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Memoirs by women (from the Global North) who have employed a gestational host (from the Global South) to become mothers are situated in a force field of intersecting discourses about gender, race and class. The article sheds light on the characteristic dynamics of this special sub-genre of ‘mommy lit’ (Hewett), labelled ‘IP memoirs,’ with a special emphasis on memoirs featuring transnational cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in India. These texts do not only present narratives of painful infertility experiences, autopathographic self-blame, and scriptotherapeutic quests towards happiness, i.e. (a) child(ren), but also speak back to knotty issues such as potential exploitation, commodification, colonisation and disenfranchisement, as well as genetic essentialism in the context of systemic inequities.
This article serves as both an état présent of emerging scholarship in the interdisiplinary field of Memory Studies and a conference report following the first MSA Forward interactive workshop which preceded the second annual conference of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in December 2017. MSA Forward is the postgraduate arm of the Memory Studies Association and offers a platform for exchanging ideas amongst a cohort of emerging scholars engaging with recent developments in Memory Studies and interacting with key academics in the field. The idea of engagement, with its political undertone, draws attention to the political valence and ethical sensitivity of emerging research as evidenced in this article, which contends that if Memory Studies is to be moving forwards as well as looking back, then it is important for emerging scholars as well as established academics to be at the forefront of the field.
Cellular mobile networks, in which devices constantly relay their location and their movements, are formed by the motion of end devices in relation to the position of radio towers. As a matter of principle, it is this motion that allows the location of devices to be identified within the network. The article argues that the emergence of mobile media based on cellular triangulation has introduced an ontology in which, by technical necessity, the position of every object is constantly registered and objects that do not have an address do not exist. The location and movement of all participants are, at all times, a known technical variable. With Xeros PARC’s “ubiquitous computing” as a reference case, the article scrutinizes how movement triggers the process that registers the locations of mobile phones or smartphones, a development it situates against the cybernetic imagination of determining the location and the movement of an object at the same time.
Ascribing to the premise that film festivals are crucial to the production of cultural memory, this article explores different parameters through which festivals shape our reception of films. In its focus on the Asian American film festival CAAMFest, the article reveals that festivals are part of a complex network of actors whose different agendas influence the narratives produced around the film, direct its role as memory object and encourage memories to travel. What is more, it shows that festival locations—from the city in which a festival takes place to the concrete venue in which a film is screened—play a significant role in shaping our experience and understanding of films. Finally, it establishes that festivals create frames for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media and live performances at the festival events. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, the article makes use of an interdisciplinary approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of acts of framing, locations and networks of actors shaping the festival’s memory production. It also draws attention to the understudied phenomenon of Asian American film festivals, showing how such a festival may actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group’s collective identity and memory.
This introduction outlines new developments in the field of cultural and media memory studies in the wake of the transcultural turn. It pays specific attention to the twofold dynamics of memory’s travel and locatedness. While in recent memory studies discourse there has been a tendency to see travel as the inspiration for innovative research, locatedness has become associated with old-fashioned, bounded approaches. Rather than reproduce the positive charging of travel and negative charging of locatedness, this special issue aims to emphasise the complexity of memory dynamics resulting from the interaction of the two poles and to make visible that the production, (re)mediation, and reception of the past in the present is constituted by both travel and locatedness.
Rebecca Walkowitz’s observation that contemporary novels tend to be “born translated” involves the notion that they equally tend to be “born in motion”; they are often already, conceptually, on the road to faraway readers during their moments of conception. A first, more narrowly defined objective of my essay is to examine the narrative strategies used in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2007) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) that facilitate and respond to this dimension of motion in particular travels of memory. In a broader scope, this analysis will be embedded into an appraisal of the potentials of recent theorizing both in narratology (i.e. the study of narrative) and in memory studies to understand the dynamics at play in the reception of far-travelled narrative memory media. It is a central proposition of this essay that the two research fields share an amplitude of common concerns with regard to questions of reception and should therefore be brought into a close dialogue. The present study explores how some of these intersections between narratology and memory studies can be approached through the notions of “distance” and “proximity.”
Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives
(2019)
This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.
Does linguistic rhythm matter to syntax, and if so, what kinds of syntactic decisions are susceptible to rhythm? By means of two recall-based sentence production experiments and two corpus studies – one on spoken and one on written language – we investigated whether linguistic rhythm affects the choice between introduced and un-introduced complement clauses in German. Apart from the presence or absence of the complementiser dass (‘that’), these two sentence types differ with respect to the position of the tensed verb (verb-final/verb-second). Against our predictions, that were based on previously reported rhythmic effects on the use of the optional complementiser that in English, the experiments fail to obtain compelling evidence for rhythmic/prosodic influences on the structure of complement clauses in German. An overview of pertinent studies showing rhythmic influences on syntactic encoding suggests these effects to be generally restricted to syntactic domains smaller than a clause. We assume that, in the course of language production, initially, clause level syntactic projections are specified; their specification is in fact the prerequisite for phonological encoding to start. Consequently, prosodic effects may only touch upon the lower level categories that are to be integrated into the clausal projection, but not upon the syntactic makeup of the higher order projection itself.
This paper investigates multi-valuation, i.e. cases where one probe agrees with multiple goals thus obtaining multiple feature values. Focusing on number agreement, I look at the cross-linguistic patterns on multi-valued Ns in the nominal Right Node Raising construction (Nominal RNR) reported in Belyaev et al. (2015); Harizanov & Gribanova (2015); Shen (2016) as well as multi-valued Ts in TP RNR construction reported in Yatabe (2003); Grosz (2009; 2015); Kluck (2009). I show that three types of languages are attested: languages like Serbo-Croatian that show singular marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, languages like Russian that show plural marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, and languages like English that show singular marking on multi-valued Ns and plural marking on multi-valued Ts. No language is attested that shows plural marking on multi-valued Ns and singular marking on multi-valued Ts. I use this 3/4 pattern to argue that multi-valuation shows the effect of the Agreement Hierarchy discussed by Corbett (1979; 2006) among others.
German free relative constructions allow for case requirement mismatches under two types of circumstances. The first is when the case required in the embedded clause is more complex (NOM < ACC < GEN < DAT) than the case required in the main clause, and the relative pronoun takes the form of the embedded clause case. The second type of circumstance is when the form that corresponds to the two required cases is syncretic. I propose an analysis that combines Caha’s (2009) case hierarchy in Nanosyntax with Van Riemsdijk’s (2006a) concept of Grafting. By placing case features as separate heads in the syntax, a less complex case can be Grafted into a different clause, explaining the first type of circumstance. The second type makes reference to the fact that syncretic forms are inserted via the same lexical entry (Superset Principle). A cross-linguistic comparison shows that it is language-specific whether a more complex case requirement in the main or embedded clause causes non-matching non-syncretic free relatives to be grammatical. For all languages it holds that the relative pronoun appears in the most complex case required, which provides additional evidence for case being complex and more complex cases being able to license less complex cases.
Die Rede vom Tod Gottes ist eine Denkfigur, die bei Theoretikern und Philosophen wie Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger und Jean Paul behandelt wurde. Die philosophischen Theorien der letzten zwei Jahrhunderte waren entweder von der Dominanz oder der Verdrängung dieses Gedankens geprägt. Durch Maurice Blanchot erhielt dieser Gedanke Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts eine Reflexion, welche die vorangegangenen Überlegungen aufnahm, bestätigte und im nächsten Schritt verwarf. Die Fragestellung, ob der Tod Gottes gedacht werden kann, wurde in Maurice Blanchots Werken wie von einem Echo aufgenommen, wiederholt und weitergeschrieben. Hierzu breiten sich seine Überlegungen in seinem theoretischen und literarischen Werk aus. Vor allem der Roman Le Très-Haut und der nahezu gleichzeitig erschienene Essay La littérature et le droit à la mort zeigen Blanchots Umgang mit dieser Fragestellung. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht in den philosophischen, philologischen und literarischen Texten Blanchots die Unmöglichkeit, den Tod Gottes zu denken, und versucht zu zeigen, inwiefern der Gedanke vom Tod Gottes auf ein sprachliches Problem stoßen muss. Hierzu werden die Texte jener Philosophen, die laut Blanchot den Tod Gottes zu denken versuchten, skizziert, um ihren Einfluss auf Blanchots Denken zu verdeutlichen und zu zeigen, inwiefern Blanchot den Tod Gottes anders gedacht hat. Bei der Lektüre von Maurice Blanchots Roman Le Très-Haut rücken auch der Roman Die Dämonen von Dostojewski, das Romanfragment Das Schloß von Franz Kafka und das Drama Les Mouches von Jean-Paul Sartre in den Blick der Arbeit. Diese Werke teilen unterschiedliche Motive mit Le Très-Haut, sodass sie zum Vergleich herangezogen werden, um zu verdeutlichen, inwiefern Maurice Blanchot den Gedanken vom Tod Gottes umgedacht und revolutioniert hat, und welche Konsequenzen für die Sprache und die Literatur dadurch gezogen werden müssen. ...
Wir konnten unseren eigenen Weg gehen, jeder von uns hatte am Ende ein anderes Ergebnis und es war keines falsch. Das macht für mich die Qualität beim Lernen aus, dass mir genug Platz für meine Gedanken gegeben wird und ich ernst genommen werde. […] Dieses Gefühl ist bis heute nicht verloren gegangen und der Gedanke, wie es sein könnte, hilft mir, aus mir raus zukommen und andere zu motivieren, das ebenfalls zu tun, um auch um mich herum anregende Gespräche zu führen, die an die während der Akademie geführten heranreichen. (Feedback einer Teilnehmerin der HSAKA-M 2018)
Bildung durch Wissenschaft im Sinne des Forschenden Lernens ist ein zentrales Thema schulischer Bildung und findet beispielsweise im Konzept Kultur.Forscher! eine didaktische, schulische Umsetzung und wird vom Wissenschaftsrat als Leitgedanke ebenfalls für Universitäten mit dem Ziel empfohlen, Studium und Lehre deutlicher an der Forschung auszurichten.
Aquesta tesi doctoral estudia la construcció de la notícia sobre esdeveniments del procés polític català en els mitjans de comunicació escrits alemanys. El període d’anàlisi s’estèn del 2010 al 2015, quan el procés ha passat de la societat civil a l’agenda política catalana i s’ha internacionalitzat. En aquest context, l’opinió publicada alemanya es considera un referent.
La tesi analitza dotze fets clau a partir d’una doble metodologia, quantitativa i qualitativa. Es duu a terme una anàlisi d’Agenda i de Frames, també s’aplica una Anàlisi del Discurs i es complementa la recerca amb entrevistes a periodistes i polítics. La metodologia ha estat provada i validada per set analistes germanòfons.
Els resultats de la recerca, exposats a més en quaranta-nou taules i figures, mostren l’establiment de l’agenda i els enquadraments dels temes i actors del procés català, la relació entre discurs, poder i legitimació, així com la construcció de l’opinió publicada alemanya.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
This thesis revolves around the development of a new critical approach to contemporary anglophone postcolonial literature in the form of a concept of ‘corporate ingression.’ This term denotes a globally recurring process of biopolitical (re)structuring of a community by corporate power and its extended cultural influence on society.
Through an analysis of contemporary engagements with similarly explored events over time and space in the form of three novels (Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), this thesis explores the relevance of the concept of corporate ingression as a new approach to such imaginative works. By reading these texts closely, with and against the grain, I enter into dialogue with their discussion of corporate power as the major structural influence in the societies they explore. I also show that a comparative analysis of these texts reveals similarities between the exploration of the period of early colonialism as acted out by the various trade corporations in existence and contemporary forms of corporate dominance. This research thus concerns various contexts and explorations of corporate power and explores the concept of recurring forms of corporate ingression as a new perspective within literary postcolonial and globalisation studies.
Oil on Water (2010) as a political novel explores the complex intricacies of communities structured around corporate power and presents a full account of the stakeholders that are influenced by or connected to the Niger Delta’s oil industry. Moxyland (2008) as a futuristic cyberpunk novel nuances the destruction implied in Oil on Water as a major factor of corporate ingression by exploring corporate power’s potential for constructive influence over a community. The Thousand Autumns (2010) as a historical novel explores an instance of corporate ingression in which the Dutch East India Company in Japan, despite its significant cultural influence, is subordinate to the host state to its activity. Corporate power is explored as a fallible construction that can be controlled by a strong regime as well as benefited from.
Despite the geographic and temporal distance between the three cases, and despite their exploration of widely differing industries, circumstances and levels of success, the common factors remain recognisable. Critical analysis shows that the contrasts between especially the constructive and destructive corporate activity in the three texts is of great interest, as it highlights the potential of corporate power both for construction and destruction of value. This research also shows how each novel actively resists a binary ethical narrative, instead presenting a set of complex power dynamics within the respective communities.
With this research I show that reading corporate ingression both significantly informs the reading of various postcolonial texts, while also showing that the analysis of these texts reveals that a conventional postcolonial binary approach is insufficient to account for what these works describe and investigate. The concept of a process of corporate ingression as a new perspective on literary explorations of historical, contemporary or futuristic forms of corporate power is thus shown to be a relevant addition to current postcolonial literary scholarship.
Nominal modification in language production: Extraposition of prepositional phrases in german
(2019)
In my dissertation, I investigate the phenomenon of extraposition of PP out of NP in German in language production. Four production experiments, using the method of production of memory, and three experiments testing the acceptability of extraposition were conducted. In extraposition, a constituent is realized in a position to the right of what would be considered the canonical position. A special case is extraposition out of a nominal phrase (NP), in which a constituent is moved out of NP to the end of the utterance. The example in (1a) illustrates the canonical version, in which a prepositional phrase (PP) is adjacent to its head noun. In (1b) the PP is extraposed out of NP to the right edge of the sentence.
(1) a. Gestern hat eine Frau mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme angerufen.
b. Gestern hat eine Frau angerufen mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme.
There are two main aspects to consider: the length of the extraposed constituent (the PP), and the length of the intervening material. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of constituent length on extraposition. The hypothesis is that longer and more complex constituents are harder to produce and are therefore produced towards the end of the utterance. In the experiment, PPs of three different lengths (2-3, 5-6, 9-11 words) had to be reproduced in either adjacent or extraposed position. As to the length of the intervening material, the hypothesis is that sentences with more intervening material between head noun and extraposed PP will tend to be reproduced with the PP in adjacent position to the head noun. In order to test this hypothesis, the length of the intervening material (1, 2 and 4 words) was manipulated in Experiment 2. The same material was used in an acceptability experiment, using the method of magnitude estimation (Experiment 5).
Previous studies found that extraposition is preferred over verbal material only, thus Experiment 3 investigated the influence of different lengths of purely verbal intervening material. Experiment 4 was concerned with the differences between PP and RC extraposition in production.
Experiment 6 and 7 used Likert scales to assess the acceptability of extraposition. Experiment 6 investigated whether the acceptability of extraposition is influenced by the definiteness status of the NP out of which is extraposed and if a soft constraint for definiteness can be found for PP extraposition in German. Experiment 7 asked if the inner structure of the extraposed constituent (PP only vs. PP+RC) influences its acceptability. An extraposed PP that includes an RC should be "heavier" than a PP without an RC, since the number of phrasal nodes is higher. If indeed heavier constituents are realized at the end of an utterance, the acceptability of an extraposed PP that includes an RC should be higher than that of an extraposed PP without one.
The results of the production experiments show that sentences are mostly reproduced in their original linear sequence, which suggests that extraposed position seems to be just as canonical as adjacent position, especially when extraposition takes place over verbal material only. With regard to constituent length, in extraposed position long PPs are shortened less often, supporting the hypothesis that longer and more complex constituents tend to be produced at the end of the utterance. Recency effects were found for intervening material as participants dropped intervening material rather than change syntactic position of constituents. The length and type of the intervening material is important with respect to how much intervening material is acceptable. Verb clusters were not shortened in sentences with extraposed PPs, however, 1⁄3 of adverbs and 1⁄2 of PP adverbials including a lexical NP were shortened to „verb only“. Extraposed PPs are more often reproduced in adjacent position than adjacent PPs are reproduced in extraposed position. However, the position of RCs is more often changed from adjacent to extraposed than from extraposed to adjacent.
While producing extraposed PPs seems not to be any more difficult than producing adjacent ones, adjacent constituents are consistently rated higher than extraposed constituents in grammaticality judgment tasks. This is in line with findings of Konieczny (2000) on German RC extraposition. The number of phrasal nodes, as suggested by Rickford et al. (1995), did not have an influence on the acceptability of extraposition, while the length of the constituent, measured in words, seems to play a role. Definiteness had no effect on adjacent PPs, but when the PP was extraposed, sentences with an indefinite antecedent were rated higher than sentences with a definite antecedent. This suggests that there is a "soft constraint" for definiteness with regard to PP extraposition out of NP in German.
Variation in enclitic possessive constructions in Southern Italian dialects: a syntactic analysis
(2019)
This thesis investigates enclitic possessive constructions (EPCs) that are a widespread and frequently used construction among Southern Italian dialects (SIDs). In general, EPCs display the structure N-EP where the N is a (singular) kinship noun and the EP the enclitic possessive directly attached to the kinship noun. However, there is a huge variation among SIDs as well as within the system of a specific dialect. The aim of the present work is twofold. The empirical part contributes new data to this topic as well as a detailed and organized overview of (micro-) variational observations from data of different sources including for example the linguistic maps of the AIS (Atlante Italo-Svizzero). The main aspects of variation are (a) the presence or absence of an obligatory article (D – N-EP vs. N-EP), (b) the possibility of plural kinship noun-EPCs and (c) the compatibility of a specific person-EP with a specific kinship noun within a dialect. Based on the empirical findings, the syntactic part proposes a syntactic analysis for EPCs focusing on the following research questions: 1) In some dialects, singular kinship noun-EPCs display an obligatory article with the 3SG.EP. What is the reason for this article-based person split (1st and 2nd vs. 3rd)? And further, how are both structures, with and without an article, represented in the syntax, i.e. in DP and PossP? 2) In some dialects, plural kinship nouns are allowed to occur in EPCs, and in others, they are disallowed. With respect to this dichotomy, what is the role of NumP? 3) Kinship nouns are relational and express inalienability. How can this property be captured in the syntax? I argue that the article-based person split is due to the deictic properties of the possessor-persons, meaning that 1SG.EPs and 2SG.EPs need to be bound by the speaker’s coordinates in the left periphery of the clause, whereas 3SG.EPs do not. As a consequence, 1SG and 2SG EPCs move to the highest position, i.e. to D°, and 3SG EPCs can stay lower in the structure, i.e. in Poss°. Based on this dichotomy, I argue that both D° and Poss° can host EPCs. In order to capture the (im)possibility of plural kinship nouns-EPCs, I argue that NumP, as a parametrised position, can block or allow further movement of the kinship noun to Poss° (and to D°). With respect to the relational nature of kinship nouns I propose that they are base-generated within the complement position of a relator phrase (RP), and EPs in Poss°. In order to derive EPCs, the kinship nouns must move out of their position. The kinship noun lands in NumP, the position where further movement is probably blocked. If further movement is allowed, the kinship noun merges to the left of the EP, resulting in a complete EPC in Poss°. The last leg of the movement to D° depends on the presence of absence of an obligatory article. The phenomenon of EPCs displays a huge variation among SIDs and needs to be investigated from different perspectives and different linguistic areas. The present work contributes to the puzzle of EPCs new data and a syntactic analysis.
Der Schriftsteller Georg Büchner gilt bis heute als ein glühender Revolutionär und unerbittlicher Kämpfer für Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit: Seine Texte thematisieren formal und inhaltlich gesellschaftliche Konflikte, die zeitlos erscheinen und doch ihre Gegenwart genau in den Blick nehmen. An der Goethe-Universität forscht der Germanist Prof. Roland Borgards zu Büchner.
Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research.
In this paper, we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was 3 months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness.