously coded political rhetoric, such as J. D. Vance’s declaration that Donald Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt was “nothing short of a miracle” (cit. in Robinson 2024) or the former president’s own assertion that “God spared [his] life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness” (cit. in Maqpool 2024). Hurth explicitly situates Meyer within the lineage of preachers for whom material wealth functions as a sign of divine blessing - an understanding central to what in the U.S. is known as “health and wealth theology” or the “prosperity gospel”. Her analysis thus resonates with broader scholarship on this tradition and its intertwining of faith, individualism, and neoliberal success ethics (see Bowler 2013). Hurth’s book approaches these dynamics with remarkable modesty: it offers a clearly delineated, in-depth case study of a public figure representing a particular reading of the Bible without claiming - at least not explicitly - to explain the entire spectrum of social and ideological phenomena it implicates. The study remains focused on the Bible and on how it is interpreted by Joyce Meyer, yet it deconstructs this interpretation piece by piece, in impressive detail and with nuance. From a critical discourse analytical perspective, this inevitably evokes broader issues of ideological relevance, though Hurth never overstates them. For non-Anglophone or non-religious readers, even discovering the world of Joyce Meyer - or rather, its carefully curated online manifestations - is likely striking, and already answers the question of why Hurth’s book matters. Meyer is not just a Bible teacher but a massive brand: a success story, a persona with merchandise and lifestyle products (such as the “Big Dream Gift Package”), a YouTube channel, and immense cultural reach. Hurth goes directly in medias res, unravelling in five chapters - each titled after a relevant biblical passage - how Meyer’s theology exploits scripture to construct a soft, toothless, and convenient version of God. As Hurth argues, “the more God is romanticized, the more clearly evil becomes separated from him and can be projected onto others” (p. 109, my translation). This version of God aligns all too well with the “us vs. them” mentality central to populist discourses (Wodak 2011; van der Velden et al. 2025), and no longer corresponds to the God the Bible portrays - one who, as Hurth explains, acknowledges evil as part of his own sphere of Reviews 249 agency (in paraphrase, my translation, p. 109). Meyer’s theology is marketable and appeals to a wide audience - something Hurth attributes to the declining relevance of the institutional church following scandals that “challenge what the church is and should be” (p. 11). Yet, the resulting evangelium, transmitted in the form of a “feel-good faith show” (p. 64), offers immediate gratification but misrepresents Christianity, which, as Hurth puts it, “is not a message of enjoyment, but a message of salvation” (p. 91). By casting herself as a charismatic medium through which God can be experienced in an accessible way, Meyer - however apolitical she may appear - not only “endorses flat hierarchies” but also positions herself as a leader figure, thereby promoting a form of celebrity cult based on “charismatic experiences that may include authoritarian directives” (p. 49, my translation). In what follows, I will briefly outline how Hurth, citing from the Bible and juxtaposing it with Meyer’s interpretations, exposes these inconsistencies to demonstrate that Meyer’s theology preaches not a message of God but a gospel of success (p. 10). Chapter 1 examines how Meyer’s autobiographical narrative functions as both theological and rhetorical capital. Meyer’s experience of childhood abuse evidently played a formative role in her understanding of suffering, and her narration of that experience serves as an authentication device in her self-representation as someone with experiential, rather than merely abstract, expertise in religious matters. Suffering, as she frames it, is an opportunity for growth. Meyer’s reference to the biblical narrative of the paralytic in John 5 constructs the paralyzed as selfresponsible for their suffering, and their waiting for salvation as weakness rather than trust in God. As Hurth explains, however, the Bible does not represent God’s actions as causally determined: referring to Job, she shows that health - or other blessings - are not rewards for particular attitudes or actions. What may be added here is that, although Hurth does not pursue this point, the broader rhetoric of suffering as a ‘learning opportunity’ sits uneasily in the context of sexual abuse, where similar framings can contribute to obscuring responsibility. Predictably, then, the topos of self-responsibility that underlies capitalist framings of health as an accomplishment linked to material success also structures Meyer’s approach to marriage, casting it as another paradigm that defines ‘winner identities’. Aligning with fundamentalist patriarchal belief systems that also characterize contemporary tradwife discourse (cf. Sykes et al. 2024), Meyer portrays successful marriage as self-created and dependent on trusting God’s capacity to remove undesirable traits in wives, thereby allowing them to understand their allotted role as subordinate to their husbands (p. 25). Meyer herself, according to Hurth, draws not only on God’s transformative power but also on the promises of aesthetic medicine and the cosmetic industry (p. 31). This reproduces a cruel logic in Reviews 250 which love is by no means unconditional, but is especially conditional for women. As I will return to below, framing love as conditional for some while depicting God’s forgiveness as unconditional for others serves to sustain a stratified vision of God’s creation. Chapter 2 addresses the mediatization of religion through Meyer’s cheerful, relatable presentation, which, as Hurth argues, renders religious experience banal - just another offer “on the market of sensual experiences” - and thus “arbitrary and trivial” (p. 69, my translation). If religion serves enjoyment and suffering is eclipsed from religious experience, this amounts to a hedonistic understanding of religion (citing Albrecht, p. 70). This process exemplifies how media logics transform spirituality into a market-compatible performance of feeling. Another problematic aspect of Meyer’s self-representation as an authentic and approachable role model of everyday religious practice is that it not only amounts to immodesty and contradicts the biblical demand for humility (p. 72) but also elevates the tangible preacher above God, who - Hurth cites Postman here - is backgrounded as a schematic figure. Chapter 3 centers on Meyer’s slogan “enjoy life”, which, as Hurth shows, rests on a misguided interpretation of a biblical passage in John. Christ’s promise of joy and abundance refers to the fullness of a life with God and is accomplished in resurrection, which precludes an absolute notion of worldly joy (p. 79). Importantly, while Meyer’s success theology casts joy as contingent on human attitude and action, joy and prosperity are, according to the Bible, God’s will and thus beyond human control. While engaging with God may indeed be a joyful experience, it is also intimidating, reminding believers of their sinfulness and forlornness (p. 81). Because God is a formidable and not primarily comforting presence, celebrating His presence cannot be equated with the carnivalesque celebration of humanity. Instead, as Hurth explains, the point of celebrating Christ is to constitute meaning - a depth that enjoyment for its own sake cannot create. Christian joy, as Hurth argues, is not caused by worldly prosperity but is inextricably tied to the inevitability of death, which urges us to seek enjoyment in the here and now (p. 89). Yet it is precisely this separation of Christian joy from worldly success that makes it persist through despair and poverty. Chapter 4 focuses on Meyer’s dualistic worldview, which relies on a personified conception of evil that legitimizes a hierarchical understanding of human identity and relationships. By constructing Satan as concrete and evil as identifiable, Meyer’s theology contradicts the biblical understanding of evil as escaping human comprehension and agency, reducing it instead to a devil who, as Hurth points out, “can be instrumentalized for a variety of purposes and interpretations” (p. 127, my translation). Meyer’s understanding of sin and guilt is moralistic (p. 95): Reviews 251 it presupposes that believers can decide to avoid and thus overcome sin. Such framing, according to John (cit. on p. 96), amounts to self-deception and means that “the truth is not in us” (1 Joh 1,8; my translation). It also legitimizes divisions between those without and those with sin. At the same time, sin is trivialized in Meyer’s theology by being reframed as a mistake that God will forgive and correct - a view that disregards the fact that sin inhabits all of humanity (p. 99), not just those from whom we seek to distance ourselves (p. 118). This “non-punitive image of God” (p. 145) is comfortable: it frees those of guilt who frame their actions as destined to destroy what is deemed evil. As Hurth explains, such a view of God constitutes hubris, as evil is part of God’s agency and not for humans to fight or conquer. Chapter 5 shows how Meyer’s message fuses Christian language with New Thought and positive thinking (as endorsed, for example, by Joseph Murphy), effectively internalizing God as ‘the God within’. By propagating a positive attitude as the correct way to handle hardship and negative feelings, Meyer not only elevates the self over God by equating human thought with belief but also collapses the transcendence of the divine into a psychology of self-empowerment. She fails to acknowledge that, as Hurth notes citing Revelation, a “God-like human” cannot overcome death - only God can (p. 168). By casting negative feelings and suffering as human-made and human-resolved, Meyer’s theology is also exposed as, in Hurth’s poignant phrasing, “merciless”: it belittles the experience and value of suffering and condemns those who fail to avoid it. Hurth’s book thus reveals a fundamental contradiction in Joyce Meyer’s theology: Meyer’s self-professed stance is explicitly apolitical yet deeply political. By framing faith as an individual, consumable tool for success, she endorses a transactional view of religion. By reducing success to God’s reward for individual willpower and strength, she neglects the fact that, in the contemporary world, individual success or failure cannot be separated from the wider sociopolitical context. Representing herself as a prophet of a glorious future, Meyer fails to acknowledge that, as Hurth puts it, “social and political injustice must be overcome” (p. 51) for such a prophecy to materialize. Ultimately, Hurth’s analysis makes it clear that “success is neither an attribute nor a measure of God” (p. 44) - and thereby effectively undercuts the logic behind Meyer’s theology. Hurth’s book convinces not only through its argumentation - characterized by a careful juxtaposition of biblical references and Meyer’s interpretive strategies - but also through its compactness. At 172 pages including references, it avoids unnecessary detours. Stylistically, Hurth’s prose evokes the genre of preaching: readers will notice that sentences frequently have Joyce Meyer as their theme, creating a sense of repetition that reinforces the book’s focus and could be perceived as accusatory - a Reviews 252 tone that, in fact, befits its critical purpose. Hurth does what Joyce Meyer avoids: she confronts contradictions and probes, rather than absorbs, the problematic conceptualizations underlying Meyer’s feel-good theology. References Bowler, K. (2013). Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Oxford University Press. Hurth, E. (2024). Das Leben genießen: Zur Erfolgstheologie der amerikanischen Bibellehrerin Joyce Meyer. Traugott Bautz. Maqpool, T. (2024, July 15). Trump says God spared his life “for a reason”. BBC News. https: / / www.bbc.com/ news/ articles/ c20g1zvgj4do [Nov. 2025]. Robinson, E. (2024, July 14). “I felt the touch of God”: J. D. Vance shares how he found Jesus Christ. The Christian Tribune. https: / / thechristiantribune.com/ ifelt-the-touch-of-god-jd-vance-shares-how-he-found-jesus-christ/ [Nov. 2025]. Sykes, K., Taylor, R. & Ahmed, L. (2024). Tradwives and the re-domestication of femininity online. Feminist Media Studies 24 (2): 210-227. https: / / doiorg./ 10.1177/ 0891241624124627 van der Velden, M. A. C. G., López Ortega, A., Roth, D. J. & Guldemond, P. (2025). Populism and polarization: a nostalgic narrative of “us” and “them”. Government and Opposition. 1-18. https: / / doi.org/ 10.1017/ gov.2025.10020 Wodak, R. (2011). “Us” and “them”: inclusion and exclusion - discrimination via discourse. In G. Delanty, R. Wodak, & P. Jones (Eds.). Identity, Belonging and Migration. 54-77. Liverpool University Press. Joyce Meyer Ministries. (n.d.). Official website. https: / / joycemeyer.org/ [Nov. 2025]. Eva Triebl University of Vienna Murata, Kumiko (Ed.). ELF and Applied Linguistics: Reconsidering Applied Linguistics Research from ELF Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2024. Li Xin Given the essential status of ELF (English as a lingua franca) in applied linguistics (AL), ELF and Applied Linguistics: Reconsidering Applied Linguistics Research from ELF Perspectives calls for a radical reappraisal of the principles and practices of English language education in the current globalized world. Written by some of the leading figures in the field, this edited volume looks at the impact of ELF on applied linguistics to encourage an open and reasoned debate. The chapters highlight the promises and dilemmas the increasing prominence of ELF brings about to various areas of applied linguistics. The authors point to the need for changes in response to the shifting landscapes and propose new research paradigms for language teaching pedagogy. Locating ELF and its research explicitly in the constantly evolving multilingual context, these substantial contributions serve to facilitate AL to become a more rich and robust enterprise, both theoretically and methodologically. After a detailed introduction by the editor, the following 12 chapters are thematically grouped into four parts. Part I, “ELF research and communication: diverse perspectives”, consist of two contributions. Chapter 2, “Conceptualising ELF and applied linguistics” by Henry Widdowson and Barbara Seidlhofer suggests a reconceptualization of established assumptions. They ask if applied linguistics is concerned with “real-world problems in which language is a central issue” (Brumfit 1997: 93), the question arises as to how a problem is to be defined, from whose point of view, and to whose advantage (this volume, p.31). Chapter 3 “Translanguaging and intercultural communication: Rethinking ‘cultural thought patterns’” by Li Wei argues that ELF studies raise critical questions about the ownership of English. According to the author, a useful AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0016 Reviews 254 and important task for applied linguists is to foster the learner’s ability of transpositioning, a necessity in effective and equitable intercultural communication, without reference to hegemonic normative norms of any named culture or language (p.44). Part II, “ELF and applied linguistics research: regional perspectives” considers how and to what extent ELF is influenced by the local scenario. The authors draw insights not only from the theories of AL and ELF but also from their own lingua-cultural and geopolitical backgrounds. Chapter 4 “The Global South has been speaking: ELF and higher education” by Clarissa Menezes Jord-o sounds a wake-up call for an epistemic turn to create spaces of resistance where more equalitarian practices around English and internationalization can be devised and constructed. Chapter 5 “English as a lingua franca in ASEAN and implications for applied linguistics research” by Azirah Hashim contends that with current developments impacting on ELF, curricula, teacher education and assessment will all have to be reconsidered. Likewise, Chapter 6 “ELT in South Korea from the perspectives of ELF and WE” by Joo-Kyung Park and Kiwan Sung puts forward some suggestions in order to align curricular directions, instructional practices, and teacher education into more futureoriented English teaching and learning. Chapter 7 “Applied linguistics in Japan from BELF perspectives” by Hajime Terauchi, Sayako Maswana and Hisashi Naito claims that it is imperative to develop language policies that are tailored to the demands of globalization, including guidelines for English education at all levels. Chapter 8 “Three models of ELF instruction: From a pedagogical perspective” by Qiufang Wen aims to fill the gap between applied linguistics and English language education by presenting three relevant models or frameworks of ELF instruction, i.e., a model of intercultural communicative competence, a framework of ELF teaching content and objectives, and Scenario-Based Pedagogy in the production-oriented approach. Part III, “ELF and perspectives on multilingual communication and education” focuses on the roles of lingua franca communication as a meaning-making practice employed by people in today’s multicultural and multilingual world. While Chapter 9 “Rethinking English as a lingua franca from decolonial perspectives” by Yumi Matsumoto and Ryuko Kubota intends to make a positive move toward achieving equitable multilingualism to expand existing ELF research boundaries, Chapter 10 “Going beyond English-only medium instruction: Challenges of multilingual education as an LPP mechanism” by Masakazu Lino seeks to reexamine how EMI (English-medium instruction) and study-abroad programs are functioning as an LPP (language policy and planning) mechanism to raise awareness of ELF concepts in higher education in Japan. Interestingly, Chapter 11 “Why aviation English is not ELF” by Dominique Estival and Reviews 255 Alastair Pennycook points out that one of the problems shared by ELF and aviation English is naming the medium of communication as English. First language speakers of English all too often consider English to be their own, a medium with which they are familiar and in which they assume they should have natural speaking rights. This Anglophone-based monolingual mentality has negative implications for ELF and applied linguistics. Part IV, “ELF and assessment - challenging the assumed paradigm? ” casts a critical view on the internationally available standard language tests, which are based on NES (native English speaker) norms. Chapter 12 “A challenge for language testing: The assessment of English as a lingua franca” by Tim McNamara alerts us of the problematic values that are implied in ELF test constructs and the clash that they involve with the interests of other stakeholders. Chapter 13 “Writtenness in assessed English: Implicit assumptions of a smooth read” by Joan Turner convincingly states that there is a need for attitudinal shift in the uptake of writing. Expectations of writtenness in English need to change with increasing diversification of its users and contexts of use. The collection of articles examines the potential for productive interfertilization between applied linguistics and ELF research. These intensive and lively discussions encapsulate most of the difficult issues that the emergence of ELF has set in train for AL-related research, teaching and the testing industry. Specifically, it deserves credit for the following reasons: First, this volume, in explicating the relationship of the two, revisits the definition of AL in relation to ELF. Applied linguistics is a major research domain that the conceptualization and description of ELF is bound to impinge on. The contributors relate their observations and claims of AL to insights emerging from descriptive ELF research. They maintain that several lingering issues of AL related to conceptualizations of ELF require more critical work and awareness. These include (a) focusing on English that further reinforces its global status; (b) focusing more on speech compared with other multimodal interactional resources (e.g., gestures); and (c) being rather exclusive in terms of where ELF research is generated. (p.142). Second, this volume raises serious doubts on the legitimacy of AL as a discipline which has traditionally taken inner circle English as points of reference. It questions whether the discipline can continue to support the hegemonic inner circle varieties and more significantly, whose interests AL actually serves. By addressing concerns voiced by speakers of English outside the inner circle, it presents a strong case that breaking the ties of AL to native speakerism can better serve the needs of the majority of users of English in the expanding and outer circles (Kachru 1992). It cau- Reviews 256 tions that the Anglo-centric orientation of AL coupled with an anti-ELF stance does not bode well for the discipline. Third, this volume attempts to balance long-established research topics with newly-emerged ones (e.g. written academic ELF) and pins down central questions of English language education in both academic (e.g. Chapter 4) and corporate settings (e.g. Chapter 7), individual and societal levels (e.g. Chapter 8, 11), national and regional contexts (Part II). As such, it allows us to meaningfully engage in reflections about conceptual and empirical work in AL from various ELF perspectives. That said, this book would certainly do better if it had set up a more comprehensive picture of global use of English across different sub-fields, including ELF lexicogrammar, phonology, pragmatics, etc. by a range of first-language speakers in different geopolitical settings (Jenkins et al, 2018). While South America (Chapters 4, 9), Southeast and East Asia (Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 10) have been given much space, other areas (e.g. Europe, South Africa, the Middle East) have been hardly touched upon. Hence, a more thorough overview of empirical research on all aspects of ELF interactions could provide a better and updated profile of ELF use. To conclude, expounding on some of the most discussed themes and trends in ELF and applied linguistics, this edited volume makes an enlightening read for all scholars who wish to align their experiences with these insi-ders’ views or to attest to the feasibility of these specialists’ proposals. Either way, it will very likely stimulate more interest in EFL thinking and research, and suggest more effective steps forward in the crucial agenda of applied linguistics worldwide. References Brumft, C. (1997). How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 7 (1): 86-94. Jenkins, J., W. Baker & M. Dewey (Eds). (2018). The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. Routledge. Kachru, B. B. (Ed.). (1992). The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. 2 nd Edn. University of Illinois Press. Li Xin Shanghai International Studies University Environmental Literacy and the Teaching of English How can foreign language education be the spark that ignites environmental awareness and sustainability? This book offers a human ities approach to this topic, highlighting the potential of language, literature, culture, and media communication to enrich environmental discussions. lt examines foreign language education and explores related fields, such as envi ronmental humanities, environmental education, and education for weiter ... b narr.digital ISBN 978-3-381-13981-1 ISSN 0171 - 5410 Contributions by: Philipp Siepmann Günther Sigott, Hermann Cesnik and Samuel Hafner Jie Guo Ines Gstrein Junghyun Hwang Ezgi İlimen Eva Triebl Xin Li