STUDENT CONFERENCE 2022 - BOOK OF ABSTRACTS ANGLISTISCHES SEMINAR
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STUDENT CONFERENCE 2022 ANGLISTISCHES SEMINAR 10th and 11th June, 2022 BOOK OF ABSTRACTS Concept and Organisation: MA Students of the English Studies Programme
Friday, June 10 (Room 110, Anglistisches
Seminar)
09.00 – 10.00 Welcome
Prof. Dr Vera Nünning (Heidelberg
University)
Keynote: Performing 'Trust': Race
and Visual Culture in US-American
Cities
Aylin Güngör
10.00 – 11.00 Language Change and Cultural
Change
(Chair: Yannick Ganz)
(Break at 11.00)
11.30 – 12.30 The ‘Other’ Classics
(Chair: Cecília Monleón Cubero)
12.30 – 13.30 Symbolism and its Uses
(Chair: Debbie Zimolong)
(Break at 13.30)
14.15 – 15.15 War and Violence in Literature
(Chair: Emanuele Russo and Sabrina
Dora)
15.15 – 16.45 Mapping Neoliberalism and Literature
(Chair: Lukas Schutzbach and Williams
Rothvoss-Buchheimer)
2Saturday, June 11 (P18, Triplex)
09.00 – 10.00 Looking for the Needle in the
Haystack: Use and Benefits of the
Corpus Approach in Research
(Chair: Hanna Dzhurynska)
(Break at 10.00)
10.30 – 11.00 Good Villains and Why We (Don’t)
Like Them - An Exploration of
Empathy in Fiction, Stage, and Screen
(Chair: Jiacheng Mo)
11.00 – 13.00 Monster Mash: Bodies in Gothic
Fiction from the 18th to the 21st
Century
(Chair: Cara Vorbeck)
(Break at 13.00)
14.00 – 15.00 Plays, Novels and Their Adaptations
(Chair: Danielle van der Merwe &
Armen Hesse)
15.00 – 16.30 Hybrids, Deviants, Mediators:
Fictional Characters between Social
Divides of Identity Construction
(Chair: Kieran Sommer)
3Language Change and Cultural Change
Chair: Yannick Ganz
Green, Blue or Green and Blue? A Study of the Mandarin Chinese
Color Term Qing
Han Wang
Did you know that in some languages, green and blue are lexically
encoded in one word? Many languages utilize a ‘grue’ category that
encompasses the portion of the color spectrum subsumed under the
English ‘green’ and ‘blue’ (Everett 2013). According to a study by Paul
Kay and Luisa Maffi (1999), more than 50% of the languages studied
had a basic color term for ‘grue’. Among these languages, some did not
only have terms for grue, but also for green and blue, such as Korean,
Japanese, Chinese, Old Welsh, and Zulu etc. In Mandarin Chinese, this
word is Qing, which is often translated as “cyan” in English.
Previous studies (Yao 1988, Lü 1997, Wu 2011, Gao & Sutrop
2014, Sun & Chen 2018, etc.) on basic color terms in Mandarin Chinese
have barely touched on the topic. Wu (2011) as well as Gao and Sutrop
(2014) have come up with different theories to account for this special
term. The answer to the following three questions, however, still
remains unclear: 1) Qing is frequently used, but do people really know
what color it is? 2) What is the focal area of Qing on the color map? 3)
Is Qing a basic color term or grue term? Or, has it ever been a basic
color term? The present study sets out to explore these questions by
conducting two experiments: First, a color naming test, in which
subjects were asked to give names to different color tiles. Second, a
color selection test, in which subjects were asked to select color tiles
they would call Qing. The results provide an answer to the three
questions above and prove that Qing is not equal to the English term
‘cyan.’
4“Mucha Sandunga Tiene Ese Body” – Code-Switching and Identity
in Latin American Music on the US Billboard
Yannick Ganz
Over the last couple of years, especially from the 2010s onwards, Latin
American music has gradually established itself as part of mainstream
music in the US charts. So far, the culmination of this process is the
2017 song Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, which became
one of the most successful singles ever and has more than seven billion
views on Youtube.
Since Latin American music has found this audience outside
of the Latinx context, it is intriguing to analyze the contact between
English and Spanish in Latin songs. The Billboard used to define Latin
songs as those that are “sung predominantly in Spanish” (2019), but
also acknowledges that the significance of the term Latin in music has
been changing in the last few years. Often, Latinx artists employ code-
switching (CS) to express their hybrid identity, which reflects their
Spanish heritage as well as the influence of the US. However, there is
also pressure on minority cultures to undergo a linguistic adaptation
towards English in order to have a voice in the US mainstream.
This presentation investigates the potential field of tension
identified above by surveying how the use of CS describes identity
formation in recent Latin American music (according to the Billboard’s
definition), based on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 songs between the
years 2017 and 2022. The usage of the English language in these songs
will be analyzed in terms of its musical functions but especially
concerning its reflection of hybrid cultural identities in relation to the
power of the English-dominated mainstream.
5The ‘Other’ Classics
Chair: Cecília Monleón Cubero
“I Am Your Number One Fan”: Excessive Fandom in Stephen
King’s Misery and Goldy Moldavsky’s Kill the Boy Band
Charlotte Schmiegel
In recent decades, popular media fandom has become of increasing
interest to both literary and scholarly discourse, and fan representation
in popular fiction has skyrocketed especially since the 2010s. The
common aim of works which feature such representations is often to
find more sympathetic depictions of fandom and the central role it plays
in many people’s lives. Both academic and literary approaches to the
topic, however, have had to navigate a history of media and scholarly
representation of the fan haunted by notions of pathology, obsession,
and deviancy (Jensen 1992, 9). Notably, as opposed to the numerous
and decidedly positive depictions of fandom mentioned above, the
figure of the fan was strikingly absent from popular literature before
the 2000s, and if they did appear at all, it was usually in the form of a
fanatic posing a threat to themself and others. One of the few works of
the twentieth century which features one or more fan characters is
Stephen King’s 1987 bestselling novel Misery, the story of which,
interestingly, is paralleled in a number of aspects in the 2016 Young
Adult novel Kill the Boy Band by Goldy Moldavsky, called the “Misery
for the Belieber generation” by Drew Grant’s review for Observer.com.
This paper will analyse and compare both novels’ depiction of their
obsessive fan characters against the backdrop of respective
contemporary discourses on audiences and fandom and their possible
influence on these representations.
6Grant, Drew. 2016. “‘Kill The Boy Band’ Author Goldy Moldavsky
on Super Fandoms, Tween Culture and ‘Buffy’”.
Observer.com, 23 February,
https://observer.com/2016/02/kill-the-boy-band-author-
goldy-moldavsky-on-super-fandoms-tween-culture-and-
buffy/.
Jensen, Joli. 1992. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of
Characterization.” The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and
Popular Media, edited by L. Lewis, 9-26. London:
Routledge.
_______________________________________________________
“Who's That Chick?” Postfeminist Humor in Helen Fielding's
Bridget Jones's Diary
Irene Cano Sanchez
Bridget Jones is a calorie-obsessed and self-absorbed 30-year-old who
impatiently waits for the handsome Mr. Right to lift her eternal curse
of being a ‘singleton’. Helen Fielding retells the romance between
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in a setting that exchanges the delicate
19th-century English countryside for the suffocating London of the
1990s. The unauthentic plot of the novel, alongside its highly flawed,
and often unlikable, heroine, have put a target on Bridget Jones’s
Diary, which has often been regarded as ‘trashy’ fiction by literary
critics. Yet as cliché and shallow as Bridget’s story might appear,
Fielding’s impact on the literary world is undeniable: she single-
handedly conceived a new literary genre modelled after Bridget’s
adventures, namely Chick Lit. Chick Lit is understood as a genre
written by (heteronormative) women, for (heteronormative) women, as
it portrays daughters of the modern consumer culture sipping
overpriced cosmopolitans whilst complaining about the alien species
of men. As a result, the genre has not only been associated with
7neoliberalism, but it has also been accused of being anti-feminist by
some gender scholars.
Nevertheless, Bridget Jones’s Diary was successfully
received by the general public, and especially its female readers, who
for the first time could relate to an uncensored female protagonist.
Indeed, Fielding’s novel gives insight into an authentic woman's mind,
with all her ideological dilemmas and contradictions from a humorous
and even parodical standpoint. BJD allowed readers to laugh with,
instead of at, a woman who is simultaneously preoccupied with female
emancipation, a future with Mr. Darcy and which reality show she is
going to watch next. Therefore, Bridget became the voice of all women
who struggled to balance being a ‘good’ feminist, and having
traditionally feminine interest and lifegoals. As a consequence, BJD,
and the genre of Chick Lit as a whole, have been classified as
postfeminist, a branch of feminism which encourages women to
explore their inner ideological contradictions and dissolves the tension
between feminism and femininity. Thus, Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s
Diary opens a discussion about late 1990s feminist politics by exposing
the outdated philosophy of second-wave feminists and proposing post-
feminism as the new feminist ideology for the modern woman.
8Symbolism and its Uses
Chair: Debbie Zimolong
The Subversive Power of Nature Symbolism in the Novels of
Virginia Woolf
Debbie Zimolong
“Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them
together and they tear each other to pieces” (Woolf 16).
The preoccupation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando with the seemingly
impossible task of representing nature in literature may strike the reader
as ironic, considering how extensively Woolf has been praised for the
unique development of nature symbolism in her writing. But what is it
that makes her use of nature symbols so unique? This talk will consider
how Woolf acknowledges the inherently two-sided, contrastive
character of natural elements in her works and examine how she makes
use of this fact to evoke unconventional symbolic associations and
subvert traditional ideals.
This talk seeks to examine four of Woolf’s most celebrated
novels through the lens of her experimental yet skilled use of nature
symbolism. It seeks to explore how she plays with and reinvents
traditional symbolic meanings in order to offer the reader an
unconventional perspective on gender and sexuality. It will be regarded
how Woolf queers the symbolic act of giving flowers to a loved one,
how water is reinvented as a symbol of female agency and sexuality
and how the multifaceted symbolic nature of trees is Woolf’s tool for
contrasting gender and sexuality norms. Finally, we will consider how
the “Vielgestalt” (Schwank 21), the multifacetedness of natural
9elements, allows Woolf to create symbolic contrasts in her works. How
can it be that the same symbol denotes both conventional femininity
and its rejection? How can Woolf use the same symbol to characterize
both traditional and queer relationships? These contrasts will be the
focus of our discussion.
Schwank, Klaus. Bildstruktur und Romanstruktur bei Virginia Woolf:
Untersuchungen zum Problem der Symbolkonstruktion in
Jakob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway und To the Lighthouse. Winter,
1975.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Oxford UP, 2008.
The Value and Uses of Primogenitor Ethnicity in Of One Blood by
Pauline Hopkins and Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
Kieran Sommer
In discussions of race, ethnicity and nationality, symbolism can be put
to constructive and integrating uses, but also provide a means for
radical disruptions of dominant narratives. In this regard, Pauline
Hopkins’s serialised novel Of One Blood (1902/1903) and Walter
Scott’s historical novel Ivanhoe (1819) provide noteworthy examples
of how authors use supposed primogenitor ethnicities, to which
contemporary ethnic groups trace their descent, and thereby contribute
to racial and/or national discourse as well as the associations with these
ethnicities.
The place of symbols in nation building and nationalist
thought has been most prominently asserted by ethnosymbolist
approaches, which examine for instance how pre-existing cultural
10materials and symbolic resources are used in national construction
(Smith, 2009: 7, 15–16) and in what regards myths or symbols are
persisting, though malleable, features of a nation (Conversi, 2007: 21,
23). These can include a wide range of material objects and visual
representations, but also more abstract conceptions of national
ancestry, which are integrated into dominant national narratives, but
can also be contested, since members of national communities have
divergent and conflicting associations with these ancestor cultures.
Accordingly, I will analyse Hopkins’s and Scott’s symbolic uses of the
ancient Ethiopians and the Anglo-Saxons, respectively, against the
background of constructivist theories of national development and
national thought of their contemporary compatriots to identify the ways
in which both writers frame, shape and influence views of these
ethnicities as carriers of meaning. On the basis of this analysis, I will
draw conclusions about how the associations created with these
primogenitor ethnicities can be related to the nations these writers
purportedly belong to.
Conversi, Daniele. “Mapping the Field: Theories of Nationalism and
the Ethnosymbolic Approach.” Nationalism and
Ethnosymbolism. History, Culture and Ethnicity in the
Formation of Nations, edited by Athena S. Leoussi and Steven
Grosby. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2007, 15–30.
Smith, Anthony D. Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism. A Cultural
Approach. New York, London: Routledge 2009.
11War and Violence in Literature
Chair: Emanuele Russo & Sabrina Dora
How Much is Freedom Worth? An Analysis of the Human Losses
in War in the Example of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun
Antonia Harrich
Ever since the first literary texts came into existence, war has been a
popular theme in literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is
considered one of the oldest recorded pieces of literature, tells us about
an epic battle and different forms of armed conflict. Even if this
Sumerian epic was one of the first stories we know of to use war as a
theme, it certainly wasn’t the last one. Over the course of history, war
as a literary motif has been used by many writers and been explored in
different shapes and forms, usually inspired by historical models. Every
real war or bigger conflict has sparked its own branch of war literature
with different intentions and perspectives from which the topic can be
viewed. While the early literary texts like Homer’s The Iliad and The
Odyssey focused on the heroic way and the hero’s journey, more recent
wars in history have increased the popularity of anti-war literature.
As one of the most influential anti-war novels of its time,
Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo explores the human cost of war
through the experience of a wounded soldier from World War I who,
as a result of his injuries, is completely isolated from society and the
world around him.
The novel focuses on the consequences that a war has on the
common people who must fight it and weighs those consequences
against the gain of fighting the battles. The story analyzes the validity
12of war by asking if the purpose of war and the fighting for the
preservation of supposed ideals like ‘freedom and ‘liberty’ is worth
anything if you lose yourself in the process. The following presentation
will not only meditate on this question and some other themes
presented in the book, but also talk about the conversations that the
book has raised over the years and its importance in the literary world.
_______________________________________________________
From the Battlefield to the Motherland: Men’s and Women’s
English WWI Poetry
Emanuele Russo
The First World War created a divide in the UK between those who
welcomed it, driven by a strong sense of patriotism, while most of the
population saw only its destructive nature. This gap is also noticeable
in the literary movements of the period.
Young male British soldiers expressed their feelings from the
battlefields through writing. Hence, English World War I poetry
allowed several generations to read about the experiences of the so-
called ‘soldier poets’. However, the complexity and heterogeneity of
their poems also caught the attention of various scholars: some authors,
such as Rupert Brooke, wrote poetry that expressed a patriotic fervour;
others, like Wilfried Owen, used writing only to illustrate the “Pity of
War”.1
Nurses and auxiliaries, but also postwomen, factory workers
and miners: there was no job or task that British women did not perform
during the difficult days of the First World War. With men at the front,
1
Owen, Wilfred. Collected Poems. Vol. 210. New Directions, 1964,
p. 28.
13women were forced to replace husbands and heads of families. The
outbreak of the conflict gave a decisive boost to what was to become
the new dawn for the status of women. Although War Poetry is
predominantly considered a male literary genre, women were also
writing poems and expressing their feelings from the motherland.
Additionally, the prevailing absence of women's poetry from the major
anthologies has not discouraged several scholars interested in this
issue: one of these was Catherine Reilly, an English bibliographer and
anthologist, who published an interesting selection of female verse
entitled Scars Upon My Heart.
This presentation aims to analyse the characteristics of English
WWI Poetry, providing examples of some of the most famous poetry
by soldier poets and a few lesser-known ones composed by young
English women.
________________________________________________________
Mapping Neoliberalism and Literature
Chair: Lukas Schutzbach & Williams Rothvoss-
Buchheimer
The Importance of Art for Democracy in Neoliberal Times
Williams Rothvoss-Buchheimer
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama proclaims the “end of history.” In his view,
western liberal democracy has vanquished the threat of communism
(by supposedly ‘winning’ the Cold War) and – as the logical next step
of humanity’s political evolution – is waiting to be universalized in a
14grander, globalized scheme. Ironically, it is also during this time that
democracies are starting to show cracks and signs of erosion, as a wave
of democratic regression sets in that has only intensified over the last
two decades of crises (Schäfer and Zürn 2021).
In this presentation, I will briefly sketch out how neoliberal
policies have eroded the fabric of democracy by replacing values of
social justice, dismantling welfare state policies, and instead prioritize
economic growth in a trickle-down ‘Reaganomics’ fashion that only
resulted in a widening gap of income inequality, a growing share of all
the wealth concentrated in the hands of a few monopolistic top earners,
and a strengthened right-wing populist movement that is threatening to
further dismantle democracies around the world (Harvey 2007; Brown
2015, 2019; Bogner 2021). Finally, my presentation will explore ways
in which art might prove important to the resurrection of democracies.
Bogner, Alexander. Die Epistemisierung des Politischen: Wie die
Macht des Wissens die Demokratie gefährdet. Reclam: 2021.
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth
Revolution. Zone Books: 2015.
Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of
Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Columbia UP: 2019.
Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16
(1989): 3–18.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP: 2007.
Schäfer, Armin, and Michael Zürn. Die demokratische Regression:
Die politischen Ursachen des autoritären Populismus.
Suhrkamp: 2021.
15Neoliberalism and the Problem of Totality: Rethinking a Literary
Aesthetics of Cognitive Mapping
Lukas Schutzbach
In this presentation I want to problematize a very specific yet very
influential idea in the current engagement with neoliberalism in literary
studies. In the introduction to their comprehensive volume
Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (2017), Mitchum
Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith present a historical model
delineating four phases of neoliberalism with the development
culminating in what they title the “ontological phase.” The authors
claim that in the socio-cultural aftermath of the neoliberal economic
policies implemented in the 1970s, certain ideological assumptions of
neoliberal capitalism have been normalized to a point where they seep
into the very ontological fabric of the present.
I want to critically engage with that claim by pointing out that
this so-called “ontological phase” might turn out to be a lot less
totalizing than Huehls and Smith are indicating. More precisely, I want
to argue that their account constitutes the false universalization of a
very specific experience of neoliberal capitalism, namely the
experience of the middle class of Anglo-American post-Fordist
economies (Hoberek 2017). This false universalization is itself closely
related to the problem of totality in the context of (late) capitalism as it
stems from the limitations of immediate or localized experience in
grasping the historical and geographical relations of globalized capital.
In moving towards a possible solution to this problem, I will
revisit Fredric Jameson’s theory of an aesthetics of “cognitive
mapping” (1988). Through a reading of Rachel Kushner’s novel The
Flamethrowers I want to demonstrate the ways in which literature can
aid us in gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the
16relationships of neoliberal capitalism and move beyond the impasses of
false totalities as the ones present in Huehls and Smith.
Hoberek, Andrew. 2017. “Post-Recession Realism.” In Neoliberalism
and Contemporary Literary Culture, edited by Mitchum
Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, 237–52. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press.
Huehls, Mitchum, and Rachel Greenwald Smith. 2017. “Four Phases
of Neoliberalism and Literature.” In Neoliberalism and
Contemporary Literary Culture, edited by Mitchum Huehls
and Rachel Greenwald Smith, 1–18. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1988. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg, 347–60. London: Macmillan Education.
Neoliberalism and Academic “Publication Culture”
David Schutzbach
In recent years, there has been an unprecedented surge in publications
concerning scientific or para-scientific knowledge publicized for a
wider, non-scientific audience. A healthy body, a mindful lifestyle, and
solutions to a wide array of psychological, even philosophical problems
have been at the center of these popular science books. In the Anglo-
American market, an academic turned whisperer of large, mostly male
audiences like Jordan B. Peterson has met his corresponding
17counterparts in the German book market, with the likes of Richard
David Precht, Byung-Chul Han or Rüdiger Safranski producing
numerous best-selling books in recent years.
This paper wants to look at the reasons for this tendency of
(former) academics to increasingly publish books for mass audiences.
In particular, it highlights how some developments within the field of
academia itself might play a major role in this: the cuts in funding
across the liberal arts and humanities (Brown 2018) and the
“neoliberalization of the scientific system as a whole” (Biebricher
2021) correlate with a changed publication style among academics
themselves; “publish or perish,” the credo goes. Neither time nor
money are available for large-scale, in-depth studies of philosophical
magnitude in day-to-day academic “business” that largely seems to
become a collection of pointless, time-consuming tasks of management
(Graeber 2019). Oeuvres in the vein of German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas, British historian Perry Anderson or American literary critic
Fredric Jameson have thus become financially unfeasible and less and
less likely to be achieved.
In light of a recently published manifesto (Bahr et al. 2022)
criticizing practices of German academia, this paper wants to show the
links between a class of underfunded, overworked academics and the
surge of cheap, fast-selling para-scientific books. The critical scope
does not primarily aim at the quality of the published material (there is
no doubt that these publications can indeed also have positive effects
on public education at large), but at the reasons behind why academia
has become such an unfavorable working environment and what
consequences this holds for publication practices.
Bahr, Amrei; Eichhorn, Kristin; Kubon, Sebastian (2022):
#IchBinHannah. Prekäre Wissenschaft in Deutschland.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
18Biebricher, Thomas (2021): Die politische Theorie des
Neoliberalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 161-206.
Brown, Wendy (2018): Die schleichende Revolution. Wie der
Neoliberalismus die Demokratie zerstört. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, pp. 209-242.
Graeber, David (2019): Bullshit Jobs. A Theory. London: Penguin.
_______________________________________________
Looking for the Needle in the Haystack: Use and
Benefits of the Corpus Approach in Research
Chair: Hanna Dzhurynska
At War With My Body: Militaristic Conceptualisation of Body
Image Issues
Hannah Puschnig
Conceptual metaphor theory, as first proposed by Lakoff and Johnson
in the 1980s, argues that much of our conception of the world is
metaphor-based. Analysing common conceptual metaphors can help us
identify the world view of a society or even individual speakers.
Research has shown that employing specific conceptual metaphors can
also influence our thinking, rather than their uses being just a reflection
of our thinking. The choice of source domain will necessarily highlight
and hide some aspects of a concept or an issue.
What does it mean, then, that militaristic metaphors have been
on the rise since the early 20th century, propelled by the two world
19wars? That in the US war metaphors are a popular way of speaking
about all kinds of different issues – the war on drugs, the war on terror
or the war on crime?
In my BA thesis, I looked at conceptual metaphors for the
body in articles on body image and weight by US-American authors.
Here, too, a number of war metaphors were used. Using my research as
an example, I would like to discuss the implications of ‘the war on fat’
metaphor on body image and the treatment of overweight people in
society.
The Productive Role(s) of Corpora in Linguistic Research
Hanna Dzhurynska
All students sooner or later approach the moment when they have to
conduct their own linguistic research. It does not matter if it is just
another term paper or the Master’s thesis. Each of us uses a variety of
methods and approaches best suited for the project in question. But
have you ever used a linguistic corpus in your research?
Corpus linguistics may be described as a methodology that
uses the statistical analysis of large collections of data to investigate
linguistic phenomena. Its main advantage is that it allows researchers
to confirm or refute their linguistic hypotheses and to outline other,
more relevant areas of research on which scholars have not focused
before. Moreover, a well-sampled corpus can be seen as representative
of specific text or speech types. Let us also not forget that one corpus
can be reusable for various kinds of research. This is not the end of the
list of its advantages, although there are still many other open
questions: What collection of texts can be called a “corpus”? What
types of corpora exist? How can linguistic corpora be used in practice?
And finally, how reliable is the corpus? As a result, this talk will help
20you determine whether linguistic corpora can be useful in your own
research, and you are always welcome to share ideas and express your
opinion about corpus linguistics. Students would benefit greatly from
hearing about the experience of others using this approach.
________________________________________________________
Good Villains and Why We (Don’t) Like them – An
Exploration of Empathy in Fiction, Stage, and Screen
Chair: Jiacheng Mo
“A Daniel Come to Judgement” or “a Chimp with a Machine-
gun”?: The Problematic Villainy of Portia and Saul Goodman
Jiacheng Mo
Portia in The Merchant of Venice is praised as “a Daniel come to
judgement” for her determination, whether feigned or not, to carry out
a just trial. In contrast, Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul is scolded as
“a chimp with a machine-gun” for his inglorious past, unpredictable
personality, and possession of a law degree. Both Portia and Saul
display unparalleled proficiency in legal affairs, but the legitimacy of
their intervention of the law has brought about much controversy. The
audience may justifiably accuse Portia of contempt of court: she
appears before the judge in disguise, solicits an arbitrary sentence from
Antonio, and condones a punishment that is neither legal nor just. Saul,
on the other hand, continually cuts corners and uses loopholes to save
his clients from punishment, most of whom are criminals, while
making a fortune for himself.
21This presentation defines the concept of villainy in these two
works which both lay heavy emphasis on discussions about law and
justice. It shall be demonstrated that villainy does not equal being
cunning, criminal, or simply bad. Rather, it refers to complicated
personalities that are sometimes at war with themselves. Furthermore,
this presentation discusses the effects of such an interpretation on the
works’ respective genres. The comic nature of The Merchant of Venice
can no longer be taken for granted if Portia’s villainy is established, and
Better Call Saul fits uncomfortably into the category of crime fiction
in light of Saul’s villainy within legal boundaries.
________________________________________________________
Monster Mash: Bodies in Gothic Fiction from the 18th
to the 21st Century
Chair: Cara Vorbeck
We’re All Dead Here: Ghosts and/as Embodied Memories in
Lincoln in the Bardo
Cara Vorbeck
Ghosts make for fascinating research subjects for investigations of
embodied memory: technically, they can exist in separation from their
(dead) bodies and their spectral appearances are usually not considered
to be bodies in a physical sense. However, symbolically, the very nature
of their existence makes them instances of embodied memory. At the
same time, their felt experiences and memories of their previous lives
can also contain traces of embodiment in a cognitive sense.
22In order to further explore the role of ghosts as somatically
remembered subjects capable of somatic remembering, this
contribution will examine symbolic and cognitive dynamics of
embodied memory in George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the
Bardo, half of which is narrated by a fright of ghosts whose bodies play
an important role in the novel’s treatment of remembrance and
historical authority. These ghosts’ diverse array of bodies is entangled
in and marked by narratives about their lives and deaths, many of which
contribute to a reading of the novel as Gothic fiction. Lincoln in the
Bardo also provides opportunities to extend the scope of possible
analyses to consider the effect of embodied memories on both
collective memory dynamics as well as historical narratives, which is
in part facilitated by the novel’s experimental structure.
This talk aims to illustrate the novel’s treatment of memory
and call attention to the way in which the bodies of its spectral narrators
comprise an essential part of its portrayal of mnemonic dynamics. It
further seeks to demonstrate that a symbolic as well as a cognitive
understanding of embodied memory is necessary in order to approach
this topic in the novel, and hopes to relate these points to larger-scale
conversations about the analysis of memory and embodiment in literary
fiction, both with regard to the text as well as to dynamics of reader-
reception.
Content Warning: This talk may include discussions of suicide, self-
harm, and sexual assault.
23Infinitely Interpretable Bodies: Jeanette Winterson and the Queer
Gothic
Ella Garfinkel
Historically, the Gothic mode has continually forged new zones to
interrogate the boundaries of identity. If Gothic literature examines
how we carve out a space for the human subject, it also bears witness
to those excluded and erased by such a paradigm: the non-human, the
nearly-human and the super-human. It is in dwelling on these bodies –
those that inhabit the outer borders of cultural intelligibility – that
Gothic literature provides a productive point of intersection with queer
theory.
By turning to the novels of Jeanette Winterson, this paper will
consider how Gothic monstrosities are utilised to register the violent
codification of marginalised queer bodies. In The Daylight Gate, a dark
retelling of the Pendle witch trials, the pursuit of empirical verification
surrounding the identity of witches becomes a tool of misogynistic
violence. As we shall see, it is in a spirit of suspended certainty that we
must apprehend this narrative: just as flimsy accusations of witchcraft
circulate between bodies, the ontological status of sorcery within the
storyworld resists solidification. In contrast to realism, which becomes
bound up with the violence of interpretative certainty, Winterson
utilises the Gothic to denaturalize the prevailing norms that structure
our conception of the real.
This rejection of fixity re-emerges in Winterson’s 2019 novel
Frankissstein, an exploration of gender fluidity and trans embodiment.
If Frankenstein was, as Brooks suggests, a novel about ‘the capacity of
language to create a body, one that in turn calls into question the
language we use to classify and control bodies’,2 then Winterson’s
2
Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative,
Harvard UP, 1993, pp. 199-220.
24novel is attenuated to the complex position its predecessor has come to
occupy in the transgender imaginary. In drawing together these novels,
this paper will examine Winterson’s continual return to the Gothic to
confront the naturalisation of social oppression, objectification and
exclusion.
Content warning: References to sexual violence, transphobia and
misogyny.
________________________________________________________
Discovering the Gothic in the Victorian: (D)evolving Bodies in H.G.
Wells’ The Time Machine
Leonard Karl
Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species shook the scientific
community of Victorian England to its core. The implications of
Darwin’s work on evolutionary biology saw humanity reduced to just
another animal, as opposed to the pinnacle of God’s creation as it was
made out to be in the centuries before. Darwin theorizes that the main
driving force behind the diversity of life is a species’ capability to adapt
to changing environments to avoid extinction – the survival of the
fittest. A reductionist negligence, this simplified expression of
Darwin’s work was subject to wide-spread misconceptions, which gave
rise to erroneous misinterpretations at best and harmful ideologies
about the human body at worst. Second Wave Gothic literature
negotiates this new-found understanding of humanity’s place in the
realm of biology by establishing dichotomies of human/animal and
civilized/primitive.
Disgruntled with these misconceptions and his fellow
communicators of science, H.G. Wells debuts with his 1895 novella
The Time Machine. In it, he sends a character mask of the stereotypical
25Victorian scientist, wholly misled and blinded by his presuppositions,
to the year 802,701 to encounter a humanity that has evolved into two
separate species. Toying with Second Wave Gothic assumptions
around the body, Wells juxtaposes the feeble and naïve Eloi with the
beastly and cruel Morlock, uncannily painting the (d)evolution of
humanity. The scientist’s ghastly descriptions of the degenerated
human body cement him as the archetypal Victorian ideologue and the
novel as a biting Second Wave Gothic satire.
Content Warning: This talk may include discussions of graphic
depictions of violence.
_______________________________________________________
Eleanor’s Resistance and Compromise: Mental Decadence
as Manifestation of Trauma
Zihan Huang
Shirley Jackson, an American novelist best known for her works of
horror and mystery, is regarded as one of the most significant American
Gothic writers of modern time. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House
was widely received by readers and critics and rated as one of the best
literary horror stories published in the 20th century. The rich
connotation of this work makes it meaningful to uncover the mysteries
wrapped within.
This thesis focuses on the process of Eleanor's physical
decline – mainly the gradual breakdown of her spirit – and the dilemma
facing her sense of self to show how Shirley Jackson uses the heroine's
mental changes to express her own traumatic experiences as well as the
dilemmas faced by women in the social environment of the time and
their attempts of resistance. By applying Sigmund Freud’s theory of the
uncanny, this thesis analyzes the two doublings of Eleanor which serve
26as a manifestation of her disintegrated mentality that stems from the
recurrent trauma. Eleanor’s longing for family life as a publicly
declared surface need and her desire for sole solitude as an inner need
constitute her dual personality. Her disintegrated desires allow the
supernatural forces to influence her and accelerate the process of
physical debilitation.
By understanding her struggle in choosing between her
disintegrated desires, this thesis is able to reveal her reason for
committing the self-destructive act at the end of the novel. Adding to
that, by taking a close look into Jackson’s biography, this thesis
concludes that the choice of Eleanor’s mental decadence is a delicately
designed one echoing the struggles of females like Shirley Jackson or
her contemporaries, and Eleanor’s end turns out to be a resistant act
after many trials of compromising with her past.
Content Warning: This talk may include discussions of suicide.
________________________________________________________
Plays, Novels and Their Adaptations
Chair: Danielle van der Merwe & Armen Hesse
Jane Eyre and the Metaphorisation of Disease in Modern
Adaptations
Danielle van der Merwe & Armen Hesse
Disease is a recurring theme in Jane Eyre which takes on many forms
and fulfils different purposes. This talk explores the ‘illnesses’ related
to two minor characters in Brontë’s Bildungsroman: Bertha Mason and
Helen Burns. Although polar opposites, the diagnoses and deaths of
these two women provide insight into how women and disease were
27perceived during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, there is the
protagonist’s angelic childhood friend, Helen Burns, who dies of
tuberculosis even though all the other students around her die of typhus.
On the other hand, there is Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s ‘mad’ wife,
who simultaneously doubles as the novel’s antagonist. Her animalistic
depiction and violent behaviour embody problematic views on mental
illness that were dominant in mid-nineteenth-century England. By
looking at the literary-historical discourse on tuberculosis and mental
illness, this talk discusses how the metaphorisation of ‘illnesses’ are
used to either romanticise or degrade female characters in order to
create and encourage an ideal image of womanhood. Additionally, it
will explore how modern adaptations from the twentieth and twenty-
first century combat these outdated ideas (or reinforce them) in their
portrayals of the characters.
________________________________________________________
Robin Hood – A Criminal as Hero?
Jessica Fingerhut
Robin Hood is one of our most popular heroes and his appearance in
literary texts and popular culture is part of a tradition that spans over
five centuries. But, strictly speaking, aren’t Robin Hood and his merry
men criminals on the run? Indeed, today’s image of the “good outlaw”3
– robbing from the rich and giving to the poor – has been created over
centuries. But how can one create an image? How can a criminal outlaw
be perceived as a hero by his audience? As I am going to argue in this
3
Appleby, John C. and Paul Dalton. “Introduction.” In: John C.
Appleby and Paul Dalton (eds.). Outlaws in Medieval and Early
Modern England. Crime, Government and Society, c. 1066-c.1600.
Ashgate, 2009. 1-6.
28presentation, worldviews such as these are created through narrative
ways of worldmaking.
Two of the most popular literary adaptations of Robin Hood
serve as the basis for this study: Joseph Ritson’s Robin Hood. A
Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs and Ballads, Now Extant,
Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw4 and Howard Pyle’s The
Merry Adventures of Robin Hood5. Both works have been chosen
because they seem to paint rather different versions of the hero at first
glance. However, as we will see, it is exactly their difference which
demonstrates how the same narrative techniques and functions can be
used to create very distinct images of Robin Hood. To do so, we will
first look at what is meant by the terms ‘narrative ways of
worldmaking’ and ‘hero’. We will then apply these definitions to both
literary works, which will allow us to outline two Robin Hoods – the
Robin Hood of Joseph Ritson’s Collection and the Robin Hood of
Howard Pyle’s Merry Adventures.
4
Ritson, Joseph. Robin Hood. A Collection of all the Ancient Poems,
Songs and Ballads, now extant, Relative to that Celebrated English
Outlaw. Vol. 1-2. Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997 [1887].
5
Pyle, Howard. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. Barnes &
Noble, 2016 [1883].
29Hybrids, Deviants, Mediators: Fictional Characters
between Social Divides of Identity Construction
Chair: Kieran Sommer
Female Heroes & Male Damsels in Distress: Gender Fluidity in The
School for Scandal vs. Gender Binarity in The Contrast
Natalie Neuberth
My research paper compares how Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The
School for Scandal (1777) and The Contrast (1787) by Royall Tyler
manifest gender norms in 18th century British and American society,
respectively. It has been argued that Tyler’s play is an American
adaptation of Sheridan’s British original which copies the basic
storyline to establish a distinctly American national identity that
detaches itself from its motherland Great Britain. By Americanizing
Sheridan’s play, Tyler not only manifests a collective American
identity but also further normative gender identities. For this analysis,
my research defines the concepts of sex and gender and compares both
male and female gender performances of selected characters within
both plays. Whereas Sheridan’s play depicts a blurred line between the
sexes and presents gender as a fluid and non-binary construct, Tyler’s
version rejects this ‘British’ gender fluidity and imposes gender
binarity. To do so, Tyler’s characters assume either hypermasculine
and hyperfeminine roles and mock any fluid gender performances. In
contrast, Sheridan’s characters freely adopt both feminine and
masculine gender traits and incorporate blurred gender identities. In
doing so, The Contrast contributes to the emergence and persistence of
cultural myths, such as the hyperfeminine damsel in distress and the
hypermasculine hero.
30_______________________________________________________
Between ‘Angel’ and ‘Monster’: Character Portrayal and the
Unreliability of Narration in Neil Gaiman’s ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’
Sarah Rassau
In classic fairy tales, the stepmother is unequivocally constructed as a
villain and is thus set in opposition to the fairy-tale heroine, who is the
embodiment of goodness. Analysing women in literature in an effort to
construct a feminist poetics, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue
that female figures are traditionally classified into one of two opposites,
namely angel or monster, and that literature written by male authors
leaves no room for ambiguous character portrayal when it comes to
female figures (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 17). By contrast, postmodern
fairy-tale retellings frequently attempt to deconstruct gender archetypes
to some extent and depict less unequivocal figures.
My proposed presentation will focus on one of these retellings,
namely Neil Gaiman’s ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’, a revision of the ‘Snow
White’ tale in the context of a macabre vampire story. Unlike the
Grimms’ story, Gaiman’s tale shifts the narration to the usually
marginalised queen, who retells the story from her perspective. As she
is about to die, the queen tries to justify her actions against her
stepdaughter to the reader and attempts to vindicate herself. Yet the
story does not simply turn the roles of villain and heroine around, but
casts doubt on the queen’s depiction of events by emphasising that her
account is biased. By depicting two deeply ambiguous woman figures,
‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ juxtaposes the well-known tale as told by Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm with the queen’s (questionable) allegation of her
innocence and challenges the reader to reflect on the unreliability of
narration that is closely interconnected with identity construction.
31Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination. New Haven [u.a.]: Yale University Press.
Crossing Borders by Magic?: Putting Hybridity into Question
through Rushdie and Hamid
Yeşim Kaya
In his seminal The Satanic Verses (1988), Salman Rushdie—a British-
Indian novelist— tells the story of two Indian migrants living in the
UK. With these two characters, Rushdie puts the issue of achieving
hybridity—both at the narrative and cultural levels—into question.
Similar to Rushdie, Mohsin Hamid— a British-Pakistani author— also
focuses on the issue of migration in his penultimate novel, Exit West
(2017), and employs Magic Realism as the narrative mode (2017). Of
course, Hamid’s agenda is somewhat different because he tells the story
of refugees. However, due to the timing of his writing, he approaches
the concept of cultural and narrative hybridity even more critically.
Taking these two works into account, in this presentation, I will focus
on the development of hybridity theory and the literature regarding the
hybrid nature of Magic Realism. I will then explain how narrative and
cultural hybridity are constructed in both works and through the
characters of Saladin Chamcha (in The Satanic Verses) and Saeed (in
Exit West). Through comparing and contrasting Rushdie and Hamid,
this paper will demonstrate differences and similarities in their
approaches to this issue. By the end of the talk, I will assess the
hybridity issue within the current context and propose it as a possible
lens to understand current integration problems of refugees in the UK
and in Europe.
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